Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri visits Southeast

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri visited Southeast students and faculty on Sept. 29. The event was sponsored by the Dorothy and Wedel Nilsen Visiting Writers Series and Southeast Missouri State University Press. The presentation began with an introduction from Dr. Susan Swartwout, Southeast Professor, publisher and editor with the University Press.

Seshadri is the author of three collections of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize with his book “3 Sections: Poems” in 2014. His other two collections include “The Long Meadow,” which is a James Laughlin Award-winner, and “Wild Kingdom.”

Seshadri started his presentation by stating he would have visited campus without payment, because he loves to associate with people of the world and talk about politics.

Seshadri read several poems from his collection, including the unpublished piece named “Commas, Dashes, Ellipses, Full Stops, Question Marks.” This poem comes from his not understanding why he was summoned for jury duty but was never picked. Seshadri said in his 36 years of living in New York he would be sequestered every five to six years and after hours of sitting and waiting they would call his name and time after time tell him he was not selected, so the final time of this happening he finally decided to write a poem about his frustration of not being selected.

“For the 100th time I have been called but not chosen, for the 100th time I have to shuffle into the subway station at J Street,” he said in the poem.

“The Trailing Clouds of Glory,” the second poem he read, is his reaction to the Arizona Immigration Laws of 2010. The laws stated all persons thought to be an immigrant could at any time be searched for proof of citizenship.

Seshadri said the name of this poem came from William Wordsworth, a major English romantic poet from the 17th century, who wrote a poem called “Intimations of Immortality.” The line states, “trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.”

“The meaning of this is the migration of the soul into the body subsequent entrapment of the soul in materiality, so it loses touch with kind of its divine origins,” Seshadri said.

Seshadri connected with his audience by trying to have his poems resonate with today’s news. The first one was in reference to the elections and the second one also political. Also, to enlighten his young audience, he said the end of the poem was a nod to Robert Burton, who was a great Shakespearean actor during the early 1900s and was married to Elizabeth Taylor. The last line of the poem, which he said was in the voice of Burton, was “I will do such things, what they are, yet I know not. They shall be the terrors of the earth, he said. The child, he said, is the father of the man.”

His third poem was called “Surveillance Report” and was about the surveillance state of America. This poem took the audience to a place that was dark and full of mystery with someone running through the city as their chronometer quickly ticked down. The end of the poem reads: “Alternatively, I could be on a beach somewhere.”

Seshadri ended his presentation with two poems he said help him deal with the passings of his parents called“Collins Ferry Road.”

“I met him up there, how did I get here, he asked. How do I get back, where do I go now?” the poem said in tribute to his father. “Your Living Eyes,” said, in tribute to his mother, “We will hitchhike to the painted hills and hop a freight back home.”

Seshadri ended with a question and answer session and a book signing.