Vijay Seshadri: An American Poet
Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, and was transplanted to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and perhaps as befits a poet-in-making, spent chunks of his youth bumming around in that huge country. It included stints in the Pacific Northwestworking in the seasonal salmon industry in Alaska, and as a logger, both very physically demanding jobsexperiences rare for the ambitious, driven first-generation children of Americans of Indian descent, tending as they do to live within cloistered cultural and social frames. He also was a Ph.D student at Columbia University, in its Middle Eastern Languages and Literature department, before abandoning it and going for an M.F.A. Vijay Seshadri's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, The Yale Review, the Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Enquirer, Bomb, The San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, as well as in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003. He has won many awards, including James Laughlin Award for his books of poems The Long Meadow (2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). The Disappearances is a compilation of poems from the two, and was brought out by Harper Collins India in 2007. He has been the recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and awarded The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony's Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. He teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. Vijay's an American poet, and though Indian poets such as Jeet Thayil praise his poem in unqualified words ("To read him is to enter a room of speed and light and air, where the myths we know and the history we are subject to are made brighter, sharper, more meaningful…") yet it is hard to see how, for South Asian readers unfamiliar with American preoccupations, scenes or idioms, with American life in general, Seshadri's poems will be anything but difficult, even abstruse. In certain poems, however, as in the one reproduced below from Disappearances, they might appreciate an inside job, a rakish, smiling yet deadpan drawing of an American inner city neighbourhood, whose effects not least of all depend on an inside out turning of local lingo ("Thelma, you the man").
Thelma We have a small place on an ugly street,
though we keep it spick and span.
I take the garbage out, but you,
Thelma, you the man brilliant as the velvet eye
setting off a peacock's feather,
rayed as the sun is rayed
through storming, broken weather and gilt-edged clouds. And me?
I strip to my birthday suit
and scream out the window at the Yemeni kids,
who scream back, 'Sharmout!' rolling by on their Rollerblades.
You and me, Thelma, and the little squirt,
with me on the stoop
in my cap turned backward and my undershirt.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments