Your opinion on poetry.

In the staff picks there is a link to Crush by poet Richard Siken. (http://yupnet.org/siken/) What do you think? Which was your favourite and why?

Are there other poems you love in the same style? Tell us here!

That high-pitched squeeing sound you may have just heard? Yeah, that was me.

Number one Siken fangirl reporting for duty!

I am so in love with that man's poetry. He has a beautiful grasp on flow and such a way with words... I've lost countless hours of sleep just re-reading some of his texts over and over and over again.

You Are Jeff is probably his best, or close to it: it's so layered, complex and beautiful in its kajillion threads of meaning, I find something new in it every time I read it, and I've long gone over the twentieth re-read, and I know that I'll keep on finding more and more and more. It's long, but it has the advantage of containing all the things I love about him: the flow, the style are beautiful the whole time, but then you get all those snapshots, those sides to him that are otherwise scattered across his pieces. I can quote a number of lines from this one, and my only regret is that I don't know it by heart in its entirety.

Scheherazade holds a special place in my heart for being the second of his pieces that I read (the first one being A Primer For The Small Weird Loves, which is great too, but in a different way), and the one that really hooked me and drove me to find more of him. This one I know completely, because it's so short. And the words. Guuh, the words. I could recite it all day long.

Then I really like Snow And Dirty Rain (I had a fragment of it as my sig for a while, that's how much I wanted to rec it out :P), Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out and Little Beast.

Siken makes me wibble, and hurts in all the good ways, and I kind of want to be him when I grow up. Look ma, I've already stayed till four in the morning pastiching his style!

I'll stop rambling before I start getting obsessive and (more) fangirly.

Now excuse me, I need to read Wishboneagain.

DANG IT; JAGGED GOT HERE BEFORE ME. *scowls jealously*

So, yes, I am in love with Siken (thanks to dear old Jagged) also, and like her, You Are Jeff would be my favourite too. There's just something so enchanting about his style, so smooth but wonderfully layered; at first read, the words flow lovelily and the meaning is nonsense of the most beautiful kind. But later, we see there is a kind of pattern even to the disconnectedness - he is always talking in conflicts, in the abstractions of life and identity, and there is always this undercurrent of galactic emotion driving his pieces. The best thing is that they are so easily read. And also - that they are so difficult to tease apart, which makes every subsequent read worth it.

Surreality strings us through and delights us; but the actual events are always grounded in a reality that is at once magical and ethereal, and tied firmly to the commonplace. The paradox of literature - and of life - is what he captures stunningly here. And the flow - my God, has he got flow - makes the pieces resemble what he must perceive the world around him to be: fluid, ever-changing, allowing for all eventualities, even those that are dreamt. It becomes difficult to separate dream from life, thought from action, emotion from the spoken word, and this ambiguity is made all the more delightful by the his grasp of modern-day human attention. There is something deeply confessional about his poems, a voice that speaks clear and pure; there is no awkwardness, no overwriting to impress; just the simple word, take it or leave it.

And I take it. I take them wholeheartedly. My other favourites would be Straw House, Straw Dog; Little Beast; A Primer for Small Weird Loves; Snow and Dirty Rain; Dirty Valentine; i had a dream about you.

But really, who am I kidding? I love them all.

I like Siken and Navita is to blame for it.

Well, actually, Siken is to blame for it. But Navita secondarily.

The end.

Correction; Helpful loves Siken and I am to blame for it, and I love Siken and Jagg is to blame for that.

But Naviiiiiita, 'love' doesn't rhyme prettily.

I liken Siken to hiking! (It doesn't get easier as you go on, but if you carry the pain far enough, if you pull your weight through stanza after stanza and milemarker after milemarker, the world will open under you.)

What do you mean, 'love' doesn't rhyme prettily? Anyway - Siken is all about terrible beauty in incompleteness and all; a master of the free verse. I don't see what rhyme has got to do with it...unless you're being facetious.

Again.

And there is no weight-pulling to be done! At all! Siken is a glide, Siken is a wonderful ride into the bizarrely real, the surreal; Siken opens up more questions than doors...Siken *getting breathless and running out of adjectives here* is a smooth, effortless read - unless, unless you're being facetious.

Again.

There is no pain to Siken - only to your facetiousness.