UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology SPRING 2024 - Flipbook - Page 18
EMBRACING THE WONDER
THE IMPORTANCE OF
HUMAN CONNECTIONS
W
"To uncover, in a sense
that is revealing some
deeper truth."
NICK FLYNN
ould you believe me if I told you that hope and joy are currencies worth trading in?
What if we remained curious enough to attempt to provide those around us with as much hope
and joy as we’d like to receive in return? While hope could be said to be expectations based on
our own desires, true joy is unadulterated, is simply taking in or sharing pleasure. Or, as the poet
Ross Gay said in an episode of This American Life podcast about delight, “Come gasp with me.”
The human condition is a constantly shifting dichotomy: striving for or thriving off moments of
successfully attaining joy, walking as many muddy deer trails as paved sidewalks.
One of the loveliest things about poets is how
open to and curious about the world they are.
Nick Flynn encapsulates this in his approach to
collages and poems, and despite notability for his
memoirs as well as his poems, he remains ardentheartedly human and filled with wonder for the
world around him. (If you’ve never read his work,
you probably know him from the Robert DeNiroJulianne Moore film, Being Flynn, which was
adapted from his memoir, Another Bullshit Night
in Suck City, on the set of which he played a small
role opposite his wife, the actress Lili Taylor.)
Low, Flynn’s sixth book of poems with Graywolf
Press, springs from collages he creates, often with
his daughter. Collage is an artform he took to in his
teens, and, in the style of Rauschenberg or Dadaera collagists, the medium allows him to combine
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found materials into images that help make sense
of the world, much in the way his poems do in their
exploration, and in the case of Low, combining.
“When I go through the world, I see an image that
somehow hooks on my subconscious,” he says,
“and I keep it, I bring it back and live with it for a
while. And then I find another. It’s slow; it takes a
long time to make one. Sometimes it takes a year to
create one.”
Many of the poems in Low were drafted during
several 30-day poem-a-day practices he undertook
when Covid lockdowns occurred and he and his
family “left Brooklyn to hunker down upstate.”
He’d taken stacks of his collages with him, and for
each of those 30-day stints, he would choose one
at random, look at it for 30 seconds, meditate on
it for seven minutes, and then spend ten minutes