NEW YORK TIMES

Review: Looking Inward in Poetry Books From Ron Padgett and Nick Flynn
BOOKS OF THE TIMES, jeff gordinier, 8 july 2015
These days were taught to be leery of the man-child, that sloppy, skateboardtoting 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 universe
is the little tyke wholl soon arrive
and let me be superfluous if
and 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 thing
as are breakfast and lunch
when theyre good and with
the 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 ones
and at the new people with their coarseness and self-involvement
As 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.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/books/review-looking-inward-in-poetrybooks-from-ron-padgett-and-nick-flynn.html?_r=0>