Detail of the Woods by Richard Siken and The Themes of Finding Independence Within

Originally written as my second term mid-exam paper for a course called “Survey of English Prose and Poetry”. This is a poem that is very dear to me because I looove love love Richard Siken and his works, it was such a fun time analyzing something that I genuinely like, even though I was stressed by the deadline as always.

I do want to dedicate this to my lovely course lecturer because if she hadn’t pushed me to my edge, this writing wouldn’t have existed. And also to the husband of a dear friend of my mother, whom is a English Literature lecturer in a university in Bandung, Om Ono. If it weren’t for his assistence, I woudn’t have made it through. Here is to the educators who made me the writer I am today.

The cover for SIken’s book, War of The Foxes, in which he painted himself. He described the process in the poem included in the book, the said poem is entitled “Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors”.

Introduction

When walking through the woods, one can find themselves wandering through clouds of thoughts. Alongside the occasional sway of wind follows the stillness that can always be found between the trees. Even the author of this essay’s focus poem, Richard Siken, cannot escape this phenomenon. Acquiring most of the biographical details of Siken was a bit of a challenge, as he is not a poet that is too popularly known outside of internet communities of Twitter and Tumblr, therefore a lot of the details I have is gathered from his official Wikipedia page. Born in New York City on February 15, 1967, Siken first received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology before then getting a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the University of Arizona. His career started as a co-founder and editor of a small press in Tuscon, Arizona, called Spork Press. But it was when his book “Crush” was published by Yale University Press in 2005 that he gets some traction and received awards and praises for the book’s accurate and honest portrayal of being a gay man.

The poem I’m going to analyze, however, is a part of his second and most recent book; War of the Foxes, that was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. I found Siken through snippets and lines out of his poems that are often posted on social media, especially Tumblr. And through people’s fascination with his words, I found my admiration within his way to convey his tumultuous feelings and heavy topics with simple poetries that are often short and packed. With only ten lines in total of the poem, in Detail of the Woods, Siken uses themes of being in nature, with imageries of trees and vague ways about how everyone has their place in the world. The poem is short and compact, but like the characters of a poem, it does not send its message in literal or straightforward ways. The charm of a poem is that of the way it can fold massive linen of themes or feelings into mere lines of vaguely written words, like a spring that is pressed down, it is small and short but the more you stretch it into its fullest potentials, the more spiral after spiral you can see forming itself into a meaning.

In this essay, I will analyze how the poem’s theme of finding independence within oneself is conveyed through the vehicle of figurative languages, namely metaphors, personification, and Siken’s specific or vague use of words.

Analysis

The poem starts with a setting, a simple, one-line, monostich stanza of a statement; “I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do”. This could be a literal meaning, it could be that the author is walking up to the woods and they are looking at all the trees — and they didn’t know what to do. It is not a question of should they go into the woods and explore it furthermore, nor it is a question to decide whether they should walk the other way to the broader street with no woods, it is simply a statement. The author may have just found a set of a place that is entirely their own, methaporized by the woods. It may have been a long and tiring journey, perhaps done entirely alone after a string of misfortunes and now at the dawn of their solitary path, they have found some sort of stillness. Dumbfounded by this discovery, they just looked and did not know what to do with it. At the end of a journey, one does not always find all the answers to their heart’s questions neatly placed at the front of their feet to be collected and opened, sometimes the ending comes after.

Metaphorically speaking, this could be interpreted as the author looking to a reflection of and beyond themselves, to find the meaning of his identity, who he is outside of his being? Now that this journey has finally shown its way to the end, where do they go from there? There are now this place, this forest, these trees, and themselves, so what then? When one looks into the mirror, one can either be preoccupied with vanity or self-deprecating and self-questioning questions of their identity. For Siken, this was in the form of looking into the trees in the woods somewhere, not knowing what step to take after.

The journey may have been tough, but often when one has been too focused on the path right in front of them they forgot what they may find on the other end. Furthermore, in the poem, this line will be supported with more questions that lead to this theme of questioning and finding independence. The trees and leaves mentioned in this poem can be seen as a metaphor or even an analogy for a unit of a human body. “A box made out of leaves” is a metaphor to describe the woods itself as an overall existing thing, it is after all a “box” made out of or is full of leaves that are on individual trees, but the author did not mean the woods is a box in literal terms. This use of metaphor can be interpreted to have a double meaning; whether it is to explain the woods as a box, or the said woods as a human body, or both.

With only two lines each stanza after the first line, this poem’s stanzas take the form of a couplet. He then continued the second couplet with the question;

“What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless”.

This further explains the interpretation that the author is perceiving the woods as a reflection of himself, or rather a human body as a whole. The woods don’t have a heart in literal terms but he is searching for it. When a “heart” is used as a metaphor, it is usually to describe the core point of something. This second line of the couplet is ended by “Nevertheless”. Every time I re-read this poem, I wonder why this word was placed there, to me it almost feels like it’s always going to end in uncertainty. It is as if the author is brushing off their questions prior about what else is in the woods, a cue to move on to the next wonder on the top of their head, or a tool to ease that wonder inside of them. And this leads the readers onto the most important lines of this poem which come right after.

In lines four and five of the third couplet, the author explains;

“Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else

I kept my mind on the moon

Cold moon, long nights moon”.

This was the destination, or maybe even still the journey, that has been brought to the readers by the past lines and the use of metaphors. In their life, the author may have always found themselves in a place where they belong to someone else, and therefore this journey was taken to find their sense of self. Siken states here his discovery of the importance of finding ourselves within us because to be in a world of individuals, one needs to find one’s place.

To always find yourself in the hands of another could distort your mind of who you are. Who are you if not the personalities of others around you glued together to become a person?

Siken uses this metaphor of walking into the woods simply to find that tranquility in loneliness, in a place where you are forced to be with yourself, sometimes you can find that person inside of you that has wandered off somewhere else while you are too busy being a person for somebody else.

To find the ability to be with yourself, find who you are, and confront yourself could take up a lot of courage and strength. This journey is for them to find the strength to live by the fact that they are who they are, but all these realizations could lead to the feeling of being overwhelmed.

In the second line of the third couplet, the author expresses this restlessness through the act of distraction: “I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon”. Siken may not be literally gazing into the moon to keep his mind off this thought, the moon is the figure or metaphor to represent other thoughts, other distractions, in whatever forms; cold or the moon that is out during one of the long nights he has where sleep is nowhere to be found. The third couplet is the core of this poem and the message it is trying to convey through the theme, it is the need for one to find their independence, not by the help of someone else, it is finding who you are when there’s no one else looking, it is finding it within yourself.

Almost nearing the end of the poem, the fourth couplet goes

“From the landscape: a sense of scale

From the dead: a sense of scale”.

This is the part where I found myself in difficulty understanding its implied meaning. But I came to interpret that the author is getting to know themselves as a whole, a general. One can see a general overview of something when one sees the landscape, hence a sense of scale. When you put yourself into the consideration that this place is bigger than you’ll ever be, you’ll feel small. From seeing a landscape of things, you have a sense of the scale of your size or capability. In this poem’s case, it is delivered through the metaphor of seeing the landscape of the woods, perhaps from above, or from a map. But in a landscape overview of the woods, you may be able to see how big the forest really is or how far the trees spread out, you may be able to see the building on the edge of the woods you would never discover without seeing the landscape.

The author ultimately figures out their proportions, they are seeing themselves as who they are and not how big or small they are beside someone else. But you can’t see details if you only look at the landscape, to look for the details you need to walk into the woods. You need to walk up into a tree, find your way to that building you see at the edge of the map, it could be an abandoned house or a barn. Those are only the things you can discover if you keep searching. However, on the second line of this couplet, the author mentions the dead also as a sense of scale. Perhaps the “sense of scale” could be explained as a metaphor for understanding and appreciating life itself from seeing stories of death. The world is constantly losing souls, people die every day and by seeing death everywhere the author maybe just now be able to have a scale of how cherishable life is, specifically one that is their own.

There’s a little connection that can be made from Siken’s biography to this line, which can be of some significance of why this poem was written in this specific theme, and as a brief insight into Siken’s psyche. In an interview with Nell Casey, Siken mentioned (or rather, allowed this interpretation) that the death of his boyfriend in 1991 had influenced his work (Casey, 2006). This theme of accepting death, having closure to something that died, can be found only if one should go through most of his works. It is found a lot through the book where this poem is published; War of the Foxes, but in regards to Detail of the Woods this may just be an added interpretation or opinion from myself, though this theme is constant in his other works. Accepting the death of a lover is not something easy to do, it could even haunt you for the rest of your life. This is a connection I realized as I was reading about Siken’s biography. This can also be more broadly used to interpret the poem as walking out of a relationship where it was damaging someone, physically or mentally, because those something you need to heal from by a long journey of self-acceptance to find their independence from their abusers.

The fifth couplet goes

“I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority. Everything casts a shadow”.

As the themes of letting go and finding self-independence continue, here the author is metaphorically turning their back on the story — their past, their self-doubt before this, the aforementioned death, or even that dead relationship — to feel superior that they have finally let go of something that has been haunting them for so long. The second line of this couplet is to make a metaphor that now because the author is standing proudly over their past, everything else casts a shadow.

The last line ends in a monostich stanza reminiscent of the format of the first line of the poem,

“Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything”.

After going nine lines without a mention of another person, this subject of the sentence is introduced and used as an ending line. The author may have dreamt of his past or deceased lover, saying that their mortal body has never been afraid of anything and that includes death that has taken them away. I don’t think this is a figurative use of language, to close this poem, Siken may have really dreamt of someone saying this to him. In my interpretation, this is one of the aspects of finding independence; to not be afraid of anything, even our inevitable fate of dying. This poem’s theme is, again, about the journey to find independence, and at the end of the line, the biggest achievement one can make is having self-acceptance and manifest it into having that independence within.

Conclusion

Now that we are at the end of this essay, I have explained in my own interpretations and analysis of the themes based on the use of figurative language why this poem is a poem that talks about finding independence within oneself. In the key line of the poem, said in line four and placed in the third couplet;

“Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else”,

Siken realizes that we are not supposed to scale our self-identity through the hands of somebody else. Though this discovery can be overwhelming, which is expressed through the metaphor of distracting themselves by looking at different kinds of the moon, the message still demands to be understood; by realizing your true proportions and seeing the bigger picture. Also by remembering the dead, as a reminder that life is to be cherished. To recover from a mindset, a bad relationship, a past, a death, is not an easy thing, and Siken did it by simply walking through the box of trees and looking at the detail of the woods. In conclusion, the metaphor in this poem is a vehicle to convey the true theme of the poem. With the use of trees, the woods, a box to describe the woods as figures to represent a journey the author is in to find liberation from their past selves and relationships. Detail of the Woods is a poem about finding yourself through placing yourself in a place bigger than you are, in a place of solitude, where the only comparison you can make is how small you are compared to the woods around you, and finding yourself without the hands of another.

REFERENCE

Siken, Richard. “Detail of the Woods”, War of the Fox, Copper Canyon Press, 2015.

Casey, N. (2006, February 27). Nerve-Wracked Love: A profile of Richard Siken. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68487/nerve-wracked-love

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Richard Siken. Wikipedia. Retrieved May 22, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Siken