{"id":337,"date":"2012-03-08T23:34:46","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.basaltmagazine.com\/?p=337"},"modified":"2012-03-08T23:34:46","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:34:46","slug":"review-of-the-captain-asks-for-a-show-of-hands-by-nick-flynn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2012\/03\/08\/review-of-the-captain-asks-for-a-show-of-hands-by-nick-flynn\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands<\/em> by Nick Flynn<\/p>\n

Graywolf Press (2011) $22<\/p>\n

Reviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n

One reads Nick Flynn\u2019s newest book of poems\u2014his first in almost a decade\u2014and emerges from the broken narratives and fractured voices with a host of nagging questions. And then the reader wonders: Is this frustration what the author really intended? Perhaps it was in a quest to veer away from the strategies and accomplishment of his previous two volumes, Some Ether and Blind Huber, that Flynn makes such puzzling choices. For instance, instead of just line breaks (which would have been more effective), many of the poems throughout The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands use backslashes. This is how the book begins:<\/p>\n

The thin thread that hold us here, tethered\/ or maybe tired, together, what\/ do you call it\u2014telephone? horizon? song? Listen\/ to yourself sing, We are all god\u2019s children\/ we are all gods, we walk the earth . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

The piece is called \u201chaiku (failed)\u201d and so the slashes might suggest the poet\u2019s \u201cfailure\u201d to fully locate these lines in a safer, unbroken lyric form. But why not revert to simple prose or forego punctuation altogether, (as he does in other places) which is itself a kind of binding system? Several poems also borrow lines and titles from other poems and popular songs, so in light of this, it\u2019s tempting to read the \u201cslashed\u201d poems as transcriptions of song lyrics\u2014even though it adds nothing to the work itself. One hates to knock a book for its idiosyncrasies, but when a writer forces a reader to struggle with why she or he has made such seemingly offhand choices\u2014and a reasonably patient reader can\u2019t come up with an answer\u2014we have to conclude that the result is little more than flourish.<\/p>\n

Fracture is, of course, both the subject and goal of this book as Flynn attempts to dissect and reassemble the cacophonic voices of the media, military and government, which feed us a constant diet of meaningless language, especially when it comes to talk of America\u2019s two wars. It\u2019s easy to admire this poet\u2019s project, yet there is little evidence within the poems themselves of what he\u2019s up to; we must rely on what we already know of Flynn\u2019s life or turn to the book jacket for direction. We can also look toward the copious (and somewhat surprising) blurbs that fill the back cover, words of praise offered by the likes of Carolyn Forche and Brian Turner, an Iraq veteran himself who wrote the excellent, groundbreaking Here, Bullet<\/em>\u2014one of the first books to tackle that war head-on. But Flynn seems to be mixing an abstract personal voice with some soldier\u2019s, or maybe it\u2019s the soldier\u2019s voice throughout; we\u2019re never really clued in. In the poems, \u201cfire,\u201d \u201cair,\u201d \u201cearth,\u201d and \u201cwater,\u201d the poet also relies heavily upon the address, \u201ccapt\u2019n,\u201d which is evocative of Whitman, to give him context:<\/p>\n

back home, capt\u2019n, I was always on<\/em>
\nlookout, any<\/em><\/p>\n

bridge, any ledge I could<\/em><\/p>\n

dive from, the highest point<\/em>
\nto throw my body off<\/em><\/p>\n

of\u2014bridge, quarry, waterfall<\/em><\/p>\n

But aside from the address, we lack the context and specificity to truly connect with whomever is speaking. The poems are effecting but, ultimately, ineffective in capturing the true horrors of war, or its aftermath since they never open the door wide enough for the reader to enter. Maybe (and \u201cmaybe\u201d is a word one must use often when describing this book) The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands<\/em> seeks only to mimic the detachment of \u201cwar-speak\u201d and military rhetoric, to hammer home the breakdown of all description, especially in light of former President George W. Bush\u2019s many misues of the English language and former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s famous defense, \u201cWe don\u2019t know we don\u2019t know.\u201d Flynn\u2019s not interested in leaving us a trail of breadcrumbs and unlike Jorie Graham\u2019s interrogation of war, Overlord, he chooses sparseness and generality to chronicle his shell-shocked soldiers and prisoners. Without a little help from the writer, though, whether in the form of a title, epigraph or notes, we are left too often guessing; we might as well be watching a newscast or press conference for all the truth that\u2019s found in these pages. And as a result, we don\u2019t get to approach these poems with the empathy Flynn himself no doubt brought to them.<\/p>\n

In the first section of \u201cair,\u201d for example, we feel the regret and deep need for forgetfulness in one complicit soldier:<\/p>\n

we put them in cages they don\u2019t like the cages<\/em>
\nwe put them in cells they pray<\/em><\/p>\n

I swim in the palace it rains from the sky<\/em>
\nthe pool between palm trees & wall<\/em><\/p>\n

the air in the cells is poison they claim<\/em>
\nthe air in the cages is dust<\/em><\/p>\n

I sink to the bottom to see what it\u2019s like<\/em>
\na grave in the air where you won\u2019t lie too cramped<\/em><\/p>\n

These are vivid, haunting lines, but then the second part of the poem starts with:<\/p>\n

space monkey, suffocation<\/em>
\nroulette\u2014super-<\/em><\/p>\n

cali-fragilistic-hyperventilation,<\/em>
\nsuper-cali-fragilistic-cali-<\/em><\/p>\n

fornication<\/em><\/p>\n

Flynn too often breaks his own momentum with some strange flourish that\u2019s meant to grab us but more often ends up alienating us from the narratives he had built. Most of all, however, one has to wonder why he chose the structure and form of \u201cseven testimonies (redacted),\u201d which finishes out the book, and acts as the central inspiration for this project. The poem is an erasure (what he calls \u201credacted versions\u201d in the Notes section) of the testimonies of seven Abu Ghraib detainees gathered by the artist Daniel Heyman in Amman and Istanbul from 2006-2008. The author tells us that he was present for the Istanbul testimonies, but this makes the final poem all the more bewildering. If he actually saw and heard these prisoners recounting the circumstances of their torture at the hands of American soldiers, why would he then choose to elide those telling, incriminating details? Why would a poet, in essence, erase their voices and stories, their very experiences? Luckily, Flynn did choose to include the full text of the testimonies in the Notes, and so it becomes apparent how his work revises and hides the original narratives. First, consider Flynn\u2019s \u201credacted\u201d version:<\/p>\n

That night, in the tent, one<\/em>
\non each side,<\/em><\/p>\n

the photographer<\/em><\/p>\n

lifted the ground. The next day<\/em>
\nto Garso, a cold tank of<\/em><\/p>\n

water (sometimes<\/em><\/p>\n

with ice), they were going<\/em>
\n& coming<\/em><\/p>\n

& then they went<\/em>
\nback\u2014I tried to find myself<\/em><\/p>\n

all night<\/em><\/p>\n

And now, the real testimony of one Abu Ghraib detainee:<\/p>\n

Then I went to Abu Ghraib for twenty-two days. There is one other thing that happened at Garso but I cannot talk about it. I did not have a beard. I even enjoy drinking. I am not a religious man. That night in that tent they put bombs between my legs, and rifles around me. Two. One on each side, and then the photographers took pictures. The bomb was real. Then they started asking me questions. They put a rope around my right wrist and tied the rope around a pipe and lifted me off the ground by this arm for three hours. I still have problems lifting my arm. The next day they took me to Garso. There they put me in a hole with water. Next they took my clothing. They would take us at four in the morning and put us in a cold tank of water, sometimes with ice. They were hitting us and beating us, going and coming, and then they went back to their cells in cold wet clothes. I tried to find a way to kill myself. This was for six nights.<\/em><\/p>\n

The testimony clearly speaks for itself. Though it\u2019s impossible not to feel sympathetic toward what this book is trying to provide\u2014since we do need more fearless artists and writers willing to confront our country\u2019s transgressions and failures\u2014The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands<\/em> constitutes a poetry of witness from which all the witness has been cut. Yes, this is what governments and leaders do: they black out and suppress information and the voices of the oppressed so that the scraps of truth with which we\u2019re left no longer resemble anything so much as flawed fiction. We expect more of our poets\u2014or ought to; if not beauty, then we hope to read the whole truth and nothing but.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn Graywolf Press (2011) $22 Reviewed by James Crews One reads Nick Flynn\u2019s newest book of poems\u2014his first in almost a decade\u2014and emerges from the broken narratives and fractured voices with a host of nagging questions. And then the reader wonders: Is this frustration what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[28,37,48],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-iraq-war-poetry","tag-nick-flynn","tag-the-captain-asks-for-a-show-of-hands"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}