Finding the Strangeness in the Everyday: A Conversation With Srikanth Reddy

For this installment in a long-running series of interviews with contemporary poets, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Srikanth Reddy. 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 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. His book of lectures on poetry and painting, The Unsignificant, is available now.

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Peter Mishler: What is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?

Srikanth Reddy: Everything about poetry is strange to me, including the simple fact of its existence. We ordinarily think of, and use, language as a form of communication—I want X. A is not B. But poetry is language moving beyond communication—something more than I want X, or A is not B—and this “extra-communicative” language’s innumerable forms, effects, our investments in it, and our delusions about it, all leave me speechless.

But maybe the strangest thing about poetry, to me, is how it makes other things strange. That will be a familiar idea to anyone who’s read Viktor Shklovsky’s great essay “Art as Device” in college or elsewhere—poetry makes something as ordinary as a stone feel “stony” to us all over again, astonishingly, by finding new language for things. Shklovsky called this poetic effect ostranenie, or estrangement. It doesn’t just happen with stones. It can make language, or the world, or ourselves, strange again, too. Wallace Stevens arrived there by the end of his great little poem “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”: “And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

PM: Can you think of a moment, an image, an experience, something fleeting or concrete that you remember from childhood or youth that you think in some way presages that you would become a poet?

SR: When I was six, my family moved from the city to the suburbs of Chicago, where for reasons beyond me I began first grade at a small private school called “The Oak Brook Christian Center.” (I transferred into the public school system the next year). My parents would drop my sister and me off there quite early, on their way to work, and I’d read Bible stories or plunk out “Jesus Loves Me” on the piano. It was a strange place for a South Asian kid from a non-Christian family to find himself more truly and more strange.

I remember one day we were playing “Cowboys and Indians” with those colorful little injection-molded plastic figurines during the school day. It wasn’t going well for the Indians, as usual. I burst into tears, to my own surprise, and to the surprise of my classmates, all very sweet Midwestern boys and girls. They kept trying to console me. “But you aren’t that kind of Indian!” It was all very confusing, and embarrassing, and I couldn’t stop crying, even while my playmates tried to make me feel better. There’s a lot to say, of course, about the misalignment of Indigenous cultures with South Asian populations in this bizarre historical slip of the Western tongue. But I think something about that slippage of language, which left the six-year old me adrift between unbelonging and identification, might have presaged that I’d become a poet.

PM: Could you talk about your first encounters with Stevens? What was your perception of him then and how has your reading of him developed up to the present day? I wonder what of his work you feel has remained a part of yours or your reading of poems, what have you abandoned, and what new readings occur to you more contemporarily?

SR: The first Stevens poem I ever read was “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” from Harmonium; my high school English teacher, Tom Carey, introduced us to it:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

It’s funny, I now see the word “strange” at the heart of the poem after all these years, and it reminds me of how Stevens’ language awakened me to the strangeness of the ordinary; it’s an unrepentant aesthete’s critique of everyday life in all its societal complicities and imaginative failures, animated by a drunk old sailor’s spectacular, private, dissenting dream. (It feels important to me that Stevens’s literary proxy for the poet is a wayfarer, a drunk, asleep, and old, too). In that respect, the poem feels political to me. All those interlocking negations—none are green, or purple with green rings, or green with yellow rings—aren’t just about fashionable color combinations, but interlocking configurations of possibility.

It seems like Stevens is a somewhat unfashionable poet today, because of his insistent skepticism about many political claims for art, even amid World War II and the social upheavals of his time. But he’s also central to so many poets I love, like John Ashbery, and sometimes in surprising ways—Susan Howe’s been writing and talking about him with an almost religious devotion in recent years. He’s one of those “pure” poets who continually insists that poetry is about pleasure, the pleasure in and of language. But there’s a deep pain in the language, too, that makes one recognize the pleasure in pain and the pain intertwined in pleasure. It’s a very Keatsian commitment to language and sensation, or language as sensation, that feels so mysterious and resonant to me. I wish I could write from that place.

PM: I think that you do. But I’d like to hear what you mean. What barrier do you perceive there?

SR: That’s a difficult question, because it makes me think about the writer I’m not. I’ve always felt that writers like Dickinson or Keats are essentially sound artists. You can feel the pleasure of sound—not the imperatives of argument, or narration, or even expression—guiding the making of the poems as you read them: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness.” And interestingly enough, that linguistic pleasure is maybe most apparent when they’re writing about painful subjects. (That’s why Dickinson can compare her own nerve pain, so pleasurably, to “a Panther in the Glove”).

Of course the poems are also arguments, or narratives, or expressions, but the poets I love most find ways to subordinate their own sovereignty over the work of art to the law of sound time and again. They never relinquish that sovereignty entirely—there’s always an “I” or some other form of identity moving through sound. But these writers discover something unexpected in their psyches’ passage through the mysterious material of language. It’s immensely pleasurable to feel sound as material in language-use—from “Erthe toc of erthe erthe with woh” to “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!”

So that’s one of poetry’s deepest dimensions to me. But there’s another aspect to the art that I feel more connected to personally, for better or worse. It’s the way that a poem can make the whole world feel more fully present than ever before in the span of a few syllables. Haiku’s a great example. You could call it the “worlding” dimension of poetry. Haiku does this in a couple of lines, and epic uses (many) more lines—but they’re both finite linguistic forms that hold open a door to something beyond form. I think that may be the kind of poetry I’m more inclined to write—or miserably fail to write—after my own fashion. Of course, all these facets of art-making touch on one another in the end. It’s not like you’re either a sound-poet or a worlding-poet or somehow exclusively defined by whatever else primarily draws you to the art form. (Sound, after all, is the way the world enters into art if you’re a poet). Probably just writing poems is how you figure out what kind of poet you are.

PM: How do you begin making lines?

SR: The line is the most perplexing and exciting formal intervention to me when it comes to poetic making. Every time I think I finally have a feel for it, it falls apart on me. That’s why I turned to erasure for my second book. I just couldn’t write a single line of poetry on my own anymore; it felt like a totally absurd thing to try to do. (Part of that had to do with a profound embarrassment about what I felt to be my own shortcomings as a writer looking back on that first book, and part of it had to do with the world falling apart after 9/11). So instead of composing or writing or sounding out lines, like I did in my first book, I began to find or assemble or “erase” lines in Voyager. I’m kind of bipolar as a writer, I’ve come to see. I had to veer from writing to erasing as a way to make poetry at that time in my life.

Then with Underworld Lit, I sort of tossed out the line altogether and dove into prose forms. Of course the line never really disappears in prose poetry, just as sound doesn’t disappear when you’re doing an erasure. (I erased ‘by ear’ when writing Voyager). Lineated writing surfaces throughout Underworld Lit—but those poetic lines find their way in through the back door of the book, in the form of fill-in-the-blanks quizzes and other cultural forms. Mostly I was exploring the architectural possibilities of the sentence as it moves through long-form serial prose narration in that book.

Now I’m back to the line again, with this adaptation of the Indian epic the Mahabharata that I’ve just started. And surprisingly, I’m finding it to be quite absorbing to fashion these 16-syllable lines (very loosely) modeled after the Sanskrit sloka into English-language couplets about an ancient war that I first read about in ‘mango pickle’-stained comic books my uncles used to bring to me from India as a child!

PM: I want to ask you about this adaptation. But let’s go back first to that phrase you used earlier, “adrift between unbelonging and identification.” I wonder if that observation you made about your six-year-old self has any resonance for you now? 

SR: There are so many ways to be adrift in the world today—so many political and historical tragedies of collective or individual displacement. But I don’t feel displaced so much as misplaced, really—it’s more an absurd than a tragic condition. Part of that has to do with my own socioeconomic privilege growing up. My parents were physicians, and we were always well off, as opposed to other immigrant or refugee minorities in Cold War America. My problem was assimilation, not survival. So my own issues with identity, belonging, and so on in the US always felt slightly silly or preposterous compared to the massive suffering and political struggle of so many in the Global South that my parents ‘escaped’ in the wake of decolonization.

Like so many others, maybe everybody, I do feel “adrift” historically—but I feel adrift in a peculiar, slapstick sort of way. Slapstick is made possible by an underlying sense of safety or security underneath all the danger and precarity; we can laugh when Chaplin’s skating on the edge of a precipice because we know he won’t fall. I myself can only explore the tragic histories of decolonization, diaspora, and migration in a comic register—maybe tinged by melancholy at the knowledge of the suffering others can’t escape. It’s a dark comedy, or a dark commedia, that opened up in the writing about underworlds in the last book.

PM: Could you say more about what you mean, “opened up?”

SR: I keep circling back to my childhood when I think about your questions—I’m not very knowledgeable about psychoanalysis, but I do think a lot of poets’ work is shaped by their early years. So I guess I’d say the underworld opened up for me as a boy—at that age when adventure and dread and violence and fantasy are the fabric of everyday life, and also when everyday life can be so deeply boring that you desperately need childhood’s forms of escape from ennui to simply survive. For me, reading and games offered that kind of escape from a gated subdivision in the American Midwest where my family had no historical connection to the larger community beyond a fragile network of immigrant families. I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons and early computer games with names like “Wizardry” and a pre-gubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian.

But the underworlds in that fantasy world were just contemporary outposts of far deeper and older underworlds of course—the underworlds of Greek, Norse, and other mythologies. And meanwhile, I was learning about the world of ancient Indian mythology from those pickle-stained comic books my uncles would bring over in their suitcases from Andhra Pradesh—stories and gods I almost believed in. So all of that opened up an underworld I moved in and out of throughout my childhood, not always as a place of fear and reckoning, but often as a form of escape. And I kind of left that place behind as I started junior high and got into sports and developed crushes and so on a few years later—but then much later I found the underworld opening up underfoot once again in mid-life, when I was diagnosed with cancer while I was going up for tenure with a small child. Suddenly the movable stacks in the basement of the university’s research library felt a lot like those pixelated labyrinths on my Apple IIe from the early 80s.

PM: One of the most terrifying aspects of Underworld Lit is that estrangement you mentioned at the beginning of our interview, a painful defamiliarization with the world and a clawing back to the world through what I think is the imaginative resource and pleasure that reading and the exploratory nature of your writing seems to be for you. You had said “I wish I could write from that place: “language as sensation” and “pleasure in pain and pain intertwined with pleasure.” It seems to me that Underworld Lit accomplishes this very deeply. Finding resonance in Nightmare Moon has some Stevensian power in it, no?

SR: Well it’s easier to talk about Nightmare Moon, or My Little Ponies more generally speaking, than about my own “painful defamiliarization with the world,” as you so aptly put it! I think the two are probably related—through my experience of parenting (and sometimes failing to parent) my daughter Mira, who was a toddler at the time of the book’s writing. Maybe the most urgent and disorienting drama of early childhood is just that problem of finding yourself lost in a world that suddenly feels frighteningly unfamiliar—and the etymological sense of unfamiliar as ‘non-familial’ obtains here as well. That’s what’s so scary about the pony sister’s transformation into Nightmare Moon in the “Friendship is Magic” TV series I watched with Mira a few too many times for my own taste while I was writing Underworld Lit. Family becoming an enemy is every child’s nightmare, and every child’s reality.

Trying to guide Mira through that time in her life, when the everyday world could transform without warning into something that felt like a little girl’s nightmare—(maybe a friend stopped speaking to her, or maybe she learned about tsunamis that day)—all of that made me feel less alone in my own estrangements and alienations as a cancer patient, as a young professor without tenure, or as a spouse who wasn’t always emotionally present to his partner during these difficult times. It’s funny, we think about how guides in literature like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno make the protagonist feel less alone on their journey; but oddly enough I felt that guiding my daughter—even as I sometimes failed to guide her—made me feel safer amid the precarity and uncertainty of that time in my life. Writing about parenting became a way of “clawing back to the world” even when I hadn’t always succeeded as a father. Now that Mira’s old enough to read the book, I wonder what she’ll think of all this—

And then there’s the curious connection that popped up, somehow, between Nightmare Moon and Horse Face—the psychopomp, or demon-guide, through the Chinese underworld—in the book. But I think I’d need the services of an analyst to unpack all that.

PM: I wonder how you see your adaptation of the Mahabharata as an extension of what you’ve explored across your artistic career thus far? Or at least post-Underworld Lit? 

SR: Maybe I’ll have some sense of an answer to that question long after I’ve finished this new book. I’ve always wanted each of my books to feel like a first book—unencumbered by the style or form or subject matter of the book before it. It’s a kind of fantasy of self-reinvention, I guess. So I wanted to do something very different from the lyric forms like terza rima and villanelles in Facts for Visitors when I jumped into the book-length erasure of Kurt Waldheim’s memoirs in Voyager—but even just looking at the titles of those books, they’re obviously coming from the same place in all sorts of ways. Then I felt like I was doing a 180-degree turn from the impersonal and procedural project of Voyager when I embarked on the auto-fictional narrative writing of Underworld Lit—but of course there are many ways that book picks up threads from the journey through subtexts and underworlds in the erasure too. So probably the Mahabharata adaptation will, in retrospect, look like a continuation of Underworld Lit—and Voyager, and Facts for Visitors—by other means. But I can’t see it now!