On Wednesday, October 7th, Bennington College welcomed poet Richard Siken to read for the season’s first installment in the Poetry at Bennington series, which is in its 15th year. He read excerpts from his collections Crush and I Do Know Some Things. He also led two craft talks after the reading.
Prior to the reading, Siken stood outside talking to a group of students and townspeople alike. After a few minutes, they filtered in, filling nearly every seat in Tishman.
Siken was introduced by Michael Dumanis, literature faculty and director of Poetry at Bennington. Siken is the author of three books. The first, Crush, was published by Yale University Press in 2005, and selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His other two collections, War of Foxes (2015) and I Do Know Some Things (2025), were published by Copper Canyon Press. He currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
Crush, Dumanis said, was the most common book for his students to have read prior to coming to study poetry at Bennington. Dumanis had read the work initially as a manuscript, one his friend had forwarded to him, saying that Siken was one of the best writers working today.
Siken began his reading by describing a stroke he suffered in 2019 and detailing how it affected his work. He said that in the introduction to Crush penned by Glück, she described the collection as one that is about panic. At the time, he described her verbiage as “confounding.” But as he reread the collection 20 years later after his stroke, he began to understand what she truly meant. In revisiting Crush, he felt like the points of relation he once felt to the work were becoming tenuous. Only just recently has he begun to gain understanding of this collection again. He read two poems from Crush, “Scheherazade” and “Meanwhile.”
Next, he read from his latest collection, I Do Know Some Things. This book is chronological, following his memory and unfolding towards the end as he begins to regain abstract thought and subjecthood. He began with the poem “Sidewalk,” a frank, unadorned retelling of his initial stroke.
To create this work, he relied on different organizational structures to support its narrative thread, one of which was imagining the places in which he slept. He was moved so often in his recovery that his bed became an anchor point for his attention. Another was family, because, he said, he was trying to make sense of what was related to him. “What do I own? What do I live in?” were Siken’s central questions.
He mentioned during the reading that his stroke gave him a sort of “beginner’s mind,” a Zen Buddhist concept of a mind that is totally open––a complete lack of preconception. This concept is displayed clearly in the dichotomy between the works Siken read. The sensual abstraction of Crush was laid bare in I Do Know Some Things, a contemplative, disturbing work. Siken finished the reading with two prose poems, a celebration of his ability to once again apprehend the abstract.
The next installment in the Poetry at Bennington series is a reading by Cameron Awkward-Rich. This event will be held in Tishman on November 11th, 2026.
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