Hi, everybody.
"I have a friend who everyone warns me is dangerous.
He hides bloody images of Jesus around my house for me
to find when I come home--
Jesus behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked into the mirror.
He wants to save me, but we disagree from what.
My version of hell is someone ripping open his shirt
and saying, look what I did for you."
That's from Nick Flynn's poem "Emptying Town," which
was my first sighting of the poet
in the issue of "Ploughshares" around 1990
that Marie Howe edited.
This was the bio-sketch in that issue.
Nicholas Flynn was born in Scituate, Massachusetts,
in 1960.
He earned his undergraduate degree, finally,
from the University of Massachusetts in 1990.
In the interim, he worked in Boston
for six years with homeless adults as a caseworker.
He's also been a photographer, an electrician,
a founding member of a cooperative gallery,
and a ship's captain.
In 1991, 1992, he was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work
Center.
He now lives in Brooklyn and is working towards an MA
at New York University.
He has been writing for as long as he can remember.
Since then, of course, he's become a renowned poet
and person publishing two books of poetry,
another book about how to teach poetry, and the much-praised
and rightly so bestselling memoir, Another Bullshit
Night in Suck City.
He teaches at the University of Houston in the MFA program
and almost every summer, in the Fine Arts Work Center
at Provincetown and sometimes in the NYU creative writing
program.
He also lives in Athens, New York.
Mr. Flynn's first book, Some Ether,
was a book about tragedy and family
and of overcoming tragedy by the hard work of memory.
It was a book about God forgetting us,
about black parrots and blue Sherlock Holmes
and also about mice.
Startlingly different was Blind Huber.
It tells the life story of a beekeeper
and the corporate life of bees, both from the inside.
And it's curiously about history and the necessity of history
for all of our lives.
A Note Slipped Under the Door--
Teaching from Poems We Love is a book I've never seen
and is therefore very mysterious to me.
But I think it's about teaching people to teach kids to write.
Nick is a good teacher.
Lastly, the memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
is, of course, about fathers and sons--
lost fathers and lost sons.
And about recovery from being lost.
Here are two illustrative fragments
from the Ulysses chapter.
"Many fathers are gone, some leave, some are left.
Some return, unknown and hungry.
Only the dog remembers.
Even if around, most disappear all day, to jobs
their children only slightly understand."
And, "Some part of me knew he would show up,
that if I stood in one place long enough,
he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost.
But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost
and you both end up in the same place, waiting."
Please welcome the poet Nick Flynn.
[APPLAUSE]