I Love You, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

a stunning poem by Richard Siken, and my recent state of being

So things have been rough for me lately. A surgery, a high-intensity semester of grad school, general brain-on-fire stuff, a healthy sprinkling of big picture anxieties—what, is something happening in current events?— and plenty of other idiosyncratic, annoying things. You know how it is. Working for the weekend, picturing myself on a beach, screaming into pillows, so on and so forth.

But more than anything, I’ve spent the last few weeks feeling like I’m walking in a lot of circles. Not literally—because of the surgery, I’ve been doing a lot less walking—but internally. I’ve always been an overthinker, but it feels like that’s less of a useful skill now more than ever. I can think about things as much as I’d like to, and I’ll get nowhere—I can’t pin anything down. Right now, nothing feels certain. All ideas intangible, all meanings abstract. Everything is loose and jangling around in the bottom of a tote bag, and I’m somewhere in there, too. And because of all this, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry.

Ethan Hawke gave a really excellent TedTalk once, and he said this:

“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and, ‘Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?’ Or the inverse — something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight. You know, you’re dizzy. ‘Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?’ And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it.”

Isn’t that a lovely sentiment? Well said, Ethan Hawke. And it’s relevant to this conversation because what he’s describing here is exactly why I find myself reading so much poetry right now. When things feel indefinable, poetry can define it. And time and time again, I find myself returning specifically to Richard Siken’s poem, “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out.”

If you’re around my age and reading this, then you know how cliche it has become to talk about loving a Richard Siken poem. For a while, anybody who cared to look cool and literary was posting decontextualized lines of his works along with pictures of their favorite tv show couple or posing for Instagram photos with their copy of his collection Crush and a latte. But there’s a reason for that. Siken is the rare poet who traverses into the mainstream—a poet that non-writers and non-readers can love and connect with. He’s an incredible writer, with a distinct voice, a knack for form and rhythm, and a way of putting terrible things into beautiful words; how could anybody not love that?

“Litany” is a poem with a frantic and melancholy sort of energy. True to its title, it is a stream of questions, requests, demands, and explanations that feels uncontrolled and desperate on the part of the speaker. What does it mean? I don’t know. The speaker is asking for forgiveness from a lover, we can assume, but the circumstances of that are unclear and frankly, don’t matter. To me, the poem is about the action of the asking for forgiveness, the demanding of it, the whirlwind of interruptions and erasures and direct addresses.

It’s not a terribly long poem, but every line is packed tightly. It’s bursting with energy and off-the-wall turns of phrase, so much so that I can’t even begin to pick a favorite line to discuss. I can only tell you to read it and hope that you do. It’s just really, really good writing, and it’s writing that I love.

Ethan Hawke is right about poetry—it is sustenance. When the questions are insurmountable and extensive and frightening, you aren’t always going to be able to find the answers; but you can find people who are asking the same questions. In “Litany,” the speaker asks and asks and asks. Why write poems made of uncertainty like this? Because everyone is asking questions, all the time, and usually, we don’t get answers.

I’ll never know why the body has to hurt in order to heal, or why people fear each other so much, or why some relationships don’t work and some do even when they shouldn’t. But at least I know that there’s beautiful poetry out there. At least there are poems like this one, poems that make the anxiety and the uncertainty feel a little less solitary. I read “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” and it doesn’t fix me. But it does reach out to me and say something without words that I understand completely. Sometimes, that’s enough to soothe the ache of everything else.