Darker Than The Joy of Painting: On Richard Siken & Bob Ross

At Queen Mob's Teahouse, Heather Lang explores the poet Richard Siken and painter Bob Ross. Nice pairing! How did this come about? Lang's discovery of Copper Canyon poet Richard Siken’s “Detail of the Woods" happened to coincide with Twitch’s Joy of Painting marathon. "Although I now know that Ross was not actually a hoarder," writes Lang, "I can still picture the painter thinking in Siken’s opening lines: 'I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. // A box made out of leaves.'" More:

Siken’s poem, however, is darker than Ross’ television program. “Detail of the Woods” is filled with indecision, loneliness, shadows, and even death. In his third line, the poem calls and responds, “What else was in the woods? A heart, closing.” These words not only express a sense of loss, but a sense of urgency, as well, as the heart is not yet closed; it is “closing.” Anxiously as a reader I ask if there is something, anything, that I can do? We still have hope. It’s not too late.

Quickly, it becomes apparent that Siken’s poem is highly metaphorical. “Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.” The woods are not a literal someone, and so in this fourth line, I start to question who or what the woods represent. And, the next stanza offers a parallel, which communicates a delicate metaphor via syntax, repetition, and even the way the stanza looks on the page:

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

Siken, like Ross, does much with little. While Ross could start and finish an oil-painted landscape during his thirty-minute show, Siken, within his mere 10-lines, illustrates our world, from the “Detail of the Woods” to the “long nights moon” and back, and all of the loss and longing, and perhaps even hope, that these symbols quietly imply.

Read it all at Queen Mob's Teahouse.