The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (review)

If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.

—Walt Whitman

Configurations and reconfigurations of the body permeate Nick Flynn's newest collection: from the minute components of the individual to the physical circumstances of bodies in conflict, these lyric poems exalt the physicality of our existence in the tradition of Whitman while blurring it through the ambiguous lens of war, particularly those wars currently being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are unmistakably American poems asking unsettling questions about what it means to be American—what we mean when we talk about freedom, democracy, spiritual belief—and work to chart the relationship between those fundamental natures, beliefs, and actions and the human machinery over which they supervene.

Whitman's presence overarches the three preoccupations of the text: the body in all its guises, the politics of war, and the influence of religion on both. Although the three sections of the book don't precisely align with these three subjects, there is a sort of progression evident from the poetics of the body to political poetry, from the individual to the masses—in a sense, the body proper to the body politic, the religious body, the corpus Christi: "inside each / corpuscle, the day, that day, everyday is / inside, my body, your body" gives way to "Listen / to yourself sing, We are all god's children / we are all gods" (from "haiku (failed)"). Flynn opens the body for the reader, exposing it as composition, composite, collage, among like constructs; we don't merely contain multitudes, we comprise them.

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands is, at its heart, a kind of echo of American culture, a machine churning out mondegreens, a deadly serious funhouse mirror. Transfigured instances of popular culture appear throughout the text—appropriations from and references to Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, and Arcade Fire collide with and complicate those from and to Paul Celan, Robert Frost, and Hart Crane, among others —and these echoes and distortions simultaneously remind the reader of the cultural forces that have shaped and continue to shape politics and literature in this century, as well as comment on the marks they have left behind. When, in the poem "fire," he writes: "capt'n, we can do as we wish, we can do / as we wish with the body // but we cannot leave marks," he not only directly references the torture practices exercised in prisons like Abu Ghraib but remarks on the paradox of the mark transmitted by history—that is, learning to leave no such mark, no "stain / [that] proves he was here" ("oh here").

Flynn repeatedly addresses Whitman's "captain" throughout the collection, although Flynn's captain is a malevolent specter, a Bizarro version of the original, an imperfect clone, a capt'n, metonymizing not Abraham Lincoln or the America of the Civil War but rather George W. Bush and the America of the wars in the Middle East. Where Whitman writes, "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" ("Song of Myself"), Flynn echoes: "I saw my own body, covering itself / with earth, my body becoming // earth" ("earth"). Where Whitman laments, "O Captain! my Captain!" Flynn's anaphora becomes, "capt'n oh my captain" ("fire").

Flynn calls these lines "pulled or twisted," and these bastardizations of the original themselves point not only to the historical game of Telephone to which we are heir ("the thin thread that hold[s] us here, tethered / or maybe tied, together, what / do you call it—telephone? horizon? song?" from ("haiku (failed)") but highlight the inauthenticity, the illegitimacy of the wars America is currently waging as well as the political and ethical maneuverings upon which they are predicated.

One of those ethical/political questions—that of torture—runs prominently through the political commentary of the book. The poems "water" and "earth" take up the question of waterboarding—"if he dies, you're doing it wrong"—with the latter exploring this...