Review: "I Do Know Some Things"
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Written by Bird Singer-Sargent
I ran into a professor on the street recently. He told me the review I’d done on Richard Siken’s Crush was the most popular piece on Falwriting. I thought it was quite bad. A few days later, I bought Richard Siken’s latest poetry collection, I Do Know Some Things. It wasn’t related to the conversation we had, it had just only released in the UK that week. I have some thoughts about it.
Six years ago, I said Siken’s poems were like a suckerpunch to the gut. It’s the only line in the review I stand by. While I was reading I Do Know Some Things, I shared the poem ‘Kitchen Window’ with a friend who said he couldn’t find words to express how it made him feel except oof. I told him Siken’s poems were like kicks to the stomach. I didn’t remember the Crush review; I’d graduated twice since then.
While it is true that Siken gets it—continues to get it, twenty-one years after Crush was released—my relation to it has changed, because I have changed. I am no longer the bumbling, queer teenage girl I’d been in 2020. It had never been relatable to me, not really, I’d never been scared, I’d never wanted a man like that. I would probably have a completely different read of Crush now, one less cluttered with other media. The truth is I Do Know Some Things was relatable to me because I, too, am angry at the things I want. Because there is something attractive about masculinity and violence, but I’m not allowed to want it. I’ve been jumping through hoops to get healthcare to bend my way a little and start testosterone. I am tired of being ‘blisteringly invisible.’ I want everything Siken talks about: the outline of a man, and the sliced fruit, and the way light gets inside everything.
I didn’t like War of the Foxes, his sophomore collection, as much as I like Crush and I Do Know Some Things. At the time I read it, I thought it was because it was less about his experience as a homosexual man. I Do Know Some Things also isn’t about that, as in, it is about it, because you can’t not talk about it when it makes up such an integral part of your identity, but it’s mostly about his family and his recovery from the stroke he had in 2019.
I’ve never had a stroke, I don’t have dangerously masculine older step-brothers, my relationship with my parents is as healthy as a relationship with one’s parents can be; I Do Know Some Things shouldn’t have been relatable to me in any way. But I do believe Siken still has this pinpoint accuracy in his choice of words that makes me see the ugliness of my desires in his poems, like a mirror held up, broken and dirty. The thing about elders is that they sometimes have to be brutal to be kind.
Eighteen-year-old me would have said he had an uncanny ability, like it was accidental instead of a long and arduous process of reflection and editing. I used to believe poems came fully sprung on the page, a word-throw-up without rhyme or reason. That you had to get it perfectly right on the first try every time. I wasn’t very good at poetry. The truth is, there is a reason Richard Siken is a multi-award-winning poet, and I’m not.
I Do Know Some Things puts things into perspective: Siken cares about words. Cares about order and meaning. Cares about syntax and structure and the silence between lines. He was left partially paralysed after his stroke, with memory loss and aphasia. None of the doctors he saw believed he’d had a stroke. Words no longer made sense; words were tools working against him. He made lists. One at first, a glossary of things rediscovered, then another one, ‘for venom and hard feelings.’ His friends stopped visiting him. His body was a ruin. His mind was a housefire. Things had broken in a way that wouldn’t ever unbreak.
I Do Know Some Things stands as a testament to Siken’s recovery, a proof of his survival, a validation of his suffering. It is an arduous labour of patience and care and anger. It’s ugly and painful and violent and twisted and lonely and sometimes, just sometimes, the light shines through.
I Do Know Some Things is available to purchase in all UK bookstores and on Richard Siken’s website https://richard-siken.com/ Siken is also on Twitter @richardsiken where he is still delivering wisdom like a smack to the back of the head.