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
- yellow — not golden, but marigold or the color of butter? — lit from behind by the sun
- a full head of orange-ish yellow leaves on the tree by the double bridge
- streaks of red in low-lying bushes — vermillion?
- BRIGHT yellow running shoes — canary yellow?
- cerulean sky
- blue-gray water with small scales
- the gun-metal gray sound of a roller skier hitting their poles on the rough asphalt with strong strikes
- shimmery silver sound of a dog collar
- grayish-tan of the ford bridge arch
- 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.