{"id":912,"date":"2014-06-24T22:05:59","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T22:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/?p=912"},"modified":"2014-06-25T06:31:56","modified_gmt":"2014-06-25T06:31:56","slug":"congratulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/congratulations\/","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations, Vijay Seshadri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vijay Seshadri won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry<\/a> for 3 Sections<\/a><\/em> (Graywolf Press<\/a>, 2013).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How did you celebrate?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>My wife, Suzanne, and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which we go to rarely, because it’s so expensive, but like a lot. Also, I smiled a lot.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How is place important to your poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the world, the world I find myself in, is poetic primarily, and my ideas poetic secondarily, in relationship to the world I find myself in. I guess I would say that good poems give us the world, this world, and that’s as true of Sylvia Plath’s poems as it is of William Carlos Williams’s.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What’s your favorite poem?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSong of Myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Which of your own poems is your favorite?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>They’re all my favorites. I don’t think I could make a selected poems. But the one I read the most these days is \u201cTrailing Clouds of Glory,\u201d because of its pertinence to the current immigration debate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

* \u00a0 \u00a0 * \u00a0 \u00a0 * \u00a0 \u00a0 * \u00a0 \u00a0 *<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Trailing Clouds of Glory<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even though I\u2019m an immigrant,
\nthe angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
\nHe unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
\nSome activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
\na gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
\nJupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
\na vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
\na few desultory orgies, a billboard
\nof the snub-nosed electric car of the future\u2014
\nthe inside is exactly the same as the outside,
\ndown to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
\nSo why the angel with the flaming sword
\nbringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
\nand the men with the binoculars,
\nelbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
\npeering into the desert? There is a border,
\nbut it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
\nand plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension
\nbefore erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train
\nto Manhattan yesterday, I sat across
\nfrom a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them\u2014
\ndelicate and archaic and Mayan\u2014
\nand obviously undocumented to the bone.
\nThey didn\u2019t seem anxious. The mother was
\nlaughing and squabbling with the daughter
\nover a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a
\nvideo game together. The boy, maybe three,
\ndisdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face,
\nthe retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
\nHe looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother
\nafter thirty hours of labor\u2014the head squashed,
\nthe lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous
\nwith blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel
\nand into the cold room of harsh sounds.
\nHe looked right at me with his bleared eyes.
\nHe had a voice like Richard Burton\u2019s.
\nHe had an impressive command of the major English texts.
\nI will do such things, what they are yet I know not,<\/em>
\nbut they shall be the terrors of the earth,<\/em> he said.
\nThe child,<\/em> he said, is father of the man.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vijay Seshadri won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 3 Sections (Graywolf Press, 2013).   How did you celebrate? My wife, Suzanne, and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which we go to rarely, because it’s so expensive, but like a lot. Also, I smiled a lot.   How is place important […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":928,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.theurbanrange.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}