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20 pages 40 minutes read

Richard Siken

Little Beast

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2019

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Themes

A Belief in Possibility

The first sentence of “Little Beast” touches on the theme of possibility. The barbecue lasts all night. There is no set end time. The barbecue is open, not confined, and full of possibilities. A night barbecue is different from a day barbecue. The night symbolizes darkness and danger. At night, anything can occur. In Lines 3-6, the song on the radio articulates all that could happen to the speaker and his partner at night. There could be love, stabbings, corpses, affection, and drinking. The options range from innocuous to lethal. The speaker and their partner could have a banal night. At the same time, they might wind up dead.

In Stanza 4, the theme of possibility pertains to history. The speaker and their partner don’t find their names in history. Outside of history, the speaker and their lover are free. The norms of history can’t confine them. They have the option to be anyone, anything, or to resist a stable identity altogether.

In the next stanza, Stanza 5, possibility manifests in the form of intimacy. The speaker desires to get his hands inside his partner and drive his body into his partner’s “like a crash test car” (Line 41). The intense lust makes it seem like a total physical union is a possibility. The speaker wants the option to become one with his partner. He doesn’t want a demarcation between their two bodies.

In the final four stanzas, the speaker and the partner realize that not everything is possible. In Stanza 6, their eyes don’t reflect “doorways” (Line 44) but mere eyes. The next stanza presents restrictions in the form of icy roads and frosty glass. In Stanza 8, the speaker realizes violence can’t create a higher form of understanding, and it’s not possible to mix his blood with his partner’s. The blood in his partner’s mouth is his partner’s. There’s no commingling. By the last stanza, the speaker admits that the possibility of an all-consuming, obliterating love affair is beyond his grasp. “I couldn’t get the boy to kill me,” says the speaker (Line 64). What is possible is less thrilling: wearing the boy’s jacket.

Everyday Moments Versus the Extraordinary

The theme of possibility sets up the theme of banality. The relationship is exciting, dangerous, and lethal, but it’s not without its ordinary moments. In Stanza 1, the couple might face death, but they might also have a relatively average night featuring “whiskey and kisses for everyone” (Line 6). In Stanza 3, Siken grounds the poem in the everyday world when the speaker calls their partner sweetheart. Referring to a lover as a sweetheart is a traditional nickname for a loved one. It’s so popular that people even use the term in an everyday, non-romantic way, such as calling a nice person or child a sweetheart. The following stanza features the cliche, “History repeats itself” (Line 12). The “little man in a brown suit” (Line 15) reinforces the triteness of history. The man’s size and outfit paint an unthreatening, unexceptional image.

In Stanza 8, Siken incorporates another cliche. “I’d like my money’s worth,” says the speaker (Line 56). The line plays upon the common phrase “get your money’s worth.” Once again, Siken links themes of danger and possibility to themes of insipidness and unoriginality. The poem concludes with the stock image of a lover wearing his partner’s jacket as if they’re a tepid, ordinary couple. Then again, perhaps what’s banal isn’t the jacket-wearing or the phrases but the violence itself. Siken’s insistence on harm and destruction brings new life to the staid images and pat expressions. The violence is so widespread that, in the context of Siken’s poem, it loses its freshness and slips into banality. Siken mentions in the same interview mentioned earlier that he is a different person from the Richard Siken who wrote Crush. There was an immediacy in the collection, a rush to explain frenziedly about being scorned, a declaration that for some might border on the melodramatic. But for the Siken who lived and wrote the poems, that extraordinary sensation inherent in the poems felt like daily wounds.

The Many Faces of Death

In the Poetry Foundation interview by Nell Casey, Siken discusses death’s evolution in the three sections that comprise Crush. In the first section, Siken admits that that “he views death romantically and with longing.” This is the romanticized version of death that Siken’s younger self dealt with and the version that his mature self, the self that can look back on the work, realizes is a fight between worldly faults and desires. In the second section, the speaker “understands [death] as a reality,” which means he’s no longer fighting with the physical and earthly but with the spiritual (or at least something higher than himself). In the third section, says Siken, “the speaker ‘has been shot’ […] ‘and is possibly dying against his will.’” This section highlights an individual who chooses his circumstances and no longer seeks absolution. This explanation of death’s many faces in the collection mirrors “Little Beast” so much that the poem works as a microcosm for the collection.

The theme of death permeates “Little Beast.” Lines 4 and 5 float the possibility that the speaker and their partner could die before the night is over. The next stanza approaches death through the buck knife. Although the man with the buck knife uses it to eat his fruit pie, the general use for buck knives applies to hunting. Siken gives the man by the freeway a buck knife to show that he is capable of killing. By saying that he wants to be like the man, Siken both admits that he has the potential for violence and that he wants violence enacted upon him.

Stanza 4 focuses on history, but the idea of death isn’t far off. Neither the speaker nor their partner is a part of history. Their lives are not documented or recorded. Their absence from history leads to a symbolic death. It’s as if they never lived or existed because they refuse to live and exist according to the restrictive definitions offered to them by tradition and the status quo.

Death is a point of attraction in Stanza 5. “You could drown in those eyes,” says the speaker in Lines 22 and 34. The possibility of drowning captivates the speaker. The speaker’s lust for the man links to “suicide” (Line 35) and additional drowning imagery, with the couple “struggling at the bottom of the pool” (Line 36). Stanza 7 reinforces the appeal of death when the speaker states there “isn’t anything sexier” (Line 53) than a guy with “a handgun, / a fast car / a bottle of pills” (Lines 54-55). Each one of these items potentially brings death. A handgun can fatally shoot someone, a fast car can create a deadly car crash, and a bottle of pills can produce a lethal overdose.

In the end, the speaker fails to get the boy to kill him. He does get to wear the boy’s jacket, which suggests that wearing someone’s clothes can serve as a symbolic kind of death. Perhaps when the speaker puts on the boy’s jacket, he feels as if his identity has been eradicated or taken over by the item of clothing and its owner. He also settles for the jacket, meaning that he accepts the death of his dream to “die” by the boy’s hands. The speaker accepts his purgatory, although violence and other types of death are right around the corner.

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