Tony Hoagland sums up Nick Flynn's SOME ETHER: "Dazed but curious, connected but detached, attentive but distant, present but disturbingly emmeshed in the long sticky tentacles of memory." Hoagland talks about how many writers use confessionalism as a "healing act", but Nick Flynn does not (and makes no apologies for it). This inability to heal in some ways coincides with the idea I expressed earlier that Nick Flynn puts up an emotional barrier in his writing. Tony goes furhter, naming this barrier "dreamy disconnectedness".
I also agree with Hoagland when he appreciates the poems as a complete collection ("collage"), rather than individual poems. Each poem provides a tiny glimpse at what is the entire picture of Flynn's reality. Though at times out of sequence, each piece of Flynn's time-line puzzle is filled in. I think that Calvin Bedient either misses this point, or just doesn't appreciate it. "The writing is thrown ahead of sense, so to speak, but too carelessly". Bedient feels that "in a poem, there is no past", and he therefore cannot appreciate that emotions from the past can still burn. Bedient disregards Flynn's poem "Wild with Dandelion Roses" because it uses a past story to express a pain that grew throughout Flynn's life. I believe, however, that Flynn sharing the story of swallowing a wasp provides an imaginative metaphor for the internal pain he felt that grew into an entire nest of wasps inside of him. I don't believe that past pain takes away from present-tense pain. In fact, I think that each segment of Flynn's SOME ETHER works to enhance every other.
Bedient also disagrees with Hoagland and me on the quality of lyrics in Nick Flynn's writing. Bedient "miss[es] in it an arresting creative force," and he believes Flynn's "lines attempt nothing new and cannot compare with the work to which they are indebted." I, on the other hand, really appreciated the simple metaphors and lyrics. I could see his true intentions (including his ever important disconnectedness) better this way. Hoagland agrees and calls Flynn's poems "beautifully clear in their particulars and meanings."
I guess in style and in method of story-telling I have to agree with Tony Hoagland's review of Nick Flynn's SOME ETHER. We both appreciate the out-of-sequence story, the "dreamy disconnectedness", and the simple, clear words that Flynn writes. While I can appreciate Calvin Bedient's points, I don't see eye-to-eye with them.
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I love the title of your post! Upon reading your post, I was ready to come up with an example where Flynn actually let down his guard and really gave us an idea of what he really feels. I found myself drawn to the poem “You moved me through each room”(77), which is a poem that stood out to me for me some reason. Flynn let us into his memories and showed us that in some ways he does indeed live in the past. I do believe that his unwillingness to leave his memory shows us that Flynn longs to be in that moment again, regardless of the fact that it is a rather ordinary scene (I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t have memories of my mother doing something as mundane as brushing her hair). What I’ve now realized is that I don’t know why any of this matters. Was this the last memory he has of him and his mother? Were those her last words to him? Was this the last time Flynn felt some sense of security or normality? We don’t know; Flynn won’t tell us. This discovery left me a little disappointed, because I realize that sometimes just telling the story and sharing the memories are nowhere near as intimate as sharing the feelings that go along with them. Why should I be happy that Flynn can revisit this moment with his mother? I don’t know what this does for him, and I will never be sure because Flynn simply doesn’t allow us to get that far into his head. -Janee
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