Some Ether

Nick Flynn’s Some Ether explores the depths of loss amidst this increasingly impersonal, inconsequential, complex and painful new millennium. In the opening of the chapter “Oceanic,” he compares the chaos and entropy around him to a coast guard description of the ocean, beautifully creating a means of description from unconventional allusion, “the ocean is always looking for a way into your boat.” In many ways this quote describes the relentless trauma that existence presses upon Flynn, through his loss of parents, self, and identity, and the residue that follows.

In the dialogue of contemporary poetry Flynn’s work involves elements of both the elliptical and the disillusioned. The author Stephen Burt identified these aspects as representing a cohesive school structure in his essay “The Elliptical Poets,” to strong criticism about the unity of such a school. Nevertheless Burt’s elements are evidenced in Ether. Although Flynn makes great use of allusion, he does so in an elliptical manner. Therefore references struggle for perfection. In the case of an ellipse, the mathematical shape, it verges on becoming a perfect circle, in poetry a perfect, ordinary allusion. Yet the ellipse can never be a circle. Let us now add Flynn’s world of loss and abandonment. Flynn’s mother committed suicide when he was twenty-two and he met his father for the first time at a homeless shelter he volunteered at. Thus how can Flynn find an expression of self in the wreckage of the world around him? The use of the elliptical allows allusion to express the disillusionment and loss present in the world around Flynn. For instance in “Bag of Mice” he writes, “I dreamt your suicide note/ was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,/ & in the bag were six baby mice.” In terms of allusion, the fact that mice here represent suicide shows the crazy, incomprehensible, impossible nature of the act. Ether works tirelessly to find self where the two vehicles for his conception have been destroyed.

“My mother cut/ a hole in the air/ & vanished into it. The report hung &/ deafened followed by an over-whelming silence, a ringing/ in the ears. (p. 63)” In the quest for self Flynn also focuses on the affect trauma has on senses, its residue. Indeed the ringing of the ears shows the overwhelming affect of loss. Yet Flynn dives further. In “Residue” he quotes Rainier Maria Rilke, who states that the perfection of color is the absence of residue. As residue is forever inherent in Flynn’s self this perfection becomes impossible. In this later poem in Ether the book comes the a climax. The forces of elliptical allusion and a need for a medium of expression and self combine in the poem, “Some Ether,” “physicists were searching outerspace/ for some ether electromagnetic waves.” Indeed Flynn’s desire for ether finds credence. In a forever shrinking world of information the need to escape accessibility and the search for an avenue of real thought become prescient problems.

Notes:

Nick Flynn 2010 Academy of American Poets

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/758

Flynn, Nick Some Ether 2000 Nick Flynn Graywolf Press, Minnesota