Nick Flynn’s awkward and mercifully brief new foray into poetry, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, worried me from the start. The second poem, “fire”, begins, “more the idea of the flame than the flame / as in: the flame / of the rose petal, the flame of the thorn / the sun is a flame” and proceeds in that manner for a dozen more pages. Not content only to copy Gertrude Stein’s nonsense, Flynn also creates an unflattering homage to Galway Kinnell’s masterful “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible” from The Book of Nightmares, stretching out that poet’s shuddering “Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!” into pages of meaningless psychoanalysis of an Iraq War soldier ordered to torture captured terror suspects.
one drunk night, even now I
wonder-sometimes still Iimagine-was I hit am I
daze, thisdream this confession, hey
little girl is your daddy home, hey capt’n heysir am I making any sense?
No. Although I suppose passages like these make too much sense as obvious attempts to illustrate the obvious horror of doing obviously horrible things. But on a universal scale, Flynn’s belief that his caffeinated rant gives us new perspective on these crimes makes no sense at all. Reading this book left me feeling guilty by default, as though I went to an open-mic poetry slam and watched a very bad rapper read a few verses about his tough childhood. How any of the five respected poets whose complimentary blurbs grace the book’s jacket fell for this nonsense, I do not know; I’m afraid I’ve permanently lost a little respect for Franz Wright for comparing The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands to Neruda, Whitman, and Yeats.
When lyrics to Modest Mouse’s “Float On” started showing up at the end of multiple poems, Flynn’s writing process became glaringly evident: get very stoned, put on some indie rock, and just write the words you feel, man. Perhaps the book should come shrinkwrapped with a mix CD and a dime bag, then you would at least be getting something for your money.
Although I could go through and find several dozen examples of nonsense to shake my head at, I want to share with you the most arrogant verses of the book, which also happen to be one of its most concrete images:
the tower towers above us
now, we can see it
from wherever it gives the impressionwe will never get lost
Flynn has confidence: the strong tower one can never lose sight of. But that confidence is misplaced in a meaningless gesture. Only the person dreaming of this tower could actually be moved by it. Note that Flynn only gives one word that describes the tower: “towers,” the verb. Like so much of this book, the image is a closed loop, hoping to hide its pretension. Flynn is so set on congratulating himself for thinking of such a great idea that he believes it needs no praise beyond its existence. When a small child makes a totally indecipherable shape out of Play-doh, we praise him or her for their creativity, but only so the child is encouraged to continue. At his age, I’m wary about giving Flynn more of that type of ego-building.
As I said, Flynn attempts to justify all this angst by linking it to the Iraq War and, more specifically, the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. In “seven testimonies (redacted)”, he takes some very moving prisoner testimonials and transforms them to dull sense-poetry through a pointless dada exercise. Helpfully for the critic, the original passages are printed in the back of the book. “The broomstick was metal. I was hit in the face, back, legs at Abu Ghraib,” becomes, in Flynn’s translation, “broomstick was I was / you are we want—”. But why? Why torture us with the senseless beating (gruesome puns intended) of real horror into art school refuse? It comes across as an insult to those who suffered at our military’s hands, suggesting that we can’t see the real meaning of their words until some MFA student wins a prize with them.
Flynn is rightfully angered by the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, but here he has nothing new to say about them. His poetry lacks the intellectual might required to make any persuasive arguments. While reading The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, I was reminiscing about one of the most sophisticated works of art examining the Iraq War, the play “Stuff Happens,” a brilliant take on the subtle and viral fears that allow the creation of a place like Abu Ghraib. In a scene in the second act, George Bush’s advisors are debating what concessions they need to make to Tony Blair to entice Great Britain to join the war when Dick Cheney violently interrupts them, hissing, “We don’t need him!” We may be able to round up some polite applause for Nick Flynn’s puppy-dog political poetry, but we definitely don’t need it.