Viking Saga: When did your interest in writing poetry first develop and what caused it?
Richard Siken: It was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. I had just switched schools the semester before. I had made a few new friends, and I was learning a new house, a new neighborhood. I was just learning about poetry. I mean, really getting at the fundamentals. I was floored that you could use language for something other than conversation. The whole world seemed like a five-paragraph essay, but poetry rubbed against that. It was contrary and rebellious. That summer it rained a lot, and hard. We had a 100-year flood. It washed out bridges. I saw a house on the edge of a swollen wash lose its backyard and then get swept away. I didn’t want to talk about it, I wanted to make someone feel it. I started writing every day. I was very bad at it.
VS: You say your earliest poetry was “very bad”. How did you improve? Do you have tips for those who aim to increase their skills?
RS: I experimented, knowing I would fail to achieve what I wanted to for a long time. There was no pressure. I tried making the parts first. I made 100 metaphors and threw them away. I made another 100. I tried to find one thing every day that I could describe in an interesting way. I didn’t try to make a complete, successful thing. I tried to make interesting sentences. I tried to break the sentences in surprising ways to make powerful lines. I would write without judging it. I’d fill a page and then return to it later, and try to cross out as much as I could whilst keeping the essence of it. No one listens to teenagers, not even other teenagers. I wanted to make something small on the page and big in the head. Something small, and swift, and powerful to use while I had someone’s limited attention.
VS: I have a couple of questions regarding Crush. The first is this: Crush is coming up on its 20th anniversary. How do you find yourself relating to those poems two decades after their release?
RS: When I reread them, or read them to an audience, I can feel them just as I always did. But after I’m done, the world is now. Back then, when I wrote them, there was no escaping them. When I finished reading them back then, I was still in that world.
VS: You paint as well as write poetry. Do you find the two art forms intertwining? Does one shape/inspire the other and vice versa?
RS: It’s cross-training. They’re both concerned with the image, they just get there different ways. Sometimes I don’t want to talk. The response to Crush was strong when it came out. It made me not want to talk for a while. Also, I was worried I’d keep repeating myself if I didn’t let that part of me rest. My second book, War of the Foxes, was very much informed by the act of painting. The ideas about representation are the same in painting and poetry. Sometimes I don’t want any trace of a story, I just want an image. Sometimes I just want color and shape. There are ways of writing without a story but I’m not very good at those. I do a lot of things I’m not very good at. Success is satisfying but failure is satisfying, too. I like the experiences. I don’t have favorite things either. What’s your favorite tool? I like hammers for hammering. I like saws for sawing.
VS: At the risk of sounding pretentious, my favorite tool is the mind. It costs nothing (except the inevitable guilt and pain of a consciousness) and may always be improved. I enjoy pens as well, fountain pens in particular. Any sort of stationary I find enjoyable. Wite-Out for its convenience, staplers for the satisfying sound they produce.
You are active on X and post fairly often. Has your experience on social media, X and otherwise, shaped your writing at all?
RS: Nope. Social media is a conversation
VS: Have you ever experienced “writer’s block”? If so, how did you overcome it?
RS: Sometimes you have nothing to say. That’s not a block. Sometimes you have something to say but you think you should be writing something ‘important’. The block is that you’re trying to force something to happen while something else is trying to happen. You have to get out of your own way. Sometimes the thing you have to write is doomed from the start, ugly and without power or resonance. You still have to write it. You shouldn’t keep everything you write. You shouldn’t demand the beautiful and profound. You cast your net and get some fish. Some are better than others. I just finished my third book, about recovering from the stroke I had a few years ago. I am writing a science fiction soap opera now. I needed to write something light. I doubt it will turn into anything. I have, for the most part, written every day for over 20 years. I’ve published less than 200 pages. Having ideas is great. Writing down your feelings is great. The art comes in the revision, in the manipulation of the materials. If you’re stuck, play with the materials and let something happen.
VS: Looking to the future now, would you like to give a blurb or two relating to your upcoming book – how it came about from your daily writing practice and what you hoped to accomplish with it? As you mentioned, it comes off the heels of a stroke, which I am sure must have been very difficult. Such an event must have been impactful upon your art, which I noticed in the shifted style of your recent poems available online
RS: I think every book of poems has a poem in it that teaches you how to read the book. For this book, I Do Know Some Things, that poem is “The List.” It was published in BOMB magazine. This book started as a list of things I knew. I was trying to build an encyclopedia of myself. I think it’s okay for you to reprint it.
VS: When you write poems, who do you write for? Is it solely a personal matter or do you consider the audience’s interpretation? When you write such an intimate collection as this, do you fear that exposure and, if so, how does one extract oneself from that fear? I realize that is three questions in one. Forgive me.
RS: When you sing songs, who do you sing them for? Sometimes you sing them to yourself in the shower or the car. Sometimes you sing them to seduce someone. You can sing a song to calm a baby. You can sing a song at karaoke. You can sing a song of protest as you march in the streets. When I say “The days were bright red,” I am using words to evoke. When I say “We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want,” I am using words to describe. I use words for all kinds of reasons. I try to create an experience. I am shaping the words to make that experience. The (published) work is intended for an audience. My goal is to make the readers feel exactly how I want them to feel without explaining it to them. It’s trickery. I have a goal. In my poems, there are enough clues to understand everything I’m saying. The parts are obvious. The way I put the parts together is what makes them mysterious. As for exposure, once you expose yourself completely and make yourself vulnerable completely, you realize no one cares. If you embarrass yourself, people are usually more concerned with how they looked while you embarrassed yourself. And intimate doesn’t always mean honest. At least not factually honest. Sometimes we write about versions of ourselves. Poetry isn’t non-fiction. You shouldn’t trust it, you can’t. Just don’t share what you don’t want to. It isn’t therapy, it’s art. I was sitting around one day, feeling crummy, thinking “I am bad, I waste my time. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a better friend. Blah blah.” It was true but it was boring. Later, thinking about the feeling, I turned the truth into myth. I threw my voice, reframed the scene, and let something else speak. I ended up with “The fish in the fish stick think to themselves This is not what we meant to be.” If you want to extract yourself from fear, be the fish sticks.
