Editor-in-chief Su Ertekin-Taner sat down with Vijay Seshadri. Vijay Seshadri is the author of five books of poems, including 3 Sections, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, That Was Now, This Is Then, and many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
1. Fundamentally Poet
Su Ertekin-Taner: Can you talk about all the buckets of things that you do? I’m thinking of your criticism work, independent poetry writing, and professorial duties.
Vijay Seshadri: I’m a poet fundamentally. Lately, though, the past few years, I’ve been writing prose exclusively, memory fragments that I’m putting together into a memoir. I also teach and I write criticism, and I’ve written lots of reviews and essays. A kind of smorgasbord not uncommon among poets.
SET: Lovely! There’s certainly a creative through-line there.
I want to talk a bit about your poetic influences. In interviews, you’ve pointed to Proust, Urdu poets, William Blake, and Elizabeth Bishop as influences. But really, I’m much more interested in the peripheral influences in 3 Sections. For example, in “Imaginary Number,” you’re pulling from the mathematical concept of the impossible number. In “Nursing Home,” you mention a brain disorder called normal-pressure hydrocephalus. How do you put your finger on peripheral influences? Where do you find them and how do you decide to incorporate them into a poem and recently prose?
VS: A lot of this work is subconscious and springs from the random or undirected intellectual activity of a writer or a poet. I’ve always informed myself, mostly out of the sheer pleasure of knowing things, about science and the facts of the world around me, the natural world, the social world, and images can come unbidden out of that intellectual engagement. I can’t really give you a clear account as to how the mechanism of my imagination works. It’s not as if I go to a specific set of subject matters to master and then somehow incorporate into my poetry. I don’t think it works that way in any artistic circumstance. The process of assimilation and dissemination of knowledge in a poem is mysterious to me, but the data of the world is important to my writing. And I keep acquiring data in order to, you know, reinforce the writing.
SET: It’s latent then?
VS: The connection between creativity and consciousness is something that has been given a lot of attention, though without the attendant clarification.
SET: I’m curious also about 3 Sections as a book of division. What meaning should we derive from the text’s structure and specifically, from its manufactured division?
VS: Three is a magical number. All of my poetry books tended to fall into sections in my mind when I was putting them together–and they have, the other books, numbered sections. 3 Sections itself has one very long poem, one large piece of prose, and some lyric poems. I saw that amalgam, and I thought why don’t I just give the book a conceptual title–a title that denotes its form rather than represents in some way its meaning. It’s self referential in the most basic way, as if one called a book one wrote A Book . And I was committed to it for that reason.
There is also the implicit question as to whether formal structures, such as the simple divisions in a book, can actually reflect meaning, can delineate the self. The self as it’s rendered in prose is a little different than the self as it’s rendered in poetry. That different aspects of the self emerge through genres is an important element of the three sections, I think– that the self is somehow determined by the way, and by the materials through which it’s articulated. Whether it’s prose or a long discursive poem, or a set of lyric poems.
SET: How do you imagine that the self is articulated differently across forms? Is one form more clarifying than the other? Does one threaten to omit more?
VS: We contain multitudes. So it’s just a question of accommodating those multitudes. And the multitudinousness is expansive. I was thinking of the sections in terms of conic sections, which contain circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas. The title just refers to the three different kinds of writing that are in the book, and there are no section breaks, of course, which is meant to be ironic.
SET: In that the borders are contrived?
VS: Yes. Or rather they hover between the arbitrary and the inevitable.
2. Energy is Eternal Delight
SET: I want to talk about New York Times columnist David Orr and his reading of your poetry. Orr wrote in the Times that That Was Now, This Is Then felt zig-zaggy, referring to the jagged enjambments that drive the poetry’s rhythm.
Similarly, while I was reading That Was Now, This Is Then, I felt that your poetry operated through destabilization. I’m wondering what you are trying to destabilize through your poetry, if anything. More broadly, how do you understand destabilization in your writing?
VS: I think what I try to do is create fields of energy, and movement within those fields of energy. The twists and the turns that have been identified in my poetry involve reversals that follow the patterns of a field of energy, a field of movements. I will make transformations and leaps that are pretty large in the poems, and will move from one way of developing to an entirely different way of developing. But those movements are a part of the pre-existing logic of the poem, the logic of its energy.
There might be a sleight-of-hand experience in the poem, but the motivation is the underlying movement, and its pleasures.
SET: When I think “energy,” I think of these vibrating moving orbs. Is that how you imagine the energy you’re talking abou?
VS: There’s a tension developed between the line, which moves horizontally across and then the sentence, which moves down. When you’re writing a poem, you’re harmonizing, half-consciously, the relationship between those opposing movements and the multiplication of effects has to do with the fact that this is happening in time. And, of course, words have their own energy, which attracts or repels other words. Rhythm is movement. Those things are part of a process of energy organization that is central to the aesthetic experience. Blake says, famously, that energy is eternal delight. That’s a touchstone for me: creating energy on the page.
SET: Has the vocation to create energy on the page, as you say, always been a touchstone?
VS: I never thought about it consciously, but I think, yes.
SET: I’m interested in your take on margins, not so much in the sense of para-text as experiential margins. What is going on in the margins of–or in between–your poetry books’ publications? That is to say, what is your process of creation?
VS: My books of poems have come out slowly. And that’s basically because I write mostly poems that don’t get finished. The ratio of unfinished to finished poems on my hard drive is about ten to one. An enormous amount of fragmentary, unseen material in the body of my work. And the poems that I finish have a very high finish.
I think that’s kind of crucial to their appreciation. I guess there aren’t margins in the sense that you are looking for them– poetry as being somehow marginal to the actual activity of my life. It’s just that a lot of the poetry making is invisible and it only becomes visible in those books, but it’s always ongoing. It’s always central to my activity and my existence and the condition I find myself in. The engagement with reality takes this specific form, but the underlying process is universal. People are always walking around making meaning, whether they describe what they’re doing in that way or not. It’s the activity of consciousness and its relationship to materiality, and that expresses itself in me through poetry.
3. Socializing Literature
SET: I want to reference your essay signing off as poetry editor of The Paris Review. In the essay, you look back on your personal history with literature. There’s one quote specifically that was striking to me. It reads, “I’ve come to realize how much literature was the means by which I socialized myself into this country and its civilization.” How do you feel you’ve socialized with literature?
VS: Literature is a doorway to other people’s experience. If you come from an immigrant background like I do–we came here when Eisenhower was president, but we were never not immigrants– and you don’t really have a fixed place in society, but you have the benefit of your imagination, you forge an identity with the benefit of your imagination rather than with the help of the social order, and literature is a means by which to do that. Literature allows people to move from the particular to the universal, which all of us share. Think the Stoic idea of the Republic of Letters, where we are all citizens. You might or might not feel that you belong to the political entity you find yourself in, but you can always belong to the Republic of Letters. When you read Pride and Prejudice, you identify with Elizabeth Bennett, whoever you are. It’s something that everyone who reads that book shares, and that’s a process of socialization too, which literature makes possible.
SET: Do you hope that people socialize with your writing? If so, how?
VS: I don’t know that I think about that. I assume they’re experiencing the world as I experienced it if they are reading me, having the experience of my consciousness and, thereby, having the experience of their own consciousness. I think the way you enjoy a poem is the way you enjoy a story or the way you enjoy a film, you know. For me, I don’t see that much of a difference between these genres as far as audience response. And that the real activity is a sort of profound entertainment, entertainment on a profound level, seems to be crucial.
SET: What is that quality, that factor, that unites these genres of art for you? In what way are these arts distinct from other intellectual activities, for you?
VS: When you say write a paper in a class governed by scholarly study, what you’re doing is amassing research and then abstracting from that research by developing arguments and propositions. You’re moving from the concrete to the abstract. In the writing of a poem, you’re doing the opposite. You’re taking a generalized idea and making it concrete and specific, making it immanent. You’re taking something that’s metaphysical somehow and making it physical, giving people images and rhythms and significant detail.
Making the abstract concrete is the activity of all art – whereas making the concrete abstract is the activity of scholarship and science and thinking generally. Knowledge is acquired and conclusions are drawn from that knowledge, a bunch of knowledge. That is what science does. Art does the opposite. It’s fairly simple in that way. No ideas, but in things, William Carlos Williams says–that everything has to be made into a thing somehow.
SET: Do you imagine that same movement from the metaphysical to physical in your prose writing? Or is that something that you feel is reserved for your poetry?
VS: Prose writing is so driven by narrative, and that movement naturally happens with narrative. The narrative itself shapes, physicalizes.
SET: My last question: What is next for you? What is latent now that you are working to bring to the surface?
VS: I’m finishing a book now that is a memoir, of sorts. I might continue to write prose for a while but I want to get back to poems, too. And, of course, I have all sorts of ideas I’m pursuing, only a few of which, given my process, will get realized. But that’s OK.