Little Beast

“Little Beast” (2005) puts Siken in conversation with an array of contemporary gay male poets, who, at around this time, addressed the intersection of desire and violence (what Glück’s intro to the book calls “purgatorial recklessness”). Seven years earlier, D. A. Powell published his first collection of poetry, Tea (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). As with Siken’s poem, Powell’s poetry confronts lust, harm, and destruction. “[D]ead boys make the best lovers,” Powell declares in one of the poems in Tea. A few years after Crush came out, Ronaldo Wilson’s second book, Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), explored the link between being gay, sex, exploitation, and degradation.

Yet Powell’s poems center on the AIDS crisis, and Wilson’s poems confront racial issues. Siken’s poem doesn’t directly address a specific social or political event, which adds to the poem’s elusive and mysterious quality. By its very existence, however, it not only adds to a long line of poetry about being gay, but it also underscores that even seemingly mundane events like a barbeque or a house party can be ripe for the politics of sex and desire and the social aspect of who determines what is acceptable in society and what isn’t.

For centuries, gay and queer male poets have had to convey their relationships with subterfuge due to intolerance, exclusion, and anti-gay activists. In "The Foolish Virgin" (A Season in Hell, 1873), for instance, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud recorded his violent relationship with the older French poet Paul Verlaine by turning Verlaine into a tormented widow and himself into a devilish bridegroom. Graham Robb, a contemporary Rimbaud biographer, says being gay attracted Rimbaud because, at that time, it was mysterious: “There wasn’t even a word for it in the language,” says Robb. “This blank space on the social map was a powerful invitation” (Rimbaud: A Biography, W. W. Norton, 2001). Despite this promising “blank map,” both Rimbaud and Verlaine’s reputations were affected by actions and rumors of “illicit” love, a love that scandalized the Parisian literary community. Similarly, in “Little Beast,” existing in a liminal space captivates the male lovers. For most of the poem, their bodies are too propulsive for domestication. Siken even says that the lover “only felt good while moving” (Line 33). Untamed and animalistic, history leaves out their names, thus denying their humanity.