The Shore Interview #51: Richard Siken

Questions by Ella Flores, Interview Editor

EF: In “Fauna” there’s a presence of location and place, whether it’s a deer caught in something, the end of the world in LA, or the sign and the beach; and in “Strata” the “flat nastiness of Nebraska,” the Badlands of South Dakota, landfills and the side of the road. Then, there’s “Volta,” its titular turning, away and towards, is seemingly placeless, dislocated. How do you see movement, place, location, or lack thereof, working in this current collection of work?

RS: I think the whole collection is an attempt to locate a self. The poems in I Do Know Some Things show greater or lesser degrees of surety, starting with the experience of the stroke itself: I went back and locked the door and stood in front of the house to wait for my friend but I wasn’t standing in front of the house, I was lying on the sidewalk with my face in my shoulder bag because I couldn’t stand up… And then, in the hospital bed, there’s this: I swear to god, there must have been a day on the beach or a secret dip in the lake after dinner. I must have walked all night against the wind once, trying to get somewhere. There must have been. “Fauna” and “Strata” are in the final section of the book. By then, I’ve regained some sense of location and place. I think that’s the real recovery. Walking again is great, but being able to locate myself in the world was crucial.

EF: You’ve previously talked about the writing process of your forthcoming collection, including mentioning a process of writing out a piece then erasing bit by bit to its essence. What I’m curious about is if you could speak to your process of arranging I Do Know Some Things on a collection level, did you similarly use a process of excision, or were there gaps to fill?

RS: In the hospital, I made a list of terms I needed to understand—bed, floor, meat, noon—to see if I could find landmarks for meaning. It turned into a glossary, then a compilation of encyclopedia entries. My whole life was a gap to fill. I figured I’d start with the nouns and see if I could connect them. My understanding of the words led to stories or meditations on the words. The book accumulated around the words. The erasing happened in the rewrites. There were too many false leads, distractions and tangential ideas that strayed away from the the initial concern—the word—that just muddied up the thinking and the goal.

Looking at the table of contents, it’s odd that I chose these 77 terms to describe my life. I never expected that beet soup, cult leader and heart valve would be foundational. There were some words I had to add towards the end—true love, poetry—because those are fundamental also. But those were obvious choices.

The book moves forward in two ways. It follows my stroke and the aftermath chronologically, and around those moments are poems that are related by theme. The issues I was confronting in my recovery would remind me of other times I had confronted similar issues. “Fauna” was concerned with the idea that I might not fully recover. “Strata” was an attempt to look at the construction of the book and its layers as a strange accumulation of historical fact.

EF: When the friction of the sentence against the line is absent, is there something in its stead that you think a reader encounters when approaching prose as poetry that still creates that friction in other ways? Or do you consider there to be other tensions at work?

RS: Breaking a line makes a powerful friction between the unit of the sentence and the unit of the line. You lose a lot when you decline to use it. I wasn’t able to break the line. Everything was so disconnected it didn’t make sense to break anything when I was trying so hard to stitch everything back together. I think the power of the poems comes in the spaces between the sentences. To use associative leaps is a craft choice, but it’s also a representation of how I was thinking, how I’m still thinking. Everything jumps around. I take the long way around to get to meaning. The recovery from a brain injury isn’t focused on healing the damaged area, it’s focused on growing new neural pathways around the damaged area. My thinking, my language, goes around the damages areas. It circles lost memories and gaps in logic. I think the actual experience of my recovery is the actual poetry of it.

EF: What have you been reading lately that influences your work or thinking?

RS: I asked for a replacement question and got this one, which concerns the same thing. When you ask a question, you have to be prepared for the possible answers. When faced with an uncomfortable question, you have the choices of answering, lying, or deflecting. You are giving me an opportunity to pull you into my private world, which is something I rarely do. Complicating that is the fact that I can’t read yet. Not without great difficulty. I don’t like admitting it. I can’t follow and I can’t track. If it’s longer than a page, I have to reread it many times. To understand the basics, I have to take notes. I’m pretty good with conversation, but with poems and stories I’m at a loss.

EF: Please speak to how two poems in this issue of The Shore (not including your own) are in conversation with each other.

RS: I think this is a great question. I think you should ask this question of everyone. Answering it is beyond my current skill set. I have successfully defined some words and made some paragraphs. That’s the book I have. That’s all I have. I still get lost in the supermarket. I still blank out when asked simple questions. I smile a lot because that makes people happy but I am hiding as much of my damage as I can. I still have a long way to go.

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Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His 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 the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.