Birth— 1954
Where—Banglore
Raised in— Columbus, Ohio
Education—Columbia University
Currently— Brooklyn

Bibliography

• 3 Sections: Poems (2014)

• New and Selected Poems

• The Long Meadow (2004)

• Wild Kingdom (1996)

Poet, essayist, and critic Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to the United States at the age of five. He earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University.

Brooklynite Vijay Seshadri’s life has taken him from his birthplace of Bangalore, India, to a childhood in Columbus, Ohio, a stint in the fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest, a Ph.D. from Columbia, and then to learning poetry and language in Pakistan.

In the citation for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, the committee called Vijay’s book 3 Sections, “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”

His famous poem “The Disappearances”  came in the aftermath of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. That poem summoned up, with acute poignance, a typical American household and scene—“the day is brilliant and cold,” a child in the yard, “poking a ground-wasps’ nest”—in the wake of the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 1963:

On a day like any other day,
like “yesterday or centuries before,”
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore—
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before—
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.

The combination of epic sweep (including the quoted allusion to one of Emily Dickinson’s Civil War masterpieces, from 1862) and piercing, evocative detail is characteristic of the contribution Seshadri has made to the American canon.

This is you at the doorway, unobserved,
while your aunts and uncles keen over the body.
This is your first river, your first planetarium, your first Popsicle.
The cold and brilliant day in six-color prints—
but the people on the screen are black and white.
Your friend’s mother is saying,
Hush, children! Don’t you understand history is being made?
You do, and you still do. Made and made again.

Appreciative readers of Seshadri’s poems can recognize his expert assimilation of American poetry from Frost to Lowell, Bishop, and Ashbery, their tutelary spirits resplendently alive in a tradition he himself is significantly shaping with his own alchemical brand of poetic magic. Now he has joined their company on the list of winners of the Pulitzer.

Seshadri has been an editor at The New Yorker, as well as an essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and various literary quarterlies. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and area studies fellowships from Columbia University. As a professor and chair in the undergraduate writing and MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College he has taught courses on ‘Non-Fiction Writing’, ‘Form and Feeling in Nonfiction Prose’, ‘Rational and Irrational Narrative’, and ‘Narrative Persuasion’.

3 Sections
Vijay Seshadri
3 Sections, Vijay Seshadri’s fourth collection of poetry, encourages the reader to question what constitutes a poem. The forms here vary greatly and include a prose lyric essay. Such variety allows one to stretch his or her poetic definition, prompting the question: when does it stop being a poem?