Srikanth Reddy: The Unsignificant
@ Seminary Co-op Bookstore
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Wednesday, October 23rd, from 6PM - 7PM
Srikanth Reddy discusses The Unsignificant. He will be joined in conversation by Edgar Garcia. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award–finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015.
True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it’s not about—not significance, or insignificance, but “unsignificance.” The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots, or Galileo’s drawings of the moon. Ranging from pictorial backgrounds in visual art to portraiture and similes to the poetics of wonder, The Unsignificant embarks on an errant tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present.
About the Author: Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, he is the Poetry Editor of The Paris Review, and Series Editor of the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. His new book of lectures on poetry and painting, The Unsignificant, was published by Wave Books in September.
About the Interlocutor: Edgar Garcia is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.
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Tags: Chicago, Edgar Garcia, Hyde Park, Seminary Co Op Bookstore, Srikanth Reddy, Srikanth Reddy - "The Unsignificant" - Edgar Garcia, The Unsignificant
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