The poem attached to this interview—“V,” from the first section of Underworld Lit, linked at the bottom of this page—is the first poem of Srikanth Reddy’s that I ever read. It’s one of only a handful of poems where I can actually remember where I was, how I was standing, at the moment I read it. It was published in the Spring – Summer 2020 Issue of American Poets—not a journal I’d read before or picked up since—which I’d been automatically subscribed to, at my parents’ address, for winning some kind of student writing award when I was an undergrad.
What I remember most—standing in my childhood bedroom, facing the window, opening the magazine, on a whim, directly to Reddy’s poem—is how committed the poem was to its own stillness. Not knowing anything, then, about the larger project of the book, it felt shocking, being brought that close to death’s front desk. From the first long, songful simile to the poem’s quiet (and delightfully polite!) finishing plea, it is a perfect example of a poem in control of its own universe, every phrase and figure aligned, and then set into lucid motion, by death’s black gravity.
Obviously, I liked it very much.
Reddy and I sat down for a phone interview on August 5th, 2025. The transcript of that conversation, just barely edited, is presented to you below.
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I just read Facts for Visitors for the first time last Monday—which was a very strong debut, by the way—and it was interesting, having read Underworld Lit a few times now, seeing the way your work has expanded over the years. It seems fair to say that the scale of your work has shifted, from mostly short, historically-aware lyrics to the grander travelogues that make up your latest books.
While that would be my own kind of quick, crude classification of your “growth” as an artist, I think it might be smart to start the interview by asking about how you see your relationship to poetry changing over the years. Do you think you’re in any way the same poet that wrote Facts for Visitors? In what ways do you look at the art and practice of writing differently, 21 or so years later?
That’s a great question. I think probably every writer’s work, when you look at it in the rearview mirror, is something like your beautiful phrase: a grand travelogue. Even with a writer like Emily Dickinson, I’m always amazed by how, within a narrow geographical radius, she travels through so many worlds. Writers starting out often feel like they’re beginning a journey, on their literary travels, too. I also like what you said about that question of scale, how you start to see a kind of map unfolding, of where you began and where you’ve been, as you write—on the level of the individual poem, but also as you write one book and then another and then another.
I think that’s why your travel metaphor resonates with me—and oddly enough, now I’m actually back to writing lyric poems, just when I thought the circumference of what a poem was, or what I wanted a poem to be, was kind of expanding and expanding. Now I find myself back to “the line” again. That’s something I kind of wrestle with—for a little while recently I was trying to push that radius out further and trying to do something with the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata, by way of an adaptation or kind of a modernization, but that kind of fell apart! *Laughs* Or, in some ways I got distracted by the pleasure of writing lines of poetry. Now I’m writing a sequence of sonnets.
That’s great. Those are always the sweetest kinds of distractions, I think, those that keep us from our major projects.
Yeah, yeah.
This is kind of a big question, but why sonnets, specifically? What are they to you?
Well, I started getting interested in metaphors, and just started writing metaphors within the space of a line. And, in a way, the old sawhorse about metaphors is that they are in themselves a kind of transport or conveyance in language. So I started stacking metaphors on top of one another and kind of found that they settled into fourteen-line shapes on their own. I’ve just been kind of playing, recently, with that poetic Jenga game.
I can’t wait to read those—that sounds right up my alley.
Oh, great! Well, got to write them first. *Both laugh*
For sure. The next question I have prepared: Reading Underworld Lit, as obviously concerned as it is with mortality in all its phases, I sometimes couldn’t help but think about that one quote from C.D. Wright: “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are all going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”
That’s great, that’s great.
Yeah, that’s a great one. I have no interest in pigeon-holing you as a poet of death—though maybe, in the end, there aren’t any other kinds of poets—but I do kind of want to build a question out of Wright’s statement. Do you find death productive?—*Both laugh*—It is, obviously, something you think about. Does knowing that you’re going to die, not to be the bearer of bad news, set your imagination running, or is it the opposite?
That quote of Wright’s feels really resonant to me. You know, in some ways, on a purely formal or aesthetic level, death is just another way of keeping in view, or giving shape to, questions of duration or intensity. Death is one form of duration that we all feel pretty universally and acutely and intensely. What Wright is saying feels to me really true as a way of thinking about poetry as an intensification of sound within duration. You want to make a sound—a meaningful sound, a resonant sound—within a duration every time you’re writing a line of poetry. And that is a kind of metaphor, you know, for duration in all its forms, whether it’s the duration of one’s lifetime, or of civilization, or a breath, or the cosmos. That sounds very abstract, but that’s something I respond to when I hear those words of Wright’s, and that animates probably not just my own writing in that book but anyone who decides to give some of their time to this art.
I think that’s a gorgeous answer. We’re only allowed so much sound before we’re met with silence. *Laughs*
Exactly, exactly. And some of it is noise—much of it is noise—and some of it is song, and there’s a lot in between. And I think poets are people who want to make space for the intensification of sound into something like song, or music, or maybe a really wild and interesting and disruptive linguistic noise.
I agree. Another question I have prepared, if we’re talking about sound as an element of poetry, this one has to do with another:
One element of your work that feels rather forward to me, and which hasn’t been discussed as much, I think, in the other interviews you’ve done, is your imagery. At least in Underworld Lit, you take time relatively often to let an image sit by itself. Like in poem “V” of the first section, the poem stands quite still when you say “Outside, the honey locusts sprinkle their pale spinning leaves in real time.”
I want to leave room in this question for you to be able to answer it, so I think I’ll just ask it like this: what do images do in your work? And, if you’re feeling bold, what are the purposes of imagery in poetry in general?
Images are something I spend a lot of time trying to make, and for me that’s one of the most fundamental pleasures of making poems: finding ways that poems can begin to feel like worlds. In some ways, maybe more than the image, it’s a question of world-making in a poem. That is a primary function of what poems do for me, and that world-making is an experiment in trying to find forms of dwelling and ways of inhabiting language. And so, bringing things and beings and even just simply space into the poem is a big part of that.
Oddly enough, I’m finding more and more that world-making happens in a poem through sound, through following sound, or listening to the ways that words for things assemble into orders of sound. That becomes a way of kind of discovering the world you want to inhabit in the poem, or that you want to invite your reader to explore with you. Does that make sense?
Yes, that makes an extraordinary amount of sense. I think quite often that sound is what gives images their reality in a poem… you can render so many ‘objects’ in a poem, so many ‘images,’ with so many rotations of language. You can render the sun coming through the window in as many ways as you like. But often, it’s the musical one that is made real for the reader because it has its own sonic reality.
Yeah, and it also has to do with grammar and word order, the syntax of perception, and something like sound-in-time, attending to sound-in-time, or I guess you could say attending to your perception of sound-in-time. I’m not getting at it, exactly—*laughs*—but that’s what allows something like a park bench in a courtyard to feel present.
Yeah. I mean, we’re working with a made and constructed medium. You have to build your images, and your phrases, with your hands. And you have to deal with the qualities of those materials, including sound, if you want your work to be real for the reader. I think that’s very true, man. But we’re getting down a rabbit hole now… *Both laugh*
Let’s just go to the next question. In your conversation with Dan Beachy-Quick for BOMB Magazine a few years back, you said the following—and I think this description actually applies to images too, but we don’t have to dive back in there—“Translation is… a technology where history and timelessness intersect in language.” You and Dan both also said some quite beautiful and true things about the poets walk each other’s ground, endlessly recovering every lost poetic technology by inventing them anew.
I want to ask about that timelessness in the context of your support of young poets in recent years. I want to ask: though I agree that poets can’t help but repeat each other, do you think it’s also possible for poets to open up new channels that haven’t been coursed before? Is it a fool’s errand, trying to build new territory that the living might set out to map?
Maybe the most exciting thing about all this editorial work that I find myself up to my eyeballs and ears in now is seeing, every day, how continually resurgent that work of making new forms and making voice strange again is in our time. I think, in a way, poets have nothing else to do than re-invent the old—old forms, or techniques, or tonalities—and that’s what jumps out at me when I’m clicking through submissions in Submittable or reading manuscripts for Phoenix Poets, the inescapable shock of the new that you feel when you read something that feels alive and poetic.
So yeah, it’s a fool’s errand, but a necessary one, one can’t help but run.
It’s kind of funny—one of the reasons I wanted to ask you that specifically is because many of the poets you’ve awarded recently, Annelyse Gelman and Nora Claire Miller, just for example, or brought in to work with you at the Paris Review, Kai Ihns, Aditi Machado, Matt Broaddus, Margaret Ross, are all some of my young favorites too. Really kind of an odd coincidence of taste—I didn’t even know Kai, Aditi, and Matt all worked with you when I asked them to be a part of this interview series.
The actual question, and this is a hard one, but I do want to ask it: where do you see American poetry going in the next 5, 10 years? Do you think it’s undergoing or has undergone a shift in the past few years or so?
That’s a good question. I see the ground shifting every day, and I’ve felt it shifting myself over the last several years, really ever since I started writing and reading—and I expect it will continue to. I’m glad and grateful to be able to witness that.
In terms of what I might see happening in the future, I don’t know; that’s what’s exciting about being a writer at any time: poetry is moving in so many directions, or almost every direction at once. There are poets working in traditional historical forms who are writing verse of incredible depth and originality, and there are incredibly exciting poets who are really pushing the edge of what, conceptually, poetry has been imagined as.
We don’t really live in literary movements at the moment. That’s maybe a good thing, because as soon as a movement is identifiable it can collapse into mannerisms. What I kind of look for is something that feels distinctive, that is following its own law, and discovering its own law, without regard for orthodoxy or expectation, and oddly enough sometimes that’s to be found in the most ancient forms and iterations of the art: we’re publishing a suite of free translations of ancient Hittite texts in an upcoming issue of the Paris Review that I’m really excited about, because you see how expressive and intimate and alive those voices feel today.
So yeah, I think we’re lucky to be writing at a time when poetry to me feels really alive and kicking as a form.
Yes, I totally agree. And I think, too, though I agree with what you’re saying about not quite seeing literary movements while you’re inside of them, that maybe the one thing that might come to define this era is the variety you’re talking about. Maybe this is true in every time, but it feels really present right now: there are so many different kinds of poets doing so many different kinds of projects. It’s very, very cool to witness.
Anyway, we don’t have to go too far down that road. I think this is the last question: In your recent reading at the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, you talked about how knowing Kurt Waldheim’s voice was on the Voyager recording, and your decision to erase his memoir, affected your thinking on what the poet was in greater society. Could you talk a little more about how your thinking on that has shifted over the years? What do you currently feel the poet’s role is, in this specific time, in this specific nation?
You know, I think the work of any poet is to reimagine what their own individual role might be. You might start out as a love poet and then find that you’ve become a protest poet somewhere along the way, or a philosophical poet, and keeping that question of ‘role’ as open as possible is in some ways the most urgent aspect of being a writer. Maybe imagining roles outside the other roles one plays in society or in one’s daily life—you can imagine poetry as a form of roleplaying, where every speaker you invent becomes a different way of imagining a part you might play in relation to the whole. Imagining roles outside of those we ordinarily recognize—that’s, I think, a really beautiful thing that poetry does.
One thing I don’t see so much lately is the dramatic monologue as a form. That’s an incredibly powerful forum for identification and imagining oneself into other worlds and other subject positions and speaking positions. So, part of the excitement about being a writer now might be to think of writing as the construction of a dramatic monologue, with a kind of Shakespearean, theatrical dimension, where the role that you have been assigned by circumstance may not be the one that you have to perform.
Interview by Lloyd Wallace
Lloyd Wallace lives in Pittsburgh. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books, FENCE, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. You can read more at his website lloydwallace.com.
