Art-1: A Pulitzer Vijay

A Pulitzer ‘Vijay’

Mr. Jigar Abhani

Department of Communication Skills, MEF, Rajkot

James Thurber, the celebrated wit, author and poet once said, “With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs”. Apparently, this statement exclude Vijay Seshadri, the Banglore-born poet who at the age of sixty has bagged the prestigious 2014 Pulitzer Prize in the poetry category for his witty philosophical collection of poems, 3 Sections.

Born in Bangalore in 1954, Seshadri moved with his parents to America at the age of five and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. According to Seshadri’s biography on the Pulitzer website, he currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at liberal Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. His other well known collections of poems include The Long Meadow (his second book that won the 2003 James Laughlin Award) and Wild Kingdom.

[Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University (left), presents the 2014 Poetry Prize to Vijay Seshadri.]

The Pulitzer winning collection 3 Sections confronts perplexing divisions of contemporary life – a wayward history, an indeterminate future and a present condition of wanting to outthink time. The Pulitzer prize committee identifies it as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”

Here are some profound lines from his award winning collection

Why I wanted to escape experience is nobody’s business but my own,
 but I always believed I could if I could
 put experience into words.
 Now I know better.
 Now I know words are experience.