He arrives, e’er long

NEW YORK -- On his passport, Nick Flynn lists his profession as “poet,” but there is nothing anemic or brooding about his appearance. On a recent afternoon in New York’s West Village, he dismounted the bike he rides every day from Brooklyn to Manhattan looking like a man ready to ride another 50 miles. In person, as in his prose and poetry, Flynn is exuberant and present, a friendly force to be reckoned with.

He pushed his long hair out of his face and rearranged his backpack before settling into his favorite Greenwich Village cafe. He talked about everything but his work -- most especially about the birthing classes he had been taking with his partner, actress Lili Taylor, who was about to give birth to their daughter. Nick Flynn, the award-winning poet and the bestselling author of a 2004 memoir “Another . . . Night . . .,” whose clever, angry title cannot be printed in full, is happy and healthy. After some prodding, he talked about his career, which he agreed had “not been very calculated or thought out.” He paused a moment, staring around the cafe in wonder. “At least not for financial compensation,” he laughed.

Flynn is 47 and many of the details of his life can be found in the two books of poetry he has published, “Some Ether” in 2000 and “Blind Huber” in 2002, along with the memoir. This month he returns with his first full-length play, “Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins,” to be published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

It’s unusual that a play should be published at all before having been produced on stage, but then Flynn’s career as a writer has been unusual, even poetic, from the start. The process of writing the memoir is a good example.

“The actual pen to paper was seven years,” he said about the memoir. “I started it in Ireland in 1997 and finished it in Rome.” The traveling was the result of an annual grant that he stretched to two years through frugal living.

The memoir was published squarely in the midst of a glut of memoirs by better known writers, such as James Frey, Dave Eggers, and Augusten Burroughs. Indeed, as Flynn acknowledged, “if you told me what my book was about superficially, I wouldn’t want to read it.” But the memoir has continued to sell steadily; its hard-won authenticity clearly has lasting appeal. It details Flynn’s childhood in Boston, intercut with his time spent working in a homeless shelter where he bumped into his homeless father.

Long process

Though Flynn didn’t start publishing until eight years ago, his poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and he’s won a Guggenheim grant, among other honors. But he has also worked in a homeless shelter for several years, on fishing boats on Cape Cod, as a school teacher in inner city New York for seven years and, most recently, at the MFA program at the University of Houston where he teaches one semester a year. In other words, Flynn has taken the dictum of bringing life to his art.

Having written the two books of poetry, Flynn and his agent sold the book to Norton on the strength of the first 40 pages. “I don’t know if they knew what they were getting into,” he said, laughing. “This was in 2001, right before 9/11. I’d already written all the pages of the book, they just weren’t good enough to show anyone. I knew the structure but I didn’t want to show the language at that point. And it took another three years to get it into shape. Which seemed pretty fast to me. They didn’t think it was very fast!” he said.

The book reads very much like a prose poem, but it took years to reach that effect. “It was tons of drafts,” he declared. The money I spent shipping boxes of drafts from Europe! Just piles and piles of manuscripts,” he said, picking at his salad. “But one of the benefits of taking a long time to write it,” he said, “is that it really went through a long gestation process, so I could always ask about parts of it, is this really true or not. A lot of self-pitying stuff, for instance, isn’t really the truth. The bravado isn’t really true, the truth is usually more of a level of gravitas and humor.”

Curiously, there is a film project of the memoir in the works, with Paul Weitz (“American Pie,” “About a Boy” “Golden Compass”) attached to direct. It is quite surreal to hear the poet talk about his dealings with Hollywood.

“I was in Los Angeles last summer because Lili had a job there,” he said, “and I spent a lot of time with the producer and the director who were casting the male lead. The first script Paul wrote was fantastic, kind of like the most amazing Romanian art film you never saw. Anyway, it was green-lit with money on the table for actors and everything and then the strike happened and now we don’t know what’s happening with it.” He shrugged.

During this time, Flynn has also turned his hand to playwriting, the result being “Alice Invents . . .” being published this summer. His editor at FSG, Denise Oswald, acknowledged that it is unusual to publish a play before it has been produced. “The play seemed to be a continuing conversation from his memoir,” she said, “about the membrane between the haves and the have nots.”

Along came ‘Alice’

“Alice Invents” concerns four characters in New York City, and could only have been written by Flynn with his lyrical black humor and existential wonderings. It is scheduled for a production in Houston later this year at the Ridge Theater in collaboration with the Mitchell Center for the Arts. It’s had staged readings over the process of being written, with actors such as Mike Myers and Taylor in the key roles.

Has his exposure to actors of that caliber inspired his move into playwriting? “I actually began writing ‘Alice’ before I met Lili,” he said. “I spent two years living between Rome and Dublin and when I was in Dublin I saw a lot of theater. It’s an amazing theater town. I was still writing [the memoir] there and some theater slipped into that book. ‘Alice’ really felt like a natural projection.”

He mentioned that he had recently returned from a trip to Turkey, where he had met with some of the victims of Abu Ghraib, for his next book, “The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir of Torture,” which Norton will publish early next year. In February, Esquire Magazine ran an excerpt from the new book, which Flynn is still working on. In it, Flynn weaves memories of his childhood, of his father’s experience in federal prisons (and their ghoulish experiments) with the real experiences of victims of American torture. In one of the most affecting sections of the new book, Flynn relates one detainee’s memories of walking into a gym-sized room filled with black boxes containing detainees -- none of them large enough to lie down in, all of them being pounded by batons at regular intervals. “Nash aswada, black coffins,” Flynn writes. “I can’t help thinking of them as the shadows of the flag-draped coffins we aren’t allowed to see.”

Flynn mused on last fall’s writers strike with a novel suggestion. “I think Letterman and Leno and all those guys should get poets to go on their shows and read poetry. Like on “The Tonight Show,” Leno would just read poetry for an hour. They will come to the poets,” he asserted. “They will come to the poets!” Years ago in Tanzania (Flynn can throw exotic places around the way some drop names) he worked on the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Darwin’s Nightmare,” and was listed in the credits as “field poet.”

“I’m pushing for that to be a union job,” he said, lightly but not joking. “On every film there needs to be a field poet!”