Facts for Visitors, Srikanth Reddy

I always feel like a complete novice, reading poetry. I feel like I don’t know how to read it properly. It is hard for me to slow down and be present and focused on such a very small block of writing where everything is happening right there, unlike in a novel, where things unfold gradually and you are always playing the long game. I have this vague but persistent sense that there are all kinds of rules about meter and rhyme and grammar that I am not properly understanding or recognizing. But I also love poetry (sometimes). It’s basically magic. Language refined down to its most mystical and astonishing features. I very much enjoy it when someone compellingly explains to me how any one of these given magic tricks works, but I also like just sitting back and watching the show without attempting to figure out what’s going on. Still, I try to become a better reader of poetry by a. reading it regularly — I always have something going, generally in the bathroom (sorry poets). b. noticing how I feel about it, whether I like it or not, whether it grabs me, etc, and c. trying to figure out why (this, Walter Pater says, is the task of the critic, so I feel like I’m on good footing).

That’s a long preamble that’s basically intended to convey that when it comes to poetry, I am a big dumb animal. My language for accounting for my feelings about poems is fumbling and rudimentary; my feelings are crude and largely instinctive. So keep that in mind.

Facts for Visitors is stunning, in the sense that it stuns you, makes your head snap back and your mind go, what? The poems are so specific, but also so strange. You have the feeling of a distinct situation — this is, I think, the best term for it; not world, or mood, or scene, but situation — and you can sort of understand what it is, but it’s also totally mysterious. But the words are also so beautiful; it’s like being semi lost on a dark path at night and feeling somewhat nervous but the air is scented with flowers so you keep inhaling deeply and marveling while also being a little afraid that something is going to jump out of the hedges. Because there is a real sense of ominousness in some of these poems (Listen. Listen. // Under that box is a snake. // Listen while the unlit places hollow you out.), but also wonder, longing, and sometimes humor. They’re incredible. I want to re-read them over and over (I have been; I keep getting distracted from writing this because I fall back into the book again). Potent stuff.