An Interview with Nick Flynn

by Hilary Melton

“Humorous” is probably not a word one would immediately associate with Nick Flynn,

the author of such dark and luminous books as the poetry collection, Some Ether and the

memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City; books that deal with his mother’s suicide and his

father’s history of alcoholism and homelessness. But humor is very much a part of who Flynn

is. People should be warned in advance of a favorite recurring joke, one that consists of Flynn

making a completely absurd statement then drawing the story out as far as he can. When I

asked him during our interview, “Do you have a favorite poet?” Flynn paused for a moment,

and then answered sincerely, “Buster Keaton. I really admire his shit. But a lot of it is silent, so

most people don’t get it. He does great things with white space.”

I first met Flynn in 1984. I was 22 and fresh out of four years in the Peace Corps. I had

spent months wandering around the East Coast, completely disorientated, trying to find a job.

When I applied for a position in the men’s unit at Boston’s largest shelter for people who are

homeless, the Pine Street Inn, Flynn was already a seasoned counselor. If you were a newbie

working at Pine Street, Flynn was the counselor you would hope would be in the crowded

Brown Lobby with you when a fight broke out, or at the front door when a guest showed up

covered in lice. He clearly respected and loved the people who stayed at Pine Street, and he

seemed to me to be fearless.

Flynn and I had our first one on one conversation late one night in the men’s dormitory.

It must have been the tail end of the 3 to 11 shift— because that was one of the few times

young women counselors were given dorm duty, before booze and drugs wore off for the
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hundreds of men lined up inches apart on army issued cots. I was sitting in the dimly lit alcove

across from the elevator when Flynn walked by on rounds. Chances are I was wearing a t-shirt,

worn 505 Levis and blue high top Converses and Flynn was in black jeans and some thrift store

retro shirt. It is also very likely that he was sporting some particularly absurd accessory he

lifted earlier from the donations in the clothing room: a neon yellow tie, a straw hat, platform

shoes…

We began having one of those “getting to know you” conversations that are usually a

litany of safe questions: “Where were you born? Where’d you go to school?” I must have been

the one who brought up parents. In that first conversation, we never got to fathers, because

when Flynn said his mother was dead and had committed suicide, I was convinced that he was

making it up. Determined to not be had, I dug my heels in, insisting he knock it off and tell me

where his mother lived.

I’m not sure how long I perpetrated that embarrassment, but it was long enough for me

to still feel a twinge over 20 years later. In our recent interview, Flynn spoke about how, when

he wrote about his father in his poetry, readers assumed that Flynn was using metaphors

because they could not grasp the idea of “father” and “homeless” applying at the same time to

the same person. In a similar way, that night in the men’s dormitory, “dead mother” and

“suicide” did not fit into my version of a conversation that included “Where’d you go to

college?”

Flynn has since the 80’s gone on to write the much acclaimed books, Some Ether and

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City that reflect upon his childhood, his mother’s suicide, and

his experiences working at the Pine Street Inn during a period when his father was homeless.

Flynn is also the author of a second collection of poetry, Blind Huber, a series of poems based
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around the 17th century French/Swiss beekeeper Francois Huber. Stanley Kunitz called Blind

Huber “an act of poetic imagination unlike any other.” In addition to the two collections of

poetry and the memoir, Flynn is co-author with Shirley McPhillips of A Note Slipped Under

the Door, a nonfiction book about teaching poetry that draws from his experiences as poet-in-

residence at the Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University.

Flynn is the recipient of numerous awards including a Discovery/THE NATION Prize,

the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the Larry Levis Reading Prize from the Virginia

Commonwealth University. He has also been awarded fellowships from the Library of

Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship,

which allowed him to spend two years in Italy, Ireland, and Tanzania.

Flynn’s best known books, Some Ether and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, are

decidedly autobiographical in nature and were written during an era of ongoing discussion

about the value of the personal in literature following the backlash against the strongly

personal poetry that characterized American poetry for much of the second half of the last

century. In a 1997 interview for Poets & Writers Magazine, Denise Levertov said, “I’m very

tired of the me, me, me kind of poem, the Sharon Olds ‘Find the dirt and dig it up’ poem,

which has influenced people to find gruesome episodes in their life, whether they actually

happened or not... I know perfectly well that lots of people really have been abused, but it’s

unfortunate to use the fact as the passport to being a poet. I’m certainly tired of that kind of

egotism.”

This past July, Jean Valentine at a lecture at Vermont College entitled, The “I” in

Poetry, also touched on the criticism of “confessional” poetry. Valentine, in opposition to

Levertov’s position, insisted that the subject matter of a poem should not at all be at issue. How
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the subject is dealt with, how the writer has or has not created “art,” regardless of content, is

what should be of concern. And while Valentine did not necessarily define her terms in this

lecture (for instance, what in fact qualifies as “art”?), she was clear about one point: whether

writing about incest or about the meaning of life, the writer’s first obligation is to the craft.

Is it merely craft and artistry that takes the ego out of Levertov’s “me, me, me”? In

reference to Flynn’s very personal story and poetry, Tony Hoagland used the word “allegory.”

Allegory, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “convey(s) truths or generalizations about

human conduct or experience.” Hoagland wrote about Some Ether, “…the book’s gift is not the

sensationalism of the tale, but the delicate kiltered skill with which the poems collage anecdote

and metaphor into allegory…” (224)

How does one create allegory from subject matter that is not typical human experience:

a mother’s suicide, a father’s homelessness, a 18th century beekeeper’s life and the life of bees

and flowers? At the core of allegory is the presence of some essential human “truth.” While

Flynn’s artistry with words and imagery can mesmerize readers, it is his ability to express

truths which resonate with an audience that raise his work from the personal to the universal.

In Some Ether, the poem Other Meaning is a good example of what Hoagland means

by collaging anecdote and metaphor into allegory:

Coming home from the drive-in, asleep under

blankets in the vast backseat,

my mother full of attention to the road

& we’re all wrapped in darkness & steel. Somewhere

lost in the heart of the engine

small fires burn, pushing us away

from where we’ve been—
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the 100-foot-high movie screen

& the airplane that passed through

Steve McQueen’s head. My feet stab

at my brother’s, wandering his own walled city

of sleep, suspended in an endless present,

endless protections & slow hum of static.

I remember a chair, a maroon & velvet throne,

I fell asleep in it once

as a party raged around me. Only later did I learn

the other meaning of maroon—

of sailors, whole families, put out to sea

in inadequate lifeboats, left to drink their own piss

& pull gulls from the sky. I open one eye

but cannot identify the tops of passing trees.

How far to home? Once

she left me on the side of the road & drove off

into the rare green earth, her taillights

fading sparks. Once she cast me out

onto the porch, naked in the snow, merely because

I said she wouldn’t dare. (38)

From a pure narrative standpoint, this poem is about the author recounting a childhood

experience of coming home from a drive-in with his mother and brother. It is also about

Flynn’s memories of sitting in a chair while an adult party swirls around him, and of being

ejected from a car (and later from the house) by his mother. But the title, Other Meaning,

immediately asks the reader to think metaphorically about the content of the poem. Flynn’s

images are packed with metaphorical possibilities.

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The title, Other Meaning, is pulled from the body of the poem (line 17) in specific

reference to the word “maroon.” First there is the meaning of “maroon” as the color of the

chair the child Flynn is seated in, and then the “other meaning” of being stranded at sea in

lifeboats, and in Flynn’s case, precariously so. The second meaning exposes in metaphor

Flynn’s personal experience of a childhood inside “inadequate lifeboats” where the family is

adrift, in danger, and “left to drink their own piss/&pull gulls from the sky” for sustenance.

Besides the title referencing the specific word, “maroon,” there are of course “other

meaning(s)” possible for almost every word in the piece. For instance, the word “home,”

viewed in a metaphorical context has many meanings that could include self, safety, family, or

a feeling of comfort and familiarity. On a spiritual plane, “home” can mean “heaven” or “God”

or “oneness” or “peace.” The line, “How far to home?” hangs hauntingly in the air, while the

description of the son being sent from the house has decidedly biblical overtones—“Once she

cast me out.”

While not every childhood is traumatic, Flynn expresses feelings that all children have

as they make their first efforts to confront the adult world, feelings about separateness,

dependence, and being at the mercy of an adult world that is at best confusing, at worst violent

or even lethal. As a child I was never left by the side of the road by my mother, nor kicked out

of the house naked in winter, but I identify with the feeling of being powerless to the decisions

and actions of someone who holds dominion over me, someone upon whom my survival

depends.

Some Ether was Flynn’s first book, and my personal favorite. Mark Doty called it “… a

startling, moving debut.” The judges for the 1999 Pen/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry said

in their official statement, “If the poems stand ‘close to tragedy,’ as Flynn puts it, they also
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embody the act of survival: syntax and line conspire to pull us past the event, beyond the

struggle…At once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate, Some Ether promises

nothing: it is a harrowing, beautiful book.” (Some Ether book jacket)

Flynn captures and collages childhood and adult experiences in Some Ether with a

photographic clarity, intoxicating musicality, and the ever-present awareness of mortality. In

“1967,” Flynn writes about his mother’s various boyfriends, “She opens the car door & bends

into the overhead light but before his lips/can graze her cheek the door closes/& the light goes

out./They sit inside & fill it with smoke./It looks creamy in the winter night, like amber, or a

newfound galaxy./I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.” (8) And from

Father Outside, “It is night &/ it’s snowing & starlings fill the trees above us, so many it

seems/the leaves sing…I wait for his breath/to lift his blanket/so I know he’s alive…” (48)

In our recent interview I told Flynn that I thought Some Ether and Another Bullshit

Night in Suck City were like different sides of the same coin, and he agreed, saying they were

just different forms of addressing the same material. Part of what makes the memoir successful

is that it also holds true to the same formula mentioned earlier: anecdote and metaphor

transformed into allegory.

Like so many recent memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City depicts a journey of

the self through the examination of one’s parentage and all the layered implications of those

relationships. Flynn’s experience is of course more traumatic than most, with a mother who

commits suicide and a father who is absent, alcoholic, and homeless. Unlike most popular

memoirs, Flynn does not employ a linear narrative to tell his story, instead he collages his

experiences together from short chapters comprised of memories, stories, language pieces, and

even a one-act play. Flynn’s prose incorporates his skill and experience as a poet. Note the
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alliteration in the following description taken from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: “Inside

the shelter the tension is inescapable— the walls exude cigarette smoke and anxiety. The air is

thick, stale, dreamy, though barely masking the overpowering smell of stale sweat.” (30) The

adroit use of repetition, pacing, tension and rhythm can be seen in the first paragraph of the

book:

Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her
voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The
phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the
receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks, Where’s the money? asks, Why
can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside?(3)

These opening lines are another good example of Flynn’s skill with anecdote and

metaphor. We see Flynn’s homeless father hanging out late at night in an enclosed ATM

pretending to make a transaction—a scene Flynn has witnessed as an outreach worker. It is a

striking image, a snapshot of one man’s father at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. It is also a

poignant portrait of a destitute person set against a shiny emblem of technology.

In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City a life raft has a recurring role, echoing the

lifeboat’s appearance in Other Meaning from Some Ether. While the lifeboat in Other Meaning

is laden with fear and doubts of survival against the elements, the function of the life raft of

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is to save people. The life raft is woven through the entire

book, first as an example of another one of Flynn’s father’s lies and exaggerations, then as a

symbol of hope. Flynn’s father claims in the beginning of the book that his father (Flynn’s

grandfather) invented the life raft. Near the end of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn

discovers that a patent was indeed issued to his grandfather for the life raft. It is this discovery

of truth in all the murkiness of his father’s stories and life that is one of the most moving events

in Flynn’s memoir. While not making anything better, or bringing anything to any resolution,
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the truth of the life raft is sustaining, “The problem was to keep the body above the waves. The

trick was to breathe only air. My grandfather’s patent was used by seven countries during both

World Wars. Thousands of heads floating about the waves. I’ll be damned.” (328)

Some Ether and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City are both, at their core, about being

adrift. Flynn’s childhood was precarious and without roots and lead to an adulthood that was

equally tumultuous and ungrounded. One does not get the sense with either book that Flynn

has come to any sort of magical or therapeutic closure about his childhood and parents. Prior to

our interview, Flynn spoke to me about how he did not find any sort of “resolution” from

writing the two books, that he did not have some big “Aha!” Anne Sexton echoes this

sentiment. In an interview with William Packard she said, “You don’t solve problems in

writing. They are still there. I’ve heard psychiatrists say, ‘See, you’ve forgiven your father in

your poem.’ But I haven’t forgiven my father; I just wrote that I did.” (17-18) And Colette Inez

has this to say: “Although I don’t think of poetry as therapy, as a prescribed remedy for

sorrows, the act of writing can bring clarity to what seems blurred, and may sometimes rescue

us from the edge.” (118)

The reader however does attain a sense of resolution (and hope) from Some Ether and

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which I think also helps explain the books’ popularity. The

resolution and hope does not come from the content of the books, but from the very existence

of the books themselves and it is gratifying to see that they have received critical praise and

garnered awards. Despite the harrowing circumstances of his life, Flynn has become the

successful writer his father dreamt of becoming himself.

Flynn’s second collection of poetry, Blind Huber, is a different sort of collection

entirely. It is a book about bees and beekeeping in the 18th century as told through many
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voices, both human and personified nature. Blind Huber is an act of creative obsession by

Flynn’s own admission and a break from the content of his own life, though Flynn’s personal

experiences still seep through this collection. In one poem, Wax Father, one cannot help but

see Flynn’s relationship with his own father:

…The father had

collapsed, the boy

wasn’t ready, so he built a replica of the old man

in order to save him. When

the legs gave out he fashioned legs,

when the hands began to tremble
he fashioned hands,

& as the fever spread he made a head. (51)

And in Workers (lost), there is his mother: “Nothing/to return to, the queen dead, I /pressed

against her until her eyes/hung empty. Afterwards,/the hive full of strangers,/none remained

precisely me, none/I would die for.” (75-76)

In Flynn’s surreal world of bees, hives, flowers and 18th century men speaking, one is

more quickly drawn into metaphor and allegory than in the other two books. Blind Huber

intertwines the perspectives of the blind scholar, his devoted assistant and different parts of

nature to explore concepts of power, dominion, relationships, life, survival, and death. Like

Some Ether and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Blind Huber exposes life, raises questions

but does not attempt to provide answers.

I was surprised to find Blind Huber as violent as both Some Ether or Another Bullshit

Night in Suck City. Because the bees, other animals, and nature are all personified, their
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violence is felt in human terms by the reader. In Workers (guards) a skunk attacks a hive and is

in turn bludgeoned by suicide bees who pump him full of venom in their death throes. In

Workers (attendants) Flynn’s bees freeze to death and their corpses lay against their living

brothers “like a shawl.” (10) In Drones, the bees speak of the actions of their queen, “First she

will kill the other virgins, those/unborn, a spike/ to the head.” (19) And in Statuary, bees

encase a living snail in wax and then a twitching winter-starved mouse.

Blind Huber also exposes power dynamics in a stark, unflinching manner. Every

character in the book is seen in a power dynamic with every other character. For example,

Huber exerts fierce control over his assistant Burnens. In Blind Huber (ii), Huber says,

“Burnens’ hands, my words/make them move. I say, plunge them into the hive,/& his hands go

in. If I said,/put your head inside,/he would wear it.” At the same time, the servant Burnens

welds power over his master. In Burnens (i) we are told that, “My ruler/measures the gap, I

count each worker/& feed him the number. His words/move my hands, but I name/what is

seen.” (p. 59) Perhaps part of Huber’s violent tinged descriptions of ordering Burnens to do

things is the anger he feels at his own ultimate dependence on Burnens to see and to negotiate

everyday life.

The world of the bees is also fraught with power dynamics and dependency. The queen

rules the hive with a vengeance, killing virgins at the same time birthing the next generation of

bees. Yet the queen’s very existence is dependent on the other bees, as she states in Virgin

Queen, “The nurses feed me from their own/mouths/& I am changed,/made essential.” (17)

There is also a power dynamic between the queen and man. In Queen, the queen speaks

authoritatively to man, “You take our honey/because we let you. We pollinate the

fields/because we are the fields.” At the same time the queen acknowledges man’s ability to
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“…seek me out with gloved fingers/and crush my head.” (14). And everyone in the book is at

the mercy of powers greater then themselves: Huber to the scarlet fever that took his sight,

Burnens to the circumstance of his position, and the bees to weather, man, skunks, possums

and mites.

While people I’ve spoken to about Flynn’s work, including Flynn himself, mostly

speak as if Blind Huber is completely divergent from autobiographical material, I do not agree.

Emotionally, Blind Huber is clearly related to Flynn’s autobiographical work. To generalize

about the themes of Flynn’s three books: Some Ether treats remembrance, angst, sadness, and

love; Another Bullshit Night is Suck City is concerned with analysis and storytelling, and Blind

Huber with the dynamics of power, anger, and offers a cynical examination of faith. (Specific

examples of the question of faith can be found in Wax (Jesus), Xenophon’s Soldiers, Without,

and in the epigraph of an Islamic folktale at the beginning of the third section of the book.)

I also think Huber’s 50 years of intense, devoted study and record-keeping of the world

of bees, is analogous with how Flynn speaks of how his own years of examining and writing

about his life felt. Tormented, isolated, obsessive and fiercely committed to putting down on

paper what he sees.

How does a writer know if he or she has entered into a realm of universal truths through

autobiography? Part of that answer I think, can be found in the writer’s relationship with the

reader. When someone other than the author is moved by the piece and finds in it something of

himself/herself, then it is no longer me, me, me—it is me and you. Before our interview, Flynn

spoke about the hundreds of encounters (in person, letters, email) he has had with readers of

his books and while there were some that reached out to complement and to marvel at the
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artistry of his work, the majority of people wanted to connect with him in order to tell him,

“That’s my story too. That’s my pain too.”

Of course there are all kinds of writing that have a large readership but do not reflect

the values attributed to literature/poetry. Flynn spoke despairingly to me about The Da Vinci

Code, bemoaning the general population’s ability and desire to read “bad writing.” While The

Da Vinci Code is, as far as I know, in no way autobiographical material, it is worth noting that

the Dan Browns, Robert Ludlums, and Stephen Kings of the world do tap into some sort of

universal human experience, though the universality is probably more along the lines of a

shared appreciation for the thrill of a roller coaster ride then any grappling with love or death

or pain or the existence of God. Walter Benjamin would probably call it the universal desire for

“distraction” as he identifies in his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction, “the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration…” (Section

XV) Today, more than ever, we live in a culture that is for the most part on continuous fast

forward. We have become the fruition of early Marxist theorists’ predictions of ever increasing

class disparity and the powerful few exploiting and corrupting technology. As a culture, we are

hindered by the enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots; a substantial portion of the

populace spend most of their waking hours working underpaid and meaningless jobs, and we

live in constant unease thanks to threats of terrorism and global warming. Brainless distraction

has become a mainstay of Americans, perhaps as a means of survival. Although brainless

distraction may be a current human need, it is never about seeking the universal truths that can

be found in art.

When an author is able to write about personal experiences in a manner that attracts

readers not intent on “checking out” or “taking a break” from their lives, and those readers
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respond introspectively to the material (again, Benjamin’s “concentration”), then that writer

has expressed some truth that transcends the personal. Whether the writing achieves the

standards of craft and artistry that are expected of literature or poetry, or whether the writing

can withstand the test of time, is another matter. Flynn is an author who has been able to write

about personal experience in a manner that attracts a readership, touches people, makes people

think, and receives the approval of critics, academics, and award distributors. That is a

combination that reminds me of a phrase often chanted by a 70 year old man named Victor

who lived on the streets in Boston when Flynn and I both worked at Pine Street: That’s the

ticket, that’s the ticket!

I’ve seen Flynn on and off over the past 20 years since Pine Street. We both lived in

New York during many of the same years; he studying for his MFA from NYU and me

continuing work with people experiencing homelessness. Before I interviewed Flynn, I had

only seen him once since the publication of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and his

subsequent success.

Three years ago, with an advance from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn

bought a dilapidated 1880’s Victorian house in upstate New York and renovated it. I was glad

that Flynn was available to do an interview in person and that I opted to make the four hour

drive from my home in Vermont because it seemed important to me to see Flynn’s new home

while conducting the interview.

As Flynn showed me around the two story house that sits on a quiet tree-lined street,

there was scant evidence of the wreck he initially purchased. Instead there were bright open

rooms, soft colors, lovely woodwork, and minimal, tasteful furnishing. “We bought an entire

sycamore tree” Flynn said in the kitchen and pointed out the beautiful matching wood cabinets
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and counter tops. The sycamore shows up in other rooms too, as the dining room table top, and

the coffee table in the living room, creating a synergy and compatibility between rooms.

The downstairs bathroom could be right out of a home design magazine with its

freestanding claw foot bathtub, white pedestal sink, and gauzy curtains undulating in the

breeze. A wooden shelf runs the length of one wall and is adorned with a Buddha figure,

incense and candles, and found items precisely placed in what can only be described as a

collage piece: a bird’s nest on a forked stick, an animal skull, a smooth egg shaped grey and

white speckled stone, and three framed hand written notes on yellowed paper.

This bathroom was where the former house owner said he “kept the retard” that lived

with him. “Look,” said Flynn, “you can still see where the bars we sawed off used to be in the

windows and where the panes in the door had been kicked out from the inside.” In a way that is

all Flynn, the shadow of the “retard” in his barred cell trying to kick his way out has somehow

become part of the beauty of this new room.

The house in general and the downstairs bathroom in particular reminded me of other

living situations Flynn had been in: his 1939 Chris-Craft boat in Provincetown and Boston and

the loft space on LaGrange Street in Boston’s Combat Zone. Both the boat and the loft space

were broken down shells of their former selves, barely usable and certainly not livable, when

they came into Flynn’s hands. Yet the boat, the loft space, and now the Victorian each had

some element of history and beauty that Flynn could see, or feel, underneath the broken planks,

shattered windows, layers and layers of filth, old paint, and debris.

Stanley Kunitz who was a mentor and friend of Flynn’s, had a similar sensibility about

being in the world beyond writing (which of course included writing). Kunitz dabbled in

sculpting, incorporating found items into collage pieces. Kunitz was also an avid gardener. In
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an interview with Francine Ringold, Kunitz spoke about being a gardener in a way that also

references his work as a writer (and could easily be about Flynn’s renovation works and his

own autobiographical writing):

One is always trying to penetrate the mysteries of existence, and the

things that grow are little allegories—every one! They speak of the
terrible will to survive and the struggle toward the light. And the
rewards are great: just the simple joy of bringing something to life
and seeing it bloom in the midst of so much that is ugly in the world.
And then again, I think every garden represents something of a
personal triumph over ugliness and disorder, over nonexistence.
It’s like conquering a piece of yourself. (142)

In the corner of Flynn’s backyard there is a cracked plaster statue of some nondescript

male historical figure that could perhaps be George Washington or could be Christopher

Columbus. The torso of the statue is missing large chunks of plaster, giving a view of a hollow

interior and emitting an eerie feel that is part shell of something, part ghost. Flynn said the

statue was sitting on a pile of garbage in the street when he found it. I could see how anyone

else on the planet would have called it junk and not thought twice about throwing it out. Flynn

saw something though and brought it home. He says, “It’s Johnny Cash.”

While sitting on the back deck with a cup of tea watching the sun lift the morning

shadow off the garden, a beam of sunlight struck Johnny in the corner of the yard where he is

installed. Framed by a weathered wooden slate fence, green vines curling up against his

cracked form, and the morning light illuminating his face, Johnny was breathtakingly beautiful.

How could anyone have thrown such a piece out and not seen what Flynn saw? The height of

the chair I was sitting in, the flavor of the tea, the arrangement of the plants in the yard, and the

sun-kissed face of Johnny—I was in a Flynn-made scene: caught in a moment where every
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element was in harmony with every other element, and the discarded broken past was

transformed into art.

The following is a transcript of my interview with Flynn the night of July 18th, 2006:

I’ve read that regardless of your creative nonfiction writing, you still consider yourself a
“poet”.

I think I am primarily a poet.

What does that mean to you?

Oh, just my impulses in writing. I am much more drawn to certain compression and

distillation of language. Generally the stuff I write dwells more with what is unknown

than what is known. It doesn’t start from a place of what I know and what I want to

present to you. It is more like grappling with ethereal mysterious, maybe even in

broader mysteries.

Is that different than how you feel about your prose?

No, I think prose is the same. I think it comes from the same impulse. I think that

memoir is just thinly veiled poetry. I think more people buy it if you don’t call it poetry.

I thought Some Ether and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City were like different sides to the
same coin.

Yes. Another Bullshit Night…was a different way to tell it with more narrative

connective tissue. A longer narrative requires more connections, and that was part of

the challenge.
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Do you have a preference between one form and the other? Is it easier to write one or the
other?

Yeah, I like hybrid pieces. Writing stuff in the middle is what I’m interested in at the

moment; stuff that is somehow harder to classify. I was just working with Lydia Davis

and Claudia Rankine. We were teaching at NYU in June. Lydia Davis writes these

incredible short stories that are shorter than some of my poems. I was there as a

nonfiction writer and Claudia was there as a poet. Claudia’s last book was ostensibly

poetry, yet her poetry is actually dealing with nonfiction issues like stuff out of the

newspaper. All of us are crossing genres. I think the distinction is getting very blurry

now, and that is where interesting things are happening.

When did you realize you wanted to write poetry? Did you have an “aha”?

It was more like I realized I wasn’t suited to write fiction. I was trying to write fiction. I

was at a workshop at Harvard Extension, the adult education thing. I was living in

Boston and I was working with the homeless then. The guy that was leading the

workshop, the first thing he said was, “The first rule of fiction is that there are no rules

for fiction.” Then I brought this piece into the workshop, and he said, “Remember what

I said last week? Well, there actually are a couple of rules of fiction, and you’ve broken

them. These are things you really can’t do.” And I thought, “Shit, this is what I’m

interested in.”

Basically I just had a poetic impulse. It was very self-conscious. I like things that show

their seams, that question the whole idea of writing. The workshop leader said you
 19

could do anything as long as you maintain a suspended disbelief— that the writing is an

artifice.

I was really interested in questioning that, which you can do in poetry. I was also

interested in time and how poetry moves through time. You can move through eons in

one line of a poem. Rilke moves from minutiae to the universe in less than a line. I just

don’t know many fiction writers that can do that because I don’t think fiction moves as

quickly. The transitions in fiction are more meant to create a scene, where as poetry

evokes a scene.

Were you reading poetry at the time?

Yes, I was reading a lot of poetry.

Were you drawn early in your life to reading poetry?

No actually. I took a class at U-Mass when I was probably like 22. That was with James

Tate. He turned us on to a lot of contemporary poetry.

Was there a first poet you fell in love with?

There were a lot of poets. Before I even went to school, there was (like for everyone)

Bukowski. Bukowski was the first. If you are young and drinking, you read Bukowski.

Actually I’ve gone back to Bukowski recently to teach, because now I’m teaching

people who are young and drinking. You go back and realize this is what speaks to
 20

them. And it is interesting stuff. There’s a certain energy to it and voice that is strong. It

is worth teaching and is actually very difficult to imitate.

Then there’s Ginsburg, early Ginsburg, and Beat stuff. I was reading a lot of fiction too

at the time. But in the University when I first started reading books of poetry, the first

book that was important to me was Carolyn Forche’s A Country between Us. That book

really meant something to me.

In an interview you did with Jess Sauer (The Austin Chronicle), you said one of the benefits of
writing in a memoir format, was that readers don’t go down the road of thinking something is
“metaphor” when it isn’t, like your father being homeless for example. You said that it was
really important to you to point out that it was read as “the truth?”

Yes, just the central story to it. I mean there is a lot of metaphoric language around it

and that comes off of it. You have to have a solid central line of things that are true.

That’s the big problem with what James Fry did; he didn’t even get the center of truth

right, he sort of made it all up. And that’s a problem, a real problem. The central truth is

a contract with the reader. And then you can obviously go off onto any sort of tangents

you want to, as long as you return to the central truth.

If someone found out at this point that my father was actually a golf pro and not

homeless, it would be understandable if they were upset. It would be understandable

because the contract would have been deeply broken.

You said in the Sauer article that in Some Ether people weren’t buying it that your father had
actually been homeless?
 21

They couldn’t wrap their minds around it. I think the mind can only contain so much.

And it seems that somehow there isn’t enough space in the brain for the word “father”

and the word “homeless.” From what I’ve encountered in general, those two things

don’t exist in the same brain pan. One at a time. So if you put them together, it causes

some sort of strange little explosion.

It’s the same now with torture. I’m writing about torture and I find the same thing

happens. Take the phrase, “America equals torture,” people just have a hard time

keeping that in their heads even though it is on the front page of the newspaper

everyday. Legalized torture in America, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the president saying

we need to torture for information…

How are you writing about it?

I don’t know yet. I’m trying to find the form.

Where did you get the idea for Blind Huber and can you tell me a little about it?

It just became an obsession. It just sparked one day. Sort of like this one, this torture
one, it just sort of sparked one day. Then you’re fucked. Then you’re stuck with it.

You worked on Blind Huber for six years?

Yes, six years. It’s just random really. The mind needed an obsession.

Why bees?

That’s the thing about obsessions. You don’t choose them. A guy at a dinner party

sitting next to me was a beekeeper and he started speaking rhapsodically about bees. I

was fascinated by it.

 22

I didn’t realize how big it was. There is a lot written about it, especially ancient stuff,

which is fascinating. So I got to do some research, and that was good after the first

book. I could ostensibly be exterior with the persona poems. It’s nice to do persona

poems really, it allows for much more range of emotion.

Did you make a conscious choice to not do interior work?

Well, it’s all interior. The poems are all interior, but they’re done through a persona.

They’re absurd in some ways: flowers talking, hives talking, everything is speaking you

know. Where would it end? It didn’t seem to end anywhere.

I was sort of just following it. I was thinking about bees and I was at McDowell, and I

went and visited this guy who was a beekeeper in New Hampshire. I drove up to see

him and saw the hives. The poems weren’t coming really well, I was just sort of writing

about the bees. At then at the very end of my stay I was desperate and this one poem

came out in the voice of a bee. I was really embarrassed about it and thought, “Oh

that’s really fucked up.” But it was the best thing I’d written, the best poem after a

miserable several weeks of struggling with it.

I was really embarrassed and put it away. I was thinking, “We won’t go there.” And the

next day another one came out, and then three came out. They started coming out in the

voices, and those were the strongest.

 23

You know, it was embarrassing and that’s always a good sign. If you are ashamed of

what you are doing, it is a very good sign. You should always be ashamed of what you

are doing. If you feel good about what you are doing, it probably sucks.

Stanley Kunitz said some very nice things about Blind Huber.

Oh I don’t know. He said, “…a work of the creative imagination unlike any other…”

What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. It’s not saying it’s good,

it’s just saying it’s unlike any other. It could mean it is like, bad.

Didn’t you work with him in Provincetown?

I knew Stanley (I feel like I still know Stanley) for about 16 years.

Was he a big influence on you?

Stanley was a huge influence on me, one of the big ones. Stanley was many, many

things. Not just wise and incredibly insightful, though part of it was that. Anytime I met

with him, anytime I had a conversation with him something would come up that I

would spend the next year or two years wrestling with, trying to figure out what he

meant. Like he said, “Tension is essential to all art.” I’ve actually been trying to figure

out what that means for like three years—no, more than that. He said it a long time ago.

I’ve actually actively been trying to teach it and figure out how you find tension in art.

And it is deep and beautiful.

There were always moments with him, sort of endless moments. Just his way of being

in the world was so profound. His connection to something was also like Rilke you

know; his connection to the garden was also to eternity.

 24

Did you ever talk about his father’s suicide? Was there a connection between you two because
of that?

We never spoke about it, but I think clearly that that was part of our connection. I don’t

remember ever really going into it directly with him. I think we talked about that stuff

in our poems to each other. I said what I had to say in the poems to him. There wasn’t

much more to say to him about it. I’d probably say more to my therapist.

Did you show him your work?

At different times I would bring him stuff. He’d always asked for that too. He’d say,

“Let me see what you are working on.” You’d bring him a poem, or a couple poems.

He was a paradigm of generosity, and also committed to creating a tribe. You felt like

you were connected with him to this large history of poetry and the history of the whole

culture of poetry. Sustaining a community seems really important. That’s what I like

about teaching. It feels like a continuation of that poetry tribe thing.

Stanley was amazing. He started the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, he

started the Poets House in New York. He was responsible for awhile for choosing the

Yale Series of Younger Poets. Look who he chose, it was incredible. Robert Hass,

Carolyn Forche, Olga Broumas… He had this eye for something about female poets.

He cultivated a whole generation in a certain way. It was probably just that he was

attuned to the fact that women were leading the way in a certain manner in poetry. It

seems like sometimes now, a lot of the innovative stuff, stuff that is pushing the art

forward, is done by women.

 25

Who specifically would you say?

Anne Carson, C.D.Wright, Brenda Hillman, Marie Howe, Carolyn Forche, Harryette

Mullen.

I’ve seen you referred to as “post-confessional,” what do you think about that?

Sure, I’ll take it. That was Tony Hoagland’s piece I think. He’s a sweet guy.

It’s again about not assuming something. There is post-modern and then post-

confessional. Post-confessional would be taking some of the strategies of post-

modernism and applying them to confessionalism; which means that you have some

self-consciousness about what you are doing about the “I”, or the “I” of the construct.

You are trying to tell a story, but you have to question the story you are trying to tell.

You can’t just take it for granted that this is the truth-- it is an artifice.

Do you have a book next to your bedside right now?

I just finished reading Coetzee again: Waiting for the Barbarians. I’m all torture all the

time right now.

Are there any poets currently writing about torture?

No, no one is writing about torture. Well, Matthea Harvey has a new book coming out,

which is very interesting. I heard her read from it and there was some stuff about terror.

Odes to Terror-- or something. I thought they were great. There’s also Douglas A.

Powell, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson.

Are there any kinds of poetry or other kinds of writing that you do not write?
 26

I don’t like bad writing.

Define bad writing. What are the characteristics?

There was a writer at this workshop, his name is Tony Door. He’s a great writer. He did

this thing where he broke down the first page of The Da Vinci Code to get a close

reading of it. It is such bad writing that the exercise was just fun. And it was interesting

because you can also be lulled by the writing and think, “It’s fine, it’s a page turner, it

goes quickly…”

Did you read it?

No, I wouldn’t read that thing. Everyone says, “It’s bad writing, but it’s a page turner!”

But you look at the first page and it is such bad writing. It is mind blowing. It is

distressing that people eat it with a spoon. It’s the same with James Fry. I mean with

James Fry, half the country will swear to you that it is the best book they’ve every read,

yet I can only assume that means it’s the only book they’ve ever read-- which by

definition would be the best book they’ve ever read. I defy you to find a good sentence

in James Fry.

Is there any popular fiction that you do like?

Alice Munro. She’s fantastic. She’s popular, right? And Francine Prose. There are all

sorts of great writers out there. They just don’t sell in the mega millions usually. Only

the really bad shit sells in the mega millions. It seems, anyway. I don’t know why that

is.

Why is poetry not more well read, in America in particular?

 27

We are doing fine. Poetry is doing fine. More and more poets every year are getting

read.

Why do you think that is?

Why are people reading more poetry? More MFA programs. More people getting

exposed to it. Every year more people get exposed to it. It’s geometric; it’s like how a

pyramid scheme multiplies, but in this case it’s a good thing.

Is a person a born poetry enthusiast, or can you teach an appreciation for poetry?

You can teach it. You have to get people excited about it; you have to lead them in. I

probably wouldn’t give them Harryette Mullen first. But by the end of the semester, I’d

give them Harryette Mullen. They’d get it by then because by then they’d be ready for

it.

What book would you start with?

Richard Siken’s book “Crush.” That’s a nice book to start with. It’s a pretty great book.

It’s accessible and gets people interested?

I wouldn’t say it is “accessible.” It has a certain narrative energy to it that people are

familiar with. I wouldn’t call that “accessible” necessarily. It is about gay S and M

relationships so I don’t know how accessible that is, particularly since I teach in

Texas… I’m kidding. Siken is great. He came to Texas. He’s big in Texas. People

loved him at the program. I did a reading with him actually.

 28

I was always impressed, back in the Pine Street days, how you were so committed to your
writing. You would have these blocks of time during the day you scheduled for writing, and
you were very dedicated to them. Remember? Do you still do that?

I write differently now. I do write everyday, just differently. Like today I jotted stuff

down in my notebook on the way to therapy in my car. You write when you can.

Things are coming together; they’re just coming together in a different sort of way now.

A lot of my process before was daily writing in notebooks and I was focused. I needed

to do that too and hopefully I’ve internalized some of that.

I’m gearing up to do my next thing; I’m structuring the piece now. I’m doing it a

completely different way. Rather than writing free and then trying to find the shape

afterwards, I’m actually finding the shape and then I’m going to fill it in.

I like to do each book differently. I figure I’ll do this one differently as well.

What’s the shape, or are you still in the middle of thinking about it?

Yeah, I’m still thinking about it. It might actually be loosely based on the form that I’ve

seen in another book that attracts me: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. I

think that for what I’m doing, that seems like a nice container.

She writes in short prose sections. It’s ostensible poetry, but includes prose passages. It

is also Rankine’s tone— in fact it is almost the tone more than the form I like. Taking

these large political events and filtering them through an individual consciousness. Not
 29

like saying, “This is the way it is” and making large pronouncements, but, “This is the

way it affects me.” I like that. It seems like a good way to write political poetry.

Do other people read your work when you are in process? Who are your readers?

I don’t know who they are now. They change with different projects. I don’t know who

my readers will be for this project. A lot of times I’ll start reading new stuff at readings,

little experimental things, and someone who is there that I know will come up and say,

“That’s interesting” and I’ll send them a couple of pages. Maybe it is something like

that, but mostly I don’t know what I do.

I know many people have commented on your ability to write about harrowing life situations
without self-pity. You have responded in several different interviews regarding Another
Bullshit Night in Suck City that there were previous drafts of that book that were filled with
anger and self-pity. It sounded to me that part of your writing process might be getting it all out
on the page, then going back and cutting… Is that true?

I might have just said that to those interviewers. I don’t think I have a self pitying bone

in my body.

Seriously though, when you say “my writing process,” I don’t know what my writing

process is. It changes with each book. The only thing I know for sure is that you should

not feel like you are doing the right thing. That’s the only thing that remains consistent.

So the thing with torture right now that I’m doing, I think I’m on the right track because

I feel like it is really the wrong thing to be doing. Everything else, besides that feeling,

is different with each piece. For everything else there is no blueprint. There is no
 30

questioning with this piece, “Am I putting a lot of self-pity into this?” No, because it

isn’t a book ostensibly about myself. And I don’t think it will get to a place of

anger…of course there will probably be anger in it. But anger, it’s one of those

things… I think there is a lot of anger in Another Bullshit Night… it’s just that it’s

veiled.

You want to write in such a way that the reader comes to whatever emotions they need

to come to. I like it when I hear that readers have come away either disorientated or

angry or weeping. And if you look at the page, you can’t really point to the spot where

it happened, the emotion just suddenly starts to build in you. That’s what seems

important: how to get it on the page without seeing it. That’s the trick.

How do you achieve that?

There are all sorts of different ways of doing it. Find all that stuff people talk about.

You know, T.S. Eliot, Johnny Keats, negative capability, objective correlatives…

An objective correlative is having an object that contains the emotion, like a fetish

object, which is what we do anyway with our lives. You put all your hopes and dreams

into a car or something, just because you don’t know where else to put it. In your

writing you have moments of that, but you can’t have the whole book be objective

correlatives.
 31

You sort of learn from all these people, you learn what you can from all these different

writers and takes what makes sense to you. So for me, from T.S. Eliot, it’s like that,

moments of that.

There is a piece in the book, Another Bullshit Night… at the end of Piss of God, where

it says, “…a la-z-y boy, my lord, maybe not again in this lifetime.” I would just get

choked up reading that out loud, and I wouldn’t even know why. I still don’t know why

exactly. But it contains something; it contains a certain amount of energy that is

mysterious. I don’t get choked up now reading it, but it still seems powerful to me in

the way that is pretty mysterious. I read it a lot actually, that piece, at readings, and it

does, it seems like a powerful ending, for some unspeakable way. If I had said at the

end, like “I wonder if I’ll ever see my father again” it would be bullshit. It would be

absolute bullshit. But if you say, “…a la-z-y boy, my lord, maybe not again in this

lifetime...” Even though I don’t think that is what it is saying, it’s not saying “I will

never see my father again,” I don’t what it is saying. I have no idea what it is saying. It

is just some weird statement that contains a lot of energy. And you have to find those

and they are really hard to find. How do you teach someone that? I don’t know. You

teach them to write a lot and then find the ones that are mysterious that they don’t

understand and then trust it. That’s all you can do.

You said in an interview you did with Robert Birnbaum that you write “books of poems, not
individual poems.” Can you talk a little bit more about this?

Now I’m writing individual poems. I’m writing a lot of poems now that don’t seem to

be connected in anyway except through my psyche.

 32

But that was true of Some Ether and Blind Huber, they were “books of poems,” but that’s not
what you are doing now?

Yes, that’s true. But I don’t know what I’m doing now. I don’t think I’ll do the same

thing I’ve done before.

Do you like working together with other people in collaboration? You recently just taught a
course, Collaboration with the Arts at the University of Houston?

I taught that twice now. I’ll probably teach it again next spring.

Do you like it?

I love it. I think it is really great. It’s wild, so wild. It’s like a wild class. I do sort of

trust the process. You have to be both very rigorous and intuitive at the same time so I

like that tension. As a teacher you have to be rigorous and be like, “What are we doing

here?” but you have to allow for all this intuitive, spontaneous stuff to come into it.

Can you tell me a little about how it went? Who participated?

20 people sign up for the class, musicians, artists, writers, dancers. There are four

instructors, we divide them up. There is some sort of date where “something” is to be

done. My last group was based on Houston buses, so we met on the Houston buses. We

also had a studio. We’d go back to the studio and process what we did on the bus.

Do you love teaching?

Not all the time. Sometimes. It takes a lot of energy, but I generally like it. It’s like that

whole Stanley thing, it just seems like it is part of the job. The ability or the chance to

access or be part of accessing people’s subconscious creativity is a great gift. And to

 33

see that is really inspiring. To see people push into something that they didn’t know

they could push into and create something.

In this collaboration class, we created this whole other art form that really felt

collaborative. I was like, “My god, what is this thing?” It was something I’d never seen

before. It was exciting.

Does teaching affect your writing in any way?

Yeah, I don’t write. It takes too much energy. It’s hard to write when you are teaching.

It’s two different muscles it seems like. It’s hard. People do it.

Have you learned things by teaching things?

Oh yeah. I always start with something that I don’t really know too well and make it a

learning thing for myself.

Do certain issues of craft keep coming up with students? Are there some issues that always
float to the top?

You have to know how to write descriptive passages and how to craft an image. On

some level even if you never write using images, you should actually have that facility I

think. Usually I often start with that in classes. It is so shocking the level of pure

abstraction. And pure abstraction isn’t bad if it is coming from a certain place. But

often a younger poet’s abstractions are like pure unfiltered emotion that just needs to be

grounded in something or else it is really unreadable.

 34

I see that in a poem, when things veer into abstraction. There are poets that deal purely

in abstraction. Even Wallace Stevens—his abstractions are based in image. In Anecdote

of a Jar, the jar is on a mountain in Tennessee, even though it is an abstraction it is also

both, it contains both (abstraction and image).

After image, what else rises to the surface?

Expository writing. Yeah, that’s pretty bad. A lot of people get lost in that. People

know it too, because they can’t even read their own expository writing. It’s the stuff

when you write it that you don’t even bother reading over again, because you know it’s

boring and it’s just giving people information. So you train people: if it’s a part where

you get to and your mind goes a little blank, just imagine what the poor fucking reader

is going through. If you can’t even read your own fucking writing…

Image, expository writing, what else?

Tension is another one that you have to look for, points of tension, transitions, what’s

said, what’s unsaid.

I noticed you’re going to be teaching an entire workshop on tension, can you talk a little about
that?

Not really. I don’t even know what I’m going to teach now because I’m sort of over

that (“tension”). I’m going to call the workshop, “Bewilderment.” I sort of think

bewilderment might even be way above tension. I’m making a whole chart now, this

whole representation of these things. I think bewilderment might be above tension, and

tension sort of a subset.

 35

What do you mean by “bewilderment?”

Bewilderment is where the point in the poem where you have to push into the

unknown. You have a place where it’s the threshold to the subconscious. You get down

what you know, and then you get to the point of what you don’t know, what sort of

throws you. You know, what you haven’t been able to say. You try to find that point. A

lot of times you can find it where you revert to abstractions. That’s a point you’ve lost

your nerve. When you find it, then you write into it. Say what you haven’t said.

There are a lot of different things. I did a whole week on it, so there are all sorts of

things you can do. All sorts of different ways to do it.

What are some of the projects you are currently working on?

There’s the torture poems… And there’s this film I worked on, Darwin’s Nightmare.

An Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, right? Did you go to the Academy
Awards show?

Yes. It wasn’t very fun. It was one of the most lifeless rooms I’ve ever been in. But it

was nice to be there with my buddy.

The director, Hubert Sauper?

Yes. I’ve done a lot of screenings for it, question and answer type things. I go when

they can’t get Hubert. It’s not so easy to get him. I mean he’s done so much for it too;

he’s done tons of it. But I’m willing to do some in his stead, if they want me.

Have you written about your experience shooting the movie in Tanzania?
 36

Yeah, I’ve written a lot about it. I have to pull it all together into a book.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. It is all sort of vague for me. I’m a one day at a time

kind of guy. I just want to figure out what I’m doing. I want to see what happens, what

comes next.

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“allegory.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2006.

Answers.com 24 Aug. 2006. <http://www.answers.com/topic/allegory>

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.

17 Aug. 2006. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/

works/ge/benjamin.htm>

Flynn, Nick. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. New York: Norton, 2004.

---. Blind Huber. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2002.

---. Interview with Robert Birbaum. Identity Theory. 22 Mar. 2005. 3 Jul. 2006.
 37

< http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum158.php

---. Interview with Jess Sauer. The Austin Chronicle. 29 Oct. 2004. 6 Jul. 2006.

< http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A235106>

---. Some Ether. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2000.

Hoagland, Tony. Rev. of Some Ether Poems by Nick Flynn. Ploughshares. Fall 2000: 224.

Inez, Colette. “Family Talk: Confessional Poet? Not Me.” After Confession: Poetry as

Autobiography. Eds. David Graham and Kate Sontag. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2001.

Kunitz, Stanley. Interview with Francine Ringold. Interviews and Encounters with Stanley

Kunitz. Ed..Stanley Moss. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1993.

Levertov, Denise. Interview with Nicholas O’Connell. “A Poet’s Valediction.” Poets &

Writers Magazine. May/June 1998. 6 Jul. 2006. <http://www.pw.org/mag/levertov.htm>

Sexton, Anne. Interview with William Packard. The Poet’s Craft: Interviews from The New

York Quarterly. Ed. William Packard. New York: toExcel Press, 2000.