Boot Theory by Richard Siken

Lineation

Siken arranges his lines in a way that makes it difficult for me to call them strophes. The lines push back and forth against the margins as though the page could never be big enough to give them enough room. It's as though he wants to remind you that the page's edges are limitations, and without them, who knows how much space his poems might take up. You can look at the poem to see the example of this, as the blog does not allow for the indenting and spacing of his format. As usual, the experience holding the actual book only enhances the experience of his formatting choices.

Pronouns

In this poem Siken addresses a man/men in the third person and also introduces the pronoun “you” in such a way that it seems to slip from specifying another party, to being the narrator’s address of himself in the third person, to being a direct address of the reader as “you.” I’m currently more than a little fascinated about the use of pronouns in poetry about gay relationships. There is an obvious challenge unique to poems (as opposed to prose or fiction) because character names are so often excluded in poetry, so there is not that touchstone to help the reader follow the conversation or the story line.

I plan to spend more time looking at the effective use of pronouns in poetry and I have my fingers crossed that I might even find an article written on the subject as it pertains to gay poetry. For me I have an added challenge as I write up synopses of Siken's poems, as I also have to add him into the mix. So I find myself with the poet, his narrator, and any other number of characters referred to as ‘he’ or ‘you,’ and to add one more factor, in the case of this poem, ‘a man.’ In this collection of poems the appearance of a woman is rare, and this poem begins with one.

Shoe Trope

This is a three-part story of a man (or three men, or three-phases-of-man), and how the other shoe drops. Part one appears to be a heterosexual relationship, where the woman leaves, after which the man who lives in the apartment above lets one of his boots fall to the floor. There is a significant pause waiting for the logic of the second shoe to drop. It does. (It always does, right?) In part two this boot turns into a series of boots falling to the floor above. Also in part two are two men and a pretty serious kicking incident. In part three the man goes to a bar -- this time Siken makes a point of saying that the man is “you this time” -- and after the bar, the man, well... it is you. You go to a convenience store. You get kicked out.

I'm trying to do my "reading" of poems lately in a way that I enjoy the art inside of them, the workings of the mind of their creator and how I can personally relate to that through the poem. The artfulness Siken uses in this trope is how well he integrates and even hides the cliche of the other shoe dropping while he displays in full fanfare an even bigger cliche: the proverbial one liner. Well, in this case, there is nothing proverbial about it. Siken employs the father of the one liner, Henny Youngman, and his best known offspring: "Take my wife, please."

Vaudeville Theme

I’m a big fan of vaudeville, so I had to call this out. His opening line is (once again) an easy hook for me:

A man walks into a bar and says:
Take my wife–please.
So you do.

Part two goes like this:

A man walks into a bar and says:
Take my wife–please.
But you take him instead.

And part three:

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
Make it a double.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:
Walk a mile in my shoes.

I think this is a brilliant use of dry comedy. He dredges up this old routine, with all of its mainstream appeal, with its throwback to the era when so many gay men lived double lives. Eventually Vaudeville expanded from the cornerstone of American comedy that it will always be, bringing us relief from our own commonness. These comedians tackled all sorts of subject matter and did not shy away from our most embarrassing and awkward normalcy, the blunders of every day life and we could identify while pretending not to be laughing at ourselves through their heavy handedness and slapstick maneuvers. These guys played the clowns we knew all too well -- the ones inside of us. Television helped this expansion to happen. Milton Berle serves as a good example for my purposes here, before gay was even a word uttered in mixed company, there he was, gender bending his way right into the living rooms of middle America, as I recall it myself, watching at my grandma's house. My grandpa was not far behind, donning her wig and her robe to get the rise of hysterical laughter from me and my sisters. Berle was the first man to appear on TV in drag.

It's almost like Siken places an implied laugh track in this poem. A forced laugh. If that is indeed Siken's intent, if we are meant to assume the man in Boot Theory has a story that includes living The Lie with a wife, then I think Siken has chosen a good foundation for this subtext and he is taking this old cliche of a joke to another mother fuckin' level. Isn't he?

Conclusions

The poem gives a multiple perspective on this man/men. Just the other day I was saying to a friend that perhaps this sort of thing in poetry is akin to Cubism and the way that the elements of time and movement were introduced into painting. In this moment I’m thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. But that is a larger conversation.

I have a few ideas about the meaning of the whole picture of Siken’s Boot Theory, but I’m going to attempt to keep my NaPo analyses a little more manageable by focusing more on structure and technique.

I will however go so far as to say that by the end Siken has sufficiently engaged me with this man -- in all of his roles and experiences -- that I end up right there with him on the riverbank in a moment of attempted surrender. The poem's focus shifts from the feet to the hands and Siken has the man "take" his sadness to a place of isolation. This man becomes humble and beautiful to me as he tries and fails, not once but twice, to let go:

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out, Richard Siken

‘Every morning the maple leaves.’

Man, I just love his opening lines. This poem is like a series of short storyboards, each with their own built in contradictions and negating alternatives (which I know you will love, featherless). Siken begins with mention of a hero who ‘shifts from one foot to the other,’ and quickly moves on to write apology notes to the host of a party (which totally sparked a poem idea for myself). Sorry I couldn't come to your party... Sorry I came ... Let the opposites party begin!

Siken then has the narrator tell a ‘better story.’ He begins a fairytale where he changes back and forth from the dragon to the princess, and then addresses himself as ‘just the writer.’ ‘I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.’ He transforms back into the princess until she sees herself in the mirror, at which point he slips back into the dragon, and confesses it: “Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero!’ The ‘you' being addressed is his lover, and the speaker sells him on this role:

‘You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as though you’re really there.’

Right then he shows a moment of insecurity or fear or neediness, and asks, ‘Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me?’ Interspersed through the first half of the poem are these fleeting intimate moments of the lovers’ relationship (remember, the one that would not get boring?).

The writer as playful inventor and hero of fun and exciting relationships shows up in these next lines: ‘Inside your head you hear a phone ringing and when you open your eyes only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.’ This little interlude of boyish charm is interrupted by a car crash and explosions, and then more apologies.

But things do not remain playful. Things get sad and there is a scene in a stairwell, allusions to other difficulties, and more apologies. Just to keep his equations from becoming too predictable, Siken also uses a double negative that totally turns my crank: ‘Here is the image of the lover destroyed. / Crossed out.’

Then he addresses all of the apologies by delving into a series of lines about forgiveness. I think the title’s ‘crossing out’ is all about the desire for an apology to result in forgiveness. ‘Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it.’

He invents another scene, this one not quite so dear as the deer in the clearing: ‘Inside your head you hear a phone ringing and when you open your eyes you’re washing up in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know.’

Happiness does not appear to be a sustainable state. The second half of the poem is an accumulation of dynamics between the two lovers over time, and a fight, and then a cascade of images about the lovers reuniting, where he comes to visit the other in another city. There is a series of comparisons and an elated strain between the lovers along with observations of discrepancies between them and their pent up internal and external conflict. ‘We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too, smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.‘ What a beautifully impossible mind fuck of a promise, that is. (taking mental note for future reference...)

Then he gives up. He gives the pencil up and says ‘Okay fine, if you’re so great, you do it --’ and then proceeds to give instructions about how to write the story, the positioning of things, and he says build me a city, that history can be told in 70 minutes, forget the dragon, he says, as he quickly begins to collapse everything. He says ‘let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,’ and then he brings in this imagery of gold and blue, ‘lakeside and backlit’ and he concludes with a back and forth between positive/negative, with a high point being ‘there were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and melon ball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grains of sugar on toast‘ (‘Lemondrop and melon ball’ is now an all time favorite piece of sound play for me).

At the close of the poem forgiveness is personified as ‘milling about in the yard,’ presumably where the maple tree from the opening line is sited. It always leaves. Forgiveness is invited to come in, ‘I saved a plate for you.’ There are such tender and maternal moments like that, but they are so quickly overtaken by shocks like: ‘ we clutch our bellies and roll on the floor...When I say this it should mean laughter, not poison.’ The love/death theme is entirely worthy of his conjuring up any number of Romeo and Juliet scenes.

Well, once again I love a poem once I get inside and make myself at home. I was not fond of this one on first reading (dragons and princesses are not a big draw for me), but I’m a fan now. One thing I am noticing, though. There is no place to rest in these poems.

The Torn-Up Road (Richard Siken)

"There is no way to make this story interesting."

In this opening line, Siken just out and out lies to the reader. It's a transparent manipulation that reminds me of a guy I once knew myself, a drug dealer who told me the best way to con a person was to tell them right up front that you were going to con them. This brings up one of the oldest defense mechanisms in the book: ‘You can’t fool me that easily! (What kind of a chump do you take me for, anyhow?)’

Siken keeps telling us in this poem how he wants to tell us this story without having to confess that he (narrator) "ran out into the street to prove something.” This something comes across as trying to make a very private thing very public. It feels like hysteria and desperation and an intense fear of losing something of vital importance. In my eyes he did not even have to include the lines that tell us what he set out to prove... “that he didn’t love me, that I wanted to be thrown over, possessed.”

The 'he' seems to be Max and Max is sketched out:

Max in the wrong clothes. Max at the party, drunk again.

Max in the kitchen, in the refrigerator light, his hands around the neck of a beer.

Tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more.

Siken tells us that the narrator responds to Max's direction in a way that seems almost Pavlovian:

I’m surprised that I say it with feeling.

The poem is written in five parts, the first part introduces the setting as a country gravel road that the narrator tastes and feels while he has the "sense of being smothered underneath a sack of lentils or potatoes;" the second part introduces the characters (as above); and each of the final three parts is like smoke and mirrors, a different angle on the narrator making his scene and running away and being subdued by another man. Because Siken switches POV -- and because Max seems to be a little withdrawn (or maybe passed out) -- it is not, for me anyhow, a forgone conclusion that this man is Max. It could be a scene from the narrator’s past, or a scene he recently observed and identified with.

The recurring image is his body being covered by this other man, who holds him down to coerce a promise that he will not run out into the street again. It is almost a parental level of control over a child who does not understand danger and will not practice common sense. It’s a fierce brand of care that comes off as a bit over the top, but as I read and re-read these lines I am reminded that I am being told a story that is uninteresting. Pshaw, right!

It’s uninteresting like your first visit to Manhattan. You’re in Chinatown, and you’ve just given your third $20 bill to some shaggy looking dude with nothing but a cardboard box and a game you don’t even know yet is called 3-card monte. You’re reaching for your wallet again because this time, you are certain. Well, no lousy street bum is gonna take your money like this, right?What are you, some small town hick? You lay down another $20 because this is the last time you'll need to, because he is offering to triple it this time. And now you’ve figured out his game, and this time...you are gonna pick out that ace.

Scheherazade by Richard Siken

Selected as the poem to open this collection, my spidey sense tells me that Scheherazade is foreshadowing. We’ll see if I still feel that way once I get all the way through, as I’ve only read about half of the poems so far, but at a pretty quick pace. There is just so much packed in to this short piece.

It starts with the narrator asking to be told, again, about a past dream. This request comes across with the tone of a child asking to be told a favorite story. The dream/story is the perfect set up for a collage of strong and distinct images, some realistic, others not so much. There are bodies in a lake, warm clothes for them, horses who run so hard they forget they are horses, trees with roots that do not need to end, days that are bright red, a carpet rolled up for dancing, a police radio that plays music, and a supply of apples, one more appearing with every kiss.

Here’s my guess at the foretelling. These poems are about the kind of love that almost drowns you, time and again, but still you cozy up in the habitual aftershock of surviving each near-death experience together; the kind of love that requires animals be pushed to their limit to illustrate freedom, sexual dynamic (if not the sex itself), and endurance; it struggles with denial and anxiety while its origins and outcomes continue to extend outward, above ground and under. In this relationship there is an omnipresence of bullets and broken glass and blood, blood inside and outside of bodies, bodies dancing and bodies being rolled. This is a love that breaks the law and is perpetually on the lam, and somehow, in the midst of all of this, there are kisses that produce the fruit of knowledge. (Is there such a thing as knowing too much?)

All of this imagery is set within rhetorical questions of “how.” “How it was late...” and “How we rolled...” and “How all this and love too, will ruin us.” The final lines of the poem freely go into abstractions about a relationship that seems destined to live on the edge. Maybe the edge is all it knows.

The relationship, I’m guessing, is very much an entity unto itself in these poems. It leaves the individuals behind, it devours them, it transcends them and it is all encompassing. In this poem, the same light that can be seen through the windowpane possesses the bodies of the narrator and his lover. There is a oneness present that is exceedingly tender and yet at odds with itself in that there are eruptions, tension, implosions, and violence in the poems to come.

This poem ends with the line “Tell me we’ll never get used to it.” It reminds me of a similar line, we've all said it ourselves, whether in a moment of feeling smitten or well-loved or well-fucked or even kicking back on a beach vacation, we say, “I could get used to this.”

As a final line I think this one is paradoxically brilliant, because my other take on it is: Tell me we won’t get boring. The relationship demands this somehow. Or the characters believe it is an imperative at least, and they feel compelled to answer the relationship's call: If you two get boring, I will die. Which brings us back to Scheherazade, who had to figure out how to tell a story in a way that would never get boring, and would never end. She did this to save her own life, and she had to keep doing it, one night at a time.

Richard Siken: Crush

I'm going to read and comment on Richard Siken's Crush. This book was selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize and was published in 2005. Louise Glück has edited that series since 2003 (she is stepping down this year). From what I can find, this is Siken's only published collection. Since 2001 he has also been the co-editor of Spork, an online and print literary magazine.

I'm still so new as a reader and writer of poetry, and I'm sure I could have chosen something a little easier, a little gentler. At the same time, I ain't gettin' any younger here, and what can I say? I'm drawn to what I'm drawn to. When it feels strong like this, I don't question it. Siken was referred to me by someone with whom I share some fairly significant aesthetic leanings, so when NaPoReMo came up, I think this book chose me. I'd only read the first poem at that point, and it begins with:

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake

and dress them in warm clothes again.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for romance. Or something.

In all seriousness, apparently the book was inspired by the death of his boyfriend in 1991. I am no stranger to loss, even if an entirely other sort. Somehow the fact that his poems seem just beyond my grasp, it feels like a clue that a lot will be revealed as I dig deeper into his poems.

There is one other thing I want to say. I've checked out a little bit of Spork and I find Siken's writing as editor to be direct and accessible, two qualities that I also appreciate. In 2001 he introduced their issue on The Body by saying "...great literature is not about its author, it’s about its reader. I wouldn’t burn the I-shouldn’t-be-telling-you-this stories because they were, ultimately, about me. I continue to not burn those stories, or these either. They are about you, too." I thought that was a pretty righteous quote for the start of NaPoReMo.

Looking forward to it,

Jane

P.S. From the same editorial intro: "We are not newspapermen, we are not looking for that kind of truth. We want to go joyriding." 'Nuff said, in my book.