Richard Siken on the Most Fundamental Poetic Device There Is

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Richard Siken. Siken is the author of four poetry collections, most recently I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). His debut collection, Crush (Yale University Press, 2006), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 2004.

*

Poets.org: What themes do you explore in I Do Know Some Things?

Richard Siken: I had a stroke in 2019. I was paralyzed on my right side and I lost my memory and my capacity for language. I was in the hospital for a month and then in a physical rehabilitation facility for many more months. I Do Know Some Things is a record of my recovery, of my struggle to claw my way back into a self, into a language. There are three propulsions in the book: a narrative of physical recovery, a meditation on the moments that defined me, and an exploration of the conceptual terms I used to rebuild myself. The narrative is the story of the stroke, in the present, chronologically ordered.

The meditation follows my recovery of memories, out of order, scattered across my far and recent past. They are related in their sections by theme: ownership of death, ownership of history, ownership of body, ownership of language, ownership of autonomy, ownership of imagination, and ownership of creation. Finally, there are poems that take place in a hypothetical space. They wrestle with the concepts I used to reconstruct myself.

Poets.org: What is your approach to the craft of poetry, and how did it evolve while working on this book?

RS: I have written three books. They are about identity and representation, though they have different strategies and manifest in different ways. My first book blurs the lines between self and other, deals with multiples of the self, explores variations and iterations of the same events. It relies heavily on the use of the second-person to make the reader a character in the story, to make the reader complicit. My second book uses the third-person and personification to explore identity.

There are poems where bunnies and deer are characters, where fishsticks think and the moon speaks, where the speaker and representations of the speaker interact. This new book is in the first-person. There are no fables. There is no artifice. It is autobiographical, and it does not fabricate or lie. I like to lie. I like to invent things. I just wasn’t able to. I lost my guile and my poker face. I had to reconstruct myself, to make an encyclopedia of myself. It didn’t make sense to build a self out of false or contaminated parts.

Poets.org: Can you speak about a poetic device that you used in I Do Know Some Things?

RS: The line break is one of the most fundamental poetic devices there is. When you break a line, you make a friction between the line and the sentence. The line goes one way, the sentence goes another. The line break produces simultaneous meanings. You get a chord of meanings instead of a single note. After my stroke, I lost my sense of line. And things were so broken, I didn’t want the disjunction of a line break. I was striving to finish my sentences. I was going to measure my progress by my ability to make a paragraph, to convey a single thought completely.

This meant that every poem was going to be a block of text, a single paragraph. The poems were all going to look the same. I lost a lot when I lost the line, so I had to make use of other swerves and complications. I varied my modes—lyric, narrative, meditative, rhetorical—and I varied my tone. I varied the speed, the direction of address, the emotional distance. I tried to keep the language thick and interesting.

Poets.org: At what point did you know that this collection was complete?

RS: Where does a word end? A word rings like a struck bell. It ends when it stops ringing. Some words—like love or hate—resonate longer. When does a line end? A line ends when it is broken. If a line is too long for the page, it continues after it hits the margin, indented, for as long as you choose to maintain it. When does a sentence end? A sentence ends at the period. A paragraph goes on forever, past the period, until a hard shift. A story has an arbitrary beginning and end. There is always a before and an after.

Where does a collection end? It ends when you run out of breath. It ends when you are ready for the next generative silence. It ends when you are no longer the same person who started writing it. I am no longer the same person who started writing this book. Already I have moved on, pushed forward into the next room. I can leave the book on the table for you but I am no longer there.

Poets.org: What was your “gateway” into the craft of poetry—the poem or poetry collection that made you fall in love with this literary form?

RS: I’m not sure I love the form. I’m not sure I can call it love. My connection is deeper than love or hate, deeper than affirmation or denial. Poetry is how we make meaning. We compare a known thing to an unknown thing and gain insight. We howl or murmur to express ourselves. We have the Socratic method and the scientific method. We also have the associative method. That’s what art does. I guess I fell in love with poetry when I realized that I could use the tools of conversation for not-conversation. I guess I fell in love with Gertrude Stein, with the idea of surface delight, that we could evoke instead of mean.

I was doing it already, being evocative, but I was often accused of lying, or being difficult, or being unable to track a conversation. It was frustrating. No, infuriating. I didn’t realize it was called poetry. After my stroke, I forgot the names of things. I would triangulate. Once, I said restaurant nurse instead of waitress. You can call it poetry but it’s more serious and foundational than a literary form.

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

RS: I am reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. I’m attempting a long poem, a book-length poem, so I’m looking for strategies. I’m also revisiting John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, C. D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, John Berryman’s Dream Songs (and looking forward to the uncollected Only Sing), and Dante’s Inferno. I just finished a very autobiographical book full of personal pain. I want more room now. I want to get expansive and have characters performing actions. I want to address situations that I haven’t experienced personally. I want to be the narrator and not the subject matter.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

RS: I search the archives a lot, but Poem-a-Day poems that have struck me are:

“Love Poem with Tumor and Petrified Dog” by Kaveh Akbar
“Addiction” by Major Jackson
“In life I’m no longer capable of love,” by Diane Seuss
“Prayer to the Gods of the Night, II” by Roger Reeves
“The Pages You Loved” by Khaled Mattawa
“Four Freedoms Park” by Monica Youn
“[…]” by Fady Joudah
“Somehow” by Dorothy Chan
“2-Sided Map Shows Line Where Falling Bodies Will Land” by Brenda Shaughnessy

______________________________

“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.