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3 Sections
The long-awaited third poetry book by Vijay Seshadri, “one of the most respected poets working in America today� (Time Out New York)
First I had three
apocalyptic visions, each more terrible than the last.
The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all.
Then the doorbell rang, and I went downstairs and signed for two packages�
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý —from “This Morningâ€�
Vijay Seshadri’s new poetry is assured and expert, his line as canny as ever. In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life—a wayward history, an indeterminate future, and a present condition of wanting to outthink time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of America’s best poets.
First I had three
apocalyptic visions, each more terrible than the last.
The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all.
Then the doorbell rang, and I went downstairs and signed for two packages�
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý —from “This Morningâ€�
Vijay Seshadri’s new poetry is assured and expert, his line as canny as ever. In an array of poetic forms from the rhyming lyric to the philosophical meditation to the prose essay, 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life—a wayward history, an indeterminate future, and a present condition of wanting to outthink time. This is an extraordinary book, witty and vivacious, by one of America’s best poets.
75 pages, Hardcover
First published September 3, 2013
36 people are currently reading
758 people want to read
About the author
Vijay Seshadri
17Ìýbooks39ÌýfollowersVijay Seshadri is a Brooklyn, New York-based Pulitzer Prize winning poet, essayist, and literary critic. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry book 3 Sections.
Seshadri has been an editor at The New Yorker, as well as an essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and various literary quarterlies. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and area studies fellowships from Columbia University.[3] As a professor and chair in the undergraduate writing and MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College he has taught courses on 'Non-Fiction Writing', 'Form and Feeling in Nonfiction Prose', 'Rational and Irrational Narrative', and 'Narrative Persuasion'.
Seshadri has been an editor at The New Yorker, as well as an essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and various literary quarterlies. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and area studies fellowships from Columbia University.[3] As a professor and chair in the undergraduate writing and MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College he has taught courses on 'Non-Fiction Writing', 'Form and Feeling in Nonfiction Prose', 'Rational and Irrational Narrative', and 'Narrative Persuasion'.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
December 12, 2020
I’m suddenly—what’s the word?—bemused.
I’m bemused because I think I’m not what I think I am�
whatever I think I am�
but am in fact an object, a thing,
one more thing that throws a shadow, and has
extension, dimension, limitation. And also the thing that I am
is not a shadow of something else, or a shadow of a shadow
of something else, that’s not the way it works,
but is itself only.
I’m bemused because I think I’m not what I think I am�
whatever I think I am�
but am in fact an object, a thing,
one more thing that throws a shadow, and has
extension, dimension, limitation. And also the thing that I am
is not a shadow of something else, or a shadow of a shadow
of something else, that’s not the way it works,
but is itself only.
December 10, 2020
Picked this up without realizing it won a Pulitzer. Really? It was clever, but clever is one of those words. I'll give him this, he had me going for the dictionary a few times. As they used to say: Word.
May 17, 2020
Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.
...
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
...
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
...
It takes so long for the human to become a human!
He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,
the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.
Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair
but the two together like curettes
and peel back the pitch-black integuments
to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,
sitting on the sketch of a boulder below
his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,
like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.
...
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
...
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
...
It takes so long for the human to become a human!
He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,
the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.
Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair
but the two together like curettes
and peel back the pitch-black integuments
to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,
sitting on the sketch of a boulder below
his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
March 17, 2016
I can not understand how this book won the Pulitzer. I mean, it's good, bit is it that good? I think not, but what do I know! Off to the next one I go.
August 11, 2016
I respond to Seshadri's first-person poems. I don't know if they are "personal" poems because the "I" may not be him, but I can get inside these poems, such as Family Happiness, Knowing, Personal Essay, and Memoir.
Several years ago when I was within the biggest crisis of my life, I sat alone in an near-empty Amtrak station, hollowed-out and despondent, and I picked up an old New Yorker and found Memoir. They say poetry can be a lifeline; this was a lifeline for me.
MEMOIR
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now -
radioactive to the end of time -
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn't peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway.
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
Several years ago when I was within the biggest crisis of my life, I sat alone in an near-empty Amtrak station, hollowed-out and despondent, and I picked up an old New Yorker and found Memoir. They say poetry can be a lifeline; this was a lifeline for me.
MEMOIR
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now -
radioactive to the end of time -
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn't peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway.
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
November 11, 2013
Vijay Seshadri's third collection, and it's well worth waiting for. The book is marvelous, constantly surprising. I enjoyed again the lacerating "Memoir" (which first appeared in The New Yorker) and the three apocalyptic visions of "This Morning" (which I first heard at a PSA reading). "Three Persons" is still a particular favorite. The theme of containing multitudes recurs in different guises throughout the book, culminating in the transformative ending of "Personal Essay," where the faces seen in a trance are themselves and more than themselves. I also love the essay "Pacific Fishes of Canada" and will be sharing it with a colleague who teaches Moby Dick. The book takes many risks in its language--colloquial, mythic, sentimental, scientific--but rides the waves through the energy of its sentences.
Read
April 21, 2022Per usual, I have no idea how to rate Pulitzer-prize winning poetry. The poems I understood, I loved. The others either escaped me or felt purposely cryptic, like high-brow poetry gatekeeping (to be clear, this criticism applies to most Pulitzer poetry. A recent exception would be The Tradition, which was beautiful and challenging in a meaningful way).
Currently reading
April 18, 201519% So far, for me, these translations are the only impressive ones in the collection.
Three Urdu Poems
1. Mirza Ghalib
No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.
If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.
Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.
Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too,
so easily do they break.
You are a laconic marksman.
You leave me not dead but perpetually dying.
I want my friends to heal me, succor me.
Instead,I get analysis.
Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood
are campfires compared to my anguish.
Two-headed, inescapable anguish!�
Love’s anguish or the anguish of time.
Another dark, severing, incommunicable night.
Death would be fine, if I only died once.
I would have liked a solitary death,
not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit.
You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully.
Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?
Three Urdu Poems
1. Mirza Ghalib
No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.
If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.
Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.
Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too,
so easily do they break.
You are a laconic marksman.
You leave me not dead but perpetually dying.
I want my friends to heal me, succor me.
Instead,I get analysis.
Conflagrations that would make stones drip blood
are campfires compared to my anguish.
Two-headed, inescapable anguish!�
Love’s anguish or the anguish of time.
Another dark, severing, incommunicable night.
Death would be fine, if I only died once.
I would have liked a solitary death,
not this lavish funeral, this grave anyone can visit.
You are mystical, Ghalib, and, also, you speak beautifully.
Are you a saint, or just drunk as usual?
December 18, 2015
The smaller pieces here did the trick for me, more than the touted prose of 'Pacific Fishes of Canada,' or the lengthy rumination in 'Personal Essay'. One star docked because some of the poems were only partially accessible, and also because Seshadri sometimes gets cute with reflexive loop like phrases that confound more than illuminate. The one absolute favorite was a poem titled 'Guide for the Perplexed'. There is an excellent musical effect in the middle of that poem, where three cogent declarative sentences are followed by a loopy one that uses the words 'yellower' and 'yellow' more than once to a brilliant effect. This:
The birch log pops in the fireplace.
The fetishes brood on the mantelpiece.
The ice melts in the gin.
And yellower and deeper than dandelion yellow,
yellower and stronger than Moroccan yellow,
the color, almost, of a yellow marigold, is
the yellow silk kimono she wears to greet the floating world.
The birch log pops in the fireplace.
The fetishes brood on the mantelpiece.
The ice melts in the gin.
And yellower and deeper than dandelion yellow,
yellower and stronger than Moroccan yellow,
the color, almost, of a yellow marigold, is
the yellow silk kimono she wears to greet the floating world.
July 14, 2021
Just about this poem:
from “Survivor�
Vijay Seshadri
We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
°Ú…]
So how could you ever win our respect?--
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luckfrom “Survivor�
In this particular poem, he takes an ironic tone to criticise everyday life. While going to the office, coming back home, and seeing that people respect you helping you feel good, you are just a survivor in a world that has been very cruel to you.
Being alienated from this type of lifestyle... the speaker of the poem is too bored and cannot suggest an alternative. Writing poems about a dull moment of our daily routines and how the process of a machinery life has turned us into Robots with no imaginations or a sense of resolution.
from “Survivor�
Vijay Seshadri
We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
°Ú…]
So how could you ever win our respect?--
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luckfrom “Survivor�
In this particular poem, he takes an ironic tone to criticise everyday life. While going to the office, coming back home, and seeing that people respect you helping you feel good, you are just a survivor in a world that has been very cruel to you.
Being alienated from this type of lifestyle... the speaker of the poem is too bored and cannot suggest an alternative. Writing poems about a dull moment of our daily routines and how the process of a machinery life has turned us into Robots with no imaginations or a sense of resolution.
June 21, 2015
Difficult poetry, and because my reading was inhibited by the distractions of travel, I had trouble connecting to Seshadri's sensibilities. I don't think he's insurmountable. It's just that I opted to move quickly through the work rather than making the dedicated effort to climb the ladder of understanding and peer over the wall at the landscape he revealed. A book to try again later.
August 18, 2014
I don't know if the title is intentionally meant to put one in mind of Ashbery's Thee Poems, but I find that Seshadri is another poet much in thrall to the poetic lineage of Stevens > Ashbery. I give this five stars for the especially lovely twelve pages long prose poem piece "Pacific Fishes of Canada." Whether it is, indeed, autobiographical or a story made up in full, it has the heft of authenticity. And one is again reminded of Three Poems in that that collection is comprised of three long prose poems.
December 28, 2014
Prize winning poetry collection that lives up to all the acclaim. The thing that is most striking to me is the strength of every single poem in the book whether they are short one pagers or longer narratives. Another wonderful quality of these poems is the tremendous diversity of subject material from salmon fishing and the international fishing industry to nursing homes and dreams. Every page was a total surprise. If I were to describe this book in one word I would say "fresh".
May 15, 2014
After trying a few times to write something more scholarly to review this poetry collection, I feel the best way thing to say is this was a heaping pile of Pulitzer Prize winning meh.
July 1, 2019
There’s a lot of over-rated poetry out there; I read reviews that promise depth and introspection where the book, upon reading, fails to go beneath the surface and ultimately disappoints. This book does not fall into that category.
I’m confused by the low and middling ratings here on goodreads. This book starts light and then yanks the reader out of ordinary perception into a new way of seeing things. It repeatedly surprises.
Bring your dictionary, or else you’ll miss something. One of the best books I’ve read in years.
I’m confused by the low and middling ratings here on goodreads. This book starts light and then yanks the reader out of ordinary perception into a new way of seeing things. It repeatedly surprises.
Bring your dictionary, or else you’ll miss something. One of the best books I’ve read in years.
August 25, 2018
Can't relate to almost all of it. It's like you can smell that a guy wrote this.
I mean, good for him, but unrelatable for me.
I mean, good for him, but unrelatable for me.
June 22, 2023
Read Harder 2023 - Task #20 ALT
Would have given this 4 stars if not for "Pacific Fishes of Canada," which was boring and out of place
Would have given this 4 stars if not for "Pacific Fishes of Canada," which was boring and out of place
May 30, 2021
I tend to define my poetry-reading experiences based on where the poem(s) fall along two distinct continuums, both subjective: quality and accessibility. I find Billy Collins and Kay Ryan, for example, high quality and highly accessible. The poems in 3 Sections are also of high quality but fall somewhere between the accessibility extremes, hence 4-stars. It's very good, and I highlighted many lines, but I'm hesitant to give it 5 stars because I felt some of it eluded me. Moving on...
This collection contains 33 poems (one about 15 pages long) and an essay and is obviously the work of a talented writer. Seshadri's mastery of the language is beautiful and haunting and precise even when describing the imprecise. There were times I said to myself: "Exactly. That's exactly it." A lovely collection.
"Memoir" and "Bright Copper Kettles" stand out in my mind.
Quotes (unformatted)
"The soul, like the square root of minus 1, is an impossibility that has its uses." - Imaginary Number
"The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations." - Memoir
"He listens deeply into the night, which listens back." - Guide for the Perplexed
"and long ago, on this same planet, you came home to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda, and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room, puzzled at what became of you." - Thought Problem
"You understand what I mean, you others, or understand at least how shocking the obvious can be
if you're not ready for it." - Personal Essay
"when I realize it's not just the story I want that I'm not going to get but that I am not going to get any story at all." - Personal Essay
This collection contains 33 poems (one about 15 pages long) and an essay and is obviously the work of a talented writer. Seshadri's mastery of the language is beautiful and haunting and precise even when describing the imprecise. There were times I said to myself: "Exactly. That's exactly it." A lovely collection.
"Memoir" and "Bright Copper Kettles" stand out in my mind.
Quotes (unformatted)
"The soul, like the square root of minus 1, is an impossibility that has its uses." - Imaginary Number
"The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations." - Memoir
"He listens deeply into the night, which listens back." - Guide for the Perplexed
"and long ago, on this same planet, you came home to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda, and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room, puzzled at what became of you." - Thought Problem
"You understand what I mean, you others, or understand at least how shocking the obvious can be
if you're not ready for it." - Personal Essay
"when I realize it's not just the story I want that I'm not going to get but that I am not going to get any story at all." - Personal Essay
June 7, 2015
I loved this collection of poems. More of these poems are ones I lingered over than in most collections. The poet’s use of language flows easily from one’s mouth. It is more effortless than most by far. I love the poet’s images and the way things are brought together. My favorite poem is Three Persons but there were many other really good ones. There are two really long pieces near the end of this collection. I would call them poetic essays. They are excellent as well. Beautiful collection.
July 15, 2015
Poems in here are funny, poignant, full of big ideas but still personal. This is a collection I would brave recommending even to someone who thinks they don't like poetry. Also - there's a personal essay (maybe it still counts as a poem since it's in a poetry book? idk) about the poet's time spent among fishermen on the Oregon coast and as a researcher out in the Bering Sea - I wasn't expecting that but since I've lived both on the Oregon coast and grew up in Alaska, a pleasant surprise. Very excited to see him read this fall at Rutgers-Newark!
October 6, 2014
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2014. There are two long poems (one in prose) in this book that take up much of its length, but all the poems provide meditations springing from the everyday. Travel takes up much of the thinking and many of the poems are beautiful, intelligent, and inspiring.
February 6, 2015
Some poems are amazing. Some less so. Uneven, but strong in the lines and verses of strength.
April 21, 2015
The soul, like the square root of minus 1, is an impossibility that has its uses.
May 8, 2015
2 star not because the book is not good, it's because I couldn't understand it fully. Whatever little I understood, it was good and different.
August 17, 2018
I.
The page where my interest was lost,
premier and pretentious,
a great grey gust of gibberish.
Phileas Fogged down in the derails.
Do you remember when we named the dog
Indiana? A wooden chalice chosen holy?
On the red line to work the other day
I saw people whose skin color was not
the same as mine, and that didn't tell me
anything deep about who they were
as people. I did not try and imagine
who they were. I did not smugly appropriate
their experiences. Whether or not they're American
is not important. I hope they had a phenomenal day
in the wondrous weather. Unless they're jerks.
Then, I hoped they all stubbed all of their toes.
Last night in the undulating darkness of the thesaurused night
my unconcsciousness theatred a script of fancy.
I shan't describe it to you.
Orwell says happiness can only exist in acceptance.
I am jubilant that this book is not for me.
II.
My eyes are in the text while
my heart is in the kitchen
the bedroom
on a beach somewhere with a better book.
The exasperating sea of prose
summed up by the coda
where the writer admits having nothing interesting to say.
He wins awards for writing about how he doesn't know how to write
beginnings or endings. The middles are choppy, too.
III.
The difference between experience and writing about
experience is more than perspective.
Is more than let me tell you.
Is more than show.
No matter how much I enjoy a turkey
and cheese sandwich, no matter my fascination with
the post-credit adventures in Super Mario Odyssey,
if all I have to say is ass bounce reveals moon
twinkling over top hat
while the crumbs catch in my goatee,
then that is all I should say.
I'm not sure how to start
telling you how much I enjoy
sitting in the solitude of my air
conditioned house collecting purple
snowflakes while the turkey and cheese
sandwich that I am unsure how to describe
sits on the plate whose importance I am having
trouble describing to you reminds me of a dream
I'm not going to tell you about because I lack
the ability makes me wish I was white water
rafting while this book fell behind the shelves,
confusing the lonely spider.
I recommend it for people who enjoy New Yorker poetry, for people who feel deep for reading award winning books, and the kind of people who go way over time reading to bored audiences at open mics.
The page where my interest was lost,
premier and pretentious,
a great grey gust of gibberish.
Phileas Fogged down in the derails.
Do you remember when we named the dog
Indiana? A wooden chalice chosen holy?
On the red line to work the other day
I saw people whose skin color was not
the same as mine, and that didn't tell me
anything deep about who they were
as people. I did not try and imagine
who they were. I did not smugly appropriate
their experiences. Whether or not they're American
is not important. I hope they had a phenomenal day
in the wondrous weather. Unless they're jerks.
Then, I hoped they all stubbed all of their toes.
Last night in the undulating darkness of the thesaurused night
my unconcsciousness theatred a script of fancy.
I shan't describe it to you.
Orwell says happiness can only exist in acceptance.
I am jubilant that this book is not for me.
II.
My eyes are in the text while
my heart is in the kitchen
the bedroom
on a beach somewhere with a better book.
The exasperating sea of prose
summed up by the coda
where the writer admits having nothing interesting to say.
He wins awards for writing about how he doesn't know how to write
beginnings or endings. The middles are choppy, too.
III.
The difference between experience and writing about
experience is more than perspective.
Is more than let me tell you.
Is more than show.
No matter how much I enjoy a turkey
and cheese sandwich, no matter my fascination with
the post-credit adventures in Super Mario Odyssey,
if all I have to say is ass bounce reveals moon
twinkling over top hat
while the crumbs catch in my goatee,
then that is all I should say.
I'm not sure how to start
telling you how much I enjoy
sitting in the solitude of my air
conditioned house collecting purple
snowflakes while the turkey and cheese
sandwich that I am unsure how to describe
sits on the plate whose importance I am having
trouble describing to you reminds me of a dream
I'm not going to tell you about because I lack
the ability makes me wish I was white water
rafting while this book fell behind the shelves,
confusing the lonely spider.
I recommend it for people who enjoy New Yorker poetry, for people who feel deep for reading award winning books, and the kind of people who go way over time reading to bored audiences at open mics.
July 23, 2019
And days afterward, after I have felt the curious release from being human
that these faces give me, and have been
drowned in them and resurrected and drowned again
on the verge of some other sleep, I will be sitting at a meeting
or on the subway,
or in the Greek coffee shop around the corner where I sometimes eat breakfast,
and someone will give me a look, and I will look back
at his or her face and think, Didn't I see that in a trance?
And I did, I did, I did see it in a trance.
4.5 stars. A delighted find after searching Pulitzer Prize winners, stopping after seeing a South Asian name. The poems parse the mind-blowing aspects of existence into the most precise definitions and pieces, from the manufacturing of silk to the almost frenetic energy of Personal Memoir, which takes the unspeakable and unknowable and somehow makes it into prose concrete.
Threes are everywhere- three persons, three apocalyptic visions, three Urdu poems, three sections. The style weaves together the mundane and extraordinary, proclaiming them to be the same. I loved the straightforward writing of Pacific Fishes of Canada, which both gave me chills but also provided a contrast to the rest of the collection, showing me how exactly poetry uses its outsized style to create sentiment. Definitely took some effort to read, though. Still grappling with the technicalities of reading poetry.
Read
July 11, 2020Seshadri's poems in this collection have a subdued quality. They're simple, declarative but something complicated is coursing through them. There's almost an ominous tone -- the passage of time is eating away at everything. He must notice where he is. How his life is passing by. How everything is quiet and calm, but underneath all, something scary is taking place. There's a sense of alienation, an attempt to grapple with the strange existence of everything.
Memoir
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now�
radioactive to the end of time�
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn’t peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
Memoir
Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now�
radioactive to the end of time�
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn’t peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
December 31, 2017
This book has a Jonathan Franzen blurb, and that was probably a good sign re how I'd feel about this.
Seshadri has a huge vocabulary, but maybe too huge ("her perisylvian pathways and declivities / choked by cities, / microscopic mercurial cities / made from her memories." "I can hear her cognition firing." "Don't even get me started on our co-workers, / whose sinuousities are instinct with a prevaricating design." I could go on.). For me, a lot of the poems came across as poncy, arrhythmic free verse ("Stare at a word in a book long enough and that word / slowly uncouples itself from what it means. / The meaning backs away. / The meaning is being evicted from / the structure of glyphs that it has rented. / The meaning of the word is making / dejected, wounded gestures with its hands as it retreats / to the precipice of the incomprehensible, where it gives us / a tender look, then turns and jumps."), and I had a very hard time enjoying anything here or finishing the book.
Seshadri has a huge vocabulary, but maybe too huge ("her perisylvian pathways and declivities / choked by cities, / microscopic mercurial cities / made from her memories." "I can hear her cognition firing." "Don't even get me started on our co-workers, / whose sinuousities are instinct with a prevaricating design." I could go on.). For me, a lot of the poems came across as poncy, arrhythmic free verse ("Stare at a word in a book long enough and that word / slowly uncouples itself from what it means. / The meaning backs away. / The meaning is being evicted from / the structure of glyphs that it has rented. / The meaning of the word is making / dejected, wounded gestures with its hands as it retreats / to the precipice of the incomprehensible, where it gives us / a tender look, then turns and jumps."), and I had a very hard time enjoying anything here or finishing the book.
July 10, 2018
This collection of 34 poems by Vijay Seshadri won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The book includes free verse poetry, lyric poetry, and prose poems. There are poems that reflect Seshadri’s Indian heritage, such as “Three Urdu Poems,� but like Seshadri himself � who moved from Bangalore to America at age five � the preponderance of poems reflect an American experience. Most of the poems are a single page each or less, but the prose poems at the end, such as “Pacific Fishes of Canada,� cover about a dozen pages.
The human and human society, as opposed to nature, takes center stage in Seshadri’s work. Dystopian notions that have crept to the fore in the popular conscious are seen in poems such as “Secret Police.� However, this may be more indicative of a look back to the Cold War, which features prominently in the aforementioned nostalgic prose poem “Pacific Fishes of Canada.� The philosophical meditation also plays prominently in this work.
I enjoyed this little sixty-seven page collection, and found it to be evocative and thought-provoking.
The human and human society, as opposed to nature, takes center stage in Seshadri’s work. Dystopian notions that have crept to the fore in the popular conscious are seen in poems such as “Secret Police.� However, this may be more indicative of a look back to the Cold War, which features prominently in the aforementioned nostalgic prose poem “Pacific Fishes of Canada.� The philosophical meditation also plays prominently in this work.
I enjoyed this little sixty-seven page collection, and found it to be evocative and thought-provoking.
January 13, 2021
The poems in the first section brought on serious feelings -- exhilaration, depression, doubt, connection. This is the book I wish I'd written, I thought. Heady. Playful. Deep. Odd. True. Then Seshadri inserts a well-executed if detached "What I Did One Summer" kind of essay followed by an epic verse that recalls T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (and not in a way that leaves you wanting). Secretly, I wish the book had built on its opening section but maybe that's the book I should write after all. Impressive stuff.
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