THE BALANCING ACTS OF VIJAY SESHADRI
Arriving early at the limit of understanding,
I managed to find a good seat
—“The Day of the Sun”
in The Long Meadow (Vijay Seshadri)
When asked in an interview about humor in his work, Seshadri acknowledges that satire is an element in his poetry, although not a major one, but that it is “also a technical issue,” suggesting a certain hard-wired necessity:
Technical issues are actually just masks for things that are fundamental to one’s own psyche. It is in my nature that if I make a large statement such as “Arriving early at the limit of understanding” … I’m going to find a way to undercut it rather than go any farther into it and try to do what, say, Rilke did. Rilke would start there, and he would move directly to the sublime. But I could never, ever, in a million years, not feel tremendous irony, and a certain shyness, and a feeling of being abashed, if I continued in that way.1
Consider an instance of this undercutting in the poem “This Morning,” from Seshadri’s third collection, 3 Sections, written in the vein of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, which begins:
First I had three
apocalyptic visions, each more terrible than the last.
The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all.
Then the doorbell rang, and I went downstairs and signed for two packages.
If a poem is like a recipe (to produce a particular sensory experience in the reader), then the apocalyptic vision is a piece of fatty meat, and the having to answer the door to sign for, as it turns out, his neighbor Gus’s packages, is an acidic dressing that cuts the fat to make the dish balanced and palatable. Balance is an important word when considering Seshadri’s poetics, an idea that I explore below.
Returning to Seshadri vs. Rilke, I need to read more Rilke; but from Seshadri’s description of him, Rilke seems like the proverbial dog who relentlessly chases the car (of, in this case, the sublime) and is completely engrossed in the act; Seshadri, on the other hand, like a cat, never quite commits to a single curiosity. A cat’s focus seems to shift easily, from a mouse it’s hunting to a noise in the background, the goal of the hunt itself shifting from finding food to play and back. This
