Nick Flynn & Beth Bachmann | March/April 2017

 
Nick Flynn & Beth Bachmann

They came on boats from across the sea…

It’s the American Dream, and the start of “American Dreamz,” the title song of the 2006 film directed by Paul Weitz, starring Hugh Grant and Mandy Moore. Grant plays a Simon Cowell-esque figure, a scout for the talent show American Dreamz, and Moore plays Sally, the young popstar-hopeful who sings the lyrics,

Every woman and man has their own destiny
To dream American Dreams
Dreamz with a z.

The film is a narrative (and satire) of the American Dream: eXtreme fame, eXtreme riches, eXtreme hunger, eXtreme goods, eXtreme energy, eXtreme dot-by-dot. If you work hard, you will succeed… z. But what is that ‘z,’ really, Weitz asks, other than the dream itself falling asleep?

Weitz’s film involves two other main characters: Omer, a showtune-loving teen in a terrorist training camp at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border whose mother was killed in an American attack; he is deemed inept in training and sent to live with family in California, where he will find himself competing onstage with Sally. The second character is Sally’s boyfriend, William, a white, small-town, wounded Iraqi vet who will ultimately walk onto the stage of American Dreamz, strapped with a bomb.

Where were you when… ?

To each era, each act, its timing.

That’s 2006. In 2012, Weitz’s film Being Flynn, an adaptation of Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, appears. The book and movie recount the suicide of Nick’s mother (played by Julianne Moore) and Nick’s (Paul Dano’s) reunion with his homeless father (Robert De Niro). Early promos describe the film as a “dramedy.” In between these years, I write a book, Temper, about my sister’s unsolved murder, and my father as one suspect. I write a book about war and post-traumatic stress, Do Not Rise, and Nick writes two books about torture, then a memoir, The Reenactments, about being on set with Weitz as he remakes Nick’s coming-of-age, and most recently, a book of poems called, My Feelings. Along the way, Nick and I speak less of Aristotle’s catharsis and more of his laughter: perfect tragedy can only happen between friends. Dramedy? Slapstick. Schadenfreude. It’s funny when someone falls down.

What’s the name for this? Ineffable: something too great or extreme to be expressed in words. Suicide, murder, torture, terror, humor, evolution, sentience, feeling, love? If, to all things an art, what then, is an art of the extreme, and, if the American dream is a dream, can we—anyone/everyone—ever possess it? Isn’t that the secret, too, about love? It only happens in the present tense. Anyone, everyone, we are living the dream right now. Right now. Right now? Can we make of the extreme a daily practice or is it like a dream, by nature, always, just a little beyond our waking?

 

A Brief Personal History of the Extreme (Three Doors)
Beth Bachmann

My interest in the extreme begins in the earth, and then, in the water. Cavers descending to extreme depths report experiencing a condition called “the rapture,” the body’s response to depth and darkness. The condition is similar to “raptures of the deep” faced by scuba divers, but with two key differences: one is marked by panic, the other euphoria; one by earth, one by water.

I am interested in what happens on the page when poets cave and dive into extreme states. First, what’s in the dirt? Bodies, for one thing. Often we think of the extreme in poetry as poems written in response to violence: war, torture, murder, suicide, all that mud that makes us unclean. Second, what’s in the water? Bodies, for one thing. Ash. And yet we think of the water as restorative, baptismal.

There are two ways to get to a god: earth and water.

In terms of extremes, on one side there is heaven, on the other, hell, loosely speaking, good and evil. Violence is only one end. The other is rapture, ecstasy, and love. Everything else is in between.

A poem that traffics in the extreme manipulates threshold space. Violence occurs at a breach of empathy and love in the space where we try to enter the other. In both cases, language breaks down: the “o” of the scream and the “o” of making love.

Rapture is not far, etymologically speaking, from rupture. One is to seize, to be carried away. The other is to break, to tear open. On the page this can happen as fragment, redaction, erasure, white space, or inversion—a kind of nonaural image rhyme, sun and moon.

Studies of the brain show we go momentarily blind when we view violent and erotic images. When an image of a bared breast or severed limb interrupts a photo stream, test subjects go involuntarily blind to the next image on the screen, as when reading is interrupted by a loud noise.

Sometimes in a poem, the moment of violence is accompanied by a moment of rapture. Yeats’s long poem, “Meditations in a Time of Civil War,” culminates in a section titled, “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness.” The passage cuts quickly from a call for vengeance on murderers to this image:

Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes.

In one of my all-time favorite poems, Chris Abani’s “Rambo 3,” the movie Rambo III is projected onto the killing wall of a prison. Amidst the movie violence, real violence erupts and we encounter these lines:

Sprayed like so much water from a hose,
bullets chase our fears across the courtyard.

Trampling shame and dignity underfoot,
blood runs thick with spilt cola.

Euphoria means feeling good when you are not well. Magical unicorns. Soda pop. Are these examples of the poet getting carried away or a glimpse into a euphoria the brain makes when it doesn’t want to see?

***

When you say you love me for the first time, we are holding hands in the doorway. You say the words, our hands part, the door closes between us and inside, I fall back onto the bed.

Lately, I’ve become obsessed with Vermeer. What’s extreme about Vermeer? It’s the light. Not just the product of it, but the lengths he goes to render it: the looking at it through a hole in a tiny box and also the blue he uses, which costs a fortune, and yet he doesn’t shy from using it in a small background space in a gray wall to make the negative space more real.

I have a need for the extreme to lead to the sublime, a belief that if we can push and push and keep pushing, there’s something beautiful beyond that we cannot hold, but that we can get close to. Or, as Willie Nelson sings in the words of Bob Dylan, “I keep my eyes glued to the door.” Survival is also a threshold state.

The extremities of our bodies are our fingers and toes, the parts that curl in response. Extremities are connected to the core, the torso, the chest, the heart. If an extreme poem fragments, it does so in service of going deeper, severing language or surface as a way not to obscure but to gain access to the subconscious or a collective unconscious, to lay bare a human vulnerability.

Saying I love you, sometimes, can be the height of speech at its threshold. There are many things to surrender to, beyond the dirty water: we had our first kiss in the bath.

***

When Cassius Clay sings, “Stand by Me,” on his 1964 album of poetry rounds titled, I Am the Greatest!, he slips and sings, Stand down; stand by me. We can surrender also to love.

The first condition for being a poet is being a wild romantic. You must be prepared to make outrageous statements. I am on the market for an old door to use as a headboard for my bed.

The extreme can service both extremes of the big and small. Marianne Moore writes of the sea and of the fish. On the sea as a grave she writes, “It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, / but you cannot stand in the middle of this.” Famously, forty-eight years after her poem “Poetry” appears in print, she cuts its thirty lines down to its opening three:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt
   for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Bold statement. We all know this (or should). Moore was a practitioner of extreme revision. Time inside a poem, outside, too, is made by the way it changes. Revolution comes from the clouds. Cassius says, “poetry and boxing do mix.” He and Marianne were friends.

My friend, another poet, sends me a letter about diving two miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean: “Next time I see you, I will tell you what it was like.”

In the end, I think, the shadows in the cave suggest the wall we are facing is merely one in a series of walls, permeable by water.

Some [Unstable] Notes on the Idea & Uses of the Extreme in Poetry

Nick Flynn

Sometimes it feels like we are living in an apocalyptic moment, but I think, maybe, we’ve always felt this way. I want to begin with passages from William Blake’s apocalyptic visions, “VALA: Night the First.” What follows is a meditation on extremities: endings, beginnings, and the apocalypse between.

From “VALA: Night the First” by William Blake

…thou art thyself a root growing in hell
Tho thus heavenly beautiful to draw me to destruction

Sometimes I think thou art a flower expanding
Sometimes I think thou art fruit breaking from its bud
In dreadful dolor & pain & I am like an atom
A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity
I wish & feel & weep & groan Ah terrible terrible

…

Behold two little Infants wept upon the desolate wind.

The first state weeping they began & helpless as a wave
Beaten along its sightless way growing enormous in its motion to
Its utmost goal…

…

…I see the invisible knife
I see the shower of blood: I see the swords & spears of futurity
Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves.
Tho’ this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain.

…

Let us refuse the Plow & Spade, the heavy Roller & spiked
Harrow. burn all these Corn fields. throw down all these fences
Fattend on Human blood & drunk with wine of life is better far

Than all these labours of the harvest & the vintage. See the river
Red with the blood of Men. swells lustful round my rocky knees
My clouds are not the clouds of verdant fields & groves of fruit
But Clouds of Human Souls. my nostrils drink the lives of Men

The Villages Lament. they faint outstretchd upon the plain
Wailing runs round the Valleys from the Mill & from the Barn
But most the polishd Palaces dark silent bow with dread
Hiding their books & pictures. underneath the dens of Earth

The Cities send to one another saying My sons are Mad
With wine of cruelty. Let us plat a Scourge O Sister City
Children are nourishd for the Slaughter; once the Child was fed
With Milk; but wherefore now are Children fed with blood

The Horse is of more value than the Man. The Tyger fierce
Laughs at the Human form. the Lion mocks & thirsts for blood
They cry O Spider spread thy web! Enlarge thy bones & fill’d
With marrow. sinews & flesh Exalt thyself attain a voice

Call to thy dark armd hosts, for all the sons of Men muster together
To desolate their cities! Man shall be no more!...

***

1. Not every act of writing is extreme.

2. Like everything else, the idea of the extreme in poetry is on a continuum—if on one end is, say, love, then death could be on the other end.

3. Some poems are not on this continuum—they are on other continuums. These poems are more engaged with form, or sound, or silence, all of which can also contain elements of the extreme.

4. All lyric poems are extreme if the poet writes them with the awareness that they will one day die.

5. A poem does not have to end in death to be extreme, just as not all poems that end in death are extreme.

6. Death, in and of itself, is not extreme—neither is suffering.

7. Death is either simply the end of life or part of life or a threshold to eternity, depending upon your belief system.

8. All belief systems are subject to revision, like everything else.

9. Is it more extreme to believe that everything that lives is holy, or that there is only one god?

10. Descriptions of nature are not generally extreme, except for volcanoes, floods, plagues, etc.

11. Eco-poetics, though, can hover on the edge of the extreme—these poems engage with—and sometimes touch—the coming apocalypse.

12. That the apocalypse has been coming for a long time (see Blake) does not make it any less immanent.

13. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is no more extreme than, say, The Illiad, or The Book of Revelations.

14. In one section of The Book of Revelations (also known as the Apocalypse), seven bowls are poured onto Earth. The second bowl turns the sea to blood and everything within it dies. The third bowl turns all fresh water to blood. With the pouring of the fourth bowl, The sun scorches the earth with intense heat.

15. Certain locations—prisons, wars, burning buildings, sinking ships—are by their nature extreme, but it is still necessary to find tension within those structures to become a poem.

16. Sometimes on a beautiful nothing morning, I’ll listen to Iggy Pop, who wakes up parts of my brain in ways that might be considered extreme.

17. The extreme without tension is simply a wail.

18. Aimé Césaire, in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, offered this: …life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

19. Mazan Kerbaj stood on his porch in Beirut and played his trumpet as Israel bombed the city around him—he calls this “a collaboration” and he named this collaboration, A Starry Night.

20. All acts of subjugation are extreme, while all hierarchies of suffering are false.

21. My daughter has grown up in a country at war, even if it has been mostly invisible to her.

22. This isn’t rock & roll; this is genocide.

23. Is it extreme to tell your child to step over someone sleeping on the sidewalk? Can the quotidian be extreme?

24. When did it become quotidian to explain to your child that you are angry that a cop shot another black man today and no, you cannot tell her why.

25. At the same time the radio is talking about a boy who jumped off a bridge after being bullied for being gay… I tell my daughter he died from being sad.

26. Weeks later she will ask, Can you really die from being sad?

27. I lie to her about how her grandmother died; I say she had a bad heart, not that she put a bullet in it.

28. A poem written in a trance can be extreme, depending upon what is pulled up from the subconscious realm.

29. Maybe I have a bad heart.

30. Blake saw the coming apocalypse and wanted to remake the world—once the Child was fed With Milk; but wherefore now are Children fed with blood.

31. A mountain can be extreme, if you find yourself trapped on it. A mountain can become a volcano, just as a breeze can become a tornado, and all rain contains a flood.

32. If you string a wire between love and death, you could pluck it and it would be a poem. But if you wrap that same wire around death, it is a bomb.

33. You can of course wrap a wire around love, if that’s your thing and it’s consensual.

 

Nick Flynn has received fellowships and awards from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation, PEN, and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in include the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and NPR’s This American Life. In 2015 he published his ninth book, My Feelings (Graywolf), a collection of poems.

Beth Bachmann’s books are Temper, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Do Not Rise, winner of the PSA Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, both from the Pitt Poetry Series. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and teaches in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University.