Little Beast

Richard Siken’s “Little Beast” is part of his award-winning debut collection Crush (2005). Like many of the poems in Crush, “Little Beast” touches on themes of destruction, identity, trauma, death, and sex. The lyric poem is an unconventional love poem. Siken’s ex-boyfriend influenced many of the poems in Crush, although Siken doesn’t explain the ex-boyfriend’s influence in detail and believes poems should stand on their own without biographical or other background information. The poem is a part of a canon of gay male poetry that pairs desire and violence to further explore personhood, history, and the complexities of love.

Poet Biography

Richard Siken’s biographical particulars are elusive and difficult to verify. He apparently grew up in Tucson, Arizona. His mom was a therapist, and his dad was a lawyer. (Before Siken’s dad died, Siken’s dad admitted that he killed his first wife.) At the University of Arizona, Siken earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an MFA in poetry. In a 2006 profile for the Poetry Foundation, Siken was described as a social worker. In a 2018 interview with the poetry podcast "Commonplace," Siken said he wasn’t a social worker, but he did work at a group home for adults with a dual diagnosis. (In the same interview, Siken admits to sometimes providing misleading information about himself.)

In addition to poetry, Siken makes films, paints, and runs a small press and literary journal called Spork. Spork makes its books by hand and has published contemporary poets like Ariana Reines and Paul Legault.

In 2004, when Siken was in his thirties, his poetry collection Crush was selected by Louise Glück for Yale’s Younger Poets Prize. Created in 1918, the prize represents the longest-running literary honor in the United States. The award goes to a young poet who has yet to publish a collection of poems. Past winners include Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery.

In 2005, Yale University Press officially published Crush. In her forward to Siken’s book, Glück praised the “driving, apocalyptic power” of the poems, as well as their “purgatorial recklessness.” Library Journal described the poems as “vital, immediate, and cinematic in scope.” Crush went on to win a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award, another award for gay male poetry. The book was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ten years later, in 2015, Siken published his second collection of poems, War of the Foxes, with Copper Canyon Press.

Poem Text

Siken, Richard. “Little Beast.” 2005. Yale University Press.

Summary

Richard Siken’s poem “Little Beast” starts on a festive note. There’s a barbecue lasting all night and a “dance on the courthouse lawn” (Line 1). A radio is on. Siken uses a literary device known as personification (attributing human behaviors to inanimate objects) to give the song on the radio agency. The song can tell what is on the night’s mind, and the night’s thoughts are odious. The night thinks about stabbings and bodies left in a dumpster. The speaker replies to the violence nonchalantly, saying, “[t]hat’s a nice touch” (Line 6).

Stanza 2 moves the action to a highway. The speaker notices a man “eating fruit pie with a buckknife” (Line 7). The man then carves the likeness of his romantic partner’s face into a motel wall. The knife and the carving continue the theme of violence. The speaker feels attraction to this man: “I want to be like him,” he says (Line 9).

The third stanza marks the beginning of a new section—Section 2. In Line 10, someone tells the speaker that “explaining is an admission of failure.” In Line 11, the speaker addresses this person directly with a curt response: “I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.” The term sweetheart implies that this person was a romantic partner. The snappy tone indicates that the speaker is somewhat annoyed with this romantic partner.

As with Section 2, Section 3 starts with another axiom. Someone tells the speaker, “History repeats itself” (Line 12). Siken takes this common saying and animates it. He gives history a shadow. This shadow covers the desktop, the sock drawer, and a stash of secret letters. Next, he depicts history as a person, a “little man in a brown suit” (Line 15). This man tries to “define a room he is outside of” (Line 16), which makes the man an outcast or a “loner.” The speaker and their romantic partner also appear as outcasts. Their names are not a part of history, so the speaker and the person they sometimes address (their romantic partner) come across as mysterious and elusive.

In Stanza 5—Section 4—the speaker makes the romantic partner less abstract. The speaker describes his green and yellow eyes. The speaker could “drown in those eyes” (Line 22). Then the speaker articulates the appeal of the romantic partner’s pulse, his body movements, and his skin. Forcefully attracted to this person, the speaker confesses, “I wanted to take him home / and rough him up and get my hands inside him” (Lines 29-30). The final two lines of Section 4 link the lust to further violence, including death by suicide and drowning imagery.

The next section takes a break from the intense violence. The speaker admits the relationship is sluggish and dormant. The “old dull pain” (Line 39) remains. Starting on Line 42, the speaker and their partner catch their reflections in mirrors and windows. They want to see “doorways” (Line 44), but all they find is their eyes. The absence of openings reinforces the stuck nature of the partnership. In Line 45, the speaker says his partner’s “wounds healed,” which bolsters the feeling that the bellicose desire has diminished.

In Stanza 7, the speaker tells how they tried to preserve the excitement of their relationship, saying, “[w]e still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars” (Line 47). Although the “ice” (Line 49) and the “frost” (Line 50) cool off their relationship, the speaker can’t repress his visceral attraction toward the partner and his potential for violence: “But damn if there isn’t anything sexier / than a slender boy with a handgun,” gushes the speaker (Lines 53-54).

The final section starts with another idiom. Someone asks the speaker what they’d like. The speaker replies, “I’d like my money’s worth” (Line 56). The speaker tells how they swallowed mud, swallowed glass, and smelled blood “on the first four knuckles” (Line 59). Such violence did not give the speaker their “money’s worth” (Line 56). The speaker also notes that “[they] can’t punch [themselves] awake” (Line 61). By the end, the dejected speaker wishes the relationship delivered greater destruction. What the speaker ultimately wanted was obliteration. Since he couldn’t get the boy to kill him, he had to settle for wearing “his jacket for the longest time” (Line 64).