The Need for Making

Richard Siken’s first book, Crush, published in 2005, was a rarity among poetry collections; it garnered both critical and popular acclaim, winning the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize and selling more than 20,000 copies. His second, War of the Foxes, out from Copper Canyon this month, is full of poems that are painterly in the best possible sense: poems with “landscapes” and “still lifes,” “details” and “portraits,” a well-curated museum of “blurriness,” thinky fables that cross the boundaries between human and animal, war and peace, love and hate, stories and lullabies. The Poetry Foundation recently had a conversation with Siken via email about a wide range of topics, including postcards, time, the relationship between poetry and painting, and what value, if any, artistic making in any genre can hope to achieve.

In many early reviews, War of the Foxes is preceded by the descriptor “much-anticipated” and the fact that a decade has passed since your immensely well-received debut. How, if at all, did having a base of passionate fans surprise you and impact your approach to this second book?

After Crush was published, I started receiving some fan mail. One said, “We used one of your poems at our wedding.” Another said, “As a straight man and a father, I am going to have my sons read your book when it’s time. Gay or straight, they need to hear your perspective on masculinity.” And then there was the email: “My girlfriend hanged herself last night. She left a poem of yours as her suicide note.” I decided to stop talking for a while.

Is that silence part of why you turned to painting? Most of the paintings on your website are from 2005—were they a respite from having just finished Crush? Your site features an epigraph of sorts from War of the Foxes: “The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects, / so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful / to you, darling. I say it to the paint—” Does the vulnerability you feel during or after making a painting differ from that of making a poem, and does the feeling of responsibility you have as the creator differ?

Vulnerability and responsibility—you nailed it exactly. There’s a tendency to confuse the speaker of a poem with the author of the poem. And there’s a tendency to believe that a poem is “true”—whatever that means to the reader—instead of seeing it as framed language or storytelling. I’m not immune to the confusion either. Painting is a way to commit to imagination without being called a liar. The only vulnerability I have, as a painter, is when people stop by unannounced and catch me smeared in paint. I feel like a kid who, caught goofing off, has to explain the mess.

The opening poem “The Way the Light Reflects” ends with the lines “I paint in his face / and I paint it out again. There is a question / I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?” It makes me wonder about your process of writing and revising: in those 10 years, how much time was spent writing this second book, and did you produce other manuscripts then?

I’m so glad that writing and publishing are different things. I try to write every day, though there are often stretches of roaring silence. I only share the parts that deliver their cargo. Some ships sink. I probably write 300 pages a year, and it’s been 10 years, but I’m only publishing 47 pages. I’ve written some essays and short stories I hope to publish eventually, and I’ve been working on a long poem that I started when I was 10. The plan is to keep working on it until my last words, which will probably be “Uh oh,” even though I hope to have something more profound to say.

“Uh oh” can be pretty profound depending on the context. That reminds me of something else that can be profound, and that’s the use of animals in poems, which you do beautifully here, asking questions such as “Can we love nature for what it / really is: predatory?” and writing, “The fish in the fishsticks think to themselves, This is not / what we meant to be.” How did you decide to turn to the fable—the animal story—and what does it enable you to do as a poet that you could not do without animals?

I wanted to stop talking about myself directly. I wanted to unshoulder the burden of truth, subvert it, escape it. I had strong, dark, angry things to say, and I needed a filter. In Crush, I used the lyric to balance the sadness. The poems in War of the Foxes move forward on thinking, not feeling. The irrational dreaming of the fables seemed to complicate the arguments of the poems and make them richer, more interesting.

Speaking of strong, dark, and angry, war also features prominently throughout the book. What moved you to turn your attention to war? To what extent are your poems political, and how do you think their political agency is manifested?

I haven’t been to war, but have lived in a time of war for so long that I felt I had to address it. I felt like I had enemies, but really, I didn’t. But I had opponents. And that was interesting, that was my initial angle into the work. “You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.” But sometimes we have to say no. Sometimes we have to defend ourselves, and others, and the poems took off from there. As for politics, I’m not for either side, and I don’t feel blameless. I just figure that the more we think about it, talk about it, the less likely we are to fight about it.

The book does have an embattled feeling, even when the poems are not taking war as their explicit subject. It also feels argumentative—like it’s making claims and, as you say, saying no when necessary, which is part of what makes it so powerful. One such denial that struck me as particularly interesting is in the second section of the poem “The Language of the Birds,” where you write: “And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually / paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything.” Do these poems and this book feel like accomplishments?

I think the poems are strong. Really, that was the goal. But the central question that the book wrestles with is the need for making, and the usefulness of making. Sitting alone all night writing a poem—or painting a bird—seems like a strange choice when there are undeniably useful things that I could be doing. I don’t feel the need to justify it, but I wouldn’t mind getting some clarity about choices. I believe that figurative language is the language of the imagination. And I believe that our challenges need strong imaginations if we’re going to find solutions. But my living room is a painting studio right now. And the doors are open to the cold because of the turpentine. And some people dropped by yesterday and there was nowhere to sit. And I wonder, “What am I doing?”