Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

There are some works that sit waiting for you for years. They wait patiently in pages not accustomed to the light, forgotten after a brief uninspired read. But then, one day they return to you. You do not not know why you turned back to them, what light drew you to them again, and suddenly they dance, those words.

This happened to me with Richard Siken’s Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out from his award-winning collection Crush published more than 15 years ago. The work is considered one of the greatest collections of contemporary American poetry. Haunted by a despair that is connected with the death of his boyfriend in the 1990s, Siken explores intimacy, desire, relationship even as he negotiates the gathering darkness of mortality. About the reader’s emotional response to Crush, he says:

“If you think the world is a golden place made out of love, then the book is ‘grim,’if you think that life is brutal and short, then the book is uplifting. I don’t know if it’s grim. I think it’s true.”

Last night I read many poems from the book again. One particular line stayed with me, and in the morning I woke up with the sentence on my lips - the beginning of Litany…

Every morning the maple leaves.

Let me pause for a moment at this this stalk that offers three different shades of green.

Every morning the maple leaves

A wedge slips in between the routine of days. Not, of experience, but the realisation of season? of loss? An object that is both symbolic and real, stationary and formidable, moves, and that movement is departure. Is it an expression of autumn, or the metaphoric process of something in your life, whose presence you took for granted, leaving?

and again

Every morning the maple leaves

This time, the noun verbs into meaning. The leaving of the maple is a natural process, birth, renewal, the fruit of union. The ‘leaf’ that is still germs into activity with the verb form ‘leaves’. This is how the poet gets under the skin of reality and through that gap in language, Siken locates the human impulse of observation, turning the ordinariness of a mechanical process into wondrous insight. He changes, even the vision through this simple formation.

and, in the end, the most direct take

Every morning the maple leaves

A block of panelled images, where each word is born into a movement of world-making. The simplicity of the image, made more piercing by the grammatical slippage in this case - Every morning the maple leaves ____ what? No, but that’s it. Nothing more. It is an image complete in its incompleteness. A simple picture

And so Siken prays in this litany, with an aesthetic of non sequitorial conversation that is littered with repetition. Each return is punctuate with objects of sentiment or material that turn ever so slightly, letting another light course through their translucent skins. This concentric movement is buffeted with a voice so certain of its entropic experience, that is splayed through multiple selves that return to the central lobby of desire, of despair, and the pieces of relationship, but every time through another door. The self changes visibly, even through the course of the poem.

Siken plays with language, but also with image. He relegates narrative to the service of thought - not in its basic presence, but as the glorious errata of its frenzied analogue. When reading Siken, one nods to the music of his stream of intermingling universes of dialogue, and stark image, sudden shifts of register, where time and space fuse in vulnerabilities untethered in the mechanical wind. This is witchery, this. It is the practised fervour of the master who knows to indulge the madness of youth, with the firmness of wisdom. Trouncing myth along with the brashness of the everyday, with the dexterity of a windweaver, he holds the threads to multiple strands of experience, multiple lives lived in rapture, and in each moment another revolution, another small death. This is the ecstasy of pain, the mundanity of desire, but seen through many eyes that fuses into singular transcription.

Litany is peopled by more than two selves at least, and while he’s already playing in a theatre of the back-and-forth of relationship, other constructions of identity enter the arena, through object, lore, and even dialogue.

It is as if the poet is walking a road, and the road turns into a fair, where every stall is a new planet, and language is a code yet to be invented. Until then touch will do: And the part where I push you/flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,/shut up/I’m getting to it. The narrator is impatient, and flawed- the persona says something, and then retracts it, and then returns to it with renewed surety, or a sudden loss of faith, and we mime these movements with the poet, and desire is not a product, but something that is arrived at - with the conversation between dialectical entities - a single individual and the other (or the intimate), one individual and the tacit crowd, the speaker and the text, the persona and the reader.

Sudden pit-stops of reflexivity abound, as Siken surfs through a battered landscape with cinematic relish: Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Taken individually, some lines are catastrophic in their multiplicity of glows - You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together/to make a creature that will do what I say/or love me back. The ship of affect anchors anywhere and everywhere, and each phrase exists not only through the fortification of its own place, but through what precedes it and what is to come. This is not simply the flourish of wordsmithery, but a sense of play whose approach diverges rather than converges. This poetry is centrifugal, and the specks shimmer in the gathering light from a thousand different suns.

Siken’s poetry is attractive to me because it opens. I see possibility and newness both in concept, and in form. The poem is at once a theatrical gesture, a cinematic unmaking, a message from the pulpit of experience, a stream-of-consciousness, self-flagellating, community embracing monologue, and a song of desire. It alights from the page with an urgency of feeling, that is reminiscent of the intuitive path of sensory enlightenment. That is its real secret.

Shout out to the reader - the anonymous contributor from the UK who wrote such kind words, and made a direct generous contribution!

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Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out