The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award–finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015.
True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it’s not about—not the logical proofs of philosophy but the affective flux of poetry. The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Brueghel’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus,” Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots, or Galileo’s drawings of the moon. Ranging from pictorial backgrounds in visual art to portraiture and similes to the poetics of wonder, The Unsignificant embarks on an unsystematic, errant, and eccentric tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present.
Arvustused
Reddy's bravery as a poet lies in his humbling acquiescence to a process that leads to such uncomfortable truths how can we judge the dead, who "do not cease in the grave" and whose lives cannot help but serve as the material for shaping our world? How do we make the world different when we are faced with the dilemma of our essential sameness? By making a poem that is a new world out of an old text, Reddy invites us to imagine how we might remake the world out of our grievous histories.Los Angeles Review of Books
Elsewhere," to Reddy, is that place about which we never know enough. We pick up its signal in snatches of extinct, invented, or arcane dialect. Reddy's masteryastonishing in its emotional depth, rhetorical facility, formal control, and lightness of touchinheres in his marshalling of these snatches and bursts into fresh and unforgettable art.Boston Review
Each time Reddy destroys the current state of the poem, a new one emerges, postponing annihilation.The American Reader
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Contents
The Unsignificant
Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink
Wonder: A Syzygy
Selected Bibliography and Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Srikanth Reddys latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of Americas T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harpers, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, and The Washington Post; he is currently 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.
