Tag: Richard Siken

dec 3/RUNSWIM

3.65 miles
trestle turn around
17 degrees / feels like 2
100% snow and ice covered

It snowed again last night. A dusting. I think we might get a lot of snow this winter. Hooray! I’m ready for winter running! Today, I didn’t like running straight into the wind at the beginning, but it wasn’t too bad and it was at my back on the way home. I liked running with the yaktrax. At first, my feet were sore, but that didn’t last long. There were a few runners, some walkers. No skiers or bikers.

Geese! A small vee in the sky, a cacophony of honks under the trestle. When I looked up to watch the geese, I admired the BLUE! sky, with only a few clouds.

Running back, I heard the tornado siren. No worries — it’s the first Wednesday of the month and that’s when they test it. One problem: it’s supposed to be tested at 1, and it was noon. Mentioned it to Scott and his suggestion: someone forgot to adjust the timer for daylight savings time.

Anything else? Near the end of my run, I enjoyed listening to the quick, sharp sound of my spiked feet piercing the snow. The sliding bench was empty. Oh — the streets looked bright silver — caused by the sun hitting the ice and snow on the road. The river was streaked with white, and not completely covered. I noticed traces of dirt on the trail where the park workers had come through to make the path less slippery — they don’t use salt because it would do damage to the river. A small thing, but evidence: of someone else here before me, the daily labor of maintaining safe (and fun) winter trails, and care for others.

Richard Siken!

I think I posted a Richard Siken! heading a few months ago, but his new book is so amazing, it’s worthy of another heading with an exclamation point. Last night, during Scott’s jazz rehearsal, I read more of I Know Some Things, including Sidewalk:

excerpt from Sidewalk/ Richard Siken

It was clear that something had happened that wasn’t going to unhappen. In the emergency room, the woman at the desk kept asking me questions. All my answers were stroke, dizzy, numb. I kept saying the words in different ways so she would understand. She didn’t. She didn’t believe me. They put me in the waiting room, which I knew was wrong, and I realized that I had messed it up because I didn’t call for an ambulance. I kept falling asleep in the waiting room. I looked much worse, slack and crooked, the two sides of my face moving at different speeds. I went back to the desk and said help. They put me in a room. No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways.

Tell it sideways. I love this idea of telling something sideways — and, as someone who does/tells things sideways a lot, I get how it can alienate you from others.

What does it mean to tell something sideways? Of course I’m thinking immediately of Emily Dickinson and tell all the truth but tell it slant, but I’m also thinking about a book I used to teach when I taught queer theory — The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways by Kathryn Bond Stockton. And I’m thinking about my peripheral vision and how see/think/imagine in its edges and not in the center.

swim: 1.25 miles
88 laps
ywca pool

It is always a wonderful day when I can swim! I felt strong and relaxed. The pool was not crowded. Everyone got their own lane — all 4 of us. There was a lifeguard on duty, which is rare. I overheard her saying to someone in the hot tub: I love going in the hot tub after a long day of giving swimming lessons! My pool friends today were the shadows. The shadow of the lane line. I liked watching what happened as the pool got deeper: at first it was straight and parallel, but soon it angled. Lots of angled shadows on the pool wall. The floor was shimmying from shadows. The blue-tiled t on the wall at the end of the lane letting you know there’s a wall, looked distorted to me. Almost like the lines at the center of an Amsler grid when I look at it.

locker room encounter

Two older women talking near my locker. Or, one woman talking at the other, speculating on the state of things, talking about bifurcated society and the haves hoarding it over the have-nots and then believing that if it compresses enough, people will fight back. The other woman, not buying it. As she left, the first woman called out, I’ll see you up there. We can sweat it out! After she left, the second woman mumbled, YOU can sweat. When I laughed she explained that she didn’t sweat easily and it was hard for her and she feels uncomfortable when she can’t and she wishes she could just sweat.

My reaction: At first — come on ladies, this is the locker room. We come here to escape and have fun and to not think about the state of things. Then, when I heard that they hadn’t worked out yet, I got it. Oh, you just haven’t worked out yet! Also: I wondered if the second woman (the woman who couldn’t sweat) enjoyed working out with the first woman (who used bifurcated and talked at her and told her they would sweat),

oct 22/RUN

3.1 miles
2 trails
44 degrees

Blustery, cool, full of color. Reds and oranges and yellows. Everything wet from yesterday’s rain. The winchell trail was covered in leaves, some wet, some dry, most of them rusty red. I greeted a guy I passed with a good morning, then realized it wasn’t morning, but afternoon. Oops. He said morning back. I wonder if he realized the mistake. Thanked several other walkers for moving over to let me pass. Heard some kids yelling at the playground and one guy yell out to someone else, that’s Ben. Ben is here. A woman stood at the top of the old stone steps, studying something below. Was she deciding whether or not to take them down? Wondering what was down there, or whether or not the steps were too slick?

Every so often, I thought about a line that I haven’t quite found a home for in GGG: Each loop adds substance, tightens the tether, but never enough to stop the looping.

Began chanting: looping and/looping and/looping again

After I finished running, as I walked back, I had 2 ideas for fun experiments with the lines.

first: switch up the order of the words — mimicking of swirling water falling from a limestone ledge? or, take part of it and create an anagram?

second: do a variation on the golden shovel form by taking the tether/never/looping sentence and ending each line of a new poem with the words from it, in order, so that it spells out the sentence. Or, to mimic the rock walls of the gorge, start each line of the new poem with the first half of the sentence, then end each line with the second half. Too contrived? Future Sara will let me know.

Found a wonderfully wandering poem this morning, “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College.” It’s long, so I’ll just an excerpt:

excerpt from Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College/ Carlie Hoffman

when my sister asked if I’d ever
kissed anyone. I was just beginning
freshman year, working to get my time
down for swim team where I’d spent summer
ditching birthdays & the ice cream
truck’s persuasive tune to practice
the butterfly & freestyle & learning to dive
less crooked, which was going as well
as expected until Andrew
sat next to me on the bus
ride home from the pool during tryouts,
his chlorine-dried hand on my shoulder
a little too long without asking when he asked
my name & he has a crush on you
said my friend Becca while faking
a gagging sound in her throat. I said yes
even though I hadn’t kissed anyone & maybe
this was my first true poem, lying
to my sister in support of love, stealing imagery
from the books I’d read in the library
to avoid the cafeteria

I love her definition of a poem: lying to someone in support of love, stealing imagery from other poets

Richard Siken!!

I love Richard Siken’s new book that I picked up from Moon Palace Books Monday night. Read this poem while Scott was rehearsing with the community jazz band:

The List/ Richard Siken

I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique. I had a grief counselor, like everyone, and a suicide counselor, because I had said the wrong thing. I wrote in my notebook. I made a list, a working glossary. My handwriting was big and crooked. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder. I tried to understand what these things were and how I was related to them. Doorknob. Cardboard. Thermostat. Agriculture. I understood North but I struggled with left. Describing the world was easier than finding a place in it. The suicide counselor said the people who hadn’t shown up weren’t going to show up, that the ones that had stopped coming would not be coming back. She had seen it before, she saw it every day. The person they knew was gone. To them, I had broken the contract: I had left first and they were already grieving. I started a second notebook, for venom and hard feelings—things that would leak into the list if I let them. It was harsh and ugly. It was true and harsh and ugly and it made me feel sick. What do I know? What do I know for sure? I built up meaning with a double set of books. —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.

I remember reading the line, Describing the world was easier than finding a place in it, as part of “About this Poem” explanation of “Real Estate.” I loved the line so much I turned it into a form fitter — my name for the lines that I shaped into my breathing rhythm of 3/2 syllables. I always thought it belonged in a poem, and here it is. Wow!

Describing 
worlds is

easier 
than find

ing your place 
in them

OR

Describing
worlds is

easy. Find
ing your

place in them
is hard.

oct 19/RUN

3.75 miles
bottom of locks and dam no. 1
47 degrees

Another wonderful run. Windier, but it didn’t bother me. Not too crowded on the trail. Didn’t encounter anyone at the bottom of the hill at the locks and dam #1. I ran until I reached the door that leads to the steps that take you over the iron grate bridge to the concrete curtain where the water falls. Saw my reflection in the glass window next to the door. Hello friend! I felt strong and was running fast/er — maybe too fast? I could run the pace for 2 miles, but then wanted a walk break. I’d like to figure out how to change my watch to show current pace instead of rolling pace.

10 Colors

  1. yellow — not golden, but marigold or the color of butter? — lit from behind by the sun
  2. a full head of orange-ish yellow leaves on the tree by the double bridge
  3. streaks of red in low-lying bushes — vermillion?
  4. BRIGHT yellow running shoes — canary yellow?
  5. cerulean sky
  6. blue-gray water with small scales
  7. the gun-metal gray sound of a roller skier hitting their poles on the rough asphalt with strong strikes
  8. shimmery silver sound of a dog collar
  9. grayish-tan of the ford bridge arch
  10. bright pink flowers — garden cosmos — in many neighbors’ yards

Richard Siken!

First, I love Richard Siken and his second collection, The War of the Foxes. Second, I was aware of his new book that just came out, his first in a decade, but I didn’t feel any urgency to get it. Then I read this interview, An Encyclopedia of the Self: An Interview with Richard Siken and I want to read his book, now!

Check out this response:

Mandana Chaffa

One of the things I enjoyed most about this collection—other than the delight of more of your work in the world—was considering prose poems and how they serve the writer and reader. Each page is a stanza—in the Italian sense of the word—with doors, windows and sometimes, secret hidey holes to similar themes in other pieces, in different sections. When did you start contemplating this collection, and how soon in the process did you set the architecture? Were the vignettes always poems? Or always in this form?

Richard Siken

I had a stroke. I was paralyzed on my right side, lost my short-term memory, and couldn’t make sentences. This was the experience of it. This is all I could do. There are some memorable lines in these poems but mostly they hinge and swerve in the gaps between the sentences. It’s associative. It’s broken logic. The goal was to say a complete thought. That’s what I was going to measure my recovery against: a solid, complete paragraph. The sequencing of one word after another was excruciating. In conversation, I would trail off and get lost.

A fundamental power of poetry is the friction between the unit of the line and the unit of the sentence. When you break a sentence into lines, you create simultaneous units of meaning. Meaning becomes a chord, not a single note. But I couldn’t break the line anymore. Everything was so broken, I didn’t want to break an additional thing. So, I had a form—the paragraph—and everything would have to be poured into identical molds. I set the margins to try to contain the thoughts. I made boxes, rooms, and sat in them and moved the furniture around.

I’m excited to see how the form of his poems is shaped by his limitations. I’ve been thinking about that a lot with my own poetry and how my inability to read a lot of words, or for long, influences my forms.

And this:

Mandana Chaffa

I appreciate how you wield language, as meaning to be sure, but also as a gesture. How in “Pain Scale,” there’s the friction between the linguistic structures we’re often forced to operate under, in this case, the almost ludicrous expectation that pain can be numerical rather than adjectival, and equally, how often people hear, but still don’t listen. What use is language, if those we speak to can’t understand?

Richard Siken

I fell down. I was taken to a hospital. I said, “I’m having a stroke.” They said, “No, you’re having a panic attack” and they sent me home. I kept thinking, “Something is terribly wrong. I do know some things.” That’s where the title for the collection came from. I went to a second hospital the next day and they admitted me. I was hard to understand and not many people tried. My premises didn’t add up, so my conclusions didn’t make sense. There were fish moving under the ice; I was running fast at a plate-glass door. They didn’t get it. I didn’t know how else to say it. Speaking in figurative language with the doctors didn’t work. They didn’t try to understand. They ignored some very important things I was saying. I just wasn’t able to say everything literally. But when you write, there’s an understanding that there will be a reader. The audience inside the poem might be impatient or dismissive but the reader is leaning in, listening very closely, trying to understand.

dec 4/RUN

2.5 miles
neighborhood
38 degrees

Feeling sore–not hurt, just sore–in my legs and lower back so I wasn’t sure I would run today but when Scott said it seemed like a great day to run outside, I had to do it. Sunny, mild, clear. A bit windy, but not too bad. A few more people since it is warmish and closer to noon, but I managed to keep distance from all of them. Listened to a playlist again so I didn’t hear any birds or leaves or far away traffic. I’m very close to my goal of 1000 miles for the year! I should take 3 or 4 days off from running once I reach that goal. My body needs it. 1000 miles has demanded a lot–I’ve run almost every day this year. Almost all of those runs have been short–4 or 5k–but frequent. Will I ever be able to run more than 1000 miles in a year? Would that be good for my body? I’m not sure.

Anything I remember from my run? My mind has gone blank. No views of the river, no remarkable trees, no roller skiers or fat tires or Daily Walker. I do remember running on the dirt trail between the river road and edmund. Uneven and windy (as in lots of meandering, not a stiff breeze). I remember wanting to stop at the top of the edmund hill to change my music but deciding to keep going. I remember seeing lots of cars on the river road and running in the grass at Howe field to avoid pedestrians. I remember stepping off the sidewalk and running in the street several times to avoid some more people, doing a loop around Cooper and Howe, smelling something overwhelmingly fruity coming from a van and guessing that someone inside of it was vaping. I remember feeling especially strong and smooth as I ran down the hill on 32nd and especially nostalgic as I ran by the main entrance at my kids’ old kindergarten. I don’t remember taking note of my breathing or making up any chants or noticing any connections between my striking feet and my inhales and exhales.

Richard Siken is the Best

I think it was last year that poets.org began including an “About this poem” author’s note with the poem-of-the-day. I find them helpful and interesting and always look at them after my initial reading of the poem. Richard Aiken’s “About this poem” note for today’s “Real Estate” is the best, most delightful one I’ve ever read. It offers an explanation that helped me to (start to) understand the poem, which is great, but it also offers itself up as another poem to place beside the first one. How cool to turn the note into a poem! I want to experiment with doing this, especially since I am so resistant to offering explanations for what I’m doing (even as I feel I should and/or long to).

Real Estate/ Richard Siken

My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out a cigarette, mutter something under her breath. Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. The man was not my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes of his third wife in a brass urn that he will hold in the crook of his arm forever. At the reception, after his funeral, I got mean on four cups of Lime Sherbet Punch. When the man who was not my father divorced my mother, I stopped being related to him. These things are complicated, says the Talmud. When he died, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t get a death certificate. These things are complicated, says the Health Department. Their names remain on the deed to the house. It isn’t haunted, it’s owned by ghosts. When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.

About this poem

“I had a stroke and forgot almost everything. My handwriting was big and crooked and I couldn’t walk. I slept a lot. I made lists, a working glossary. Meat. Blood. Floor. Thunder. I tried to understand what these things were and how I was related to them. Thermostat. Agriculture. Cherries Jubilee. Metamodernism. I understand North, but I struggle with left. Describing the world is easier than finding a place in it. Doorknob. Flashlight. Landmark. Yardstick.”
—Richard Siken

I want to experiment with adding these notes to my mood ring poems–and maybe my earlier Snellen chart ones too. Is that too much?