Facts for Visitors

New California Poetry

by Srikanth Reddy, Robert Hass (Series Editor), Brenda Hillman (Series Editor)

Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. The prefatory lyric, "Burial Practice," imagines the posthumous narrative of "then’s" that follows an individual's extinction; in the poem "Aria," a stagehand steps onto the floorboards to wax poetic after the curtain has dropped on an opera; and the extended sequence of "Circle" poems obliquely revisits Dante's ethical landscape of the afterlife.

Many of these poems were written while Srikanth Reddy worked for a rural literacy program in the south of India, a fact reflected in the imagined postcolonial world of lyrics such as "Monsoon Eclogue" and "Thieves’ Market." Yet the collection moves beyond the identity politics and ressentiment of postcolonial and Asian-American writings by addressing the fugitive dreams of shared experience in poems such as "Fundamentals of Esperanto." Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2004

About the author

Srikanth Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Times and The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are times when your mind is absolutely, terribly, beautifully opened by new ideas and words and landscapes; this is one. Mark it. This poet is himself, quietly, reminding me of Wendell Berry, yet utterly singular. "I tried to cut through all our hurried centuries, lost in a forest within." Yes and yes and yes. This. This and yes. This is academic, elevated poetry I can read, not the mind numbing boredom of some of the so-called greats. This, this, this. "...that time is like a window opening up the sad patterns of never."

Burial Practice reads like mindfulness practice, meditation practice; the span of time, of the rise and fall of civilizations as he waits for you. This was an assignment in a poetry course I am taking, and it was the catalyst, the impetus the need for change, for transformation of grief, for poetry-therapy. The way we think can be monotonously ingrained into the same neurological channels in our brains, but if we try, if we step outside our comfort zones, the brain is a vast, fertile, changeable part of us. I am loving this poet's view of the world, steeped in his Indian heritage and infused with spirituality and innovation.


Book Three: 16

I tried to cut through
all our hurried centuries,
lost in a forest within.


Men
broke by war
emerged in frightful shape—


more than human
but also less,
they were quite aware,


the sovereign dead,
that time is like a window
opening up the sad patterns of never.


As one they advanced—
Lloyd George
Georges Clemenceau


Adolph Hitler
—through history.
But the past does not follow


so straightforward a path
said I
(predictably in Italian),


and, burning
under their masters,
they proclaimed


the world a pendulum.
It is possible,
but this gives rise


to the often-heard complaint
that repetition is unavoidable.
Still time issues into today,


little fathers.
The years, I believe,
can be shaped with one’s hands.


The world
—its obscure moving fields,
Persian tragedies,


and countries in peace—
I had to inform
that council of the lost,


remains an instrument,
a valve instrument,
which, when waning,


is perfectly clear in the pit
—and, being given
to such classical concepts


as freedom and necessity,
laboriously continued
in the traditional way—


I believe I believe.

Burial Practice


Then the pulse.
Then a pause.
Then twilight in a box.
Dusk underfoot.
Then generations.

—

Then the same war by a different name.
Wine splashing in the bucket.
The erection, the era.
Then exit Reason.
Then sadness without reason.
Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.

—

Then pages & pages of numbers.
Then the page with the faint green stain.
Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded,
is thrown onto a wagon.
Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else.
Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else.
Then the page scribbled in dactyls.
Then the page which begins Exit Angel.
Then the page wrapped around a dead fish.
Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean.
Then a nap.
Then the peg.
Then the page with the curious helmet.
Then the page on which millet is ground.
Then the death of Ursula.
Then the stone page they raised over her head.
Then the page made of grass which goes on.

—

Exit Beauty.

—

Then the page someone folded to mark her place.
Then the page on which nothing happens.
The page after this page.

Then the transcript.
Knocking within.

Interpretation, then harvest.

—

Exit Want.
Then a love story.

Then a trip to the ruins.
Then & only then the violet agenda.

Then hope without reason.
Then the construction of an underground passage between us.

Fundamentals of Esperanto

The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one
sitting.

Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj
(pronounced -oy) & the accusative, -on (plural 0ojn).

Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative
friend & friends.

Adjectives end in –a & take plural & accusative endings to
agree with things.

Ma amiko is my friend.

All verbs are regular & have only one form for each tense or
mood; they are not altered for person or number. Mi havas
bonajn amikojn is simply to say I have good friends.

Adverbs end in –e.

La bonaj amiko estas ie. The good friend is here.

-

A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in
Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in
Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the
International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with
its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth
branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA,
has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where
young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings
by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home
Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old
Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first
feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto.
Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space
on board the Voyager spacecraft.

-

Esperanto is an artificial language
constructed in 1887 by L.
L. Zamenhof, a polish
oculist. I first came
across Fundamento Esperanto, the text
which introduced this system
to the world, as I travelled abroad

following a somewhat difficult period
in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the
railway platform just outside
Warsaw where I had missed
my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit
& dark glasses pushed a cart
piled high with ripped & weathered volumes—

sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing
musical scores & outdated physics textbooks,
old copies of Life, new smut,
an atlas translated,
a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics,
a guide to the rivers &
mountains, thesauri, inscrutable

musical scores & mimeographed physics books,
defective stories, obsolete sex manuals—
one of which caught my notice
(Dr. Esperanto,
Zamenhof’s pen name, translates as He Who Hopes) &
since I had time, I traded
my used Leaves of Grass for a copy.

-

Mi amas vin, bela amiko.
I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough.
There’s a man from Quebec in my head,

a friend to the purple martins.
Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows.
All purple martins are dying or dead.
Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest
these creatures feel the same levels of doubt

& bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity.
While driving home from the brewery
one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program
about purple martins & the next day he set out
to build them a house
in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything,
let alone a house,

not to mention a home
for somebody else.

I’ve never unrolled a blueprint onto a workbench,
sunk a post,
or sent the neighbor’s kid pedalling off
to the store for a bag full of nails.

I’ve never waited ten years for a swallow.

Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting.
Never piped sugar water through colored tubes
to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded
with strong, tired hands.
Never dismantled the entire affair

& put it back together again.
Still no swallows.
I never installed the big light that stays on through the night

to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights,
never rested on Sunday

with a beer on the deck surveying
what I had done
& what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx

while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers.
I have never collapsed in abandon.
Never prayed.
But enough about purple martins.

-

As we speak, Esperanto is being corrupted
by upset languages such as Interlingua,
Klingon, Java & various cryptophasic tongues.

Our only hope of reversing this trend is to write
the Esperanto epic. Through its grandeur
& homegrown humility, it will spur men

to freeze the mutating patios so the children
of our children’s children may dwell in this song
& find comfort in its true texture & frame.

It’s worth a try. As I imagine it, it ends
in the middle of things. Every line of the work
is a first & a last line & this is the spring

of its action. Of course, there’s a journey
& inside that journey, an implicit voyage
through the underworld. There’s a bridge

made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers;
a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors;
a digression on shadows; men clapping

in fields to scare away crows; an unending list
of warships: The Unternehmen, The Impresa,
The Muyarchi, Viec Lam, The Przedsiebiorstwo,

The Indarka, The Enterprise, L’Entreprise,
Entrepeno... One could go on. But by now,
all the characters have turned into swallows

& bank as one flock in the sky—that is,
all except one. That’s how we finally learn
who the hero was all along. Weary & old,

he sits on a rock & watches his friends
fly by one by one out of the song,
then turns back to the journey they all began

long ago, keeping the river to his right.

[Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book begins with a succinct, odd and unobfuscated language set in a poetic do-si-do: "Burial Practice" is a genesis story -- physical, intellectual, then cultural. The poem suggests the poet Srikanth Reddy is a builder. He builds in brick-by-brick phrases -- "pulse" to "pause", a ritualistic "then" starting most lines, almost chanting, and the also-brick-like symbols in the pivotal spaces between stanzas round out the concept. By the first poem he's already invoked the Holy Bible, and before long, he's conjuring Dante's Inferno, William Shakespeare, and maybe Stephen Hawking and John James Audobon. And, we couldn't really be without it this fall, and wouldn't want to -- bees.

Looking further into the pages of the book, there is the curious "Corruption", which we learn is inspired by Saint Augustine, among others. All-'telling', the action and scene tucks inside the process that the writer ever-so-writerly points out. 'Deft' is the word I can use to compliment this piece -- in how Reddy states he will tell a psalm ... which is not a psalm, or wouldn't be if Reddy hadn't asserted that it was. The poem is many things at once, though never one thing entirely.

After some time getting to know Reddy's work, I saw this kind of braiding or woven-ness as a emergent theme. I was taking notes repeatedly asking myself to remember "matryoshkas" or Russian nesting dolls; telescopes to look at the stars, their levels evolving upward into ziggurats of lenses; and the "exploded view" (an idea I remembered from the title of a Sandy Beach poem). I'm more comfortable thinking of it as nesting dolls rather than braids. Here, there are so many seeds inside seeds.

Reddy's rhyme-play and sound-alikes are very prominent. The rhymes and the brick-setting continues in "Loose Strife with Apiary". Reddy writes: "books on bookkeeping, on being, on coping & beekeeping". He suggests that the result of bees' work is "recycled cosmos", figuring pollen as stars, amalgamated. Barring immediate analysis because I'd rather go with the gut than parse: Incredible, brilliant work. Another poem to get that "incredible!" denotation was on page 11 (already) called "Evening With Stars". It has so many atmospheres that layer upon each other -- a case in point, a myth, an apocryphal story, a dream, a lie, a nightmare. Or a truth. The characters in "Evening With Stars" aren't really there, and when they are, they all have animal faces. And they are escaping with treasures into the night. I really do love this poem, and so many others in this collection, that I'm actually kind of giddy from it.

Reddy also has a bit of what is surefire to get me involved in the work: the literary gothic. There is a constant thread (or threat) of decay, of disaster. There is always a cloud looming on the horizon, the campfire at the edge of town after it has been obliterated. The shattering of sense, the retrieval of sense, the regained mutant sense. It is that sense of fore-boding that drives the tension in the work. It plays into that part of us as humans that enjoys watching something become destroyed, or at least to imagine what can't be broken, through time-lapse photography; the evening news; family reunions.

"Facts for Visitors" was a damn good book.

[Michelle Taransky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know precious little of elsewhere.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Corruption
‘I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words I have said remove themselves from expectation & are now held in memory while those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation. The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying. As I speak, the present moves across the length of the psalm, which I mark for you with my finger in the psalm book. The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest ink known to mankind. Every ink is made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink, the color is carbon & the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also composed of carbon & water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end, the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to adopt sepia. Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish. One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.’

32 Scarecrow Eclogue
‘Then I took the poem in my hand & walked out
past the well & three levelled acres
to where the sugarcane built itself slowly to the songs of immature goats
& there at the field’s shimmering center
[...]
How it shone in my withdrawal,
worksongs rising
over it all. So then I said the poem aloud,
my version of what the god dressed up as a charioteer said
to the reluctant bowman
at the center of the battlefield.

How he spoke of duty, the substance
of this world,
& the trembling armies ranged.’

50 ‘Are there ways to kill time
without hurting eternity?’
[...]
Once you’ve mastered the folds (valley crease,
rabbit’s ear), everything

tucks itself in.’

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phew! I've known about this poet for years, but didn't check out his work until this month. Exceeded my expectations. Reading this book feels like unearthing an ancient text. Something biblical that brews from within. It's lost in time, dabbling with both parable and myth. I'm obsessed. 6 out of 5 stars.

[Matt Maielli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I know precious little of elsewhere.”

perhaps this one’s a bit too academic for me — felt like some of it went over my head. But he still writes unlike any other poet I’ve found, so I don’t mind too much.

[sushiladybug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of my favorite poetry collections of all time

[Choo En Ting · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm afraid I will never be lonely enough."

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a lyric!

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Chicu Reddy, briefly, at a poetry reading in Boston whereat he autographed my copy of this book. This is great stuff. Reddy injects new life into all the poetic forms he uses, which range from the prose poem to the villanelle. He is truly a versatile poet. No matter what form is he using at the time, Reddy makes poetry seem so easy and fluidly flowing and *fun* that reading this book will make you want to sit down and write prose poems and villanelles of your own. This is limpid, beautiful, visionary verse, full of dreamlike free associations and joyous wordplay, written in an authoritative yet conversational and all-too-human voice. Reddy's vision of life in the Information Age is a fundamentally optimistic one, and his poetry will leave you feeling that poetry is far from dead, and life is yet full of possibilities.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an innocent(seeming) tendency toward storytelling and clarity of feeling in these poems that I find very endearing. They are neither sentimental nor cynical, precious nor abstract, and they fill that middle ground (where my favorite poems reside) nicely. I also appreciate the poems' rhythmic qualities, sometimes even metrical, and their subtle use of rhyme. But I have a thing against villanelles; they hardly ever (with a few famous exceptions) seem necessary, just, good. And here, too.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, I really liked this book. In this collection, Chicu displays a soul and sensibility that is lacking in most contemporary poets. His poems are heavily felt and still accessible. "Scarecrow Eclogue" is a perfectly composed poem.

As good as this book is though, it's not the radiant masterpiece that some would claim it is. Still, an excellent beginning by one of the best of the new generation.

[Bradley Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

"By point / ing or performing simple gestures it is possible to communicate / everything necessary to carry on living. A finger upraised is the firma / ment. The hand extended palm forward means blessing or stop."


An excerpt from, "Sixth Circle"

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is so good i think writing another book is going to be hard.

[Colleen Coyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not biased because he was my advisor, I swear - Reddy's poems just have an eloquence and precision of language that is rare in many younger poets today...

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of expansive poetry that covers the largest and smallest of matters effectively and beautifully.

[Cemalec · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the tone throughout this book, of facts transformed into emotion, and vice versa.

[Jamie]

Curious to see more. Loved the first few poems, love the words/ink to reality analogies, but want to see more done with them.

[Lacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed most of these poems and found quite a few lines to be thought provoking and sticking.

[LaRaie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't make anything of it

[Ilias · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated his wordplay and the sense of narrative in his poetry, along with the references which tied the whole book together. I especially liked the long poem in the middle. I wish I knew more about the circumstances of the poems. I'd be interested in reading prose by this author.