The Unsignificant

Author: Srikanth Reddy

Publisher: Wave Books (2024)

The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award–finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015.

True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it’s not about—not significance, or insignificance, but “unsignificance.” The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots, or Galileo’s drawings of the moon. Ranging from pictorial backgrounds in visual art to portraiture and similes to the poetics of wonder, The Unsignificant embarks on an errant tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present.