WEBVTT

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My name's Tyler.

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I work here as the executive
director at the Poetry Center.

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I just want to start by
thanking the Amazon Literary

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partnerships, which is one
of our partners tonight.

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It's helping support the fall
and spring residents here

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at the Poetry Center.

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So Srikanth is here as our fall
resident at the Poetry Center.

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We're really excited and
happy about that, grateful

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for that support to
help make this possible

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and extend the stays
of the poets who

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are visiting in the
reading and lecture series.

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One of the things you'll
immediately notice

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is that, unfortunately,
Suzanne Buffam is not here.

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How many people
are sad about that?

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A lot of us.

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I am too, especially Chicu.

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Srikanth is sad too.

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She's just not feeling well.

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So it's unfortunate.

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And we miss her very much.

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And we'll be excited to have her
back here at the Poetry Center

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sometime in the future.

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I'm saying that on the camera
so everyone can hold me to that.

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So we're very
excited about that.

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OK, I'm going to
do the introduction

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and then we can move forward.

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It's my pleasure to introduce
Srikanth Reddy to all of you.

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He's the author of three books
of poetry, Facts For Visitors,

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a formally expansive
book written

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largely while abroad and in
the context of a traveller's

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state of mind.

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And Voyager, a book featuring
a galaxy eclipsing satellite

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and erasures from the former
UN Secretary General Kurt

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Waldheim's memoir In
The Eye of the Storm.

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Some of you will remember
that our last resident here

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at the Poetry Center,
Jen Bervin, who

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was here this spring, was also
working on an erasure project.

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Hers was on John Van
Dyke's book, The Opal Seas.

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We're excited about how these
two things talk to each other.

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Both of Reddy's first
two books are out

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from the University
of California Press.

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While Facts for
Visitors becomes a map

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of the foreign and familiar,
and explores languages, roles,

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and blurring the distinctions
between those two things,

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Voyager operates
more in the mode

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of sparse prophecy, a
conflicted one at that,

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considering Waldheim's
damning past

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as an operative in
Hitler's regime.

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A thing to love in
Reddy's work, a thing

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that I love in Reddy's
work, is the way

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that it often makes the
reader feel two or more things

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at the same time.

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This is understated in poetry.

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And it matters.

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Complicated prophecy.

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This is something that's
complicated, foreign and

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familiar at the same time.

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I don't mean this as
a simple overcrowding

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in the reader's head.

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I mean in the way that
two mutually exclusive

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sensibilities find equal
and simultaneous stakes

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within a single poem.

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How highly
conditional language--

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if this, then this, then this--

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share space with short,
direct statements

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that feel immediate and
intimate in their brevity.

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How associative
layering interplays

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with the deep fidelity
to the pleasures

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of narrative and shape.

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One gets the sense in mapping
how a contemporary mind might

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move through the complexities,
tiny wonders, and pressures

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of a single day, but Reddy
is also simultaneously

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able to keep in view what the
mind most desires and loves.

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Above the friction
of our wildness

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is the shape we overlay upon it,
these poems seem to say over,

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and over, and over.

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A third book is the
collaborative project

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Conversities, which he co-wrote
with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick,

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and which is out
from 1913 Press.

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His critical book
Changing Subjects

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was published by Oxford
University Press.

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The book examines digression
as a defining mode

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in American poetry, tracing a
new line between Walt Whitman

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to John Ashbery and beyond.

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The book maps the
movement of poetic subject

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as a method of negotiating
the art, history, politics,

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and knowledge of
the last century

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as they mixed in modernity's
unforgivable crucible.

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Are you excited for
the lecture next week?

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Excited for the poetry?

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Please help me welcome
our fall resident here

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at the Poetry Center,
Srikanth Reddy.

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