HOUSTON CHRONICLENICK FLYNN WEIGHS IN: a prose writer unleashes poetryDoni M. Wilson, 28 May 2015

MY FEELINGS, poems, Nick Flynn's new collection, starts with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, and like her, he isn't kidding around. When you have been through a lot, "You cannot fold a Flood/And put it in a Drawer." There is a trace of irony here because Emily Dickinson did put packets of her poems in a drawer every deep feeling beribboned for its eventual discovery and release. But Flynn, who teaches in the University of Houston's creative-writing program, has done no such thing with any of his feelings: He has plays, previous award-winning poems, and his well-known memoir,Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, in which he sees his long-lost alcoholic father in a homeless shelter in Boston. The difference is that before, his writing has been revealing while still holding, to a large extent, a stiff upper lip, letting excruciating circumstances speak for themselves.

Now, he allows a lip quiver, lets us in. In the opening poem, "The Belly of the Beast," he announces a certain kind of emotional liberation that is hard to achieve but admirable. Maybe before the river was "held back / by the stones it has carried" but that is so over. Feelings, Flynn's or not, "cannot stand still inside you" and have to be dealt with, maybe even abandoned. He vows: "One day I'll leave not you / but all this this hunger / that pushes each wave."Flynn is a keen observer and his emotional reactions are dark. In his stream-of-conscious moments, love and white houses transmogrify into tombstones and graveyards, and in a flash "yes the world is one big graveyard after all." But this is not gratuitous morbidity: This is how his mind works, and how the images are fueled. Feelings are supposed to hold you back, get you off track. But sometimes, they are the springboard for the imagination: In "AK-47" an ostensible (and improbable) screenplay pitch is meant to school us in how the only thing that really gets the action going is strong feeling: "maybe he is the one who killed her & now he is the one using vengeance / as the engine to drive his body through time."Maybe the best poem-poem (and not prose poem) is "Kafka." Here, the author of "A Hunger Artist" comes to the poet's mind as he has to make life-and-death decisions regarding his dying (and starving) father: "The fact / that I am the one who will pull the plug on him / & that I will pull it with one simple word / is in the realm of the unbearable, but / apparently / I will bear it." Master of the line break, Flynn knows when to put a stop to things. He has had to do it before.Ironically recalling "the mansion" his father grew up in, Flynn confesses what we all know but are afraid to admit: Terrible things happen, and we feel like hell, but that is what produces art. We plagiarize lines from the scenes that we wish hadn't happened, but guess what? They did. Flynn surprises the reader when he says, "And my father's masterpieces, his / many novels, mine / now to publish I don't have to tell anyone / I didn't write them, not a word." But really, he has been telling the reader this all along. We are suddenly all Kafka Gregors in a communal metamorphosis in which we manage all the feelings that come from all the decisions and moments that we might not have chosen.Central to the collection is the death of Flynn's mother. Her suicide is the subject of "The When and the How," and the brilliant prose-poem, "My Triggers," in which the bond between the speaker and a woman are the suicides of their mothers. The "when" is "autumn," and the triggers are "buildings, windows, department stores" or "pills, guns, the ocean" as those are "the how." Flynn's mother writes "I FEEL TOO MUCH" and you have to be one cold customer to think that that was some kind of crime, and the reader viscerally feels that the price is too high if you have an excess of emotion. In "My Triggers" Flynn explains, "We never discussed the why," and anyone who has ever lost someone to suicide completely gets this: You will never know the answer, so there is nothing to discuss. Instead, the reader realizes that although Flynn is a card-carrying Romantic squarely set in that tradition, the game has changed: There is no "emotion recollected in tranquility." In this collection, that itself is an obsolete romantic notion. Sure, you can recollect things, but forget tranquility.Even a conversation with his daughter in "Father, Insect" has glimmers of turmoil, every parent's fear of his or her child knowing who the parent was before parenthood, always finding "a way to apologize for all / my imperfections...." His daughter asks him what he was before he was a father: "then what were you / a bug?" Well, maybe. Such moments make themselves into lines, poems, books. We are lucky Flynn chooses to do so. In "Gravity," which glosses on that overrated film, we see that choosing to live makes all the difference in the world, and he translates his feelings into words that make us get that the notion that the worst can happen, but we have to get through it, like everything, so that the words will build the cathedral of the poem, at least eventually. In "Forty-Seven Minutes," getting through a poem with a class seems like an impossibility, especially when a student asks the irritating but universal question "Does it matter?" Like any brutality, Flynn reminds us, "But to get through the next forty-seven minutes / we might have to pretend it does." A lot of life is composed of the last line of the last poem: "waiting."One of Flynn's many accomplishments in "My Feelings" is that he can write prose poems that are poetic and do not smack of "flash fiction." Thank goodness, because once they do, they are no longer poems. He avoids this, as in "If This Is Your Final Destination," lyrically revealing that our emotions are what they are because they are what they are: as in "strawberry is her favorite, because it tastes / like strawberry." Flynn doesn't brood I cannot call him "Byronic." It's just that sometimes a spade is a spade, and that applies to emotions as well as cards, the rush of feelings as well as plain bad luck.Nick Flynn's poems subvert the label of confessional poetry (what isn't confessional anyway, at the end of the day?) because he might claim possession of feelings even on the title page, but they might be your feelings too and that is important so that the poems are not too remote. Flynn's collection reminds us that feelings come from somewhere, often dark places, and they are not self-indulgent or gratuitous, but essential, and can be transformed in the realm of the poem.