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In Conversation with Richard Siken

When we first decided to launch this podcast, we tossed around a handful of ideas about who or what our first episode should center around. In the end, we settled—well, Juliette settled—on Richard Siken.

At that point, there wasn’t much of a plan for how the episode would be structured. An interview with the author hadn’t even crossed our minds. Not until Juliette reached out to Siken’s team to ask about the possibility of an exchange between the hosts and the poet.

So imagine our surprise when Siken responded personally.

Juliette may or may not have paced the halls of her workplace for a solid thirty minutes afterward—pink-faced, elated, and a little in disbelief. Somehow, she’d made it happen: a conversation with her favorite poet. What followed was an exchange of emails that unfolded over three and a half weeks.

The full interview can be found below.

Juliette Florian: How do you manage to view the world with such compassion when it often proves to be cruel?

Richard Siken: There's a concept called "cleaning up the line." We inherit everything from slights to abuses from our cultures and our families. The goal is to deal with it and heal, rather than pass it down the line to our children. It's easy to choose yelling or hitting, if that's what you were taught. There are better ways to solve problems. Some people think this idea means you have to absorb the damage to end the cycle. You don't have to absorb it, you just have to process it. As an artist or a teacher, you also have the opportunity to clean up the line and not pass the damage along to your students or audience. Art doesn't have to clean up the line--art can be generous or punishing, or anything else--but personally I don't want to be abusive. I think abuse comes from a belief that you are right. I think art comes from a place of curiosity and doubt. If you know the answer, there are many ways to advocate or protest, and poetry can be one of those ways, but that kind of poetry runs the risk of being preachy or shrill if not handled with great consideration. I do want to break things with my poetry--habit, laziness, calcified thinking, inaction--but I don't want to hurt people, I just want to jostle their vision.

Victorya Solè: You spoke of breaking habits and calcified thinking, jostling visions without causing harm. How can this be done while still keeping the poem from bruising the reader and yet keep the integrity of the piece? What craft choices, if any, are made to prevent harm?

RS: The original project of Confessional Poetry was to use the self as an example of the world. This solved several problems. The location of the content and the emotion was now located inside the speaker. You could speak about your experience but you couldn't speak for anyone else. You couldn't generalize. In therapy, you're encouraged to make "I" statements. You stop saying "You make me feel bad" and learn to say "I feel bad when you [do that]." This shift from "you" to "I" eliminates blame. It changes the focus. It's no longer an attack, it becomes an expression of an experience. It's hard to claim authority and maintain the reader's trust when you speak as if someone else's experience is your own. It lacks authenticity. I stick to my experience. If people feel bruised, they're bruised for me, not by me. Crush often uses the second-person as a strategy to make the reader complicit in the speaker's actions. It's a multivalent "you": sometimes meaning "one," sometimes meaning the reader, sometimes it's the speaker talking to or about himself. There's also the use of "you" as a hypothetical, specifically in "You Are Jeff." All of this keeps the responsibility, the culpability, of the reader in flux. Before Crush was published, I knew that the content would be difficult to read. Using the second-person, putting the reader in the middle of the situation, was a strategy to engage the reader, to keep them reading. The "you" keeps the content from being an accusation. Instead, it invites the reader to imagine being the speaker. It says "This happened to me, to us." Even with all that said, I still haven't answered your question. Not really. Pick a quote or a section for me and I'll deconstruct it.

JF: In the world of Crush, did you feel the reader could only digest the story if they were a part of it? In your original response you mentioned the concern of poetry coming across as preachy or shrill if not handled with great consideration; by bringing the reader into your shoes, by forcing them into the story, do you feel you eliminated that sense of judgement? Or at the very least, made it possible for them to experience your pain from a safe distance? In

Driving, Not Washing

" We are not dirty, he keeps saying. We are not dirty... They want you to love the whole damn world but you won't, you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath, who knows what to do with his body, with his hands. It should follow, you know this, like the panels of a comic strip, we should be belted in, but you still can't get beyond your skin, and they're trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything walks away."

This jump between perspectives; the multivalent "you", the wes, the Henrys, do they protect your reader from harm? Does it allow for them the choice to bruise for you instead of by you?

VS: As somewhat of a follow-up, in "Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper" the 'I' and 'you' form a sandwich of sorts. "There is no new me, there is no old me, there's just me, the same me, the whole time", "You want to solve something? Get out of your own way", "The world doesn't know what to do with my love... I'm trying really hard to make it love". As a girl who lives in her own mind, this is exactly what it feels like. The self becomes a room you can't leave and there is a constant tug-of-war between control and collapse. In times when 'you' is the self, what does that say about blame, responsibility, and tenderness towards oneself?

RS: I think digest might be the wrong word. I was afraid the reader wouldn't ingest the poems. I was afraid they would be seen as too dark, too harsh. I used a lot of strategies to hook the reader. Using the second-person was a hook. Leaning heavily on image was another hook. Keeping the poems restless and surprising was another. I used a lot of craft tricks to complicate the surface of the language while the content of the language did its work. All of the poems present situations. The situations are facts. The people in the poems can be considered characters in a play. These characters and their actions are facts. You can't blame facts or get angry at them; you can only describe them, deal with them. The speaker could say "Don't be mean" and that would be boring and preachy. They could yell it and that would be shrill or strident. Instead, I say "We hurt each other," which is the description of a situation, not a rule for how to behave. I'm not sure anyone escapes judgement--not the author, speaker, reader, or character--but the author isn't blaming the reader for being bad or wrong. Once you say "I am right, my side is right" you are in danger of moving from poetry into advocacy. What are the strategies for creating distance from the painful parts of the content and experience of the poems? First, the situation is hypothetical, a story. The reader-as-character (signified by the second-person) is an opportunity to inhabit the experience. The reader-as-person can close the book at any time. The reader-as-person can say "That's not me." Second, there are a lot of characters in play. Let's look at "Driving, Not Washing." One speaker is addressing one character, but look at how many characters are involved and participating. That adds distance. We are not he keeps saying They want you to love...you won't, you want [man] who knows You know We should you still they're trying drive you anything walks The focus is on the tragedy of the situation and all involved, not just on one person and their pain. The reader performs their role as they read the poems. They enact and inhabit the situation. All the harm and bruise is happening to reader-as-character, not reader-as-person. The pain is strangely more personal and simultaneously more removed. What happens when the "you" is the self? Well, that "you" isn't the reader, so I don't need to keep anyone safe or blameless. I don't need to be tender to myself and often I'm not. An example, talking about myself: "The enormity of my desire disgusts me."

JF: I, at this moment, am struggling to word my next question. I don't think it's a particularly difficult question, but I think even writing this email is a reminder of it. My partner, Victorya, often jokes at my inability to get out of my own head. I have been struggling for months to put my thoughts to paper--to print. There were days I could not get the words out fast enough and now, those words have dried to nothing. It is terrifying to have the stories, the characters on the tip of my tongue and still be unable to write them the way they deserve to be written. So I suppose this is my long winded way of asking, what or how do you get out of your own way? You often discuss the importance of writing what you know, of being vulnerable but still ingestible for your reader. How were you certain it would be? How did you know it was ready for consumption?

RS: The composer John Cage was once asked why he wrote music that couldn't be performed. He replied, "Composing and performing are different things." Similarly, there is writing and there is sharing. They are different things. The first draft and the final draft are different things. There are a lot of fears we need to overcome when making things. The fear of the blank page is a significant one. The fear of the first draft is another. A first draft isn't supposed to be good. All the magic comes from the shaping, the revision. No one gets it right on the first try. And if you could, there would be no discovery, no experimentation, no growth. The goal is to fail often and significantly. I cast a net. I catch all sorts of creatures and garbage. Don't worry about putting thoughts to paper, put words on paper. The thoughts will rise up. If you are writing fiction, make things happen. If you are writing poetry, make images. The images are what lead to thought, feeling, and revelation. Here are two bits of writing. The first is just words and glimmers. The second develops a mood and a story. The water, the fish, the burning boats--they're from the same vocabulary set, the same cohesion. You can see them. There wasn't a plan, there were words. Some things I followed, some things fell away. You don't know what your concerns are, the important things, until you have enough parts to start building something interesting. You can see that the tone remains, even though the scene changes. I like both drafts. Probably I will steal images from the first draft for other places but I shaped with one goal, with intent: a focus. I built a place out of images so something could happen there. A FIRST DRAFT Their eyes were moons, were pools of water. His blue outline. Blobber, purple flower, smear. Replaced by fire lights. People were stunned on the beach, watching, flabbergasted. The night scribbles a vortex, leaving the door open. In my opinion. The blue dog, it looked like that dog had three heads, from this angle. The story has a hole in the argument: his face face, his plastic face, unmovable face. Firelight, faces in glow, things disappearing into in their blue outlines, darkness. A FOURTH DRAFT The water confuses. It’s hard to remember what came before the endless rowing. There must have been something important. Once, we were fish. They say that. I don’t remember why we gave it up. We might as well burn the boats. We’re not going back. From the west, a strong wind. It got in their heads. They had not yet decided if it was in front of them or behind them so they made camp. The boats burned all night. They sparked and crackled as the men slept. What is a dream? Small, bright flashes on the surface of the water.

JF: I wanted to veer a little to the left, if I may? I’ve scoured the internet for previous interviews, other conversations you’ve had discussing your work. I think even outside of your poetry, I enjoy the way you think, the way you say things. I’m not saying this to be flattering, if anything I think it drives me a little insane.

The first time I read your work, something cracked inside of me. I knew what poetry was supposed to look like, what it was supposed to sound like but your work didn’t really line up with my preconceived notions of what poetry was supposed to be. It pulled at an internal thread I wasn’t sure had been there to begin with.

In 2019, you suffered from a stroke that caused loss of memory and your capacity for speech. You had to relearn words, to piece together your memory as best you could. You mentioned in your interview with Thomas Hobohm for The Adroit Journal, that you lost your filter alongside everything else. Your newest work, I Do Know Some Things, refrains from the same narrative tactics used in Crush.

When writing I Do Know Some Things, did changing the style of your writing from line breaks to prose, better inform your ability to keep the integrity of the piece intact? And in making that decision, did you have the same initial reaction I had to your writing when I first read it? Did you have to break out and away from what you perceived your poetry to be? How did you reconcile with these thoughts and emotions?

RS: You can call it a change of style. I think of it as project diversity. Crush is narrative poetry with a film metaphor and a focus on now & then. War of the Foxes is rhetorical poetry with a paint metaphor and a focus on here & there. I Do Know Some Things is meditative poetry with a music metaphor and a focus on up & down. The next one (The Realms) is lyric poetry with a [to be determined] metaphor and a focus on in & out. Crush deploys the second-person and has indented lines. Foxes deploys the third-person and has left-justified lines. IDKST deploys the first-person and is in paragraphs. Realms will deploy a first- and third-person conflict and will be book-length in numbered, four-line stanzas. Everything is craft, intention and craft. The craft is deeper and more comprehensive than you're seeing. I don't know what you mean by integrity. You've used the word twice. Are you separating form from content? Form is content. There is no reconciliation necessary. Poems aren't made of thoughts and feelings, poems are made of words. I don't have preconceived notions of what poetry is supposed to be. I am a poet. I decide what poetry will be. I reinvent it and construct it. It might sound like I am just talking. I am not just talking. I am not just making conversation.

JF: Sorry, I think perhaps I should have clarified my thoughts better. In your interview with Adroit you mentioned that after your stroke you had to abandon the line break, a change in your usual form. My question pertained to your personal reconciliation with the change in how you saw your own work. Sometimes things happen to us and change how we see ourselves and the art we put out in the world. I wanted to know if that affected you as a person, not just as a writer. I'm interested in knowing what it took out of you to progress out of second and third person and into your own shoes, outward.

RS: IDK, after Crush I abandoned the indentation. After Crush I abandoned romantic love as subject matter. Those changes were also significant. They were changes of choice, not necessity, but it was functionally the same thing: a change in the previous form. I've worked in three very different forms. None of them were usual or more true than the others. I publish a book every ten years. If the work didn't change, there'd be a problem. There is no reconciliation. I don't understand what you mean. The biggest change between War of the Foxes and I Do Know Some Things was that I decided to tell the truth plainly. War of the Foxes was made out of invention and personification. The book was full of fables, where animals were the characters and they talked. It didn't take anything out of me to switch to the first-person. I went through catastrophe after catastrophe after my stroke. That's the subject matter of I Do Know Some Things. I had to relearn how to write, among other things. The line breaks are just an easy thing to point to. A person changes and the writing changes, not the other way around. I am currently writing differently again. I think you are looking at the stroke as a singular event that has a before and an after. I see (at least) four events (so far), one before each book, that changed my relationship to language. There was also the event that was my MFA. There was also the event that was 11th grade English class. There were actually several events between Foxes and IDKST. What happened when I chose to give up indentations? I had to work my weak hand. What happened when I had to give up line breaks? I had to work my weak hand. The longest poem in Crush--"You Are Jeff"--is in 24 parts with no line breaks. The fables in War of the Foxes have no line breaks. Paragraph-as-form is not new to me. The only thing that was different after my stroke was that the lack of line breaks was a craft choice that was made for me, not by me.

JF: I see, I think you're right that I'm possibly zeroing in on one event, on one effect. In fact, I think this a great transition into my next question. What do you think young poets misunderstand about their medium--if anything?

RS: Tone.

JF: Do certain lines of your work linger in your mind longer than others? And if so, which ones?

RS: Rhetoric is persuasion. It's question and statement. It argues. In an essay, you argue with logic. In a poem, you can argue with image. That sounds like the basic advice of "Show, don't tell" but the showing has to be part of the argument, not just a description of scene. My favorites are the lines where the image is the example: "The fish in the fishsticks think to themselves This is not what we meant to be." And in this next part, the images are also the examples. The images are the point. The argument (things break) is actually boring: "I wouldn’t break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was already broken. I lashed the words like pack dogs, each to each, and sledded the frozen lands for yards... Dawn breaks. The waves break against the cliffs. A necklace breaks and the opals scatter like rats. You can break a promise, you can break a glass, you can draw a line in the sand or throw a ball of yarn at a kitten yelling Minotaur! Measure measure, cut cut. The sauce breaks. Your heart breaks. The car breaks down by the side of the road and you end up walking home in the dark, exhausted and iambic. I didn’t want to risk it." Then there are the lines that are fun to recite to an audience. They have attitude and they surprise. Still, it's image and rhetoric: "Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing. You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?" Even this line is image and rhetoric:"Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable."

JF: When the world gets overwhelming or your skin begins to feel tight--too small to hold all of you, what do you do? Do you take long walks, or stay awake all night going in mental circles? Do you make a midnight snack and stare out your kitchen window?

RS: If I'm overwhelmed by mundane things, I make handwritten lists. For mental circles, I draw diagrams and make flow charts. When the overwhelming feeling is more complicated, I whisper into a microphone and use dictation software to transcribe it. I have midnight snacks and stare out of windows whether or not I'm overwhelmed.

VS: I’m curious — when life throws something really hard at you, do you usually try to take control and shift the outcome, or focus on accepting what you can’t change?

RS: You can always shift the outcome, even if the only thing you shift is your attitude. I try to be absolutely present and uninvested in the outcome. Which means full participation without expectation.

VS: What is something you would like to see more of in the world?

RS: I would like to see more 24-hour restaurants.

JF: Tell me about a favorite memory spent in a restaurant/diner. The more detail the better.

RS: It was called Grill. Drew Burk was a cook, I was a waiter. We worked there for years. We started Spork over 4am shift meals. Details take too long. Here's a poem: Photo Booth The photo booth was a small box with a red curtain. It took four photographs and printed them on a strip. The restaurant had four rooms: storage, kitchen, dining, lounge. The photo booth was in the lounge, where we would eventually put the bar. I worked the fourth shift, dinner and the bar rush, and after work I would feed my tips into the machine and sit in the small box. I took pictures of myself until I got tired of myself. It didn’t take long. I started dressing up, pretending to be other people. I used props. The curtain was a half curtain. I would pull it shut to obscure my head and shoulders but you could see my legs. What was being photographed was hidden but everything outside the frame was visible. If you watched me, everything was reversed: the framed space inaccessible, the space outside the frame illuminated. The strip would document what happened in the box but by the time the strip was ready, it was over. I tried to build a narrative on the strips, but the time I had between the photos was brief. Everything had to be done quickly. It was interesting: the gap in time between the shots, between the strips—the missing moments. You couldn’t capture everything. I started leaving the curtain open so people could hand me props but sometimes a hand would end up in a shot and break the artifice, alluding to a larger world. One of the line cooks was also manipulating the machine. I was making little stories but he was documenting something else. A waiter spends his nights delivering the goods—milkshakes, omelets, chicken-fried steak—and returning with a tray of residue. A line cook holds his ground and cooks. He would watch me through the pass-through window, running around. I would watch him through the pass-through window, standing still. From the booth, with the curtain open, you could see into the dining room—customers at tables or navigating past the waiters and their oval trays. The line cook realized that inside the booth, with a mirror at an angle, he could take pictures of the dining room. He had moved outside the box, past portraiture. With a second person holding a second mirror, reflecting back at him, he could take pictures of himself in the booth, holding the first mirror. With two people and two mirrors, he could make the photo booth take pictures of itself, flashing through the minutes. Photo Booth is an excerpt from his newest release, I Do Know Somethings

VS: What is it about humanity you find it easiest to love?

RS: Gumption.

JF: How does it feel to know that you’ve affected so many with your writing? In the beginning was it very apparent that you had?

RS: In workshops, it's important to find someone who loves your work and someone who hates it. The one who loves it will always be encouraging. The one who hates it will give you the opportunity to focus your intent. I had a nemesis in grad school. It took me a few years, but I was finally able to get some respect from him, although grudgingly. That's when I knew I could affect people with my writing. The haters are your target audience. If you can sway them, you have significant power. My goal is to jostle the reader's vision, to reframe their understanding of the world. I want the reader to see other meanings and have other options. The first time I saw a stranger with my book was a turning point. My sphere of influence had grown past the circle of people that I knew. Since then, it's just been a change in numbers: one stranger, two hundred strangers, three thousand. How does it feel? I like the praise, but concentrating on the praise doesn't lead anywhere. It doesn't lead to better work. I wanted (and still want) to make good, effective work. Work that inspires thought or action. I think I've affected people by showing them what they couldn't see, maybe even what they didn't want to see. Honestly, I don't really know how they're affected. I'm just guessing. Artists want to create landmarks. Not monuments but guideposts. Artists want to lock it down in stone or song as an expression, an example, a consideration. They want it to last, to continue to radiate. Knowing that I've affected people means the poems worked--that I got something out of my head, onto the page, and into their heads. They continue to radiate. I think I would write even if no one read my poems, but it feels really good that people read the poems and share them.

JF: Does it ever surprise you what people ask of you--about you?

RS: When they ask about my biography, I decline. I tell them to focus on the work, not the author. When they ask me to help them with their poems, I decline. There are better venues to get my criticism than at parties or through Twitter. When they ask me to write poems for them, for someone's birthday or wedding, I decline. I have never been successful with commissions. If they asked me out on a date, I would probably say yes. Nobody asks, though. I will go to their potluck. I will go to their art opening. I will share an Uber to the airport. I will do what normal people do. My boundaries are pretty reasonable. I gave a reading once and the first question in the Q & A afterwards was "What about death?" At first I was put off--I wanted to talk about the poems--but I decided to take the question seriously. We turn to poets to tell us things. We (rightfully) expect that they have wrestled with things. I answered by giving examples from my poems and the poems of others that I had memorized. I concentrated on sharing the attempt to address, rather than the conclusions. Addressing texts is literary criticism. Without the texts, you're just a philosophy major holding court in a coffee shop. I talked about the line break as a little death. I talked about giving closure or refusing closure at the end of a poem. I talked about the sound of loneliness and the syntax of grief. Overall, it was a pretty good evening.

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