NYT Reviews New Collections by Nick Flynn and Ron Padgett

Summer's heating up! If you're still deciding what to read next, check out Jeff Gordinier's New York Times review of two new collections by Nick Flynn and Ron Padgett. Gordinier writes, "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." More:

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 he’s writing about salad (“I don’t see why I can’t 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. Padgett’s 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. Padgett’s latest collection, “Alone and Not Alone,” there’s 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.

[...]

If Ron Padgett is American poetry’s 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. Flynn’s 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. [...]

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