Vijay Seshadri | |
|---|---|
 Seshadri in 2014 | |
| Born | 13 February 1954 Bangalore, India |
| Education | Oberlin College (BA) Columbia University (MFA) |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Poetry |
Vijay Seshadri (born 13 February 1954) [1] is an American poet, essayist and literary critic based in Brooklyn.
Vijay won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for 3 Sections .
Vijay's parents immigrated to the United States from Bangalore, India when he was five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University. [2]
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'. [3]
In a 2004 interview, Seshadri discusses the creative process and his influences, in particular Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Blake. He also reflects on his cultural influences including the experience of "strangeness" coming of age in Columbus, Ohio during the 1960s. [4]
Several of Seshadri's poems have been published by the New Yorker, including: "Rereading" (2012), "Visiting Paris" (2010), and "Thought Problem" (2009). [5]
His poems, essays, and reviews have also appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Epiphany, Fence, Field, Lumina, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Ploughshares, Poetry, The San Diego Reader, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, the Times Book Review, TriQuarterly, Verse, Western Humanities Review, The Yale Review.
Anthologies which have included his work include Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Under the Rock Umbrella, [6] Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times and The Best American Poetry 1997, 2003, 2006, and 2013.
Seshadri's poem "The Disappearances" deals with a "cataclysm" in "American history" and the baffling nature of loss. [7] The poem was written in response to Seshdari's memories of John F. Kennedy's assassination, but not published until The New Yorker magazine printed it on its back page following the September 11 attacks. [8] The New Yorker's poetry editor, Alice Quinn, said that the poem "summoned up, with acute poignance, a typical American household and scene [...] The combination of epic sweep (including the quoted allusion to one of Emily Dickinson's Civil War masterpieces, from 1862) and piercing, evocative detail is characteristic of the contribution Seshadri has made to the American canon." [9]
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| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| The estuary | 2020 | Seshadri, Vijay (1 June 2020). "The estuary". The New Yorker. Vol. 96, no. 15. pp. 32–33. |
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I thought it was unfortunate but it was unfortunate in a way that was ambiguous. The poem made me more well-known than I had ever been. It appeared on the back page of the New Yorker at a time of national crisis. Lots of people read it, and I always felt uncomfortable about the situation of the poem, but it was quite deliberate on the part of the New Yorker. The editors understood that the poem moves toward a historical cataclysm and then moves beyond it. It takes in loss and it makes the historical personal somehow. There was a serendipitousness about that poem's being published when it was, and that wasn't odd so much as mysterious. It was a particularly intense period where people felt loss and grief. I've been told by friends and students who read it then that it answered to the feelings of that moment for them—and it also rose to the Kennedy assassination, which was the last time in American history where people felt the same sort of profound instability. I think it was legitimate that it was published at that time. The only thing that bothers me is that people would think I would write in response to 9/11. I mean, I don't think I could have written a poem in response to 9/11 to save my life. I was just too shocked.
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