Divedapper Interviews Nick Flynn

Kaveh Akbar is at it again! This time he hosts poet and prose writer Nick Flynn at his popular web journal, Divedapper. Flynn and Akbar share a struggle in common: both grappled with addiction and are currently in recovery. Akbar explains, "we're both people...who are interested in writing about addiction, and your work is a place that I've gone to for years and years to find experience, strength, and hope in writing about that. We had no sort of interactions before." (Though, Flynn immediately clarifies: "No, we didn't. I think we were initially connected through our mutual friend Alix Lambert. And somehow, as things go, it just slipped off from my shelf.") Let's pick up with their conversation from there:

Yeah. It was cool to then loop into each other's orbits.

I think it's much better this way. We've gotten to know each other. Otherwise, with this phone call—I wouldn't even know what you look like. I wouldn't know your poems. It would've been a very different thing.

Yeah. And aside from just the content of talking about addiction, I think there's a kind of load-bearing humility in your work that I'm very interested in.

Yeah. I don't know how I would talk about that. It's one of those things where once you start talking about how humble you are, you definitely run into trouble. "I might be the most humble person in the world."

Haha. Sure, sure. A useful way to talk about it might be to say that I think there is a way to write about what you've written about where the locus of control is external—where you are the victim. But the way that your poems work is often a way that claims responsibility, and accepts responsibility. And they work in a way that is not ashamed of fallibility. That's something that I've studied intensely. And my poems owe your poems a great debt in that specific way.

Yeah, I love the way poems work. Reading your work opens up other worlds to me. Early on, with my first book, I met with Fred Marchant, who's this wonderful poet based in Boston.

Yeah, he's got a new book out with Graywolf, right?

Yeah. I didn't know his work before we met, but we had this great conversation—you know, before Graywolf took my book, they didn't take my book. They asked if I'd be willing to talk to this editor. So I talked to Fred for a few hours. And it was so moving to sit down with someone who really gets what you're doing and what you're succeeding at, but who also sees where you're failing and where you're falling short. Who sees the little things that you think you can get away with in poems, you know, the things where you're like, "No one is going to notice this one spot that isn't quite working."

There are going to be moments where you're not pushing into something deep enough. Where you're holding back. And maybe you don't know how to go deeper yet. You can only write a poem—you can only do anything from where you're at, you know? Which is also a part of the whole recovery idea—whatever speed you're going at is the right speed.

Stanley Kunitz said writing the first book is like creating a myth of yourself. You're introducing yourself to the world, like, "This is who I am." And that sounds sort of grand especially in our day and age, but these are the concerns that I'm going to try to sort out for the rest of my life. You know, you're not going to get it perfect in your first book. It's impossible. You're going to return to these things and keep circling around them.

So Fred Marchant said this thing to me—and there are only a handful of moments in my life where someone said something that really opened another door for me. He was talking about poems about my mother's suicide in my first book, and he said, "You're approaching it in a way that is really successful in this poem. It has an emotional energy. But these other poems are approaching it the same way. You're going back into it and repeating yourself in some way. Not in a bad way, they are decent poems, but you should think of the whole subject of your life as a mountain that you're climbing. And what is it? Is the mountain the self, is it the story of the self, the myth of the self? At any rate, this is your material. And in these poems, you're taking the same route up. And it's a good route, but you have to find different purchase on the material." He used the word, "purchase." And somehow that word was enough to trigger in me an understanding. And I said, "I did! I did have other purchase on the material." I had other poems I didn't think fit in. I was uncertain about them, or they made me uncomfortable in a way. I've become much more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Read on at Divedapper.