My name's Tyler.
I work here as the executive director at the Poetry Center.
I just want to start by thanking the Amazon Literary
partnerships, which is one of our partners tonight.
It's helping support the fall and spring residents here
at the Poetry Center.
So Srikanth is here as our fall resident at the Poetry Center.
We're really excited and happy about that, grateful
for that support to help make this possible
and extend the stays of the poets who
are visiting in the reading and lecture series.
One of the things you'll immediately notice
is that, unfortunately, Suzanne Buffam is not here.
How many people are sad about that?
A lot of us.
I am too, especially Chicu.
Srikanth is sad too.
She's just not feeling well.
So it's unfortunate.
And we miss her very much.
And we'll be excited to have her back here at the Poetry Center
sometime in the future.
I'm saying that on the camera so everyone can hold me to that.
So we're very excited about that.
OK, I'm going to do the introduction
and then we can move forward.
It's my pleasure to introduce Srikanth Reddy to all of you.
He's the author of three books of poetry, Facts For Visitors,
a formally expansive book written
largely while abroad and in the context of a traveller's
state of mind.
And Voyager, a book featuring a galaxy eclipsing satellite
and erasures from the former UN Secretary General Kurt
Waldheim's memoir In The Eye of the Storm.
Some of you will remember that our last resident here
at the Poetry Center, Jen Bervin, who
was here this spring, was also working on an erasure project.
Hers was on John Van Dyke's book, The Opal Seas.
We're excited about how these two things talk to each other.
Both of Reddy's first two books are out
from the University of California Press.
While Facts for Visitors becomes a map
of the foreign and familiar, and explores languages, roles,
and blurring the distinctions between those two things,
Voyager operates more in the mode
of sparse prophecy, a conflicted one at that,
considering Waldheim's damning past
as an operative in Hitler's regime.
A thing to love in Reddy's work, a thing
that I love in Reddy's work, is the way
that it often makes the reader feel two or more things
at the same time.
This is understated in poetry.
And it matters.
Complicated prophecy.
This is something that's complicated, foreign and
familiar at the same time.
I don't mean this as a simple overcrowding
in the reader's head.
I mean in the way that two mutually exclusive
sensibilities find equal and simultaneous stakes
within a single poem.
How highly conditional language--
if this, then this, then this--
share space with short, direct statements
that feel immediate and intimate in their brevity.
How associative layering interplays
with the deep fidelity to the pleasures
of narrative and shape.
One gets the sense in mapping how a contemporary mind might
move through the complexities, tiny wonders, and pressures
of a single day, but Reddy is also simultaneously
able to keep in view what the mind most desires and loves.
Above the friction of our wildness
is the shape we overlay upon it, these poems seem to say over,
and over, and over.
A third book is the collaborative project
Conversities, which he co-wrote with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick,
and which is out from 1913 Press.
His critical book Changing Subjects
was published by Oxford University Press.
The book examines digression as a defining mode
in American poetry, tracing a new line between Walt Whitman
to John Ashbery and beyond.
The book maps the movement of poetic subject
as a method of negotiating the art, history, politics,
and knowledge of the last century
as they mixed in modernity's unforgivable crucible.
Are you excited for the lecture next week?
Excited for the poetry?
Please help me welcome our fall resident here
at the Poetry Center, Srikanth Reddy.