Reddit reviews Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir

A memoir, not a novel, but Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.

Man, yesterday I was all ready to write an essay about this, I have it like 1100 words in and lost momentum, mostly because I revisited another race-poetry kerfuffle a friend of mine got in a couple years back, or, really more a brother of a friend but anyway, it really dissuaded me from bothering putting my opinion out there in a more official manner. I'm just going to give some bullet points here, I may finish the essay and post, still very much on the fence. (edit—looks like I spent a lot of time on this post now, great.)

Hicok's essay in my eyes: It is kinda like an old hippie who used to make money selling merch about air and water pollution who noticed a dip in sales, and he is grappling with his own selfish desire to sell as much merch as he used to sell, and the comfort that the air and water are getting better which is why his merch isn't selling, and ending at it being good for everyone even if he's taking a personal financial hit. And damn did he repeat so many times how great he thought it was. He was terrified as being seen as a self-pitying rich white man for expressing his feelings at a situation he and many others in his milieu are experiencing. The essay wasn't aimed at me, though in a number of ways we're similar-ish, I think he's putting too much weight on his sexual/racial status and not enough on a possible lack of keeping up with the times, or more likely, just that people are excited by the new. He's the seasoned. He's also afforded many opportunities because of his connections and reputation, which he acknowledges. For me it was too long by quite a bit, I thought he spent too much of the essay reiterating how good multiculturalism is for literature and the world—we agreed with you the first ten times you said it in various ways—especially when the method of the day is to cherry-pick quotes out of context, which Yu definitely did. Onto that.

Yu's response was more combative than I felt Hicok's essay called for, if it was supposed to be a part of a discussion and not an irritated yelp review. He treated Hicok's essay like an editorial as opposed to a personal essay, which it seemed to me to clearly be. Yu saw it as a call to action, even pointing to the so-called hypocrisy of having the spotlight put upon him for a piece that laments losing the spotlight. Who do you think was directing that spotlight? People outraged that someone might be a little bummed they're not as cool as they used to be. The first sentence Yu quotes is cherry-picked to not even show the entire sentence, some bush-league shit right there, very disengenuous. Maybe I noticed it more because I'd just read Hicok's essay so it was fresh in my mind, but it put me on edge right away with its trickiness. Here's a little bit I'd drafted regarding that quote:

>His selective quote early on omits a section that undercuts his point of Hicok being an old straight white man crying on his mountain of gold. Here is the fuller quote with the omitted section included. “In American poetry right now, straight white guys are the least important cultural voices, [as was inevitable, given how long we’ve made it difficult for others to have their say.]”

>This is an example of trying to make a simple point and couching it in an apology because people are so reactionary. I would argue that it’s a valid point, due to supply and demand. The straight white male writer’s perspective has saturated the market and while there will still be a demand for that perspective, with more options there will be fewer readers of any given poem, especially if it's more of the same perspective that had been readily available before. By taking the second half of the sentence away, Yu transforms the use of the word ‘important’ into one of ‘prominence’, whereas in context it is to be understood as ‘needed’.

Yu does rightly point to problematic language in the "inversion of the hierarchy" but it also seems to be out of line with the rest of Hicok's essay which is praising the levelling playing field. If I were workshopping that essay I'd recommend rephrasing. But I'd also say that he tried to hard not to offend people... yet here we are.

Yu then sites data that's kinda relevant, but not entirely. Hicok said that it's something he's noticing and not something that is canonical. Yu even calls Hicok's observations a 'harbinger'... then he sites Pulitzer numbers... see how those don't line up? Yu should have sited, among others, Amazon sales, but then he'd be faced with the fact that neither of them addressed, which is that the majority of people don't buy poetry to read it closely. The top 30-50ish is almost entirely stuff clearly bought for an English class (Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Maya Angelou—Joy Harjo has a bump for being the Laureate which is rad, she's a great poet), a couple celebrities, and mostly Instagram poets. An example of one of their highlighted poems (in its entirety) would be:

>Distance often gives you a reason to love harder.

That's right. An idiom reworded to be worse. And there are quite a few poets of that ilk in the top 20 (Claudia Rankine's in the top 30 to which is good, I have her collection "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" in my 'to read soon' stack). Hicok didn't seem to be talking about the apparatus of publishing or the established canon, he was talking about hype, about the poets who were being talked about, who're going the poetry version of viral. Kind of like how Richard Siken was the hottest shit for awhile around Crush. Maybe he still is, but my point is that people are drawn especially to the new, to new discoveries, new voices. Nick Flynn is another one kind of around that era who was 'hot' around the release of his first collection Some Ether and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City(both around $5 used with shipping at those links, both great books in case even one person reads this haha). Poets sometimes will get 'hot' around their first collection or around prizes. Hicok was just saying that in addition to lower sales (I think he specifically says readers, but, ipso facto, the only real metric is sales) he noticed that the 'hottest' writers were of a more multicultural background than he.

Yu points to Hoagland, which is where I went to right away while reading Hicok's essay. I guess I'm of a somewhat different viewpoint because I've never seen poetry as a way for me to confess my life story, but as a way to entertain. I'll add in some real life elements if they fit and are better than fiction, but I've never seen first person poetry as being strictly the person's voice and read all of Hoagland's What Narcissism Means to Me as an exaggerated/invented persona with some real life elements likely worked in and shrugged at the pov. Someone brought up the controversy when I was in grad school and I revisited the poem and yeah, there's certainly problematic areas and Hoagland's narrator was a bit too close to his own POV that the tribalism he expressed wasn't properly addressed...

There were two other recent dust-ups in the poetry community regarding race in the last decade that I know of: the aforementioned poem "How To" by Anders Carlson-Wee in The Nation—here's a NYT article on the controversy and the Yi-Fen Chou/Michael Derrick Hudson issue from Prairie Schooner and Best American Poetry. Here is Sherman Alexie's essay regarding the BAP selection. I think both are pretty silly to be honest. In "How to" the voice is pretty clearly not the poet, but it didn't have anything racial in it. Perhaps I've just spent more time around homeless people but nothing in the poem made me think that the speaker was black or white. It wasn't important to the poem or to me. I was more concerned with small inconsistencies in the voice but even that was tolerable. Calling it 'ableist' is absurd. I'm saddened that the poetry editors felt forced to put that apology up, whether it was pressure on them from the outside, or from higher up editors scared of the wrath of Twitter. The Yi-Fen Chou issue is interesting mostly because nothing in the poem has anything to do with the pseudonym, there's no appropriation of anything other than using a fake author name. I don't recall the poet's reasoning, but it is intriguing that people gave so much of a shit. It shows that the cover letter does matter as much as the poem, to some people, but for not for elitism, for inclusivity (Alexie's essay is really good, if you haven't read it I highly recommend it). But, not many journals claim to read submissions blind, that incident reminds you of that. What really bugged me the most about that whole story was that Prairie Schooner didn't accept simultaneous submissions at the time, (I know more than the average bear about literary magazines from my years of research and reading) and in Hudson's BAP notes he talked about 49 rejections prior to publication. I know how long it can take if you're simultaneously submitting, to pull a poem from being submitted and waiting until you get all replies if you want to submit it to a journal that doesn't take SS's. It's possible but unlikely that the poem was actually only submitted to Prairie Schooner. Sorry, long aside there)

I just read Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn and loved it. It feels like a story, not just someone telling about their life. He doesn't just talk about his life in highlights - he shows his own mistakes, his own flaws. The memoir focuses on his relationship with his father, and both of them being writers sets the text up with some great dialogue exchanges and poetic phrases.

https://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0393329402

Another bullshit night in Suck City


by Nick Flynn

http://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0393329402

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

http://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0393329402

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. It's basically a memoir of the author's drug addiction and his life up to the writing of the book. I read it a couple years ago mostly because Patton Oswalt highly recommended it in a blog or an interview and am very glad I did.

appropriate-schmappropriate: get your teacher's attention with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

but if you're determined to be school-appropriate, The Road of Lost Innocence is short, incredibly moving and inspiring, and about a very controversial topic (escaping sexual slavery in Cambodia).