Nick Flynn writes in defiance of despair, and the poet’s fourth collection is as emotionally fraught as its title. Even the dust jacket art, which depicts an abandoned laundromat, is exhausted. My Feelings confronts suffering without flinching. The speaker sounds emotionally spent, but these poems endure in the midst of exhaustion.
Flynn says that he no longer tries to write poetry that will “impose meaning on chaos.” Instead, he recognizes here that “one can’t impose one’s reality on the world. One has to just accept it.” And this honest acceptance drives My Feelings: “I don’t want poetry to be anything except an experience.”
It is this experience, though filled with pain and self-doubt, that ultimately leads Flynn to authentic hope. Flynn’s fans know his story—suicidal mother, homeless father—but unlike earlier volumes, this one doesn’t dwell on the horrors of his past. His familial tragedy hovers in the margins, but it is no longer the subject of every poem. Instead, Flynn expresses his haggard emotional state through new forms and dissonant images. He lifts the epigraph from Emily Dickinson—“You cannot fold a Flood / And put it in a Drawer”—using the two lines as a declaration of the emotional scale of the following 32 poems. My Feelings refuses to constrain Flynn’s emotions, choosing instead to revel in excess.
In the second poem, “AK-47,” Flynn writes in an experimental form called pecha kucha, a nonliterary pres-entation format born from the same PowerPoint womb as TED talks. In pecha kucha, the speaker deploys a rapid-fire sequence of slides, speaking briefly about each one. Topics range from beer brewing to a critique of selfies, and “AK-47” models this cadence, moving breathlessly through a 23-section poem in just 64 lines.
Rather than express his original thoughts, the poet hides behind subjects ranging from Jack Gilbert’s poetry to plot summaries of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. The first section contains Gilbert’s line “love lays hold of everything,” and in the sixth section, the speaker declares that “the amnesiac in the film last night tattooed words on his / body.” Aware of the risk of such an avant-garde form, the speaker wavers uncertainly in lines such as “think whatever abstraction, you can / insert here _____” or “we could melt it down [could we?] into nails
or bells.”
But this is not novelty for its own sake. It is more akin to Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” in which the speaker admonishes herself to “Write it!” even if the results are disastrous. The speaker in “AK-47” summons courage from wherever he can find it, whether poetry or pop culture.
“My Feelings” is one of Flynn’s biggest wagers. “Maybe I / should be locked in a cage in the center of / the village,” he begins. The following lines show a mind in crisis, reeling over failed love. As in “AK-47,” the speaker is uncertain and halting.
really tried but maybe it was simply
the first moment I could be with someone
& say nothing & know
the other understood.
Flynn characterizes the confusion of his lonely voice through false starts such as “I want to say” and ambiguities like “maybe.” But the poem ends with Flynn’s gamble: 12 lines of crossed-through adjectives between the first word, “my,” and the last word of the poem, “feelings.” The rejected adjectives flow without order or punctuation, ranging from “oceanic” to “purple.” Yet even with the tricks and maneuvering of the earlier poems, “My Feelings” falls short. In his longing for originality, Flynn comes across as too clever, heavy-handed, and “My Feelings” is a rare miss.
“Polaroid” is a brilliant, three-line composition about a conversation between Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Flynn uses pop culture as a template in “Gravity,” “The Day Lou Reed Died,” and “Philip Seymour Hoffman,” and, in the latter two, examines his father’s death and the temptation of suicide through the deaths of two celebrities. In “Forty-Seven Minutes,” Flynn describes a debate in a high school English class about whether rain is an image or an idea. A student asks, “Does it matter?” The speaker answers, “no, it doesn’t . . . But to get through the next forty-seven minutes / we might have to pretend it does.”
My Feelings is not about grandeur but surviving the next hour. Flynn’s poetry is temporary and laden with the transience of pop culture and experimentation. But it is also rife with the steady endurance of a man who refuses to acquiesce to sorrow. The final poem, “Marathon,” is about the Boston Marathon bombing. But rather than wallowing in violence or loss, Flynn writes with more compassion than elsewhere: “Petals / on a river, a tree in blossom, one / pink bud—unopened—falls.” The calm image is jarring after the chaos of the previous 31 poems, and Flynn ends with an image of life after death: “Look,” he says,
runs without thinking
not away but into the cloud where we are
waiting.
Will Brewbaker, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was an intern at The Weekly Standard.
