Richard Siken: On Constructing a Glossary of Self
Editor-in-chief Su Ertekin-Taner sat down with poet and painter Richard Siken. Richard Siken’s book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (forthcoming, Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I. There is No Breath
Su Ertekin-Taner: Can you tell me about all of the buckets of things that you do? I’m thinking about your poetry work and your painting.
Richard Siken: Sure. I’m curious about the world and curious about making things, and each genre, each mode, has its own pluses and minuses. There are some things that I can do with language that are great, and there are some things that I can’t reach with language. There are basically two types of art. There’s art that moves in space and art that moves in time. Art that moves in space includes painting, architecture, sculpture. Art that moves in time includes language, music, dance. So, fundamentally, the first distinction between the buckets is the format I’m playing with. I really like going back and forth between painting and writing because they’re different methods of representation.
I came to painting after I published Crush. People’s responses were so strong that I felt like I needed to stop talking. So I started just pushing color around. From that came form and from that came idea, and things opened up in that arena, in that way of moving. I stopped speaking with my voice and started speaking with my hands.
I have a new bucket, too. I’m starting to think in essays. I couldn’t think in essays before. It seemed too declarative. I’m a poet of doubt. And it’s hard to write an essay full of doubt. I am, unfortunately, really bad when it comes to advocacy, and I want to advocate because there are many things I believe in, but my personal language isn’t forceful or strident in a persuasive way. It’s forceful and strident in an emotive way. I’m trying to write essays to see if I can say something I believe, rather than say something I’m confused about.
SET: That spatial presence that you talk about, that dimension that you find in art is something that I feel is applicable to your poetry. The poetry of Crush or I Do Know Some Things has a spatial dimension on the page.
RS: I wanted to be an architect. I thought I was going to be an architect. I think in boxes, in habitable spaces. The subject matter of Crush was, Is there a place for me? Can I build a place for me? And I really meant that in the spatial sense. I was so lost after [having a] stroke that I was having parts of memories interrupt other parts of memories, and I couldn’t keep straight which room I was in, in my thinking, and I tried to lock it down by finding the bed. Where was the bed? What bed was I sleeping in? And what house does that mean?
I think the paragraphs of I Do Know Some Things move as rooms that get shuffled. There’s a spatial dimension in the content and in the architectures of building them. The form is very considered. 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.
SET: You mentioned in a BOMB interview that the line is the unit of meaning of poetry. Crush, as you said, is defined by jagged edges, War of the Fox by left-justified poems and smaller boxy fables, and now I Do Know Some Things with one-page prose poem blocks. I’m wondering how your understanding of the line has shifted across the three texts.
RS: This—I think I could go on for months about it. Let me just hit some points. The line goes on as long as you want to maintain it. It hits the margin and then returns, indented, and keeps going. The only reason we think the line stops is because of the format of a book, but a line scrolls and scrolls until you break it. And that breaking is significant. There’s a disjunction there: The sentence means one thing and the line means a different thing. And when you put them together, you end up with a friction. And it’s a fundamental friction to poetry, so there’s two meanings reverberating at the same time. Which is a really strange, strange idea. You end up making a chord of meaning rather than a note of meaning.
Most poetry is left-justified, which means you break the line and your eye returns to the left. You break the line and the eye returns, again, to the left. In Crush, I didn’t want to start over every time, so I had a variety of indentations. I break the line and come back almost to the end. I break the line, and I only lose a little bit of space. I’d move two steps forward and maybe one step back. And I got this visceral feeling that the left margin was the ground and the right margin was the sky. Anything in the middle was levitation. If my line broke but didn’t come all the way back to baseline, it was hovering. It was a magic trick.
In War of the Foxes, I had poems that were in traditional stanzas because I wanted to see if I could do something with my weak hand. I wondered, Do I have poetry if I don’t have this trick of the jagged line? And then for I Do Know Some Things, I was having such a hard time just linking phrases together that the idea of the disjunction of the broken line made no sense. There was no way to break a line because I would get lost. It would stop me. I couldn’t finish the thought. I couldn’t finish the sentence, so they all had to be paragraphs.
SET: That makes me curious about the concept of breath in each of these pieces. Louise Glück in her foreword for Crush notes that the poems have this built-in panic, a sense of hitch in the breath due to the enjambment. There is a same breathless energy in some of the pieces in War of the Foxes with your cross-stanza enjambments. I’m wondering how you figure breath in your new book, I Do Know Some Things, which is all prose poems.
RS: There is no breath in the new book. It’s heartbreaking in a way. It was certainly heartbreaking when I started because not only does it lack the visual artifice, it also lacks in musicality. It doesn’t work at all in music that way. For Crush, it was notated—the breath was notated, the music was notated. A period was a whole note rest, a dash was a half note rest, a comma was quarter note rest. The line break was a sixteenth note rest, a hitch in the breath.
In I Do Know Some Things, I just had no sense of timing or music. I tried to vary the sentences at least, but that’s all I could do for rhythm and music. I really wasn’t breathing. I was having a hard time breathing—not medically, but I didn’t like being in my body. It wasn’t working, and I wouldn’t take full breaths, and I wouldn’t speak loudly because it would make me reverberate and I’d feel like, Oh, you’re here in the damaged body, whereas 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. I’m having trouble coming back into the body and being comfortable with it, and I think that has affected my poetry. I wonder what it’s going to do to the next book.
SET: Yes, there’s a sense of drowning in the lines. It’s difficult to find a line to quote. The power is in how they follow each other. It’s all breathless, as you said.
RS: There’s no quotable line. I was concentrating really hard on the space between the sentences, which isn’t anything I’d done before. It used to be the sentence was the unit, and I would say a powerful line. For this, the connection was the goal. The whole recovery from a stroke, from a traumatic brain injury, is the connection. You want to rebuild connections. So the function of writing it and the power of sharing it—it was how one sentence was connected in an associative leap. The space between the leaps, the distance of the leaps, really propels the poems. The size of the leap makes it followable or not, and there are poems early in the manuscripts that are unfollowable (and they’re closest to pure lyric because I’m not saying sentences correctly). Then, towards the end of the book the distance is short and the jump maybe has a twist or is charming and delightful, and the moves are fun or wise, but in the beginning the moves flail around. They’re so disjunct that it’s terrifying.
SET: There is an interesting vibration in these poems in which the speaker is direct and plain in their language, but there are so many negative spaces or points of secrecy between the sentences. What math or logic are you trimming out between the lines?
RS: When you’re doing math, they say show your work and often, they will give you partial credit for showing your work, even if you get the problem wrong, because they can trace how the mind was working. They can trace out your logic and say you made a computational error, but your logic was sound. The book is a representation of the experience as much as it is a story of the experience, and there are a lot of places where I didn’t show the math. I didn’t show my work and a lot of it is simply that I didn’t know the math.
I jumped forward and back, flailing around, trying to make connections. I would love to explore the gaps. I would love to fill in the gaps. A lot of recovery is filling in the gaps or learning how to get around them. When you have damage to an area in the brain, you don’t really repair the area. You build pathways around it. The poems do that. The sentences build pathways around the empty or damaged spaces—at least I hope they do. They’re trying to.
II. A Glossary
SET: I would like to turn to I Do Know Some Things as a whole. Can you tell me about the 77 terms that appear in the table of contents? How did they come to you?
RS: There are a couple poems in I Do Know Some Things that state really clearly: these are 77 terms that I tried to figure out in the hospital. I tried to figure out what I knew. I would wonder, What does meat mean? I don’t even know what that word is. What does floor mean? And so each poem starts as a meditation on what the word is. Then, with that, I was able to connect myself in some ways to what the word meant, and I was able to rebuild the world that way. And if you look at the table of contents, I picked 77 strange words to rebuild myself with. It’s a glossary. It’s an encyclopedia of me, and I wouldn’t have thought there would be an entry called “Cult Leader.” And that’s a really, really strong poem that really fleshes out a good part of my teenage years.
“Parataxis” is a concept I didn’t realize was fundamental to how I make meaning in the world. I wouldn’t have expected anyone to rebuild their self with foundational blocks that were “Cult Leader” and “Parataxis.”
SET: Encyclopedia, interesting.
RS: With the encyclopedia idea, I really did think I wasn’t going to make it. I really did think that this was the last push. Because I was not only concerned that I wouldn’t recover well, I was really expecting to have another stroke. And so it was sort of, not to get too heavy, but it was a letter in case I died.
There was a very clear sense of that. And I thought I would share what was most important. And now looking at it, it’s a really weird compilation of what’s important. There are things that should be really important that I don’t mention at all. Why is that? Why did I not think of that as important? It’s not comprehensive at all. It’s not fair or balanced at all. But it was really—I don’t know what the word is—was really generous of spirit I guess. It really was, Here’s the best of me. It’s just weird that this is what I thought the best of me was.
SET: You map these terms incrementally or perhaps, linearly. The one-word titles for your prose poems start elemental—“Bed,” for example—and progress in complexity to terms like “Syllogism.”
RS: Yeah, that’s right. I was building up words and concepts. You have to understand the words in the beginning of the book to understand the next words. I had to start with bed. I had to start with landmark. I had to start with really simple things before I could get further along and say parataxis. The book builds a logic, so it builds a world from small units to more complicated units. As I was rebuilding, I was able to get more complicated. I knew a couple things. I knew ambulance, I knew sidewalk, and I knew friend. That’s what I knew.
What did I know about ambulance? The word pops up a lot in the later poems, and every time it pops up it gets bigger and more intertwined. But you remember that that’s a building block. And friend, of course, pops up often and becomes more complicated and, unfortunately, emotional, but that was one of the building blocks.
As for linearity. I don’t think it’s linear, I think it’s modular. You can make a beautiful sectional couch, but you have to have all the sections of it. I think the poems function as units, but you build them up together and you get something that’s more than the sum of its parts. I think there’s space in between the poems, and you could shuffle them and pull out any five and say, Oh, now that the distraction is gone, look at what he’s doing with that image, that concept.
SET: I am also interested in the fact that these poems feel so expanded. They take the opportunity to insert em dashes and enumeration to lengthen the piece, for example, and single sentences cover large portions of the page, especially in the poem “Sentence.” Is this where you were always going with language or where you planned to go after Crush and War of the Foxes? Or was it entirely a surprise to you?
RS: It was entirely a surprise, and the autobiographical nature was entirely a surprise. I had something different planned, and it’s not at all what this was. I was going to do something meditative, but I thought it would be even more artificial than the fables in War of the Foxes were. I thought I was going to go abstract. I thought I was going to go into concepts and totally leave myself out of it. I was so interested in leaving myself out of it, and I got the opposite. I ended up with just myself and just autobiography.
I was meandering through thought, and there are so many dashes because the thinking would twist on me or disconnect on me. And even the dashes were a way of trying to pull it together just to link it up, to make knots in the rope. And then there would be slack, and then I would try and knot it up again. Put a period on it and then start the next sentence and ask myself, Where are we now?
III. Architecture, Then Practice
SET: How have your poems arrived to you over the years?
RS: I studied with Jane Miller, and she said you can’t shake your obsessions. You may write the same poem over and over for your whole life. And that scared me a little bit, so I made some foundational rules about what each project would do and how it would have to be different than the previous projects. A fundamental one is modes. Crush was narrative. War of the Foxes was rhetorical. I Do Know Some Things is meditative. So I have a whole plan, I have architectures and blueprints for how I won’t repeat myself.
SET: Does this pre-set architecture for each project modify your writing practice? How has your writing practice changed over time?
RS: I wrote Crush by hand. I wrote War of the Foxes on a computer and I wrote I Do Know Some Things mostly with dictation software because my hand is not as good as it used to be, so typing and writing take too long, and the text was full of errors.
The next book, of course, will be lyric because that’s the fourth mode, so that’s necessarily fundamental. I’m going to hand write so I can look at it and score for music as if I was writing underneath the notes for an opera, going to think of it as the libretto for an opera.
Saying it out loud is going to be really important so that I can get the cadence, and I can get rhyme and sound and internal rhyme, and I play with meter too, but I try to keep that all invisible. Typing on the computer is not going to be successful for that, for the lyric. That’s not going to be generative. There are a lot of strategies that won’t be generative or will be contrary to what the goal is. Each craft choice, each practice choice has to be in the service of the goal. It has to be. Otherwise, you’re making mud.
SET: Architecture, then practice it seems. Let’s talk a bit more about the practice of writing I Do Know Some Things. As you mentioned, you dictated these prose poems. Did you find yourself carving these pieces out of an excess of material or piecing them together and building them up? Or was your practice a mix of the two?
RS: I would turn on the dictation and I would think about the word and I would tell myself a story. And I didn’t judge it, and I talked for about an hour, and then the next day I would look at it and think, Did I catch a useful idea or an image or a phrase? And if I did, that got highlighted and everything else got struck through. A couple days later, I would go back to the same word and start over and ask, Well, what do you know about this word? and things would come up again, but new things would come up. So it arrived very much in layers. As I got more landmarks in the story I was telling, I paid more attention. How does this connect to that? In returning to it, and returning to it, returning to it, I was able to make the connections.
SET: I think the text is honest as a result. Your last two books of poetry were fiction—narrative and rhetorical, respectively—and your forthcoming book is autobiographical. Is this new work completely without performance?
RS: There are a couple poems that address the performative self and the lack of filter that I had. In revising, there were places where I heightened the language. But in writing it in the initial drafts, I couldn’t lie. I couldn’t tell a made-up story. I couldn’t keep it straight. I was trying really hard just to make a basic meaning. I was struggling with subject-verb-object, and there was no way to construct a complicated performative self.
SET: Yes, I think even in the omission or the gaps, there’s so much truth.
RS: I think even outside of art, there’s always a performative self. To some degree, we’re always presenting. A lot of that comes from the best place—we’re trying to be understood and we’re trying to mirror the person we’re talking to. With these poems, there was no “Other,” not really. And the performance was contaminating the rebuilding of the self. These poems are a lot more honest than I thought they’d be. I’m surprised, but I’m okay with it.