NEW YORK TIMES
Review: Looking Inward in Poetry Books From Ron Padgett and Nick
FlynnBOOKS OF THE TIMES, jeff gordinier, 8 july 2015 These days
were taught to be leery of the man-child, that sloppy,
skateboard-toting guy of a certain age who seems determined to
cling to his concert T-shirts and skillfully avoid adulthood for as
long as he can.Among male poets, though, the preservation of a
stubborn streak of boyishness can feel like an advantage, at least
when it comes to coaxing readers into the backyard soap-bubble of a
poem. It might even be a job requirement.For decades now, Ron
Padgett has built up a body of work that, like the tenderly deadpan
ballads of Jonathan Richman, has at its heart a sort of wry,
pickled innocence. Whether hes writing about salad (I dont see why
I cant dive into that salad bowl/and rough up the lettuce) or a
tabletop (When I run my fingers/over it, it makes a cool swoosh),
he specializes in conveying a sense that he is encountering stuff
for the first time, and encouraging his readers to do the same.
(Richard Hell, in his memoir of the CBGB era, I Dreamed I Was a
Very Clean Tramp, cites Mr. Padgetts poetry as an early influence,
which makes you wonder whether he deserves credit for being the
gentle stealth uncle of American punk rock.)On the cover of Mr.
Padgetts latest collection, Alone and Not Alone, theres a Jim Dine
drawing of Pinocchio, the wooden marionette who longed to become a
boy. Many of the puckish, unadorned poems within suggest that Mr.
Padgett himself, now a grandfather, may have similar thoughts on
his mind.As he puts it in It Takes Two:My replacement in the
universeis the little tyke wholl soon arriveand let me be
superfluous ifand when I feel like being so.He ponders the
strangeness of Roman numerals and rabbits. He celebrates the
pleasures of a bathroom curtain and a painting in Copenhagen. He
likes food. In Pep Talk, he fearlessly defies writing instructors
everywhere by using the word nice:Dinner is a damned nice thingas
are breakfast and lunchwhen theyre good and withthe one you love.A
newcomer to Mr. Padgetts worldview could be forgiven for asking, Is
this even poetry? Mr. Padgett might answer, Gosh, Im not sure! The
charm of his lines and their power, because his work has a way of
disarming you and pulling you in again and again often comes from
his allergy to anything pretentious or even poetic. He makes plain
niceness look like the most radical stance of all.If Ron Padgett is
American poetrys Peter Pan, Nick Flynn, in his latest collection,
My Feelings, channels the interior growling of a Lost Boy, which
should come as no shock to anyone who has marinated in the darkness
of Mr. Flynns acclaimed memoirs. A dying father, a suicidal mother,
the bullying and manipulative stepparent known as addiction these
figures weave in and out of My Feelings like the shadows in a
haunted house.Even if it comes with an implied wink (and maybe an
echo of Karl Ove Knausgaard), the very title of this book suggests
a kind of doomy adolescent churn. (A female writer recently told
me, provocatively, that only a man could get away with a title like
My Feelings. Discuss.)One of Mr. Flynns previous volumes, Blind
Huber, delivered a fascinating mosaic of poems about the workings
of a beehive, but My Feelings does not try to transplant said
feelings into the hollowed-out trunk of a different habitat. No,
these poems are just what they look like: buzzing, stinging plunges
into the complicated colony of self.At their weakest, Mr. Flynns
lines can feel like preliminary sketches for the more fleshed-out
poems that should have come later in the process. The Day Lou Reed
Died carries the germ of a compelling premise the idea that Mr.
Flynns biological father and Reed are twinned currents of patrimony
in Mr. Flynns life but it never quite makes the leap from that
premise to a fully realized elegy: I/knew him better than I knew my
own/father, which means/through these songs, which means/not at
all.At their strongest, Mr. Flynns poems are much tougher than
that. Philip Seymour Hoffman presents an unvarnished look at the
mind games that addicts play with themselves. It grabs you by the
earlobes with its opening line: Last summer I found a small box
stashed away in my apartment,/a box filled with enough Vicodin to
kill me. (I dare you to stop there.)The agonies and delights of
youth never seem too far away for Nick Flynn and Ron Padgett, but
its interesting to note that the most memorable verses in both
books wind up being the ones with a hard-forged insight as their
foundation. (Mr. Flynn, too, likes to shuck off the linguistic
frills. His songs of experience hum with immediacy.)Consider The
Street, in which Mr. Padgett proves that hes not all salads and
tabletops. The poem starts off as a memorial to a friend in the
East Village who has died (and its you Im waiting for as I walk
past Little Poland), but then it goes bitter, turning into an
indictment of a citys love affair with gentrification:Knowing you
were there made me be more here too,made New York be New
York,fueled my anger at the new buildings that ruined the old
onesand at the new people with their coarseness and
self-involvementAs Mr. Padgett knows, downtown Manhattans no longer
a cheap playground for bohemian-dreaming boys like him or like
Richard Hell, for that matter. For neighborhoods as well as for
poets, growing up isnt all its cracked up to be.PULL QUOTES
[The poems in MY FEELINGS are] buzzing, stinging plunges into
the complicated colony of self.
Nick Flynn, in his latest collection, My Feelings, channels the
interior growling of a Lost Boy, which should come as no shock to
anyone who has marinated in the darkness of Mr. Flynns acclaimed
memoirs. A dying father, a suicidal mother, the bullying and
manipulative stepparent known as addiction these figures weave in
and out of My Feelings like the shadows in a haunted house.
Philip Seymour Hoffman presents an unvarnished look at the mind
games that addicts play with themselves. It grabs you by the
earlobes with its opening line: Last summer I found a small box
stashed away in my apartment,/a box filled with enough Vicodin to
kill me. (I dare you to stop there.)
[Flynns] songs of experience hum with immediacy.
