Nick Flynn has received fellowships and awards from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation, PEN, and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and National Public Radio’s This American Life. He is currently a professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston, where he is in residence each spring. In 2015 he published his ninth book, My Feelings (Graywolf), a collection of poems. His work has been translated into 15 languages.
Elee Kraljii Gardiner:
It’s a nervy and disarming title, My Feelings, for your ninth book.
Nick Flynn:
I had a bit of discomfort around the title—it just seemed wrong in so many ways, which is, in the end, why I went with it. One of the discomforts was that it would be taken ironically, which is fine, but the poems themselves are very low on irony. It’s not that I’m fully comfortable in the realm of pure sincerity, but if those two were on a continuum, irony on one end, sincerity on the other, I tend to find more energy on the edge of sincerity—for me it feels riskier. Not true for everyone, which is, in part, why I included the disclaimer. I also saw it as a poem in and of itself, in a Michael Martone sort of way.
EKG:
The disclaimer tucked into the ISBN page made me laugh out loud:
Disclaimer: The word “my” in the title is meant to signify the author—as such no claims are made on anyone else’s.
NF:
The disclaimer is playful, I hope, but also deadly serious—I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble, over the years, imagining that I can truly understand the inner life of someone else, especially those closest to me.
EKG:
Is the disclaimer an inoculation against failure (If we understand the poetic act as one of communion? Or is this an anti-colonial idea?)
NF:
The anti-colonial swerve at the end of your question throws me, so I’ll ignore it for now—maybe you can clarify later? As for communion, and you feeling the feelings in the book—I imagine you felt your own feelings, and not mine, though I’m thrilled if you confused the two.
EKG:
What I mean is that you are delineating the responsibility for—or territory of—your own emotional response without assuming it is joint/shared. Instead of colonizing the entire term “feelings” you make it specific. Maybe “anti-colonial” is a red herring or wrong term but there is a declaration with the “my” that is both gentle and boundary-like.
NF:
Now I get what you mean by anti-colonial…I’m not trying to colonize your feelings—exactly. Even if I could, would I want to?
EKG:
The book is six sections with an irregular spread of 32 poems. Can you talk about your sequencing process? Was it obvious/tricky? Do you go for an arc or did you lead the poems into stalls in the barn?
NF:
The ordering of the poems came in the eleventh hour, and yes, there is a sort of arc to it, if only that the father is alive before he is dead. Though this might be false, for the dead keep coming back (or do they never come back?).
EKG:
Some of the poems were written while your father was dying while you were caring for your child—amounts of tenderness and vulnerability are peaking and plummeting through the poems. What role does fear have in this book? How is fear holding hands with the idea of purpose (Notes on the Periodic Table) or reason, or hope? (Put the Load on Me: No one believes/those wings will lift you.)
NF:
Fear? I remember when I quit drinking (the first time), being at a new age retreat in upstate New York, and I had the strangest sensation, which I was eventually able to identify as the absence of fear. Having learned to carry it my whole life (“the virgin compared to the air we breath”—Hopkins), it was unsettling to be outside of it, if only for a moment. I guess I’m trying to say that it is still hard for me to recognize the poems as written from a place of fear (if they in fact were), though I have no problem with you sensing that while reading them. Purpose? The purpose in the poem Notes on the Periodic Table is about as basic as can be, no? That our bodies, when we die, will simply make more dirt…
EKG:
I realize the fear issue is the projection of my feelings about “My Feelings”. By “purpose” I meant less purpose of the poem and more purpose of the person, the one who goes on…or the reason for persevering. The hope.
NF:
Again, if its hope you need or find in the book, then I would never attempt to dissuade you of it. I just don’t know if hope is a central engine of creation, for me.
EKG:
More on form—you’ve moved from lyric poems to memoir to poetic memoir to record of witness of social justice issues to memoir of memoir to x to y... Is My Feelings a continuity or rupture? Or, about your next writing project: is there a place of writing post-feelings?
NF:
I just finished The Executioner’s Song, a book I’d been wanting to tackle for years… I was interested in how Mailer (seemingly) absents himself from the narrative completely, though in fact his breath is behind every word. I’ve done some work like this (Blind Huber, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Alice Invents…) but not in such a sustained way.
Gilmore, by the way, says this: “Some feelings are personal.”
EKG:
You cast your child as a ghostly little oracle. In other places knowing too much or thinking too much is a road to pain. It seems you reach comfort through acceptance.
For example, these lines from Homily:
I strap myself to the breaking wheel.
Consider my sin a hymn of praise.
Understanding the miracle, I forget
what it is.
NF:
Yep, my child is, among many other things, a ghostly little oracle—maybe we all are. Knowing too much or thinking too much a road to pain? Maybe, but I don’t think this is a negative thing—our job as poets is to push into the unknown, which certainly involves knowing and thinking—if some pain awaits on the other side, we are likely in the right place. That said, acceptance does seem to be the key to the kingdom, but in the Martin Luther King sense—“there is a time to let things happen, and a time to make things happen.”
EKG:
One trait of these poems that is captivating is the shamelessness: the feelings are. The addiction is. The grief and the need—they are. Your feelings aren’t dressed for presentation. The poems are honed and clear, but the feelings are unadorned.
NF:
Shameless. I try to maintain whatever the initiating spark is, that thing that got each poem started, and sometimes that spark might drift into a realm where shame might lurk, but I’m pretty well beyond reacting to shame at this point. That said, I do think there’s plenty for us, as a species, to be ashamed of, but only if it motivates us to change.
EKG:
The title poem struggles with language, with impulse, with nailing the expression of feelings. You draw a line through 41 possible adjectives for those feelings. As a tactic, the description of the negative space delineates more space. Can language be accurate for our feelings by not working?
NF:
I do think there are limits to language as a way to contain experience or feeling, which is why the art that interests me is that which allows, requires, forces me to be actively engaged with it, so that the poem is itself an experience, in the act of reading it…whatever feelings arise, it is enough to simply notice them, track them, maybe attempt to follow them to their source inside you.
EKG:
EPITHALAMION
no one
gets all the days, even if it seems
that we are the ones
writing the book,
I file this stanza under compassion—it’s anti-romantic and for that reason strikes me as the best sort of companionship for one’s wedding day. Such a beautiful, realistic, carpe diem comment. Do you ever feel like you are “writing the book”—is this just the illusion of control or are there moments it’s working?
NF:
More and more I try to step aside and let the poem come.
EKG:
Thank you, Nick, for your mindfulness here and in the poems.
Elee Kraljii Gardiner directs Thursdays Writing Collective. She is the editor and publisher of seven anthologies from the Collective and the coeditor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012). A book of poetry, Serpentine Loop, is forthcoming from Anvil Press in 2016.