Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. The hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not, and the hand wants to do something useful. Unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the paint is like looking at a bird that isn’t there, with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway. But it isn’t a bird, it’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? We do. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy-series or sequence, one foot after the other-but existentially why bother, what does it solve?Īnd just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. This went on for a long time.Ī man saw a bird and wanted to paint it.

Sometimes the man felt like the bird and sometimes the man felt like a stone-solid, inevitable-but mostly he felt like a bird, or that there was a bird inside him, or that something inside him was like a bird fluttering. The bird had a song inside him, and feathers. Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything.Ī man saw a bird and found him beautiful. What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do. His fans’ favorite lines are “bodies seized by light” and “love too will wreck.” 1. The Richard Siken poems address matters like love, life, and enduring in this world. In addition, he works as a social worker full-time and resides in Tucson, Arizona. In addition to two grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Siken has won a Pushcart Prize. Yale University Press published crush in 2006 and earned the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 2004. Most people are familiar with Richard Siken poems from his poetry collection “Crush.” In 2004, the poetry book took first place in the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.īlue Jupiter, War of the Foxes, and Crush are all written by Richard Siken.

Richard siken