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.

"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"--

Contents

The Unsignificant

Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink

Wonder: A Syzygy

Selected Bibliography and Works Cited

Acknowledgments