Crush is Up

We've just put up five poems from Crush with more to come. Read and comment on them here.

A few words from Louise Glück's Foreword to the book for those unfamiliar with Richard Siken's work:

We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic.

Siken takes to heart this exhortation. Crush is the best example I can presently give of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible. By Higginson's report, Emily Dickinson famously remarked, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

She should, in that remark, have shamed forever the facile, the decorative, the easily consoling, the tame. She names, after all, responses that suggest violent transformation, the overturning of complacency by peril.

In practice, this has meant that poets quote Dickinson and proceed to write poems from which will and caution and hunger to accommodate present taste have drained all authenticity and unnerving originality. Richard Siken, with the best poets of his impressive generation, has chosen to take Dickinson at her word. I had her reaction.