A talk about how energy is organized in prose and poetry by means of basic units—the line, the phrase, the period, and the sentence—and how these units expressively deployed create rhythm and life independent of sense and meaning, and how they conspire with sense and meaning to create literary experience.
Vijay Seshadri: BA, Oberlin College. MFA, Columbia University. Author of Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, The Disappearances (New and Selected Poems; Harper Collins India), and 3 Sections (September 2013); former editor at The New Yorker; essayist and book reviewer in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, and various literary quarterlies. Recipient of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, James Laughlin Prize of the Academy of American Poets, MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize; grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; and area studies fellowships from Columbia University. Sarah Lawrence, 1998–