Crush Richard Siken
In my last post, I wrote about the Lonesome Dove Problem—i.e., my lifelong struggle to find a girthy novel as totally absorbing as Larry McMurtry’s masterpiece—and attempted to identify some common denominators shared by Lonesome Dove and a few other totally absorbing novels, so that I might be better equipped to analyze future selections based on their potential Lonesome Dove-esque-ness.
It’s no coincidence that Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the 2005 Yale Younger Poet prize, can be described with the same vocabulary as an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: like the long-running series, Crush is a self-consciously campy work that has become a cult classic. “Richard Siken’s Crush is the winner of the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. It is a powerful new collection of poems driven by panic and obsession. As the distinguished poet.
In the process of addressing the Lonesome Dove Problem, however, I realized that I have other Problems—i.e., other books or groups of books which, for seemingly inane reasons, I’ve elevated onto impossibly specific pedestals that inherently resist new entries (see also: “Lonesome Dove-esque-ness”). Which brings me to…
The Crush Problem.
It’s lucky that Crush, Richard Siken’s Yale Younger Poets Award-winning first collection, is so much shorter than Lonesome Dove, because I literally carried Crush everywhere I went for three or four years. It was like my poetry-security blanket. Which is funny, because Crush offers little security—in fact, it totally upended my entire aesthetic sense of self as both a reader and a writer.
Before Crush, I was afraid of messy poems. I liked my poems short n’ sweet n’ clever, with last lines that tied everything up in neat little bows, almost like punch lines.
But the poems in Crush are decidedly, unapologetically messy. They hurtle; they sprawl. They end awkwardly. They blurt out their secrets. After I read Crush, everything else felt limp, stale, tame.
“Fine,” you might proffer (oh good, you’re back!). “Just look for more messy poems!”
For a while, I did look—that is, I flipped through poetry collections to get a visual sense of their messiness. But just because a poet hits the “tab” key a lot doesn’t ensure a Crush-worthy collection. The engine driving Siken’s messy passion, it seems, isn’t purely visual.
Just when I’d given up all hope of ever being Crushed again, I happened upon Jericho Brown’s Please.
Brown’s poems aren’t nearly as messy as Siken’s, nor is he quite so monomaniacal; while Siken kind of goes zero-to-sixty from “I love you” to “OH MY GOD IF THERE EVEN IS A GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE,” Brown offers nuanced musings not only on sex and relationships but also on music, form, family, race, and history.
But my response to Please was immediate and visceral, and immediately, viscerally reminiscent of my reaction to Crush.
“The common denominator here is obvious,” you might point out, smugly. “You have a Gay Male Poets Who Title Their Collections With Single Words That Could Be Interpreted As Multiple Parts of Speech and Whose Cover Art Features A Close-Up Photograph of a Stubbled Chin Problem:”
Aha! Problem solved!
No, wait.
Exhibit B: a disproportionate number of my favorite single poems are also authored by gay men. Gay men whose collection titles have more than one word, and whose cover art is 100% chin-free. The heteros, the lesbos, the variably conflicted and confused—no other orientation is half as well represented in my personal canon.
But before we dig into that canon, a few caveats:
First and foremost, I’m not claiming that “all gay male poets,” let alone “all gay men,” share the same preoccupations and quirks. That would be ridiculous, especially since I’m quoting only from contemporary gay male poets I know and love—an extremely incomplete list.
Second and secondmost, I’m also not aiming to make a comprehensive list of said preoccupations and quirks—not even for the specific gay male poets I cite.
Third and thirdmost, I’m aware that my observations may be informed by my own stereotypes and presumptions, though I certainly do my best to avoid this.
In other words, I’m just taking a first stab at answering those potentially Problem-solving questions: What do these things have in common? Why do I love them so much? And how can I find more like them?
“OK, OK,” you might backpedal, exasperatedly. “Just get to the poems.”
Finally! In vaguely associative order, and with a fair amount of overlap between observational categories, here’s what these poems have in common.
• Blurred boundaries between violence and tenderness. Some of these poems like it rough. Some of them wish they didn’t. Some of them get too rough, and then they’re not sure if they like it. Or sometimes they don’t like it rough, but rough is the only way they seem able to find it.
How the hell you say
But I love you.
Though I’d rather hear,
Fireplace. How to burn you
Alive. How to keep my man
Warm.
(Jericho Brown, David)
///
He hits you and he hits you and he hits you.
Desire driving his hands right into your body.
Hush, my sweet. These tornadoes are for you.
You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds
of things.
You wanted to be in love
and he happened to get in the way.
(Richard Siken, A Primer for the Small Weird Loves)
• On a related note, penetration. Which, in these poems, often feels more like permeation (as in penetration that diffuses, infuses, spreads) or breach (as in, of boundaries, of defenses):
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside someone else.
(Siken, Detail of the Woods)
///
That part about the body
asking for it,
to be broken into—is that the first, or the last part?
(Carl Phillips, Mirror, Window, Mirror)
///
Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s
the desire to put it inside us, and then the question
behind every question: What happens next?
The way you slam your body into mine reminds me
I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling…
(Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain)
• On a related note, complex power dynamics. Sure, some of these poems are pretty explicitly about BDSM and related activities. But the language of power is applied outside the bedroom/dungeon, too, creating an atmosphere in which intimacy involves constant negotiation of control—who has it, who wants it, who takes it, who wants to give it up.
You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that?
To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude is voluntary.
(Mark Wunderlich, Voluntary Servitude)
///
…I wish you would
Sniff a man. I wish his whip
Sharper than fangs. I wish you could know
How bite-less I feel, the mouth
I don’t close, his head in my throat.
(Jericho Brown, Lion)
• The unshakable presence of death. The sex/death connection is hardly revolutionary (see also: la petit mort). But death feels especially present in these poems—sometimes spectral, sometimes explicit, but often inextricably tied to sex and desire. Taken together, these lines suggest a world in which intimacy can be contagious, toxic, risky.
I live with
A disease instead of a lover.
We take turns doing bad things
To my body.
(Brown, Contrast)
///
…Erotica,
give it up and let
me have my way. And the gin-soaked dread
that an acronym was festering inside.
(Randall Mann, Fall of 1992)
///
You are a fever I am learning to live with.
(Siken, Straw House, Straw Dog)
///
isn’t he the one who looked upward into your gawp as if a deathbed held him against you. he was living, then. you were both living
and the vessel protruded, your hull dragging up onto the beach, his carcass already a carcass on the sand, no, he was a darling critter
a feral thing, but he struck you, he bit you, and you broke inside and the condom broke, shoddy piece, princeling, posturer, dirty dirty beast
(D.A. Powell, Centerfold)
OK, so maybe this isn’t really that much of a Problem. After all, there are more gay male poets than Lonesome Doves. But perhaps this analysis still yields some insight into what it is that I look for in poetry, regardless of its Crush-esque-ness. Urgency. Avoidance of sentimentality. Unexpected tenderness. Complex dynamics. Palpable heat.
Or, as Siken writes:
…the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.
Then again, I hesitate to end by praising these poems for their universality. I remember reading various rave reviews of Brokeback Mountain (screenplay by Larry McMurtry, holy full circle!), which repeatedly praised the film as “a love story for everyone.” The highest accolade available to a gay movie, it seemed, was, “Don’t worry—it’s not a gay movie.”
But Brokeback Mountain is a deeply gay movie, about the specifically gay phenomenon of the closet, without which Ennis and Jack would presumably have come down off the mountain and lived happily ever after.
And my gut tells me there is something, well, gay about these poems—something that doesn’t preclude their universality, but that also distinguishes them from their hetero/lesbo/etc counterparts.
What do you guys think? Are gay male poets especially adept at stuff like urgency, unexpected tenderness, heat, etc? If so, why?
I.
Blood and leather. A back-alley stabbing at an innocent dance on a courthouse lawn. Witty asides. Dread so palpable you can practically hear the slow creep of chords in the diminished fifth. It’s no coincidence that Richard Siken’s Crush, winner of the 2005 Yale Younger Poet prize, can be described with the same vocabulary as an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: like the long-running series, Crush is a self-consciously campy work that has become a cult classic.
People who claim not to like poetry go out and buy Siken’s book after reading a single poem, which has likely been have blogged and re-blogged with a short introduction that asserts this is one of the blogger’s absolute favorite poems of all time. Scholars and poets also frequently describe their relationship to Siken in superlative terms: one writer included Siken on a list of poets who changed my life, while another poet writes that she “literally carried Crush everywhere I went for three or four years.” After a ten-day stint at a writers conference, no fewer than five poets directed me to Siken, his name coming off their lips with the same tenderness allotted to a lover:
“Have you read Richard Siken?”
“You know what you’d love? Crush by Richard Siken.”
“Have you heard of Richard Siken?”
“Has anyone ever told you to read Crush by Richard Siken?”
“You should read Siken.”
Film critics identify cult classics not only by a devoted fanbase, but also in large part by the transgressiveness and marginality of the content. Crush is a book by a gay male poet that creates a vivid portrait of violent, BDSM-influenced male sexuality; by thus flouting traditional social norms, Siken’s book lands firmly within the critical definition of a cult classic. It’s not surprising that, as a gay man coming of age in the post-Rocky Horror era, Siken chose to borrow images and rhetoric from the camp aesthetic. It’s more surprising that, in drawing up on the tropes of the genre, Siken created his own cult classic.
II.
According to Susan Sontag’s classic essay “Notes on Camp” (1964), “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Given this definition, one might say that camp’s natural habitat is the stage (or, today, the cinema)—for the theater, as a space in which men costume and disguise their true selves to enact fictions before a complicit audience, has long been associated with duplicity and histrionics. Sontag continued on to write that “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.” As a culture whose prevailing sensibility is epitomized by the air quote, we have embraced camp so heartily that what started off as a symbol of the counterculture has fully permeated the mainstream. The 1990s produced the popular TV shows Buffy, The X-Files, and Charmed, now often held up as camp artifacts, as well as the Austin Powers and Scream franchises, which were at the forefront of a growing trend toward intentional camp. Even the midnight viewing of Rocky Horror is no longer an event restricted to misfits and non-comformists; instead it has almost become a teenage rite of passage.
Although not all campy films are cult classics, all cult classics are considered campy. What links movies like Barbarella, Clockwork Orange, Bride of Frankenstein, Heathers is the size and scope of their ambition—expressed not only in visual exaggeration, but also in their fantastic storylines, which seem too outlandish or impossible to be believed. Contemporary film directors are all too aware of the correlation between camp and cult: in their attempts to create so-called instant cult classics, they produce films like Snakes on a Plane, which, although they might not go on to become cult hits, are widely viewed as pure camp.
Crush Richard Siken Poems
III.
Almost every poem in Crush is a movie on paper. I mean that in a concrete sense: Siken writes with a precise, filmic imagery and a screenwriter’s terminology. You could say, as Sontag says about camp, that Crush “is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Or, rather, life as film. And not just any film, but a campy genre film. Which genre depends on the poem. There is the melodrama:
We’re filming the movie called Planet of Love—
there’s sex of course, and ballroom dancing,
fancy clothes and waterlilies in the pond…
There’s a part in the movie
where you can see right through the acting,
where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears,
right before I burst into tears
and flee to the slimy moonlit riverbed
canopied with devastated clouds.
the horror film:
The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night
is thinking. It’s thinking of love.
It’s thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
the Western:
There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western,
Henry. It’s a downright shoot-em-up.
and the buddy movie:
It’s a road movie,
a double-feature, two boys striking out across America, while desire,
like a monster, crawls up out of the lake
with all of us watching, with all of us wondering if these two boys will
find a way to figure it out.
With this appropriation of cinematic lexicon and familiar, genre-specific tropes, Siken appeals to the modern appetite for visual camp and the satisfaction of recognition it provides. He also distances himself from the traditional poetic universe, which is stereotyped as serious and Romantic, with rhymed and metered lines about willows or swans. The casual reader of modern poetry isn’t comfortable in that Victorian world. Siken makes that reader comfortable by reproducing the claustrophobia of our atheistic, empirical, and media-saturated culture. He writes about sex and TV shows, sets his poems in parking lots and cheap motels, and uses long prose-y lines that give the sense of relative formlessness. Siken’s world is not a vast expanse of ocean and meadow, but rather a film set—
He raises
the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins.
That’s what the violins are for. And yes,
he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it
until it shines.
or a room—
Everyone in this
room got here somehow and everyone in
this room will have to leave. Divinci d 6 surround sound system manual.
or a person—
They want you to love the whole damn world but you won’t,
you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath…
It is a world where stylization, playfulness, and the theatricalization of experience have triumphed over what Sontag calls “the pantheon of high culture”: truth, beauty, and seriousness. It is a world where camp has replaced art. There is something safe and comforting in the smallness of this world; it is a world we recognize.
And yet, although Siken’s poems preference the built world over the natural, tend toward exaggeration, and approach serious matters with frivolity—although, in short, they sound a lot like camp—Crush transcends camp. Sontag writes that “camp and tragedy are antitheses,” and there is real tragedy at the core of Siken’s book: Crush was written partly as a response to the death of his boyfriend in the early 90s. In one of the poems excerpted above, I omitted a section that does not conform to the expectations of camp. That section, included below, hints at a depth and complexity that precludes the work from being classified as camp.
We’re filming the movie called Planet of Love—
there’s sex of course, and ballroom dancing,
fancy clothes and waterlilies in the pond, and half the night you’re
a dependable chap, mounting the stairs in lamplight to the bath, but then
the too white teeth all night,
all over the American sky, too much to bear, this constant fingering,
your hands a river gesture, the birds in flight, the birds still singing
outside the greasy window, in the trees.
There’s a part in the movie
where you can see right through the acting…
At “but then,” the sentence transforms from a description of a campy movie scene into a lyrical flight of fancy, which reads as a literal yearning to flee the nostalgia and kitsch of the set scene. This reading is reinforced by the sentence’s grammatical devolution into a series of fragments spliced together with commas: it is as if Siken is trying to escape from the confines of the sentence itself. The grammatical breakdown also speaks to the power of the emotions stirred up by the narrator’s recollection of the “you” addressed throughout the poem. He cannot translate the feeling, which is “too much to bear,” into a coherent sentence. Contemporary syntax fails him. Our cultural lexicon, with its focus on media and pop culture, fails him, too. In those four lines, Siken turns from the glamorous language of the screen to the poet’s conventional subject: the natural world.
Crush is full of these momentary glimpses of another world, an older, slower, and—perhaps—better one. A world not yet cut to fit our screens. You should read him.
Crush Richard Siken Quotes
Emma Winsor Wood is Editor of Stone Soup, the magazine for kids by kids. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA and tweets @emmawinsorwood. More from this author →