Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy 2004 Reviewed
by Craig Morgan Teicher
Amidst echoes of W.S.
Merwin and the kinds of religious texts which are his sources, and somewhere in
the wide shadow of Jorie Graham, we find Srikanth
Reddy’s debut Facts for Visitors. Reddy’s imagination is populated by
scarecrows and gryphons, and is the kind of place in
which a torture victim begs to be “strapped…back on that wheel” while
whispering sweet nothings to his “darling.”
It is a dismal if, at times, slightly perverse country, but a whimsical
one as well, enlivened by self-effacing humor (“…women
are few when ones lives in this manner”).
Reddy is a storyteller with a disjunctive bent, clearing a space for
what comprises our turmoil—uncertainty of purpose, vague guilt, a sense that
barely discernable forces are ever-exerting pressure—in the timeless ether of
poetic myth, a place far too few young poets have been visiting of late. Reddy has fashioned a world as haunting,
pleasurable and lasting as any to come into view in years.
The
character who speaks these poems (and it is important to note that this is not
the poet speaking but a kind of invented truth-hungry lay-philosopher) has
gathered fragments of information—pages from old journals, half-torn or burned
pictures, whatever is left—and from these he extrapolates the rules of the
world where he finds himself, which is sometimes familiar (though no less
surprising or appalling), and sometimes totally uncertain. In “Corruption,” Reddy says, “The present is
a word for only those words which I am now saying,” alluding to a couple of his
basic tenets: Reddy’s Facts are born
of articulation; whatever is said is true.
Also implicit is the fleetingness of this kind of knowledge—language,
which has the power to create, speaks the truth for only as long as it takes
for more convincing language to replace it.
The consciousness of Reddy’s poems is ever-speculating,
ever-contradicting and ever-revising itself; what results is a speaker with the
vocabulary of a philosophy student and the vulnerability of a precocious
child. “Corruption,” a prose poem (of
which there are many well-crafted examples in Facts for Visitors), continues:
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 know 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…
Underlying this cool academic tone is the
fear that the same increasingly uncontrollable cyclone of information (digital
and otherwise) which is rapidly bringing “…the history of ink…to an end…” will
do away with us as well. The speaker’s
panic is quietly figured as an associative drift—if he doesn’t know enough
about psalms to speak about them for long, he can combat that loss of control
by continuing to discuss whatever he can.
This sense that articulation is the only means of stalling our own
effacement is finally Reddy’s principal subject. The same associative drift, from psalm to
squid to glowing fish, is also indicative of Reddy’s sense of humor, which is
dark and dry, and laced throughout the book like a subtle spice.
Essentially,
these poems are dramatic monologues—some of my favorites in this genre by a
young poet—which rely on accessible and quickly established narratives to carry
them. Narrative is both a virtue and a
crutch for Reddy, who is capable of implying an extended story in only three
lines—take his bare-bones “Sonnet” as an example: “You sent me a crate in a
crate with a note saying bury this./ So I struck off with my shovel & never
came back./ When the digging was over, I buried my shovel”—but never, at least
in Facts for Visitors, writes a
discursive poem in which a plot and ventriloquism are unnecessary. I do wonder if he is capable of a lyric
without a story, and yet, the story-teller in Reddy is a welcome respite from
so much poetry which steadfastly turns inward toward only its own words. Still, in the fragmenting spirit of
contemporary writing, many of Reddy’s subjects are veiled, as in these lines
from “Evening with Stars,” one of Reddy’s finest and most inventive poems:
It
was light…
…
I had the houseboy bear it
into the sunroom…
…
I returned sometime after
to examine it. A pair of monkeys
were hoisting it over the threshold
toward a courtyard of fireflies. When I shook my fist
they dropped it & I settled down at
last.
It
was gilt. It was evening with stars.
Where
there should have been a latch, a latch
was painted on…
…
It
was light. I could see
in the middle distance a bone priest
picking his way through crop rows
toward the wreckage of an iron temple.
…
Here,
on a cistern, a woman
keeps nursing her infant.
She us unwell.
The
workmanship is astonishing.
You
can pick out every lesion on her breast.
Mostly,
I am alone.
This illusive and ever-changing “it,” which
acquires the luminosity of the whole night sky and then the intimacy of the
nursing scene, slips through the mind like a wet bar of soap, figuring the
ungraspable nature of information itself, which, as is the case in
“Corruption,” always gives way to other information. The speaker struggles to find something
definitive and irreducible amongst all this slippery language,
renaming the object again and again (“It was gilt. It was evening with stars…It was light…”),
becoming more emphatic about putting its particulars into words until, by the
end, the view is close enough to see “every lesion on her breast.” The poem’s retreat into generalization (“The
workmanship is astonishing”) and then the conclusion that no one else can share
this experience (“I am alone”), seem, finally, to be
the only verifiable truths given the speed at which the imagination informs and
alters perception.
Reddy
zooms in on his fanciful subjects like microscopes toward slides of soil or
water, which grow more haunting and intriguing as the lens gets closer. Take these lines from “Jungle Book,” in
which a friend offers a metaphoric explanation for sadness:
“First
learn about jackfruit,” he said,
handing
me a ripe one. It smelled heavy and
delicate,
like my friend. “Break it.
What do you see?”
“Only these seeds,” I said, “& all exceedingly small.”
…
“Break one,” he said.
“Now what do you see?”
I split open a seed with the edge of my thumbnail,
cupped it in the palm
of my hands & squinted…
…
There
was a very small tree
folded up inside, with
one pale leaf on a stem
the length of an
eyelash. It sprang to life
& put out hundreds of jackfruit blossoms all at once
but when I started
to speak they blew everywhere.
The saddest lesson a jackfruit can teach
is that things are likely to proliferate, overwhelm and evade explanation when
subjected to linguistic scrutiny. As the
fruit sheds layers, both the friend and the fruit seem to promise some final
revelation, but the blossoms silence the speaker (“…when I started to speak they
blew everywhere”) as if their truest revelation is that all revelations, like
the interminable number π, can, at best, be approximated crudely. The cost of articulation, which is our only
means of bridging the gap between ourselves and others, is the painful
realization that “Mostly, [we are] alone.”