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Richard Siken
Jan. 12th, 2026 05:39 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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“Where was he, the one who remembered who I was?” – from “Doubt”
Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book. Even without an exclamation mark, the book’s title, I Do Know Something, handwritten in capital letters across the solid black front cover, suggests that the poet really means business. Then open the book and stare for a moment at the bright red endpapers, a detail from an artwork by Cecil Touchon called “Post Dogmatist Painting #934” (2017). Touchon’s piece depicts portions of large white letters of the alphabet, jumbled up and overlapping each other, so that the symbols of communication have become mute sculptural shapes, as if Robert Indiana’s famous “Love” sculpture had come tumbling down.
The poems in this, his third book, are all written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out between the first word and the last. No enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s singular, captivating voice. The title sentence comes from the book’s fifth poem, “Sidewalk,” in which Siken tells of turning up at a local hospital, sure that he is having a stroke, but no one there will believe him. The doctor tells him he is having a panic attack and sends him home. Five poems later, in “Metonymy,” a poem of staccato short sentences and phrases, a friend finally insists he call an ambulance and go to different hospital, where it is immediately recognized that he is having a stroke. “I slept, I peed myself, I fell off the mattress, I fell out of chairs talking wildly. I scared them, whoever they were, the people I was supposed to know. I knew who James was, he was on the phone. He was in California. You can’t stay there. You have to go to the hospital. You can go to a different hospital. I changed my clothes. It was like dressing a mannequin.” This book is his declaration of return, his account of the struggle to regain language and the use of his body, and of the need to rebuild his memory all over again, beginning with his family history.
At the beginning, I was just making a list of things I was trying to remember. I had a stroke. It wiped me clean. I had to claw my way back into a self, into a body. I lost my right side to numbness, and I had no vocabulary. The poems accumulated as autobiography by default because I had no artifice but felt a great need to get it right. I needed to figure out what a doorknob was, what a sandwich was. Crush played with the ideas of self and other, of overlap and clash and rupture. War of the Foxes played with the self and its representation in painting and in myth. These new pieces don’t play. They’re focused on rebuilding a self in a very serious way.
My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing. [from an interview with Z.L. Nichols in BOMB Magazine Spring 2024 issue]
In three poems that come near the end of the book—”Line,” “Sentence,” and “Paragraph”—Siken tells the reader why he chose this format. I’ll quote from just two of them. From “Line”: “Orpheus descended. The red ribbon unspooled from his mouth in the darkness. He sang and it fluttered. [. . .] When does a line end? How long is a piece of string? A line ends when it is broken. [. . .] A sentence ends with a period but a line continues on. I wouldn’t break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was broken already.”
From “Paragraph”: “I didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in a box. [. . .] I set the margins and surrounded the thoughts on all sides. I made everything the same shape and concentrated on the space between the thoughts.” [My ellipses in both poems.]
Siken returns again and again to this theme that looks like miscommunication on the surface. It occurs primarily between himself and various medical professionals. In “The List,” the narrator complains about a nurse, his grief counselor, and his suicide counselor, all of whom have made up their minds about him based on other patients they have seen in the past. So he gives up on them and begins a second, apparently private notebook in which he is unafraid to write down what he is actually thinking. Here, he will not write in the terminology desired by the professionals. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall. —A doorknob is your stupid head. You will not survive this.” As he puts it, “I built up meaning with a double set of books.” The poem “Pain Scale” begins: “My primary care physician is not a neurologist. He doesn’t understand the difference between sadness and damage. I do not like this man. He refuses adjectives. He wants me to say My pain is eight, instead of Thunderous and upsetting. When he says You’ll be fine, I have to explain that I won’t because I have never been fine, but I’m not saying it right.”
At this point, reading “Pain Scale,” which happens to sit exactly halfway through I Do Know Some Things, there is a line that makes it apparent that this theme of miscommunication that Siken has been writing about is about something larger than his stroke. He tells us in one of the poem’s lines that “I think many people struggle with my aesthetic.” I’m sure many of us have sat in a doctor’s office and have been asked to rank some strange pain on a pain scale of 1 to 10, which makes no sense at all. So, we look to a poem like “Spoon” to understand a little more what Siken means by “my aesthetic.” In “Spoon,” the narrator is trying to figure out what makes him different from his two stepbrothers, who were “comfortable, powerful” and “didn’t worry about things.” He begins with some fairly obvious observations: “I was smarter but they had stamina. I was good with hypotheticals but they knew how to get things done, real things, with tools.” Then he moves on to more meaningful differences. Here’s the ending of the poem: “I had a certain capacity, which was a generous way of saying that I had nothing. Their hands were full but their skies were empty. No clouds, no shapes to guess. I was blurry at the edges and unrelatable. Do not try to bend the spoon. There is no spoon. It is only you that bends. I was the spoon and there is no spoon. I was blisteringly invisible.”
“Blisteringly invisible” conjures up the incandescent idea of a superhero of some sort. The young narrator of “Spoon,” looking up at his two older, confident stepbrothers, is realizing, in effect, that he is a poet. He is seeing that the characteristics that seem to put him at a disadvantage—like being “blurry at the edges and unrelatable”—can be attributes of exceptional value elsewhere. Throughout this book, Siken plays with these two extreme opposites, the damaged, hospitalized stroke patient and the man who knows himself far better than the attending professionals and the brawny stepbrothers.
To put this all together though, Siken has the reader pinballing back and forth across the pages of I Do Know Something, puzzling his life story out, much as he himself is trying to pull his own past back out of the black hole of the stroke.
Ω
“I wanted to reclaim the self I had. I was honest because I had no filter. I’m glad I couldn’t lie because I would have been tempted to lie. Why rebuild a self out of contaminated parts? I didn’t think of it as proving I was real or inventing anything. I just wanted to remember my friends, my preferences, what a light switch was. I wasn’t fractured, I was erased. The goal of these poems was very small: try to remember.” From “An Interview with Richard Siken” in Wildness 40
Siken brilliantly uses rhetorical devices like metaphor and metonymy to make his descriptions of concepts and ordinary events vivid. Take a poem called “The Waves,” where all that Siken is really talking about is his struggle to sleep and think clearly while in a hospital bed that has rails. He thinks that the word drift seems to describe his situation and realizes that it is “a sea word.” And immediately the poem takes off in a Homeric direction. “I strung the words and everything under the shattered clouds in sentences. By which I mean, the wine-dark sea. It bruises where the oars strike. . . I am the mermaids singing, twisted in the sheets. I am, I have, I know and say. I know, I have, I will and do. Whitecaps and froth. I yelled at the waves. The ghost of myself slept deep. Try to finish, finish the thought. Do not drop anchor here. . . The fingered dawn. The terrible shore. The complicated mooring.”
Siken slyly moves from the hospital scene into a vivid metaphor of Odysseus on his ship during his multi-year attempt to return home. We see him struggling to get past the Sirens (or mermaids, as he calls them) who are singing to lure him ashore where his ship would crash and he would die. In the following few brief sentences of the poem, the scene flickers between the hospital room and the rough Mediterranean Sea. But Siken leaves it up to us to make the connections, to figure out where we are and when narrator is Siken or Homer. We go adrift in the text in much the same way that the poet went adrift in his hospital room.
The poems in I Do Know Something describe extraordinary physical and mental struggles, but somehow, they manage to seem effortless. In “Piano Lesson,” Siken writes about one particular development in the modern piano. “By 1837, with some refinement of the pedals, a player could sustain the notes even after their hands had moved away.” The musician/poet can lift his or her hands into the air and say “Voila! It’s all magic!” There has always been something fearless in Siken’s poetry, especially in his previous book Crush (2005). But now, broken and repairing, his writing is audacious. He does know something, indeed.
Richard Siken. I Do Know Something. Copper Canyon Press, 2025.
