[APPLAUSE]
Promise to exact some revenge on Chicu.
[LAUGHTER]
Tonight's your night, last night in town.
We're going to miss you.
Thanks, everybody, for coming.
It's nice to see so many people out, such a busy time.
Students, there's grad students, Whitman Circle enthusiasts,
strangers who just wandered in because you
thought there was wine in here.
Hello.
[LAUGHTER]
In conversation with Mark Levine,
Srikanth Reddy said, quote, "Maybe poetry
is where we can weigh our uncertainty
to make sure it's earned and not just an easy way out
of political, emotional, or philosophical problems."
This from the critic and poet who,
if you were here the other night last week,
has been throwing the gauntlet down to his pal,
Chen, who's on trial for war crimes he apparently committed
a couple centuries ago.
Chen doesn't exactly recall, and Reddy thinks this is funny.
This political, emotional, and philosophical uncertainty
of whatever twisty, elusive, and obdurately funny
poems like Emily Dickinson's and Gertrude Stein's might also
be said to be tonight.
One question that both Reddy's prose and his poems seem to ask
is, what sorts of thinking and feeling
can a poem make worth our while?
What else might our not getting it do for us?
Why is this strange little machine
made out of words so pleasing and so frustrating?
Why am I irritated by it, and why am I now reading it
aloud to this person I actually claim to love just
to see if I can make them similarly irritated?
The answer to all of those questions
is, I have no earthly idea.
But Chicu knows, and if you'll
allow me to build this up to impossible expectations,
he is going to share with us the secrets
of his hard-won insights tonight.
A few years back, I was trying to figure out
how to teach poetry when I finally finished grad school
and managed to get a job in Chicago.
So I wrote to a lot of poets smarter
than me to tell me what they did in their classes
sitting around the seminar circles, workshop tables.
Chicu was my neighbor at the time,
so I don't think he had a good way
to say he wouldn't want to be a part of it.
I was walking my dog.
You're going to do this.
Yeah.
Anyways, in his essay in that volume,
it's called Poets on Teaching, Reddy says, quote,
"As a teacher of poetry, I try to encourage my students
to cultivate a fascination with what's
difficult about this art, from prosody's endless demands
to the toil of revision to the psychological challenges
of self-disclosure."
I recently learned the word interoception
from one of my students.
This is the word for your ability, friends,
to feel into your own bodies machinations.
Your hunger, your sleepiness, your digestive needs,
your states of arousal, perhaps.
Not your emotions, exactly, but what
your body is giving you to recognize
at any and every moment of the day as a body.
And then the dim little light bulb went off over my head.
This is exactly what Srikanth Reddy feels
through in the poems he likes.
Let's call it his X-ray interoception skills.
That is, the ways a poem might move
can be illogical, ambiguous, confusing, and even very
occasionally, delightful.
It might arouse, or excite, or beguile, or confuse,
and estrange.
But the ability to tap into this,
and to listen to the pleasure of any poems particular
difficulties, I think that's why we're here.
To be threaded into what a poem might do and say.
To learn about what we need to give up in order to breathe
life into the poem before us.
That it may surprise, or veer off,
or alter us through the bizarre labor of what we actually
brought to the adventure of our reading it.
Now, I'm building this up.
And I'm going to go on for quite a while, so just relax.
[LAUGHTER]
But Reddy's gift is to show us, to demonstrate
before our very eyes, how to fall in love with the pleasures
embedded in those difficulties.
He will show us that it's been us
in our own way the whole time.
And that clunkiness of being a body in a room,
hungry, curious, may not be fatal for poetry.
It might be exactly what we need to overhear Dickinson and Stein
and Reddy listening and talking through the centuries to one
another.
Last night, we were out to dinner--
myself, Chicu, Brian Blanchfield--
and then dinner became drinks.
And I said, Chicu, I have to teach
my big lecture in the morning, and I have
to write your introduction.
He said, forget it.
Have another drink, and just read my bio off the internet.
[LAUGHTER]
That's what he told me.
So I texted him a couple of hours ago.
I said, I'm still hung over, but your intro is done,
you bastard.
[LAUGHTER]
And he texted back.
He said, my dear Josh, what's pain but customizing yourself?
Which would have been funny to me,
except for that it was a line from one of my own poems.
[LAUGHTER]
Srikanth Reddy was born in the world.
He's promised he's going to live at least long enough to tell us
what happens on Chen's wild adventures
through all the books of the dead.
Let us hope that there are many sequels and prequels
and that it does not end, ever.
Tonight, he's here in Arizona with us
to show us how to work his magical X-ray
interoception into the poems of Emily Dickinson and Gertrude
Stein.
I'm excited.
I'm going to sit down and stop talking now.
Please welcome Srikanth Reddy.
[APPLAUSE]