Nick Flynn's "Unbroken"
CLOSE READING AND WRITING PROMPT
UNBROKEN By Nick Flynn As if the past were riding up to meet you as if the past could ride a horse as if the past were a horse wandering riderless along a dusty road as if the horse had never been ridden / They say a horse is broken when the rider can stay on they say the past is broken when you can let go of it I have broken with the past, she says. I have erased it from my phone I have blindered my eyes from her eyes / I didn’t know the past was made of horses I didn’t even call it a horse until now I didn’t even call it strange until I looked back on it the past was a horse crossing a desert a body draped over it this is how we get the beloved home / Strange now to never hear a horse upon waking or when out in the field I didn’t know the past would come for me I didn’t even call it the past until now sometimes one gallops past but no one else ever sees it
LOTSA STUFF TO THINK ABOUT
How many characters are actually in this poem?
Why does the poet choose the word “blindered” instead of “blinded?”
Is there a mythology or a reality being fastened together by this poem?
What poetic devices are deeply at work in this piece?
Which line invokes William Faulkner?
Poet and memoirist Nick Flynn was born in Scituate, Massachusetts. His debut poetry collection, Some Ether (2000), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Flynn has said, “The way I write I don’t see much distinction between the two, although prose seems more suited to daylight, and poetry to night. I try to cook both down to something essential—by the end hopefully some balance between mystery and clarity remains.” Flynn is also the author of the books of poetry The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), and My Feelings (2015). He has also written several memoirs, including Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), The Ticking is the Bomb (2010), and The Reenactments (2013); and the play Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (2008). His book The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment (2010) addresses the Abu Ghraib scandal. Flynn teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, and splits his time between Houston and Brooklyn, New York.
SUGGESTED WRITING PROMPTS
Do you have a spirit animal? Write about the past, or your past, as if it were THAT animal.
Take anywhere from three to five snippets of vernacular or colloquial phrases involving animals ( “raining cats and dogs” “the fish are really biting” or yes “no use beating a dead horse”) and write a stanza that builds off of each phrase.
Write about how and what it means to “erase the past.”
Write a poem or story about meeting your past, as if your past were a person.
Creative non-compliance with imperialist workshop facilitators.
Amazing, amazing poem.
Spirit animal is skunk.
xx