An Interview with Richard Siken

Richard Siken’s work often treats observation as a way to stay alive in a story: to notice is to endure, to keep asking questions is to stay in the room. A poet, painter, and filmmaker, he is the author of Crush, War of the Foxes, and I Do Know Some Things, a collection of seventy-seven prose poems written in the wake of a stroke and the slow work of reclaiming the self.

At wildness, we’ve had the privilege of sharing Siken’s work in ‘Balcony,’ ‘Velocity,’ and ‘Tablecloth,’ pieces that move from hospice rooms to kitchen tables to ghost-costumes, holding grief and absurdity in the same steady frame. In the conversation that follows, he talks about curiosity as an engine for art, paragraphs as rooms, neuroplasticity and recovery, gallows humour, and who – if anyone – gets to “own” meaning, offering a glimpse of the rooms his new book builds and an invitation to sit awhile and see what you notice.

You once wrote that “art doesn’t come from trauma, art comes from curiosity.” After reading I Do Know Some Things, that feels particularly relevant – the collection seems powered by a kind of attentiveness, each poem an act of looking. Yet the book also follows a period of personal upheaval, when art became, almost inevitably, a form of recovery. Now that the book is out there, does curiosity still carry the same weight for you?

Curiosity is fundamental. Always has been and always will be. We think art comes from trauma because we’re most curious when we’re devastated or in danger and we’re curious for an answer. You can be desperately curious. It doesn’t have to be a mild feeling. Some people say they can’t write when they’re happy. That’s because they write pain out of habit. They just aren’t curious about joy. Joy can be just as intense, profound, and even terrifying. Recovery is a side-effect of curiosity. Knowledge is a side-effect of curiosity. The opposite of curiosity is an insularity that leads to self-isolation and a solitary death.

You’ve often spoken about language in spatial terms – boxes, rooms, skeletons – and in the new book the prose blocks feel almost architectural, both container and surface. That seems apt, given your interest in architecture. You’ve also described painting as “pushing colour around” until something begins to make sense (The Columbia Review), a similar kind of discovery to writing. When painting became an additional language for you, did you come to see the two mediums as interdependent? Do the physical textures of painting ever shape how you approach language and its structure?

Both painting and poetry are interested in the image. They get there in different ways. One moves in time (beginning/end) and one moves in space (up/down/left/right). The two mediums are independent, not interdependent. I don’t think they even overlap. Illustrating a poem erases its mystery. Using text in painting (unless it’s just a visual element) collapses possibility into definition.

Language has sonic and rhythmic textures. I don’t think the physical textures of painting are a useful analogy. Poetry is about its materials, not just its content. Poetry uses the materials of conversation for not-conversation. Anyone can write an essay. Poetry comes from an understanding of the use of words – how they evoke and refer and obscure and surprise. Doctors need to understand anatomy before they’re ready to perform surgery. They might have an idea for a good surgery, but without technique they’re just butchers. Everyone has an idea for a good poem. The idea is not enough.

I was talking with my housemates the other night about what it means to have an ‘inner life’. For me it’s spatial. I imagine in three dimensions as well as in time. My first book was concerned with indentations and line breaks. In left-justified poetry, the eye always returns to the margin. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to start over every line, I wanted some lines to levitate, as if there was a sense of five steps forward and only four steps back. The aesthetic was absolutely spatial. In my new book, I needed a different spatial and conceptual structure. Each paragraph is a room. In the poem ‘Paragraph’ I write “I built a house out of other houses. I stapled them together. It was makeshift but it kept the wind out. I sat in each room until I could describe it. I adjusted the furniture.” And later I write “I drove all night to get to Santa Fe once, just to get away from everything. I stayed in a Motel 6. It was like a paragraph. Once, I described a forest as a box of leaves. You can put words around anything, even an absence.”

In BOMB Magazine you said the poems “accumulated as autobiography by default because I had no artifice.” That phrase struck us – as if honesty arrived by necessity rather than design. In ‘Sidewalk’, you write, “No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways.” When memory fractures, does writing become a way of proving you’re real to yourself, or a way of inventing a new version of that self altogether?

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. In revision there was some shaping, but not much. Mostly a shuffling and smoothing of the parts for clarity. And still it accumulated with associative leaps rather than logic. I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to represent that and not recap the content in hindsight.

You’ve mentioned that your neurologist credited your recovery to having “multiple engines … for making meaning” (The Common) – painting, poetry, language. Do you think artistic practice retrains the brain, or is it more about relearning perspective, finding new points of entry?

Artistic practice physically builds (or rebuilds) the brain. It’s called neuroplasticity. Relearning perspective or finding new points of entry is a great thing to do, but it isn’t the same. It’s conceptual, not physical.

You told the Chicago Review of Books, when readers ask if a poem is true, you feel they’re really asking, “Can this happen to me?” Do you think that’s what we really want from poetry, to see our reflections moving through someone else’s experience?

IDK. It’s like asking “What do we want from food?” Too many possibilities, too many variables. I don’t want reflections or someone else’s experience. I want a really good song. If I wanted true things, I’d turn to science. I want the biggest lies possible. In the poem ‘Poetry,’ I write “Sometimes, to avoid suspicion, I would pretend to be a robot and I would sing—like this: Beep boop. An impeccable camouflage.” And later, “If I was undercover now I wouldn’t say. Until tomorrow. I tell you this because I love you. I might be doing it all wrong.”

Having run Spork for years, you’ve seen art from both sides. Has that experience influenced how you want your own work to be held, or has it deepened your understanding of editors and readers shared ownership of meaning?

Spork helped. Waiting tables helped more. As an editor, your job is to negotiate the space between what the cooks want to make and what the diners want to eat. And truly, I don’t think anyone owns the meaning of art. Just as no one owns the meaning of life. Anyone who says they own the meaning – author, reader, or critic – is a bully or a fascist. Meaning, and objective reality, exists outside us and beyond us. We approach it. Science is better at approaching it. Owning the meaning of art is impossible and misses the point.

On X, you wrote: “Stay curious, stay tender (so hard to do), be humble and don’t get bitter. Stay flexible and resilient.” That generosity runs through both your poems and your posts. With social media’s chaos, what keeps you engaged in the “conversation”? Is it purely curiosity that tethers you to that world?

Okay, it’s kind of heavy. I came out about six months before AIDS hit hard. The generation above me, that was supposed to teach me and look out for me, was decimated. We still haven’t recovered the centuries-old tradition of cross-generational sharing. I’m trying to open up the discourse and lead by example.

A certain kind of humour seems integral to your poetry, be it a dry resilience in ‘Balcony’ (“They didn’t seem unhappy but I kept finding my mother’s pills under the kitchen table.”) or the sly absurdity of ‘Tablecloth’ (“In space, no one can hear you lying to your mom.”). Do you see this as a way of staying in motion, as proof that whimsy can be found in our darker moments?

Gallows humour. Dark humour. Life is a tragedy. It’s absurd. All you can do is notice and shrug. Art isn’t representative if it lacks humour. I want to use all the tones and moods and modes and styles that there are. I want options for multiplicity and depth.

Before we finish, we have to ask about the “science-fiction soap-opera porno” you mentioned in The Common. Can you give us a line, or at least describe it a little more?

Right. When you have “writer’s block,” it’s because you want to say something important but you have something stupid in the way. You have to write the stupid thing to get past it. When I get stuck, I work on my science-fiction soap-opera porno. It blows the carbon out of the pipes and loosens me up. It’s kind of filthy and weird, though. Hard to excerpt. Here’s a mild part, for flavor:

Read more from Issue No. 40 or share on X.