Nick Flynn

Some Ether

Reading Log No. 1-First Impressions

In the first section of Some Ether Nick Flynn focuses a lot on his mother’s suicide--an event that happened when Flynn was 22. Many of the poems seem to be from the perspective of himself as a child. Flynn gives the impression as almost an outsider looking in on his mother’s life; a startling perspective as he should be directly involved in it.
A poem that really stood out to me was one called “You Ask How” where Flynn confronts people’s reactions when they hear that his mother is dead. He chronicles the building questions that follow that statement: how she died, where she shot herself, etc. He seems to casually dismiss these questions, but he goes into how much the memory saddens him; how isolated his mother’s suicide made him feel.
Flynn’s poetry centers heavily around death, and mortality. One poem in the second section is called “Memento Mori” which is Latin for “Remember your mortality.” He also seems interested with the idea of loss of innocence, especially childhood innocence as in the poem “Cartoon Physics, part 1.” The universe, and space are other recurring themes that I picked up on in my first reading. Nick Flynn is a central character in many of his poems, and a minor plot can usually be found, but rarely is there a conclusion or any sort of closure.

Reading Log No. 2-"Bag of Mice"

I thought perhaps it would be fitting if my first reading log was on the first poem in the book. Nick Flynn opens Some Ether with a poem called "Bag of Mice." A poem in which he uses the very first line to tell the reader that it is about someone's suicide note. "I dreamt your suicide note/was scrawled on a brown paperbag,/& in the bag were six baby mice." reads the first three lines. I already know that Nick Flynn's mother committed suicide when he was 22 years old, so I can assume that this is in reference to her. Flynn uses a lot of dark imagery, most notably that this is about a suicide note written on a brown paper bag. But then the bag catches on fire with the baby mice inside of it, and each individual letter of the suicide note is burned. The mice manage to escape, though, into an open field as his mother's "voice [is] released into the night/like a song, & the mice/grew wilder."

That is the basic plot of the poem, its news or felt idea. I think it's safe to assume that Flynn is the narrator since we know of his mother's suicide, but it could also be from someone else affected by her death. "Bag of Mice" also sets up for us the main theme of Some Ether which is suicide. I also think it is clear that much of the imagery in this poem is figurative since he tells us that this was a dream he had. But the part that I find the most interesting are the baby mice in the brown paper bag. I am not quite sure of their significance, but I think they may represent, or be metaphors for, Nick Flynn and perhaps even other members of his family: siblings, extended family, etc. I think he felt trapped and suffocated by his mother. I would imagine if she was suicidal, she had other problems as well. But when she died, the mice were free--free to go wild, or free to experience the world without having to have someone depend on them.

Reading Log No. 3- "Trickology"

This is another narrative poem, telling a story about Flynn's childhood. It highlights the dichotomy of Flynn’s relationship with his mother; the good and the bad. We get more of a glimpse into his mother’s personality. The poem is divided into two halves. In the first part, he recalls a memory of her buying a “water-wiggle” for their hose for him to run around in the summer. I like the juxtaposition Flynn uses between the words “berserk” and “valium in the first stanza--at the same time he is running around like crazy, but describes the air as valium, a drug used to treat anxiety, thus calming one down. Then Flynn writes: “she could whisper the word burn/& I’d turn to ash.” This gave me some trouble, and I wasn’t quite sure how this was significant until after reading the poem a few more times. This quote is representative of the absolute love and devotion Flynn felt for his mother when she would do things such as attach the water-wiggle to the hose. This is such an innocent childhood moment, completely unaffected by his mother’s mental illness.

The second half of the poem shows the bad side of his relationship with his mother. Flynn writes that he would pick blackberries from a patch near their home to bring them home so his mother could make a pie. Instead he was met with her telling him “that she doesn’t know how to bake, that/no blackberries ever grew around us,/that [he] never ate pie anyway.” You can almost hear the disappointment in his voice at this part of the poem, and that he is a bit more disillusioned with his mother than when she set up the water-wiggle. The concluding lines are a representation of that disillusionment: “not ash, really/but the bright flecks rising from a burning/house, the family outside, barefoot” I feel like not only did this sum up his disappointment, but it also referenced back to the first poem “Bag of Mice” where he writes about the six baby mice in the burning bag the suicide note was written on. But in this passage, he makes reference to an actual family, watching a house burn.

Reading Log No. 4-"Cartoon Physics, part 1"

This poem deals more with childhood innocence than many of the other poems in the first part of Some Ether. Flynn focuses more on other issues than his mother’s suicide in the second section of the book. I like this poem, because, in a way, it is not as depressing as some of the other ones. This poem almost even has a whimsical element to it. Although all of the events he describes happening in this poem are horrific like, burning houses, car wrecks, sinking ships, etc. he has a tone of hope because all of these things, in cartoons, can be fixed and are manageable. He mentions that with all these “earthbound, tangible/disasters” kids can be heroes. They can draw a door on a rock and safely pass through it, not allowing anyone else to go through. These are the kinds of disasters kids should be exposed to; they shouldn’t know that one day the sun will have used up all its energy and earth will cease to exist. I like this poem because I feel like there is a certain element to it that we can imagine, that we as readers can relate to since many of us may not be able to relate to the other event’s in Flynn’s life. We can all remember watching Looney Tunes as kids and seeing these laws of cartoon physics applied in the shows. But yet there is still that dark element to his poetry. It sort of gives the impression that life is just inherently dark.