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Richard Siken is a gay American poet.

I choose Richard Siken's poetry to explore because he was the first poet who really resonated with me. I first found his poetry through a quotation posted online and went looking for his collections to read more. I think the more I discover about his life outside of poetry (his recent stroke, his sexuality etc.) the more I connect to and understand his poems more deeply.

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I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

I find this line powerful because of how it relates to human wants. I love the way a noble thing is juxtaposed next to applesauce.

Poem: Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out (My favourite poem of his)

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The poem is Boot Theory.
And you can hear the man in the apartment above you

taking off his shoes.

You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,

you’re waiting

because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be

some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together

I like the idea of waiting for the other shoe to drop and the idea of nonsensical floating in the image.

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In Saying Your Names many things with Siken's style change. The previous poems have dramatic spacing with lines spread throughout the page. In this poem however the text is one frantic wall. The mania of the poem, with the rush of text and connections firing here and there makes me understand the speaker of the poem to be his heart. This poem reads like a heart's nonstop train of thought.

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For another, explore your thoughts on the significance of the title.

The poem title is I Had a Dream About You. This title when coupled with the medium of poetry seems romantic. This ultimately isn't the case. The poem starts with the hijinks of a normal dream "All the cows were falling out of the sky and landing in the mud.

You were drinking sangria and I was throwing oranges at you," before transitioning slowly into a darker dream that melds impossible events like the sky and sand of a beach being red with presumably realer, non dream events, like the person he is dreaming about being at the hospital. We hear that these dreams are recurring, "In these dreams it's always you:". We also see that these dreams are a way for Siken to cope with the events that befell the person he is dreaming about with lines like: "Oh, the things we invent when we are scared

and want to be rescued". By the end of the poem the line between dream events and real events has been blurred. Siken imagines the person in the dream climbing a pear tree, but when Siken cuts it down he finds it empty. The final lines talk about how Siken always waits but the friend never shows up. I believe this references the death of the friend and that is why Siken has these recurring dreams about him.

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In the poem Straw House, Straw Dog I believe the intended audience is Siken himself. Following off the themes and story of a friend dying developed in I Had a Dream About You this poem reads as Siken going through the grief of losing someone he loved so much and at the end being absolved of his guilt and pain surrounding the death.

The poem starts by calling back to dreams of someone in pain or dying, "I had four dreams in a row where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire", which is a similar motif in I Had a Dream About You. The poem then goes more into depth about the toll this persons death is taking on Siken, and how he wishes the person was still around. We can see the anguish and stress Siken is under with lines like "I wanted to fall down right there but I knew you wouldn't catch me because you're dead." Near the middle of the poem there is a change, Siken says the person and their death is "a fever I am learning to live with". This shows how the pain of their death still effects him but he is slowly on the path to learning to live with the loss. If I had more time to do an in-depth look one could probably analyze this poem through the stages of grief, with the next being depression, represented in lines like these "I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything, couldn't do it anyway". By the end of the poem the motif of dreams re-emerges. In the lines "You can sleep now, you said.

You can sleep now.

You said that.

I had a dream where you said that." His friend in the dream absolves him of his guilt after going through the stages of grief, however it isn't just his friend in his dreams absolving him but his subconscious mind, which controls and creates dreams, also absolving him of his guilt. This is why I believe the audience of the poem is himself. It shows his growth throughout the grieving process and ultimately is about him forgiving himself.

This is one of my favourite poems and I feel like I could write a bunch more on the stages of grief and the symbolism of the dog and the fire and the ending lines but for time reasons I'll end it here.