The Poetry of Bob Flanagan: ‘The Realm of Clown or Seer’

The spectre of childhood looms large in all lives, but perhaps more than most in that of artist, poet and ‘supermasochist’ Bob Flanagan. Born in 1952 with cystic fibrosis, doctors thought him unlikely to live past the age of 6 or 7. Yet Flanagan outran this fate, well into an adulthood that no one had expected of him. He died in 1996 aged 43. It’s impossible to set aside this biography while reading Fun to be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan (2024), a book that gathers, for the first time, six volumes of his poetry and prose, as well as essays and commentaries by friends and collaborators including Dennis Cooper and Dodie Bellamy, and a foreword by Sabrina Tarasoff, who edited the collection. The volumes span Flanagan’s writing life, from the Charles Bukowski-esque poems of The Kid is the Man (1978) published when Flanagan was 26 years old, to the brutally elegant alphabetized prose of The Book of Medicine, unfinished at the time of his death and published here in full for the first time.

Despite reaching prominence in his lifetime in the art world and beyond (famously appearing as himself in a Nine Inch Nails music video), Flanagan’s poetry is less well known. That’s partly because it has, until now, been uncollected and out of print, but perhaps also because it aligns less neatly – or sensationally – with the popular image of his exhibitionist BDSM practice, as displayed in live performances and installations made in collaboration with his mistress and partner of 16 years, Sheree Rose. Flanagan had a sophisticated, eloquent relationship to pain: in The Book of Medicine he articulates ‘a bittersweet tale of a sick little boy who found solace in his penis at a time when all else conspired to snuff him out’. If cystic fibrosis subordinated his body to pain, sickness and premature death, sadomasochism became a way to assert agency, pleasure, defiance or simply endurance in the face of this existential volatility.

In this context of control and containment, Fun to be Dead shows a poet deeply invested in testing the limits, restraints and possibilities of poetic and literary forms, from free verse to sonnets, from syllabic to alphabetical constraints. The space of the page becomes another body on which words can be carved, controlled, contorted, made to rhyme, sing, break, bleed, come apart. In Flanagan’s writing the page becomes a fellow masochist, ‘dead wood’ that can inexhaustibly take it.

The poems in The Kid is the Man are typically short, micro-narratives of daily encounters, childhood memories and glimpses of the BDSM fascination not yet centre stage in the work. If they exhibit some hallmarks of a poet’s first offering – a dilettantish playfulness that groups found poems, cut-ups and sing-song repetitions that evoke Flanagan as charismatic-guy-in-a-band, freestyling lyrics while Mike Kelley plays drums – they also entertain with their anxious need to outmanoeuvre their influences. In the comical ‘Bukowski poem’ the speaker appears to catch Bukowski like a bug, finding that it has not only made him write like the famous poet, but also, to his horror, run himself a bath in Bukowski’s likeness: ‘CHRIST! I yell. / I don’t take baths; Bukowski / takes baths; I take showers!’

Yet even in these early poems, with their deceptively simple vocabulary, gallows humour and repeated phrases, Flanagan is up to something. Many of the poems share features with the ballad, a tradition in which acts of violence and morbid truths are made tellable through a combination of repetition, rhythm and voice, the prosodic DNA of which lives on in nursery rhymes. In poems such as ‘cut cut cut’ and ‘humble kid humble’, Flanagan’s clipped, lilting lines and sparse, Blakean characterizations portray children spurred by violent drives: ‘bang bang bang, the miffed kid / blows his mom and dad away’; ‘his piece of toast / won’t fit in his mouth / he jabs his cheek / with a fork’. Like Emily Dickinson, whose poem ‘How soft this Prison is’ lends an epigraph to the book, Flanagan enlists aurally pleasing and familiar balladic features to compress and subvert the poems’ murkier, insatiable fixations.

Slave Sonnets (1986) is a sequence of 10 gorgeously crafted vessels brimming with thwarted horniness and sexual subservience, dedicated and addressed to Sheree Rose. Think the contemporary American chattiness of Bernadette Mayer’s ‘You jerk you didn’t call me up’ (1968) spliced with Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1954). Through lines both ornate and irate, Flanagan builds to a masterful use of the volta – the sonnet’s twist before the reveal, the key’s click in the lock. His speaker refuses the poems’ happy endings just as the poet-as-masochist climaxes in being denied: ‘Confine me or crush me — but like magic / each reduction makes me all the more huge.’

Sickness warps time out of linearity. In her introduction to The Book of Medicine, Dodie Bellamy describes Flanagan’s state as one of ‘extended liminality, the realm of clown or seer’. If suspended life forecloses the possibility of ever truly growing up, Fun to be Dead shows that Flanagan’s writing flourished in this Peter Pan-like dominion, mining childhood cadences, desires and myths as a way to articulate and mature their latent and life-giving masochisms. Bob Flanagan on the page is as enigmatic a blend of tenderness and extremity as his performance and visual work, and Fun to be Dead reveals a serious, complex writer contorting through forms; the blindfolded poet groping the limits of the page as soft prison, testing its lines as sweet and sullen bars.

Fun to be dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan (2024) was edited by Sabrina Tarasoff and published by Kristina Kite Gallery & Pep Talk.

^{Main image: Fun to Be Dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan (detail), edited by Sabrina Tarasoff, published by Kristina Kite Gallery and Pep Talk, 2024, Los Angeles, designed by Lauren Graycar. Courtesy: Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; photography: Lauren Graycar}