City of Sadness and Violence
Review of Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then (USA: Graywolf Press, 2020)
By Yeow Kai Chai
Vijay Seshadri is rightly regarded as an expert in languid American conversationalism, and in his fourth poetry collection, That Was Now, This Is Then, these lines aren’t merely droll or ironic—they can kill and draw blood too.
The second of its three sections is steeped in personal and collective grief, and the poet, who was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, the curiously un-sectioned 3 Sections, has excavated complex aspects of grieving in six poems.
The outpouring isn’t a sludge of sorrow or interminable self-pity, but an excoriating self-audit—to confess, confront, to not make excuses. The poet has erected a city of sadness, but the sadness is counterpointed by an equal demand for succour, for vigour, for justice, and for righteous anger. It is a city where one pines, but also brays, marches, calls a spade a spade.
As testament to his delicate switcheroo between formal and vernacular, popular culture and high-brow, direct and metaphoric, these poems attain a sense of immediacy—as if the brain is trying to make sense of trauma in real time. Something larger than him (and us), something beyond his control (or ours)—like the inconsolable death of a parent—has hit him hard. He will unravel it, even as he is himself unravelling.
So, how are we transformed by grief itself, and where are we now? To that (yet-to-be-determined) end, the reader is swept along by limber lines that segue from bafflement and denial to placidity and acceptance… or to somewhere else. This is no straightforward trajectory.
That immersion also means it is easy to overlook his formal unobtrusiveness. Sometimes, it can be as subtle as the change of one word—substituting “uninflected” for “thin”—in two poems, “Meeting (Thick)” and “Meeting (Thin),” which are otherwise textually the same.
In other poems, the logic of each line dictates its length or brevity, or its prosody, as it mimics the train of thought, something he learnt from a literary forebear like John Ashbery, what he has termed as the latter’s “flows, eddies, retreats of language and thought, hesitations, aporias.” Seshadri’s lines, indeed, could unfurl, or be crisp.
The unusual mix of self-critique, diffidence, and offhanded conversation culminates in “Collins Ferry Landing,” the second section’s centerpiece. It’s an accomplishment sharpened by sceptical distance, from mawkishness, from oneself. The three-part elegy is addressed to his father who had died a few years prior, but the poet’s gauche self-awareness means this is no dirge soundtracked by beautiful, beseeching strings.
In fact, it’s attained a level of tragicomedy worthy of Seinfeldian genius. The middle section of the poem is a long prose passage which sets up the innocuous sitcom-like premise: “I have a friend. (You’ll be glad to know.) She and I work together. (You’ll be glad to know I still have a job.) She’s an ally. She’s sympathetic.”
The poet starts talking about his father, but gets sidetracked by his own pontifications about “cultures of shame evolving across millennia,” “civilizations teetering on the edge of time, about to take the plunge into oblivion,” and “Deep India, strewn with elephants and cobras.” Then the sympathetic ally utters what the poet damns as “the sentimental non sequitur”: “She puts her right hand on my left arm and says, ‘He’ll always be with you. In your heart.’”
Her response, well-intentioned, is bathos of the highest order, and flips the narrative. Suddenly it dawns on him: “I wasn’t just feeling grief but congratulating myself for it. I was seeing myself as the star of my loss, its protagonist, treading the boards, pacing under the proscenium arch of bereavement.”
It’s come to the final, unironic, and literal statement that also proves to be the most devastating: “I wanted to be sitting on the living-room couch, watching Jeopardy! with you.”
One is buoyed along by Seshadri’s seamless shifts between registers, lyrical or prosaic, entering/exiting privacy and public theatre, baring personal pain or performing urbane ritual. Events are experienced less sequentially, but more as a loop, a mortal coil of sorts, if you may—hence the book title. Time and mortality are intertwined, with grief (or joy) as its tether.
“It is what it is,” he quotes his father’s favorite sentence, which is also the title of a book of discourses by the 13th century Sufi mystic, Rumi. Practical yet gnomic, it’s a principle to live one’s life by.
This adage may well apply to the depiction of his plucky mom in “Your Living Eyes,” a poem completed in the last months of her life, and hence “not strictly speaking an elegy,” he has said in an interview.
In the poem, the Angel of Death, “disguised as a little girl,” paid his mother a visit. The repartee goes like this: “She said, ‘Beauty and sadness are never far apart.’/ You said, ‘Bullshit.’/ She said, ‘Some birds are real, some are invisible, but which are which?’/ You said, ‘Back off, bitch.’”
The mother’s ruddy defiance is a rebuke of subjugation and resignation, and so the poem ends with the poet’s promise to live (and die) their own way:
But the sun is climbing up.
The world your eyes see is the world as it really is,
and you and I are going to live in it forever,
and we will hitchhike to the Painted Hills together
and hop a freight back home.
This insistence to see “the world as it really is,” and by extension, to come clean with oneself, also underlies the second elegy in the section, “Cliffhanging,” which is addressed to the American poet Thomas Lux.
“I’m a little worried about myself because/ all this hostility from every quarter bothers me/ much less than it should,” the poet confesses. Helplessly, one gets swept away by “the great wave” which has riven America, and the world lately, “only to suck me back and drop me dangling by one arm/ on the edge of the half-eaten cliff.”
“I won’t let myself fall, but I don’t want to pull myself up,” he adds, admitting to being ambivalent. However, if Lux were here, “looking down on me and saying,/ ‘Grab my hand, grab my hand,’ I would, I know, I surely would.”
This ambivalence is the purgatory between faith and despondence, as real-world news headlines and photographs, terrorizing and urgent, seep into the marrow of his lines.
While somewhat elliptical about “the great wave” in “Cliffhanging,” he is more explicit in “Night City,” haunted by a nightmarish scenario buzzing with “flat images desperate to become round.” Flashed ad nauseam in the news cycle, these “flat images” stir to life only after the screens are crushed, “flailing across the river from one dimension/ to the next.”
How can anyone turn away from these images of “brutalized children, drowned fathers, drowning/ in the river and then in/ the eye and then in the mind,” and which “wrap around the sleepers like/ cellophane…/ muffled by their longings, their ears/ muffled, while mobs with torches/ rage on the rubble”?
Here’s the question: Are you one of the “sleepers,” wilfully ignorant; or worse, are you in those “mobs with torches/ [who] rage on the rubble”?
Tribalism, and the threat of danger between tribes, is further investigated in “Goya’s Mired Men Fighting with Cudgels,” which references the 1820s painting of two men walloping each other with sticks while knee-deep in mud or sand. Here he spells out the language of violence as a critique on the bloody infighting within divided nations, and between them. Along the way, he weighs the cost of “the weaponized/ word or image,” and the value of comradeship.
The poet pleads for mutual empathy: “This compassion he feels for me as his/ mirror enemy, image, brother in wrath/ and that I feel for him,/ this compassion is the compassion that those/ who see themselves in agony feel.” Significantly, the scuffle is observed by a “great deaf master,” presumably unruffled by the noisy rhetoric of the day, who will “paint us in silent pastels.”
This is not the first time Seshadri has addressed current events in his verse. Whereas an early poem “The Disappearances”—about the aftermath of the 1963 Kennedy assassination and published in The New Yorker a month after Sept 11, 2001—spoke to a shell-shocked America by providing some comfort, two decades later Seshadri’s new and vivid words cut a nerve with barely-suppressed rage.
“Nothing can be understood/ about the blunt-force trauma to the head,” he states in the Goya poem, before indicting the use of violence writ large now on the contemporary stage: “the percussion grenade,” “the roof collapsing in Aleppo,” “the beam slamming the frontal lobe,” “the drone, the terror by night and day.”
There are no easy answers—or accountability, for that matter. That is why in another poem, “City of Grief,” the poet throws the reader into the film noir urban landscape, where (almost) everyone lives in the shadows, a cloud of moral ambiguity hangs, and there is seldom any clarity or resolution. He says unsentimentally: “No one needs an explanation/ here for what happened./ ‘It happened’ is the explanation.”
Ironically indeed, “no one here belongs to a/ race, an empire, a nation,” for grief is “this unmappable,/ landlocked, film-noir city/ situated in eternity.” These tropes, clichéd and claustrophobic, trap all and sundry. “[No] one cares why/ one becomes the other,” he goes on, then qualifies, “no one but the private eye/ that is, the gumshoe, the/ bird dog standing in for us,/ our body double.”
So, in this numbing paralysis—drowned in an assault of decontextualised images—how does the private eye/the reader keep on living?
In the end, surrounded by limp pasta and aerating black wine, one may be, or has to be, triggered by a survivalist’s urge to not cave in, to do something, and transcend this behemoth of grief:
There is a clue to find.
There is an innocence
to establish and an anguish in
him he needs to destroy
before it destroys him, an
anguish so pure it almost
feels like joy.
To locate a clue, to establish one’s innocence, to exit loop after loop of grief—that is the redemptive force which thrusts Seshadri’s poetry forward, just as it is borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Yeow Kai Chai is a poet, fiction writer, and editor. He has three poetry collections, One to the Dark Tower Comes (2020), Pretend I’m Not Here (2006), and Secret Manta (2001). A co-editor of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, he was Festival Director of Singapore Writers Festival from 2015 to 2018.
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