Review of The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn

Graywolf Press (2011) $22

Reviewed by James Crews

One reads Nick Flynn’s newest book of poems—his first in almost a decade—and 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:

The thin thread that hold us here, tethered/ or maybe tired, together, what/ do you call it—telephone? horizon? song? Listen/ to yourself sing, We are all god’s children/ we are all gods, we walk the earth . . .

The piece is called “haiku (failed)” and so the slashes might suggest the poet’s “failure” 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’s tempting to read the “slashed” poems as transcriptions of song lyrics—even 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—and a reasonably patient reader can’t come up with an answer—we have to conclude that the result is little more than flourish.

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’s two wars. It’s easy to admire this poet’s project, yet there is little evidence within the poems themselves of what he’s up to; we must rely on what we already know of Flynn’s 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—one of the first books to tackle that war head-on. But Flynn seems to be mixing an abstract personal voice with some soldier’s, or maybe it’s the soldier’s voice throughout; we’re never really clued in. In the poems, “fire,” “air,” “earth,” and “water,” the poet also relies heavily upon the address, “capt’n,” which is evocative of Whitman, to give him context:

back home, capt’n, I was always on
lookout, any

bridge, any ledge I could

dive from, the highest point
to throw my body off

of—bridge, quarry, waterfall

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 “maybe” is a word one must use often when describing this book) The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands seeks only to mimic the detachment of “war-speak” and military rhetoric, to hammer home the breakdown of all description, especially in light of former President George W. Bush’s many misues of the English language and former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld’s famous defense, “We don’t know we don’t know.” Flynn’s not interested in leaving us a trail of breadcrumbs and unlike Jorie Graham’s 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’s found in these pages. And as a result, we don’t get to approach these poems with the empathy Flynn himself no doubt brought to them.

In the first section of “air,” for example, we feel the regret and deep need for forgetfulness in one complicit soldier:

we put them in cages they don’t like the cages
we put them in cells they pray

I swim in the palace it rains from the sky
the pool between palm trees & wall

the air in the cells is poison they claim
the air in the cages is dust

I sink to the bottom to see what it’s like
a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped

These are vivid, haunting lines, but then the second part of the poem starts with:

space monkey, suffocation
roulette—super-

cali-fragilistic-hyperventilation,
super-cali-fragilistic-cali-

fornication

Flynn too often breaks his own momentum with some strange flourish that’s 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 “seven testimonies (redacted),” which finishes out the book, and acts as the central inspiration for this project. The poem is an erasure (what he calls “redacted versions” 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’s “redacted” version:

That night, in the tent, one
on each side,

the photographer

lifted the ground. The next day
to Garso, a cold tank of

water (sometimes

with ice), they were going
& coming

& then they went
back—I tried to find myself

all night

And now, the real testimony of one Abu Ghraib detainee:

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.

The testimony clearly speaks for itself. Though it’s impossible not to feel sympathetic toward what this book is trying to provide—since we do need more fearless artists and writers willing to confront our country’s transgressions and failures—The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands 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’re left no longer resemble anything so much as flawed fiction. We expect more of our poets—or ought to; if not beauty, then we hope to read the whole truth and nothing but.