The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures
The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures
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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.
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One reads these essays, not necessarily for the satisfaction one takes in watching Reddy pin down his subject, like a lapidarist netting a butterfly, but for the joy and vivacity Reddy clearly takes in getting there.
Thomas Mar Wee, Antiphony JournalSrikanth Reddy’s latest books include the Bagley Wright Lecture book, The Unsignificant (Wave Books, September 2024), and his book of poetry, Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), which 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.
Publication month: September 2024
ISBN# 9798891060067 (6x8.25, 96pp, paperback)
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