Reactions to Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors
Srikanth Reddy’s first collection of poems, Facts for Visitors, was eye opening to me through his different forms of poems, borrowing from other authors and sources, various forms and lines, and other unique techniques. He is repeatedly extremely successful in letting his audience into his conscience and allowing them to feel his most personal emotions. Because he strays away from many conventional poems of poetry and did it with such ease, he helped me realize how much of an artistic license we as poets have the ability to manipulate language, and the extraordinary effect it can have on our audience.
It is not always very easy to understand his poetry as he often describes fantastical situations. I believe that in order to appreciate his work, it is definitely necessary to read each poem multiple times. I found that after my first and reading and last reading of each poem, I noticed new aspects each time and began to understand his purpose progressively more. More often than not, the voice he uses is in first person which makes his poems that much more relatable to his audience, and invites them to see the world in the way he wants to portray it
A recurring technique of Reddy’s is to use enjambments as he often does not finish either sentences or thoughts from one line to the next, or one stanza to the next. He often ends lines with a cliffhanger, that only makes sense to the reader once the next line is read. When he does this from stanza, he creates a stimulating flow, with a sense of urgency to continue. I have tried to emulate this in class in the past and after reading many of his poems with this strategy, I realized that the more confusion or fragmentation there is at the end of the line, the more successful he was in employing the enjambment.
One of my favorite examples of this is form his poem On Difficulty:
Suffer yourself to know beautiful women.
Suffer yourself to learn many words
for one thing. Suffer yourself
to elope like a river, suffer yourself
to remain. Are there ways to kill time
without hurting eternity?
Me, I make seagulls from paper.
Once you've mastered the folds (valley crease,
rabbit's ear), everything
tucks itself in. How crooked rooftops
enfold sleeping souls under stars
seems so simple. Pagodas
in traffic lights, birds within birds
without end. When she left, she left me
this note on the table.
I can't make anything of it.
Even more surprising are the lines that seem like they could be finished, but then the next line causes the reader to take a step back and reread the line in its fullness. Generally, Reddy seems to enjoy keeping an aesthetically pleasing form by having the lengths of the lines in a single poem relatively consistent and even. Thus, sometimes he uses an enjambment to keep the balance to the reader’s eye. However, generally, it seems he desires to take advantage of the expectations of the reader’s brain as it recognizes patterns, and disrupt them by breaking up thoughts and emphasizing certain points, ideas, and themes.
Although the actual messages Reddy strives to share with his audience are not always clear, his ability to include phrases that are so visual, one can easily conjure an image in their head is quite impressive. He has simply mastered the “show, don’t tell” goal that all of us have been striving to reach since the beginning of the semester. He draws readers into a sensory experience by providing us with mental snapshots that appeal to the senses. In essence, his images often show his meaning, because we are forced to compare the images in our mind to our own personal experiences, resulting in an emotional connection the poem. Although his use of imagery is not new to poetry as a whole, yet his poems are generally brief and he is successful in creating an entirely new world in just a few short lines. A few examples are “the delicately-woven grass of the scarecrow’s upraised hand where it began to shine and give a little in the gentle unremitting breeze” (Scarecrow Eclogue), “they wipe rice paper flakes and charred moths from benches with a dripping rag” (Thieves Market), and “its eyelids so thin you can see to the pupils beneath, you can see the veins networking under the skin (Canisters).
Reddy is able to inject new life and sentience into all the poetic forms he uses, which range al the way from prose poems to villanelles, exhibiting his versatility. The rhythmic qualities change throughout, as they are sometimes metrical, and even have subtle uses of rhyme. Although he is adept consistently, his prose poems are specifically striking, as it such is a difficult form to master. He is original by reaching his conclusions through his meditative calm thought process, sometimes almost detached. A few of the most emphatic ones to me are Prose, Acid House, and Corruption Raven and Eclipse.”
Although obviously not a new technique, a strategy that I noticed Reddy repeatedly using is personification. Reddy comprehends that his poetry is not the easiest to grasp and he uses the personification to help his readers relate to the concepts that are presented, giving us more complete understandings. He is able to develop a connection between a distant idea or object so that we way me feel sympathy towards it. The fact that these lines stuck out to me makes me want to attempt to develop more of these phrases in my own poetry. A couple of my favorite examples are “moon scribbles white on a dark” (Chariot with Torn Bodice) and “ wind comes worrying the candle tip” (Waiting for the Eclipse in the Black Garden).
Although I enjoyed many of the poems, my favorite one is Fourth Circle:
Fig tree stamped
on the back of a
coin. Sticky fig I
swapped for a coin
in my prime . O
coin I bought with
a coin in my age.
It perfectly displays Reddy’s prowess in being able to accomplish so much in so little space. He uses enjambment as discussed before, to surprise us in the entirety of the flow of words. He uses repetition in a way that keeps the reader wanting more, without being ineffective and overly tedious. In just three short sentences, Reddy left me pondering over the message he strives to tell us in the poem.
There is a constant sense of fluidity, full of visionary verses and dreamlike associations and wordplay, written in a conversational, yet masterful voice. Reddy remains generally optimistic on his outlook to the world, offering endless possibilities about love and companionship. He enjoys using poems to tell stories which helps makes them more accessible. He is able to gracefully approach topics such as politics, death, heartbreak, among many others, without pushing the reader away. Reddy’s originality, cutting-edge, expressiveness, and various resources are all showcased in Facts for Visitors.
