Don’t Call Me During the Day

It was already sweltering in early May 2018, but those who usually leave Tucson for the summer had held out a few more days. The coffeeshop where we all wrote our theses was hosting an impromptu reading. A big-name poet had come in from Casa Grande down I-10. The room was abuzz but went silent as soon as Richard Siken walked in. He was legendary among those of us currently enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MFA program—the same program Siken had graduated from in 1994. His poems would show up Xeroxed and strewn about in classrooms in the Modern Languages building. Many of us taught his work to our English 301 students, especially his first book, Crush (2005), a panorama of unyielding desire that makes for a perfect gateway drug to poetry. His looming presence cemented the feeling that Tucson really was a poet’s town.

I carried this memory with me when I met Siken earlier this year at Casa Video and Film Bar on Speedway Boulevard, the last video rental store in town, where DVD is still king. A true Gen X gem. A knee injury involving one of the four large-breed dogs he lives with had forced Siken to use a walker. We nodded to each other as he slowly staggered inside the craft beer bar. We chatted about his new, highly anticipated third collection I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), now shortlisted for the National Book Award for poetry. It comes a decade after his second collection, War of the Foxes (2015), which itself came a decade after Crush. As much as I tried to stick to the interview format, I couldn’t help but feel grateful in his simply being alive; Siken had a stroke in the spring of 2019, an experience that informs every page of the new collection, as in "Sidewalk":

I crawled to the front door and swung it open so the ambulance could find 
me. It seemed like a strange thing to do, since I hadn’t called for an 
ambulance, so I crawled to the end of the sidewalk and sat there, which still
didn’t make sense. All the condos look the same, so it was going to be
difficult to find me if the door wasn’t open. There was a noise in my head
and I couldn’t afford an ambulance so I called a friend to come and get me
and he wasn’t happy. [. . .] I felt like I was running
to him but I wasn’t moving. The trees were tall and fast outside the 
car window. I kept apologizing. It was clear that something had happened 
that wasn’t going to unhappen.

“[The images] were foundational. Everything was wiped clean, and whatever words and images I was leaning on before got lost and reshuffled,” he tells me, settling into a corner table over bowls of popcorn and pints of Hazy IPA. “I think some of them are resurfacing, or resurfaced in different ways, but we have our obsessions, and we have the things we regret, and we have the things that we like to circle around and punish ourselves for, the things that keep us up at night.”

Queer desire, violence, self-invention, and loss have long been at the crux of Siken’s obsessions. What makes Crush an oft-cited text among readers of all ages—and perhaps why Louise Glück chose it for the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Prize—is how it captures grief and deep longing, here played out in the aftermath of the Reagan era, when AIDS raged and animated regret over romantic and sexual attachments. Both memeable (“If you love me, you don’t love me in a way I understand”) and memorable (“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us”), Crush summons the consequences of desire in slant, evocative lines.

Writing these new poems, Siken tells me, was a way back to such language. For him, language is communication, but it is also a speech act as it points and signifies. “[Language] is a placeholder for something. And I didn’t panic when I was using all placeholders or said the wrong word. It was very choppy at first, but it got to the place where I was being coherent and followable, but I was still approximating and triangulating to get over the blank spaces. I forgot the word for ‘waitress,’ so I said ‘restaurant nurse.’ And the meaning survived.”

***

Siken, who was born in New York City in 1967, moved to Tucson when he was two. His parents—his dad a lawyer, his mom a therapist—were seduced by the lush desert, and left the big city to start over. His father’s second marriage had ended, as had his mother’s. Siken’s parents waited until his paternal half-brother went off to college before they and their toddler headed west. The family’s dissolution comes into stark focus in I Do Know Some Things (abbreviated IDKST hereafter). Siken creates several unsettling scenes of undoing that read like myth, as in these lines from “Family Therapy”:

The morning after my father killed his first wife, he woke up next 
to her dead body, rose from their bed, and began his morning 
routine.

What makes his new work difficult is comprehending too well the depth of abuse his speaker endured as a child and young man. In “Patty Melt,” for example, he recounts a fleeting rapprochement with his mother after his grandmother’s funeral: “On the drive back to my car in the / Marie Callender’s parking lot, my mother explained why we should / return to not-talking, which we did.” And in “Albondigas,” a poem that oscillates from the sardonic to the poignant, he narrates the moment, during a family dinner at Red Lobster, that his parents announce they’re divorcing:

I tried to break a toy school bus that he had 
given me but it was too well-made and solid wood so I gave up. It’s
not that I don’t want to be your mom, it’s that I don’t want to be
anyone’s mom. You can call me Phyllis and we can work on being
friends. When I get back.

In “Real Estate,” the collection’s first poem, Siken opens a portal to a familiar and intimate world through an invocation of contractual relationality:

My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he 
would say, If you don’t stop buying jewelry, I will have to divorce you
to keep us out of the poorhouse. When he said this, she would stub out 
a cigarette, mutter Motherfucker under her breath. Eventually, he 
was forced to divorce her. Then, he died. Then she did. 
It’s a book you pick up, put down, take a deep breath and pick up again.

“He goes all the way to the end of an experience, and then that’s the end of the book. You don’t leave his work thinking, well, I didn’t really get it,” says Jane Miller, Siken’s mentor at the University of Arizona (as well as a student of Glück). “It’s the last thing on your mind after you read a Richard Siken book, or even a single poem, or even a single line, you get it. You may not agree with it or like it, or you might just absolutely love it, but his work is profoundly clear.”

One of the most striking aspects of IDKST is its form. The tight prose blocks are unfamiliar to anyone expecting the libidinal and languorous errancy of Crush, or the dizzying descriptive wanderlust of War of the Foxes. There is a powerful constriction here, as if Siken wants readers to witness him journeying back to his body. Perhaps he wants readers to feel trapped beside him inside a jarring memory—a family slight (You don’t deserve to outlive me), a body part’s betrayal (I can’t feel my body), or a recounting of the mundane irritations of night shifts and day jobs (The guests complained when the doorknobs fell off at night).

He metes out his autobiography by way of these formative indignities. If you ever wanted to know that his aging father wrote him out of his will only to bequeath him the exact amount he would’ve paid a minimum wage worker to care for him in his old age, it’s in there.

In “Orbit,” Siken searches for the familiar injuries, and for what he describes as “the artifice” that serves as his emotional skin—a kind of shock absorber to keep painful memories at bay:

I had forgotten the regular things I obsessed about—my 
favorite ugly places, where I would dwell endlessly: old wounds, 
slights, embarrassment. Now the weight of their importance 
seemed questionable. I had done worse, been hurt worse. The field 
had been swept clean of habit. I circled regrets I had forgotten. I 
dredged up deeper shames . . . I didn’t know who had forgiven me or 
hadn’t. I circled new darknesses, the things I had covered up.

The latter images of circling, dredging, and burying bring to mind the work of queer theorist Avgi Saketopoulou, who critiques the dominant narrative of trauma as a condition to be overcome through the available smorgasbord of healing therapies. In Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023), she extends the concept of “traumatophilia” developed by the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, which challenges the idea that the only goal with trauma is to “extract” or “work through” it. Instead, Saketopoulou argues that engaging with or even pursuing the energies that animate the traumatic experience, or “traumatophilia,” can allow for cognitive transformation and a new sense of emotional and intellectual liberation. In forgetting how to suppress these slights and embarrassments, Siken travels to a temporary station mired in pain. Yet, it is exactly that pain that guides him back to his foundational self.

***

A month later, when I met Siken for a follow-up interview at Casa Video, the bar’s screens were broadcasting scenes from the live-action cult flick Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Siken was on his feet, this time with the aid of a cane. We talked about his artistic practice and the paintings he made before his stroke. He no longer has a studio space to work at scale since he moved in with an old friend, but we talked about Egon Schiele and his favorite, Francis Bacon. The latter is a logical influence given how Siken conflates violence and desire in his Crush-era poems. A day or so later he sent me JPEGs of some of his paintings: intense anti-portraits of masculine subjects, some in ties, others cast in bright primary hues with multiple eyes and split lips. His paintings have yet to be exhibited.

Siken’s paintings, like his poetry, evince an intimacy with emotional turmoil that’s both experienced and witnessed. Some of that witnessing came when he was a care worker in the mid-to-late 1990s. Siken had worked in various capacities during his graduate student period with patients navigating serious mental illness. He would work long, overnight weekend shifts at behavioral health facilities so that he could read and write poetry during the week. It was a schedule that allowed his nocturnal tendencies to flourish.

“There was a real switch that went off for Louise [Glück] when she was reading and judging Crush,” Siken tells me at our third meeting, over strong espresso at the coffeeshop that used to be his 24-hour haunt in the early 2000s. “Because her New England understanding of light and day was that light is nourishing and keeps the garden going, whereas darkness is cold and impressive and threatening and not conducive to life.”

Siken echoes the adage that in the Southwest, the light will kill you. And he reminds me that the light in much of his work is punishing, as in “Visible World,” from Crush:

    Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow 
                                                                              flat on the wall. 
          The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. 
You had not expected this, 
                           the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light 
                                                           pummeling you in a stream of fists.

“When we were becoming friends, Richard told me, ‘Don’t call me during the day,’” the poet Brian Blanchfield tells me. “[Siken would say], ‘I get going once the night breezes start.’”

As Siken was writing and revising Crush over a period of 15 years, he left social work for restaurant jobs in downtown Tucson, falling in with a cadre of artists and musicians who eked out livelihoods in the service sector that relied on the city’s Old Pueblo lore; Tucson was often a filmic backdrop to movies such as Tombstone, Three Amigos, and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. He tells me there was one job opportunity in 1998 that spurred a move to New York, but he returned to Tucson less than a year later, where he went to work at a local bar and grill. It’s there that he met bookmaker and writer Drew Burk, with whom he launched the experimental publisher Spork Press in 2001. Spork had a storied existence of literary tastemaking with its initial literary magazine, and because its core team were all Gen Xers, the press also released a catalog of cassettes and mix tapes. Much of Spork’s critical output happened during the early to late 2010s, with early works and textual experiments by Ariana Reines, Sophia Le Fraga, and Matthew Dickman. More recent work by Dorothy Chan have brought Spork to a younger generation of readers.

The spirit of Spork still animates the ethers in Tucson, proof of which is The Spork, a frappé concoction on the coffeehouse menu where Siken and I last chat. Though since Siken’s stroke and the economic fallout from COVID-19, which included the loss of Spork’s offices, the press seems to be on a permanent hiatus.

***

For Siken, poetry is also service.

“Having an experience is great. Being able to evoke an experience is service. Everyone has a story, but being able to tell a story that is underrepresented or not represented or just new and delightful is service.”

IDKST exemplifies the notion of service in two distinct motifs of ghosts and care (both giving and receiving). There are the ghosts of former selves and dead family members haunting the intergenerational transmissions of trauma. And there are the diverse registers of care that ignite memories of troubled filial piety, overwhelm relationships founded in bacchanalian expression, and situate the end of the family line in hospice and cremation. What sets this collection apart from its predecessors is its proximities to death, with an extended attentiveness to the means of recovery from the social forms of death assigned early on and throughout a lifetime. From "Fauna":

I wrote you a letter in 
case I died but I threw it away. It was good practice. We have to 
practice losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are 
the road where they collide. 

“I like poetry because it’s condensed, and it’s fast. I don’t have time to tell a whole story. I never do. I’m always interrupted,” Siken tells me over nonalcoholic beer I forgot to tell him was nonalcoholic. “I am also telling stories that are uncomfortable or people don’t want to hear. So, I ended up trying to be as economical and precise as I could, to slip it in before they could shut me down.”