The Unsignificant - by Srikanth Reddy (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 significance, or insignificance, but "unsignificance." The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Bruegel's Landscape with the 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 errant tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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 mastery--astonishing in its emotional depth, rhetorical facility, formal control, and lightness of touch--inheres 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

About the Author

Srikanth 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.