Editor-in-chief Su Ertekin-Taner sat down with poet, editor, and professor Srikanth Reddy. Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, and The Washington Post; he is the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. The recipient of fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Reddy is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His book of lectures on poetry and painting, The Unsignificant, was published by Wave Books in Fall 2024.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I. At the Engine Level Room of Writing
Su Ertekin-Taner: Can you tell me about all of the buckets of things that you do? I’m thinking about your work as a poet, your professorship at UChicago, and your editorship at The Paris Review.
Srikanth Reddy: You’ve covered the buckets pretty well. I guess I might add dog owner and father of a 16-year-old daughter to that list. But poetry-wise really, I just try to write poems whenever I can—which is easy to lose sight of in relation to other things like my teaching here at the University of Chicago, where I’ve been since 2003, and my editorial work at The Paris Review, which is also a big part of my days working with poetry. I do some book editing as well. I’m an editor at the Phoenix Poets Book series at the University of Chicago Press; we publish four books of poetry a year, and I work with three amazing co-editors: Katie Peterson, Douglas Kearney, and Rosa Alcalá. We also publish one book of translation every other year in addition to those four books of original contemporary poetry each year. So with all of that, my poetry plate is pretty full. And I do try to find time to write poetry now and then.
SET: Let’s talk about your poetry. I’m wondering how the process of constructing a line has changed for you across your poetry books: Facts for Visitors, Voyager, and Underworld Lit. How does it mutate in your prose works, like your lectures in The Unsignificant?
SR: I think the line is a kind of a problem or a cross that every writer has to bear in the making of poetry over their lifetimes. The act of discovering what poetry is and what a poem is—the line is the field where that happens, or the scale of making where that happens. Now, there have been long periods of time when the prospect of writing a single line of poetry felt so utterly impossible to me–either I just stopped writing altogether or I found myself trying to re-enter into poetry through the back door by writing prose and calling it poetry. Prose poetry has been a big part of that push and pull of negotiating the poetic line from the beginning for me. My first book includes prose poems, but also poems that are fairly prosodically wrought or deliberately constructed, lineated verse forms like terza rima or the villanelle.
So in relation to your secondary question about writing in prose genres like the essay, I’d say wrestling with the poetic line has made me think about the unfolding of language, within the conceptual scheme of word order and syntax, a lot more carefully–maybe a little too carefully for my own good because it seriously slows down the process of writing prose. I find that thinking as a poet is something that’s hard to shut off when you’re writing prose. And so, when I write an essay or the lectures in The Unsignificant, the sentences are being thought through poetically in the placement of one foot, one metrical foot or one cognitive foot, after another.
SET: It’s interesting you view writing prose poems as entering poetry through the back door. Do you feel as if writing prose poems cheats the art?
SR: I think everyone who writes a prose poem has that Emily Dickinson in the backseat of the car being like, what happened to enjambment, dude? But actually when you write a prose poem you trade one dilemma for another, and the line break as a caesura or a turning in the language just gets swapped out with the problem of the imaginative leap from one sentence to the next. In a prose poem that’s exciting. Each sentence ending should be torqued just like a line break. The next sentence shouldn’t follow in a prosaic fashion. Extending that leap from one sentence to the next in the prose poem also makes one a more dynamic writer in other prose genres like the essay and maybe fiction too–if I were ever to write a short story or a novel.
SET: I’m wondering what qualities of poetry you employ in your prose. Is it a spatial or visual quality you take, like an interest in formatting or how a phrase looks on the page? Or do you find yourself employing the sonic qualities of poetry in your prose? Maybe, it’s some other quality entirely.
SR: Everything that you’re thinking about as a poet is of concern when you’re writing prose too: sound, rhythm, word order, and so on. The focus, for me, isn’t so much the look of the language but the sound of the language. Of course, when you’re writing a prose essay, many things occupy the foreground more than when you’re writing poetry, like argumentation. When I’m writing prose, reasoning drives the language as much as–or more than–music or sound. Whereas when I’m writing poetry, sound drives everything, sound guided by reason or by feeling. To continue that backseat driving metaphor, it’s a question of who’s in the front seat and who’s in the back seat.
SET: I’m also curious about form. Interestingly, when I searched up your name to do research for this interview, a biography of an architect of the same name popped up, which felt very appropriate because you’re quite a prolific architect on the page. So many of your books are roaming and liberal in their form. Facts for Visitors comprises terza rima, the villanelle, and prose-poems. Voyager punctuates prose poems with free verse. How does form come to you? And what does approaching poetry through multiple forms allow?
SR: I’ve got to look up this architect because usually the other Srikanth Reddys who pop up when I Google myself daily are corrupt politicians or anesthesiologists. But I think form, and the things we’ve been talking about earlier–sound and thought–are also all driven by feeling, at the engine room level of writing. One thing I’m finding more and more with form is that it’s an expression of a particular kind of feeling. There’s a prose poem kind of feeling. There’s a villanelle kind of feeling that’s maybe more recursive than a prose poem kind of feeling. And there is, I guess, a kind of erasure feeling. Those are very vague, broad ways of thinking about form, but I think once you find a form for the affective condition that’s the ground of creativity for you–whether it’s anger or love or fear–then writing starts to happen very quickly.
And the interesting thing about the form is how you start to discover what it was that you were feeling in the first place through engagement with form in the real-time of writing. So it’s not really a one way road. The poem begins to act on you as you work your way through it. For example, the erasure form–if erasure can be called a form, maybe it’s more like a technique–emerged for me from a period of real melancholy I was feeling about not being able to write in the face of political developments in the world. That was during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the post-9/11 world. Writing a line of poetry, as a form, was no longer available to me. So I began to experiment with ways of making by unmaking language from Kurt Waldheim’s memoir, oddly enough. I think if you were to ask any number of writers about different formal engagements or formal work that they’ve done, at bottom, you’d find it would be a story about what they were feeling.
SET: Form, then, seems to be very threaded with time for you. Would you say that you’ve outgrown any forms?
SR: That might be a fairy tale every poet tells themself, probably every human who’s forced to write seasonal haiku when they’re in kindergarten tells themself. You spend the rest of your days thinking haiku is a kind of a baby form; it’s small. But when I return to forms that I think I’m no longer going to be animated by, they come alive in all kinds of unexpected ways, at different stages in my life. Reading Bashō now is still one of the most exciting things for me–and in some ways, now, as I get older and I read Bashō’s great haiku from the end of his life, haiku feels to me like an old man’s form, not like a children’s form.
Here’s another example. The sonnet was a form that really interested me when I was first getting into poetry; I wrote lots of sonnets and love poems in sonnet form in college. Then it receded into the rearview mirror, and I didn’t really think about sonnets for a long time unless I was teaching poetry to undergraduates here at UChicago. I didn’t really think I was ever going to dip my toes in that form again–and now today, I found myself writing sonnets. It just happened by accident. I started writing lines and was trying to find a way for them to hang together and lo and behold, I looked at the end of the poem and I was like, oh, this is 14 lines long. Let’s do another one. So form finds you even when you think you’ve left it behind.
II. Figure-Ground Relationships
SET: Talking about form makes me think of poetry as an art negotiating the figure-ground relationship. The poet debates what to prioritize on the page and what to leave off the page, the feelings to spare for later. Is this something that you think about ever? Do you think about yourself as an artist, as arranging figure and ground on the page?
SR: All the time. Another way of telling the whole story of artistic making is by thinking about figure and ground–not just the poem as a figure you’re making against the ground of language or the ground of silence, but also the poet as a figure against a (social, or environmental) ground who is in turn making their own figures in the ground.
That’s why, for me, the backgrounds of works of art are always so engrossing. The background is where you can see the artist making a decision about what doesn’t belong in the foreground. But the figures in the background are also not omitted entirely from the artwork, right? They occupy this strange place that tells you something about why art cannot just be all one figure. Maybe art itself is not a solitary figure, or an autonomous thing in the world, but something that exists in a complex set of relations, or relational space, just like we do.
And oftentimes, if you are temperamentally disposed to be a poet, you probably feel like you are a figure in the background of life, observing the artwork from within–at least that’s how I’ve kind of always felt, and I’m most comfortable that way. We can leave the foreground to the Donald Trumps, or maybe to the Buddha.
SET: Or the various other dictatorial Srikanth Reddys in the world.
SR: Maybe that architect Reddy.
SET: You talk about figure-ground relationships in The Unsignificant with reference to the W.H. Auden poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. As I read the lectures, I found myself thinking that the figure-ground relationship is so pertinent to erasure poetry specifically. Erasure poetry requires one to consider all of the background, the gestalt and then carve to make the foreground. Can you talk to me more about how you engage with the background in erasure poetry?
SR: It’s funny as we’re talking on Zoom, there’s this picture behind me that I couldn’t help looking at in my own background. It looks like little black marks on a white field, but actually each one of those little marks is a head of a bird. It’s a little tiny drawing of the head of a bird, and that’s where my mind went when you were asking about erasure.
When I was using Kurt Waldheim’s memoir as the linguistic ground for making that book, Voyager, I think that’s when I really started to think about questions of figure and ground in a new way. Waldheim’s memoir is actually not a background, it’s all figure. It’s the story of the Secretary General of the United Nations, flying from one global political crisis to another–during the Iran hostage crisis and the border conflicts between India and Pakistan and turmoil in sub-Saharan Africa and all over the world. [To take] that geopolitical story, which is also a dreary bureaucratic document of a political fraud, and make it into a background or ground and to try and find figures within it that were poetic–that was the idea. To find what Henry James calls the figure in the carpet, those little faces you see in the whorls of wood paneling, or (I think they call them pareidolia) when you see the Virgin Mary’s face in a grilled cheese sandwich–that’s the way figures began to emerge from the ground of Waldheim’s memoir.
It involved a kind of reversal of figure and ground. What was the figure of his memoir became the background of making something new. I’m always entranced by art that manages something like that reversal. Conceptually you could say Bruegel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, stages that reversal of figure and ground, but also there are also works of art like quilts that take pieces of other beautiful objects and then assemble them into a new kind of thing that makes us think, what is the figure? What is the ground? Where does the art begin, and what is its dimensionality in relation to me?
SET: Waldheim was exposed as a Nazi after his tenure as UN Secretary General, which makes me think about all the ways it must have been uncomfortable to engage with his biography. When has it been uncomfortable or troubling to engage with background for you?
SR: In some ways, that raises questions of political complicity. One thing that was troubling me when I was writing, or erasing, Voyager was a feeling of being unwillingly complicit with a lot of things that I didn’t want to be part of. I mentioned the invasion of Iraq. But I think probably any writer who has a moral conscience will feel that way about any number of things, whether it’s late capitalism, or if you’re a religious poet, forms of evil or collective life that one doesn’t want to belong to. And that feeling of complicity that I think anyone ought to feel at some point acutely in their lives–and maybe should always feel acutely in their lives–is a feeling of being part of a background that one wants to step out of.
Then you also get caught in the problem, if you’re a poet, of not feeling very comfortable being an autonomous agent in the world who’s affecting change because as a poet, one also dwells in uncertainty and is afflicted by uncertainty. A poet isn’t the gendered kind of ‘man of action’– at least the poets I love aren’t. I guess there probably are a lot of poets who are politicians or military generals–you know, Mao wrote poetry. But that uneasy place somewhere between the background and the foreground is probably where one is consigned to dwell as a writer.
III. The Duration of Art
SET: You delivered a talk at Columbia in February which I attended, and there was something you noted that stuck out to me. In describing your poetic process, you said that you like to find words and images that “glow with cosmic weirdness.” How do you go searching for nodes, images, words that appear in your poetry? Where do you find them?
SR: There’s a pathology one can fall into as a poet: endlessly questing after or searching for words that “glow with cosmic weirdness.” For me, what really blows off the top of my head, as Dickinson would say, is when a poem or a word that seems utterly ordinary begins to glow with that aura. When a word like “when” suddenly breaks over you like a wave of otherworldliness, that’s when I feel close to what poetry is in the world. Some book titles or titles of poems can give me that feeling. Fanny Howe, the great poet [who] just died a few days ago, wrote a book called Gone, but I never really thought much about the title until Fanny’s death just a few days ago. And then that word “gone” feels almost unbearably beautiful to me in a new way. Even though it’s made of language, poetry at its deepest actualization as art estranges us from language and makes a word like “of” feel like an unbelievable miracle of existence.
SET: Though the word “gone” might be a newfound consideration for you, katabasis feels very important to a lot of your works, but particularly Underworld Lit and Facts for Visitors, for me. You’re interested in what appears on the surface and how exactly we can get below it. I’m wondering how often you think about death and life and legacy, and in what capacity?
SR: Maybe I’ve been saying this about all of your questions, but it feels like it’s the question. And the answer is always. You mentioned my first book of poetry, Facts for Visitors, and my last book of poetry, Underworld Lit, but for me in many ways the book in between the two, Voyager, is a katabasis from beginning to end. I don’t think of it as a heroic journey. I think of it as a condition we’re all born into and live daily.
There’s a reason why katabasis is a psychological and psychiatric term. Just this morning as I was walking my boston terrier around the block I found myself thinking why do poets oftentimes talk of “the dead”? That phrase “the dead” can feel awfully pretentious and ponderous–like a poet is invoking the actual life worlds of people who no longer exist in a way that’s almost parasitic, to secure some kind of cultural prestige or authority for their work.
I mean, that’s an awfully cynical way to describe what’s probably a very admirable sentiment in so much discourse around the dead. But it struck me like a little mini thunderbolt as I was walking the dog–I think one reason “the dead” are so compelling is because we are all “the dead”… in not too long. So that’s a community we have membership in, an advance membership. All art probably emerges from some subconscious or conscious registration of that membership. Otherwise why make art? There’s so many other things we can do. We can be hedonistic animals or spend more time with our family or do more worldly things. I think that awareness of mortality drives every poem.
SET: Is katabasis something that you are going to be thinking about in your future poetry? And in tandem with that, what forms are you thinking about now?
SR: Well, I’d rather not think about dying. It’s an unfortunate affliction but a universal one. And I don’t mean to be so existentialist about art either. The awareness of mortality is just an awareness of duration. And that awareness of duration doesn’t have to be emotionally attached to fear; it can invoke different kinds of feelings of acceptance, or of hope, or of understanding. And so, for me, right now I’m just trying to put one line after another. And every line that happens is an experience of the duration of art. And that probably relates to a lot of other big picture questions too.