After achieving a rare crossover hit with 2005’s Crush, the poet rebelled against public attention. With I Do Know Some Things, he splays himself open for his readers.
Richard Siken(Courtesy of Cooper Canyon Press)
A few years after Richard Siken published his 2005 debut poetry collection, Crush, a teenager e-mailed him asking for help on a school assignment. She was required to reach out to a living writer, and she asked for 18 facts about his life that would help her understand his work. Siken wrote back saying that if she needed biographical details to feel his poems, then they “were a failure and I had wasted my life.”
New readers might find this response unnecessarily harsh (the student surely thought so: “She said I was rude and that now she was going to get a B,” Siken recalls). But the poet has never been one to conceal his sensitivities or misgivings; in fact, this kind of interaction would play out again and again in the ensuing years.
Siken is, 20 years after Crush’s publication, a rare thing—an enduring crossover hit between the literary world, where his singular style instantly became iconic among young queer poets in the early aughts, and online fandom culture, which has pushed his work into the mainstream. That a high school student chose to do her homework assignment about him, early in his career, is remarkable; that numerous of young people are still asking him the same questions today is even more so. Nowadays, Siken, at 58, regularly responds to people on X about trivial questions regarding his favorite movie, dessert, or condiment: “There have been so many questions,” he observed, “but none of them have been about my poems, which is really the only thing I’m an authority on.”
For an artist who has built such a reputation for shutting down intimate questions, Siken’s newest collection is bracing in its openness and self-reflection. Siken describes I Do Know Some Things as “meditative”: Plainly autobiographical, it marks a departure from what he calls the “narrative” mode of Crush, told by various ambiguous speakers, and the “rhetorical” nature of War of the Foxes, his 2015 book of abstract, philosophical musings on art and representation. But regardless of the style, Siken maintains a confessional approach: Driving all his work is the urge to externalize something suppressed—in Crush, through a frenzied release of emotion and longing, and in I Do Know Some Things, through logic and order as a means of accessing a disorienting period in his life.
The 77 prose poems in I Do Know Some Things trace Siken’s recovery from a stroke, in 2019, that temporarily left him unable to walk, recognize faces, or form sentences. “I mumbled. I stuttered. I crashed the words together or trailed off,” Siken writes in “Yardstick.” “I couldn’t say it straight so I tried saying around it—dark-struck, slumber-felt, sleep-clogged.” This preoccupation with language’s frustrations, with speaking obliquely through the unsayable, has long haunted Siken, but his new poems concern themselves less with the shame of hiding an emotional truth and more with literal obstacles to communication. Siken’s insistence that all you need to know about him is there in his verse may once have seemed like a writer’s prideful comeback, but in I Do Know Some Things he has made it true, as he relinquishes control over the inner life he once so closely guarded.
“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake.” This was Crush’s opening line. From the start, its characters are torn between the desire to be told a story and an unwillingness to face the truth. In begging for a tale, then describing the exact particulars of what he wishes to hear, the speaker ultimately betrays his own desperation; this dissonance creates, in the words of Louise Glück, “a book about panic.” “There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you,” the next poem begins, but the speaker still shares too much just a few lines later: “I swallow your heart and you make me / spit it up again.” Crush’s speakers are self-aware at times and anxious, even uncontrollable, at others. The poems struggle to contain themselves, jolting across the page with nervous explanation (“There is no way to make this story interesting…”), apology (“Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine”), and supplication (“Let’s not talk about it…. You never mean it / anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed.”)
I Do Know Some Things documents a more biological struggle with language. In “Sidewalk,” the first poem about Siken’s stroke, a skeptical doctor misdiagnoses his symptoms as a panic attack, and at the front desk, “all my answers were Stroke, dizzy, numb. I kept saying the words in different ways so she would understand. She didn’t.” But even while Siken struggles to speak, his poetry seems, for once, outside of panic. “It was clear that something had happened that wasn’t going to unhappen,” he says plainly. On the way to the hospital, the trees are “tall and fast”—his mind, reaching for words beyond its grasp, stumbles into a gorgeously precise depiction of staring out a car window:
No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways…. They asked the wrong questions. I gave the wrong answers.They thought I was faking it. Isaid Numb. I meant getting numb, more numb, half of me mostly numb. They said Lift your leg. I did, a few inches. It was heavy, they were mad. You aren’t paralyzed. They kept missing the point: None of this was normal. I do know some things.
Siken’s new poems forgo the stylistic variety that in his earlier work had produced a breathy, sensual rhythm. After his stroke, line breaks—slippery, prone to ambiguity—only furthered his sense of chaos and confusion, and he decided to work with sentences instead. Each poem’s title comes from a glossary of terms Siken created to reacquaint himself with meaning. He first composed much of the collection verbally, giving himself a prompt and speaking freely into dictation software. His recovery serves as a natural narrative through line, but interspersed throughout are childhood events and organic word associations that give new meaning and language to a lifetime of repressed emotions.
If Siken once used poetry’s physicality to embody emotional agitation, he now achieves the opposite effect: a removed clarity that writes around, and even in spite of, the body. “If I took shallow breaths and wrote without musicality—if I was writing from the mind, not from the body—I wouldn’t have to constantly confront my damage,” he told The Columbia Review. “In Crush, everything was floating and indented and in I Do Know Some Things, everything has been poured into the rectangular container of the prose poem.” With a book of identically formatted poems, Siken challenges himself to find narrative and voice within a set of new, self-imposed strictures.
Where Siken once depicted the body as a place of violence and viscera, he now excavates it as a detached site of history. One of Crush’s most enduring images is that of a young man so overcome by desire that he takes a bullet for an ambivalent lover. Love becomes a power play: “You keep saying I owe you, I owe… but you say the same thing every time,” Siken writes in “Wishbone.” “I’m tired of asking to settle the debt.” The speaker begins using the bullet as a bargaining chip for his affections:
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“It’s mine, see, I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s as good as anything.… Do you want it? Do you want something I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands?”
Another poem describes sex with a hateful man who “sees me as a piece of real estate, / just another fallow field lying under him.” The phrase reappears in I Do Know Some Things as the first poem’s title, but here “Real Estate” no longer evokes a body inviting invasion or abuse, but rather a burial site. After “the man who was not my father” dies, Siken is unable to verify their relationship or obtain a death certificate, and his death lingers as a bureaucratic annoyance. “When I die, I will come in fast and slow,” Siken decides. “I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.”
But sometimes the familiar panic seeps in, as Siken confuses his imaginings with reality. In “Pornography,” they briefly become the same thing. Its opening line sounds just like a scene from Crush: “They shot him by the side of the road.” Momentarily, we’re back in the world of blood and shoot-outs and wrestling atop gravel—until we realize they’re shooting a film. Siken observes two porn actors performing in front of a cameraman and thinks:
I want to be them. I want to be like them. I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched. It’s awful, my watching: the refusal to participate, the ogling and smug superiority, the approximation of a true desire. It’s fake, but it isn’t. It’s art, but it isn’t. They’re pretending but it doesn’t matter because they’re actually doing it, exhausting themselves as the acting evaporates…. The cameraman is standing very quietly. It looks like he is weeping.
Unlike in Crush, whose speakers tend to reside within a story, Siken stays one step removed, in his mind more than his heart, in his heart more than his body. Glück, who wrote the book’s original introduction, believed that Siken’s obsession with repetition in Crush—cameras and tapes, “the means by which an instant can be replayed over and over”—was not so much a poetic device as a psychological means of control. “Everything is a trick, the poems say, everything is art, technology—everything, that is, can still change,” she wrote. “This is Siken’s way of saying the reverse: in these poems, everything is harrowing and absolute and deadly real.” In this way, then, “Pornography” manages to reimagine one’s original encounter with a collection like Crush, of believing and yearning for something despite knowing it’s all an act. He weeps as the memory unfolds in front of him.
Crush has sold more than 100,000 copies since 2005, “a head-spinning count” for a debut collection, writes Dana Levin in a new introduction for its 20th anniversary. Levin attributes this lasting success to queer readers—who, following the AIDS crisis, understood the “generational and American” anxiety in Siken’s poems—and to the online fans who continually inject them with new life. Even today, Tumblr houses thousands of posts containing Siken’s poetry or tweets, usually paired with GIFs from shows like Supernatural and Hannibal and tags such as “sorry for siken posting it will happen again,” and “thanks u mr siken for being active on twitter I owe you my life.”
Only somewhat recently has Siken openly engaged with these subcultures. Twenty years ago, as an emerging poet during a particularly homophobic era of American cultural life (as the AIDS era was drawing to a close and the War on Terror was beginning), he naturally felt annoyed by a stranger requesting his biography or people plastering his grief onto Twilight screenshots, using the Internet “to interact with each other without me.” This irritation still sometimes rears its head. When someone asked Siken last November what species of bird he would be, he tweeted back: “Silly questions need to be really interesting for them to work. Try harder.” The pushback was immediate and moralistic, branding him as arrogant, condescending, even “rotten.” Siken felt a generational divide: He may be intense and bristly, or even just old, he said, but he denounced the flattening of those words to call him mean. “Someone said ‘Come play my game,’ and I said ‘Come up with a better game to play,’” he explained.
His irritation is especially palpable when the questions betray a lack of tact. Once, someone asked him about a network TV show’s superficial resemblance to Crush. “Are you really saying that the poems I published 20 years ago line up with your feelings about a current tv show? The poems I wrote about AIDS and my dead boyfriend?” Siken replied. “Shame on you.” People love to ask about this boyfriend, despite the fact that even a cursory Google search reveals that he died in 1991 of unverified causes and that Siken will not speak about it—although, according to I Do Know Some Things, this information is apparently false.
“I told a lie and it turned into a fact, forever repeated in my official biography,” Siken admits in “Cover Story.” His boyfriend died on Christmas Day in 1990, in a car crash. The poem’s obvious tragedy lies in retelling the story of a lover’s death, but underneath lies a second, quieter devastation: that of having to survive every day in the mythology of one’s own making. After the accident, a friend asked Siken to break into his boyfriend’s apartment and start discarding things. “For several minutes I didn’t understand, then—evidence. He hadn’t told his family and it didn’t seem right to tell them now, to suggest that they didn’t really know him,” Siken writes. “I drove in the darkness between the accident and dawn.” These details never made it into Crush. (Glück helped Siken cut all the “blather and mud,” he writes in a new afterword.) That he can tell the real story two decades later is a brave surrender, and not only of his own past elision.
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Siken recalls attending his boyfriend’s memorial service: “I sat in the back.” Then he breaks up the poem’s even rhythm with a succession of commas and dashes, bringing us into a disquieting New Year’s Eve party. He stands around “with a drink in each hand—one for him, one for me—I kept asking where he was, if anyone had seen him.” The poem’s simplicity amplifies the cruelty, and rather than deny the manic physicality of loss in Crush, it complements Siken’s original, circumscribed account. The violence of grief and secrecy lingers even now, in an older, more resigned voice, granting legitimacy to his past self’s often jumbled storytelling.
Few poets have so quickly achieved both the literary and pop-culture cachet that Siken did with Crush; to have been able to observe him adjusting to these worlds—online and on paper, across decades—is rare in contemporary literature. And much like his tweets, Siken’s poems are cheeky and unpredictable. In “Doubt,” he begins to question his book’s lofty premise, of writing a self he does not know, as he waits for an unnamed man who never shows up: “He took my story and wouldn’t give it back.” His present reality, in which he can barely figure out his body’s left and right sides (“I am over here, now I am over here”), seems to have pushed him into a more trusting relationship with his work and his readers, as he dares them to join him in this new game. So many readers have taken Siken’s words and turned them into something else entirely, but in this collection, he no longer needs to get them back. In acknowledging this, I Do Know Some Things sheds a gracious light on his earlier poems, offering them the freedom to be as they are. The poems are the only real thing, Siken is saying, and they were true, in some way at some time.
Yvonne KimYvonne Kim is an associate editor at The Atlantic.