How to read a poem.
Or: Please love Siken's "Scheherazade" like I do.
In middle school, we had a famed Poetry Project each year. A retrospective, a portfolio—the first half of the assignment consisted of writing original poetry in different formats (haiku, acrostic).
I still remember a sixth-grade classmate, Julia, who ended a piece with “her love was like a moth / drawn to a flame / and killed by its obsession.” I turned to her desk, slack-jawed, told her it was so, so good. She seemed surprised, said “really?” and I wanted to prod her and see if she’d actually written it herself, but I chose to believe her, to believe the magic that a writer my age could write like that.
So I love poetry. I don’t want it to be dead. I want people to read poems and like them. In a bout of indie-girl virtue signaling (the boys were IN the DMs), I would post poems on my stories. Any time I got a heart from someone unexpected (not suitors, the girls/gays/theys), from someone I didn’t think would hold down screen and make it through, it felt like God’s Work.
I don’t want to harp on this, conceptually, for too long but I know poetry feels dense and irrelevant. I know a poet’s choices seem random, haphazard. Below, I explain how I’ve learned a poem, specifically my favorite poem.
First take: for fun, for the forest.
This pass is just for first impressions, for feel. Read aloud if you can—the only guidance I’ll give is to read more slowly than you normally would read prose, observe spaces, line breaks, and punctuation with a bit of a pause.
Don’t worry about understanding any of it; don’t get hung up on language or images, just see how it feels in your mouth.
Scheherazade
By Richard Siken
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
Second take: for the trees.
Now we can go through line by line and mark things we like.
For me it’s the desperation in the speaker, begging the “you,” the reader, to tell them something. The first line is eerie, spooky. From there, we have, romance, pleading. And, the gut-punch: “Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. … // Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
Okay, so now we have a little buy-in for the poem. If I’ve lost you at this point, see you later, thanks for humoring me.
Now we can do a little research on anything that sticks out/context we might not be familiar with. (Sidebar: there is a rap genius for this poem lmao.)
The title, Scheherazade—pronounced shuh-HAIR-uh-zahd /ʃəˈhɛrəˌzɑːd/ —is a character in 1001 Nights: a series of Middle Eastern folk tales that English speakers typically refer to as Arabian Nights. Without retelling the entire tale (have at it with this summary) (or just let a man read the tale to you on YouTube), what I think to be most pertinent to this poem is that she tells a story so mesmerizing, the sultan keeps her alive an extra night so that he can hear the end of her tale. She continues this pattern of storytelling for 1001 nights and the sultan falls in love with her etc., etc. (Favorite YouTube comment: “Homegirl delayed her execution through cliffhangers.”)
So now this context informs our reading. “Tell me about the dream,” it begins, and at the end, two more: “Tell me how…” “Tell me we’ll never get used to it.” Scheherazade is a storyteller, the speaker needs her stories.
Notably, this poem leads off Siken’s debut collection of poetry, Crush (2004). Thus, the poem sets the table for the poems to come—gutting and painful investigations of violence and queerness that certainly made him the darling of early-aughts Tumblr. (“We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me / spit it up again.”)
This was my literal bio for so long (emo ass):
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.I’ll go so far as to say that he coined “tell me,” a conceit that went absolutely off. Look in contemporary poetry; the tell me’s are everywhere, the desperation to be understood.
You can listen to someone read “You Are Jeff” on Soundcloud but I can’t find the full text online but here’s an excerpt from part 24 (long but worth it!). It’s written in paragraph format with no line breaks:
You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.
Okay, just one more thing, promise, and then we’ll get to read the poem one last time.
You’ve heard of the term metaphor—just a dressed up word for comparison through image. The reliance on metaphor sets poetry apart. Yes, prose uses metaphor, but poetry relies on it.
A list of the images in this poem:
bodies being pulled from a lake, dressed in warm clothes
horses running until they forget that they are horses
tree where the roots have to end somewhere [which “it” is not]
song on a policeman’s radio
rolled up carpet
apple sliced into pieces
light through the windowpane
bodies possessed by light
Bodies, horses, tree, song, carpet, apple, light, bodies again—a poem in and of itself. These images live in the same world; we’re not pulling something anachronous out of left field.
The images in another poem, say, Terrance Hayes’ “Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy,” the intro poem to his collection Lighthead, wouldn’t work within the rules of Scheherazade. The proper nouns wouldn’t work (“I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us / Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes”). Siken couldn’t evoke space: “Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires / upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction / of the earth.”
And okay, one more thing: bodies bookend the poem. First, the speaker is dressing (assumed to be) drowned bodies. In the end, the speaker and the spoken to are two bodies, possessed by light—hope! (or… hope?)
Last take: put it all together now.
Okay, your turn, read it again (ideally aloud), I’m stepping out.
Take your pause, read the title, read the poet’s name.
Scheherazade
By Richard Siken
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
Love you xo.
loved this <3