Forty-Seven Minutes

Years later I’m standing before a roomful of young writers in a high school in Texas. I’ve asked them to locate an image in a poem we’d just read—their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back & forth about the grass & a styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand & asks, Does it matter? I smile—it is as if the universe balanced on those three words & we’ve landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that no, it doesn’t, not really, matter, if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But, I whisper, leaning in close, to get through the next forty-seven minutes we might have to pretend it does.

Credit

About this Poem

“I was going to call this poem ‘Pretend It Matters.’ It is nearly a found poem, in that I simply transcribed an incident—whatever transformations happened, happened in the moment. The girl’s question genuinely threw me—we teetered for a moment on the edge of existential dread, that edge we avoid as we get older and closer to the actual abyss.”

—Nick Flynn

Author

Nick Flynn

Born in 1960, Nick Flynn is the author of the poetry collections My Feelings (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf Press, 2011), Blind Huber (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Some Ether (Graywolf Press, 2000), which was the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.

Date Published

07/24/2014