Construct, Destruct, Instruct

I find most all of Robert Birnbaum's interviews to be positively illuminating, and I particularly enjoyed this one with Nick Flynn. Flynn is a poet and the author of the memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, which details his experiences working in a Boston homeless shelter where his father was a frequent patron.

The great thing is that, while almost any traditional media coverage of Flynn's book would quite literally be like, "Oh yes, isn't that such a dramatic story? Well, that about sums it up," Birnbaum has the depth and the extra space to have an expansive, true conversation with writers. Very enjoyable indeed.

Here's what I loved most about this one:

Robert Birnbaum: In terms of what you want to do as a poet and writer, are you interested in movies, dance, drama?

Nick Flynn: It's funny you bring that up. I went to an old bookstore in NYC yesterday, 12th Street Books or something. I looked at a Rauschenberg retrospective. He's like the great collaborator. I'm teaching a class at Houston this spring on collaboration. And so I'm working with the art department, theater department, dance department, and we are inventing this class. I don't know what I am going to do. I am desperately trying to find a book about collaboration or about at least from my discipline. I have done a lot different collaborations with people. I did a play a year ago in New York. I have done dance performances.

RB: What do you mean?

NF: I did a collaboration with some dancers in New York and we did a thing at St. Mark's.

RB: What did you do?

NF: They put me on stage and made me dance. [both laugh] I had text. It was improvisational dance and so they started messing with me. I was just trying to read my text. And they came up and started flipping me over and doing all this stuff. I think it's real important to keep open to different forms and to see the possibilities within different disciplines. And see how they can feed each other. I have done a lot with artists. Artists have taken my poems and worked on them and done pieces with them. I have done visual stuff. There is a friend and we have been mailing things back and forth for five years now. A piece of wood, and we cut it up—my friend Michael Landis; we cut a piece of plywood in half and each take a piece and mail it back and forth and keep changing it, putting things on it. Erasing and changing. After a year we stop and do another one—for five years.

I'm quite fond of his sense of perspective and unusually creative approach.