The importance of being earnest

Vijay Seshadri is known best not for poetic prophesies but for tapping the pulse of a city and a people. The 98th annual Pulitzer Prize in the poetry category reconfirms the status of this Bangalore-born American poet in the canon of American poetry. While the award has clearly brought him into the limelight, he is still sceptical about what change it might bring. What difference will this award make? “I wonder,” he answers simply.

His work has been published in the exalted pages of The New Yorker for the last 25 years, where he made an indelible mark with the poem The Disappearance (October, 2001) published after 9/11.But Seshadri won the award for his recent book 3 Sections , which the Pulitzer committee commended for being a “compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”

Boondock saint While Seshadri today is the chair in writing at the Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and former editor, essayist and book reviewer at The New Yorker ; who has written for the world’s leading publications, his early years were rather desultory. In an email interview he talks about working in the fishing industry for five years in the Pacific Northwest. He toiled on the boats, worked as a low-level biologist for the national marine fisheries service, even as a salmon buyer. “It was basically a young-man-runs-away-to-sea type of thing, and I had a wonderful time,” he says.

Homeland ties Born in 1954, he moved to India at the age of five with his family, while the “physical connections,” with India, are “tenuous,” his south Asian heritage does appear in some of his work, and as he reiterates, “the culture, the attitudes, the perspectives all came with us.” To glimpse a poet, it is probably best to read his verse. In Thought Problem , ( The New Yorker , 2009) he writes, “How strange would it be if you met yourself on the street? / How strange if you liked yourself, / took yourself in your arms, married your own self, / propagated by techniques known only to you, / and then populated the world? / Replicas of you are everywhere.”

Seshadri avows that the American poets of the late ’60s and early ’70s urged him into the world of poetry. He elaborates, “Poetry was a real embodiment of all the new energies surging through America, perhaps its fullest embodiment. There is a lot of great work being done now, but then poets seemed, to me to be at the centre of culture. I became a poet because I fell in love with certain poems when I was young.”