Crush
by Richard Siken
2005
It's been a little while since I've read poetry, but a couple friends of mine both recommended Richard Siken's Crush to me when they learned that, and a third friend endorsed it when she saw me reading it. I noticed it also made Genrepunk Magazine's list of the hundred best indie books of the 21st century. (Impressive, since 80 of the books they listed are from the last 5 years! My personal fave, Clown Girl by Monica Drake, made it on there too.)
The combination of the title and cover art of Crush led me to expect it would be about desire, about the feeling of having a crush on someone, and it is, but Siken also seems to capture all the violent connotations of the word as well. There's very little romance or affection in these poems; Siken's desire is sexual, visceral, and the men he desires seem to want to both fuck and kill him, simultaneously, or maybe just to beat him up to demonstrate how thoroughly they disavow their own desires.
Reading this reminded me how homophobic the 90s were, how scary it was to realize your own same-sex attraction in the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard killing, at a time when so many of the seemingly reasonable people around you would openly praise or sympathize with or apologize for the killers. The men Siken writes about wanting seem to hate themselves and hate him, to hate him because they want him ... except for the ones who just hate him, because he made the schoolboy mistake of confessing his feeling to a straight boy who feels righteously justified in punishing him for being gay. "A Primer for Small Weird Loves" maybe shows this best, and shows Siken's own heart hardening as he goes from being the battered younger lover to the older partner, and the potential source of violence himself.
Reading this, it seemed like I could understand what it would be like to feel desire the way that Siken does, which is different from the way I feel it myself. It makes me wonder how common or universal his way of feeling is? Do other gay men experience their desire this way? Do straight women? Is this what it feels like to love men? Surely not for everyone, not every time, but is it common? Very common? Because I feel like maybe I recognize what he's describing, like I've seen it before, seen friends feeling it, at the start of relationships that seem almost self-destructive, because the men who inspire wanting like that are not nice men, are not good or safe to love.
The poems in Crush are organized into three chapters or sections. The ones in the last part all seem to be related to a single, fraught relationship with a young man named Henry. These poems are the most intense, the most violent, and it seems that Siken maybe literally took a bullet for the man he loved, who didn't know how or maybe wasn't able to love him back. My friends' favorite poem from the book, "You are Jeff," is from this section, and while overall it wasn't my favorite, I agree with them about the last stanza, the one that starts "You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you he loves you, but he loves you." If I could pick out just one thing from the book to share with someone else it'd be that stanza, but it's sort of unrepresentative, because it's like he finally reached the calm after the storm, the resigned acceptance of a truth he no longer rages against, the way he does throughout the rest of the book.
The combination of the title and cover art of Crush led me to expect it would be about desire, about the feeling of having a crush on someone, and it is, but Siken also seems to capture all the violent connotations of the word as well. There's very little romance or affection in these poems; Siken's desire is sexual, visceral, and the men he desires seem to want to both fuck and kill him, simultaneously, or maybe just to beat him up to demonstrate how thoroughly they disavow their own desires.
Reading this reminded me how homophobic the 90s were, how scary it was to realize your own same-sex attraction in the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard killing, at a time when so many of the seemingly reasonable people around you would openly praise or sympathize with or apologize for the killers. The men Siken writes about wanting seem to hate themselves and hate him, to hate him because they want him ... except for the ones who just hate him, because he made the schoolboy mistake of confessing his feeling to a straight boy who feels righteously justified in punishing him for being gay. "A Primer for Small Weird Loves" maybe shows this best, and shows Siken's own heart hardening as he goes from being the battered younger lover to the older partner, and the potential source of violence himself.
Reading this, it seemed like I could understand what it would be like to feel desire the way that Siken does, which is different from the way I feel it myself. It makes me wonder how common or universal his way of feeling is? Do other gay men experience their desire this way? Do straight women? Is this what it feels like to love men? Surely not for everyone, not every time, but is it common? Very common? Because I feel like maybe I recognize what he's describing, like I've seen it before, seen friends feeling it, at the start of relationships that seem almost self-destructive, because the men who inspire wanting like that are not nice men, are not good or safe to love.
The poems in Crush are organized into three chapters or sections. The ones in the last part all seem to be related to a single, fraught relationship with a young man named Henry. These poems are the most intense, the most violent, and it seems that Siken maybe literally took a bullet for the man he loved, who didn't know how or maybe wasn't able to love him back. My friends' favorite poem from the book, "You are Jeff," is from this section, and while overall it wasn't my favorite, I agree with them about the last stanza, the one that starts "You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you he loves you, but he loves you." If I could pick out just one thing from the book to share with someone else it'd be that stanza, but it's sort of unrepresentative, because it's like he finally reached the calm after the storm, the resigned acceptance of a truth he no longer rages against, the way he does throughout the rest of the book.
"...he finally reached the calm after the storm, the resigned acceptance of a truth he no longer rages against, the way he does throughout the rest of the book."
ReplyDeleteThis line of yours is poetry in itself :).
Thank you! I do try to write well when I compose these things.
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