Review: I Know Nothing (A Review of I Do Know Some Things By Richard Siken)

By Hugh Blanton

 

When Seamus Heaney published his 1975 chapbook Stations he thought he'd invented a new form of poetry: the prose poem. However, not long after its publication, he happened across Geoffrey Hill's 1971 poetry collection Mercian hymns and realized he'd been beaten to the punch. "What I had regarded as stolen marches in a form new to me, had been headed off by a work of complete authority," Heaney said, and stopped bringing up his own chapbook (and hoped no one else would bring it up either). Some scoff at prose poems, claiming they aren't really poems at all. Poet and critic Ryan Ruby offers up his own definition of a poem in his 2024 book Context Collapse that should put the whole matter to rest: "[A] poem is whatever a person recognized as a poet says is a poem." And with that definition we're ready to get into Richard Siken's latest poetry collection I Do Know Some Things.

 

Richard Siken isn't the most prolific of poets; he gives us a new book about once a decade. He suffered a major stroke in 2019 (he was misdiagnosed and dismissed on his first trip to the emergency room which undoubtedly led to more damage being caused and making his rehab more odious) and this book is a direct result of the upheaval it caused in his life. "This new book is in first person," he said in an interview with Mandana Chaffa in Chicago Review of Books. "There are no fables. There is no artifice. It is autobiographical and it does not fabricate or lie." Siken's poems are strong where they need to be, his opening lines are almost always either lapel-grabbing or curiosity-inducing. The first line of the first poem inverts the reader's expectations: "My mother married a man who divorced her for her money." While most of the poems here deal with his stroke and its aftermath, he does take us back to his childhood days in a few of them. The pet cat he had as a small boy was named Good-For-Nothing Layabout Cat. Siken is not a poet you go to for uplifting poetry. (He doesn't tell us who named the cat.)

 

Siken's sentences forge ahead without hesitation, he's excised most of the conjunctions that would have acted as speedbumps if they'd been there. His sentences sometimes knock the reader about like a pinball: "There was a man. He wasn't a man, he was a suit, a terrible suit. A piece of cloth caught on a tree branch." Animals are mentioned plenty throughout the collection, although some of it reads like Aesop on an acid trip: "Zebras have stripes, leopards have parties. Bobcats eat ham sandwiches and crème brûlée. A bird will sit on your finger and tell you a story. A dog will sleep at your feet all night and not overthink it." He's at his best, however, when he's channeling his inner John Ashbery: "If a harp lay down and fell asleep and you bludgeoned its dreams with felted hammers then you would have a piano. If you were wearing a tuxedo you would have a grand piano."

 

The impetus for I Do Know Some Things was of course his illness. Siken said that the stroke caused him to lose his sense of line and that's why these poems are written in sentences instead. "I was trying to piece things back together and the line break was making it harder, not easier. I had to abandon it." I Do Know Some Things is the poetic equivalent of autofiction without the bland melancholia that so often pervades autofiction. "Sadness is overrated," Siken tells us (Ocean Vuong take note). If Walt Whitman's growing up in a loving family helped form his poetry, it's the near complete lack of love in Siken's family that spurred him on. In his poem "Piano Lesson" he tells us "By the time I was eleven I stopped being sad and started being afraid." When Siken opens his poem "Family Therapy" with "The morning after my father killed his first wife, he woke up next to her dead body, rose from their bed and began his morning routine." he wasn't being entirely metaphorical (she apparently died of a drug overdose after being encouraged to take all her pills by her husband). About the only pleasant memory he recounts from his childhood is watching The Lawrence Welk Show Sundays at 6 PM.

 

The way Siken describes trying to order the world after his stroke reads like a fever dream and sometimes devolves into nonsense, deliberately so. Various friends assisted him with his day to day living, but with his memory loss, he often didn't know who he was with. He would ask them questions: "Where did we meet? How do you spell your name? Why did you like me?" Then there were the questions he couldn't ask: "Did we love each other? Did I do bad things? Should I be ashamed?" Since he couldn't remember the alarm code for the studio where he was staying, he wrote it above the alarm panel. During one of his visits with a neurologist, they are going over a brain scan and while the neurologist explains the image, Siken is lost in thought:  "I ruined myself with bad living. He isn't saying it but he's saying it." In his poem "Drug Plane" he goes into how ruining himself came about: "I couldn't figure it out, so I concentrated on sleeping with strangers and doing drugs. I loved drugs." Siken's a Gen-Xer, born in 1967. He came of age during the go-go 80s. He continued his partying ways well into adulthood—when he received his father's inheritance he "wrote a check for the deposit on an apartment downtown, by the bars."

 

Siken didn't go through the long route of obscurity before finally "making it" as a poet. His debut collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Award (judged by Louise Glück). He even gives us a little writing lesson here in I Do Know Some Things; in the seventh and final section of the book he opens with three poems titled, "Line," "Sentence," and then "Paragraph." He describes how sentences can flow like river rapids or they can pool "behind dams as methodical thought fills the basins with inscrutable language, replete with the debris of semicolons, parentheticals, and asides sandwiched between dashes." I Do Know Some Things has seventy-seven poems, a nod to John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs. I do hope that he doesn't wait another decade to give us his next book.

 

 

 

 

 

 Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.