Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Lamont Poet, Slated to Speak

Each year, the Academy Library’s Lamont Poetry Series brings renowned poets from around the world to the Exeter campus, showing students the interactive role of the art of poetry in the world.

This coming Wednesday, Oct. 7,  the 2015-16 Lamont Poet Vijay Seshadri will come to campus to share and discuss his work with the Exeter community.

Many hope that the conversations that arise during Seshadri’s visit will inspire a deeper understanding of his work, modern poetry and of the immortal art of the genre in general.

Established in 1982, the Lamont Poetry Program has brought in hundreds of artists to share their work with the Exeter community. Each visiting poet gives a public reading, meets with students and presents the Library with a manuscript poem.

“Over the years we have had an incredibly diverse and talented group of poets participate in the Lamont Poetry program.”

After a long selection process by the Lamont Poet Committee, Seshadri was chosen as the first of two Lamont poets for the year, the second coming in the spring.

Candidates must display a variety of charecteristics to be selected, according to Academy librarian and Lamont Poet Committee member Gail Scanlon.

“The poets are selected by the members of the Lamont Poet Committee based on their body of work, enthusiasm for working with students and availability,” Scanlon said.

Seshadri’s work presents a wide range of experiences and narratives through complex images and diverse voices. Some of his notable works include Wild Kingdom, Long Meadow and 3 sections.

These works have been nominated for and won multiple awards, including the James Laughlin Award and the Pulitzer Prize award for poetry.

“[Seshadri] is a great poet, like all the poets that have come through here, but like all of the other poets we have had he brings his own style, voice, experiences, aesthetics and energy to the most ancient of literary art forms, ” English instructor Matthew Miller said. “He makes the art new and in doing so continues the tradition.”

In preparation for the visit, many prep English classes read selected works of the poet.

Lower Maya Kim lauds the program for providing students with the ability to, literally, put a face to the name they’ve been studying.

“[The program] provides us with a rare opportunity to be able to meet the writers behind the work and we are very lucky to be able to,” Kim said. “The Lamont poet brings insight to the poems that we read during the term and helps us understand their ideas when they wrote it. In class we make assumptions and guesses to what the poet is trying to get at.  It’s not often, however, that someone is able to ask a poet how they came up with an idea or what the poem is about specifically.”

Teaching intern in the English department Wendy Mellin echoed Kim’s idea that hearing a poem read by its author can provide a host of benefits.

“Anytime we discuss a poem in my class we read it so that we can hear it. It’s a very different experience listening to a poem than to read a poem and annotate. To hear a poet himself/herself read his work aloud, hearing the different speeds that certain passages are read, the crescendo in their voices and the emotion in their tone, can give us a whole new view of the poem,” she said.

Seshadri’s poems have been generally well received by prep classes and their teachers.

The complex style of his poetry has generated a degree of questions and confusion, which Mellin hopes will be alleviated by the visit.

“We started out with two poems from the Long Meadow and the discussions have been very dynamic. Students have really enjoyed his work but, most importantly, we have a lot of questions in store for when he comes,” Mellin said.

The Lamont poetry foundation has brought poetry to life on the Exeter campus by allowing students to interact with and question the poetry of modern poets from around the world.

Seshadri joins a long list of impressive poets, and Scanlon is excited for the visit.

“Over the years we have had an incredibly diverse and talented group of poets participate in the Lamont Poetry program. I am looking forward to meeting Vijay Seshadri.”