Significant World

Valerie Duff-Strautmann reviews Srikanth Reddy’s “The Unsignificant.”

By Valerie Duff-StrautmannApril 12, 2025

• Poetry

• Literary Criticism

AS I SAT in a coffee shop reading the essays contained in poet Srikanth Reddy’s The Unsignificant (2024) in the days leading up to the November election, they seemed to presage events to come. It is hard to explain how. These lectures-turned-essays came into being as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry in 2015 (the series supports poets who give public lectures on poetry and poetics through this partnership, offering them the opportunity to publish a book with Wave based on their lectures). The essays created a syzygy (to use one of Reddy’s terms), or confluence, that made me think deeply (as poetry should) about my particular moment.

A lecture, like a poem, can traverse a great distance in a short span. There are, in total, three lectures contained within The Unsignificant. What begins the book is an inquiry—not an answer. Reddy’s questioning allows us to connect his exploration of art to what we want from art and art’s relevance to our experiences. Always curious about how the artist influences us, Reddy directs us to the background in the first lecture, and we find ourselves in this space—the space any poet feels compelled to inspect. He writes: 

I found myself wondering, what is a background? Is it just a figure suffering from low self-esteem? What are we missing when we disregard those unassuming little figures—birds, clouds, unmanned military drones—in the offing? Can paying attention to what’s going on in the background make you a better person? Can we see—or hear, or smell, or taste, or touch—anything whatsoever without some sort of negative space behind, or around, or before and after it?

In what follows in all three lectures, Reddy considers perspectives: his topics are poetry and art and are not ostensibly political, although politics is as ever-present as the drones are among the clouds. 

No stranger to writing about poetics, Reddy has examined the work of modernist and contemporary poets in his book Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry (2012). The lectures in The Unsignificant are digressions in themselves, attending to important exchanges between art and poetry and always curious about our response to that exchange. The title lecture in The Unsignificant takes on what might be construed as insignificant in art but is more accurately deemed unsignificant by poets—embedded in our consciousness and integral to the whole. To this end, Reddy probes the attraction of Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (ca. 1560). The second lecture, “Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink,” considers the impact of our associations and the techniques used to evoke a powerful and unexpected likeness from seemingly unlike things, and it includes examples from the work of Pablo Picasso and Takashi Murakami, from Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. “Wonder: A Syzygy” explores expansions and erasures (syzygy is an astronomical term—think alignment of celestial bodies such as what happens in a lunar or solar eclipse). So how did Reddy’s book, in that moment on November 3, 2024, show relevance and speak to me? As he reminds the reader in “Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink,” “poets trade in resemblances.” 

“The Unsignificant” begins with W. H. Auden’s famous ekphrastic poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” published in 1939, in another moment of great tension and unease. Auden’s poem is a response to “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”—which, no matter how you interpret the painter’s intent, was, in the 1500s, a groundbreaking attempt to shift perspective in a work of art. Auden’s poem touches on suffering, misunderstanding, and disaster, and Reddy moves swiftly to the question of what we should be looking at, and why, entertaining various motives—the artist’s, the poet’s, the viewer’s. He writes, “Only our ability to disregard what’s in the offing—whether it be suffering, disaster, or even something amazing—permits us to sail, like a costly and fragile vessel, ‘calmly on.’” There are two central questions here: What does Bruegel want us to see? What is the purpose of this art anyway? And because Reddy is a poet, he asks himself a more particular question: “And, because I spend too much of my time thinking about poetry, I also wondered, what can poems tell us about the background of things?”

Bruegel’s “Landscape” not only piqued Auden’s interest, Reddy tells us, but also called to another great modernist poet, William Carlos Williams. Reddy notes that Williams introduces the concept of unsignificance when he describes the painting: “unsignificantly / off the coast / there was // a splash quite unnoticed / this was / Icarus drowning.” Like Auden and Williams, Reddy is fascinated by what this unsignificance means, working hard to understand his own position, his own “unsignificance,” in the art before him. He calls on philosophers to help him understand the point of all of this, bringing in some heavy hitters to shed light:

Every time we see a figure in the background, we become a kind of Icarus writ small. In his book Phenomenology of Perception, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes his sense of engulfment in another person’s perspective:

A vortex forms around the perceived body into which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, my world is no longer merely mine, it is no longer present only to me, it is present to X, to this other behavior that begins to take shape in it. The other body is already no longer a single fragment of the world, but rather the place of a certain elaboration and somehow a certain “view” of the world.

Does Bruegel want us to think Icarus doesn’t matter? He matters. When we see him, and don’t see him, Reddy says, he is us. Reddy elaborates, still looking at the painting, but beginning to reach beyond the painting into life: “Viewing somebody from afar entails knowing that they, too, entertain a perspective on the world—a view from which you yourself are but a background detail.” This is what happens when we focus on the vortex that is Icarus in Bruegel’s painting: “We may respond to this vortex in different ways—by turning away, by plunging in, by fixing our gaze on its whirling surface—but every response discloses our attitude toward a perceptual background that is the foreground of other lives.”

At any point, Reddy (and we) can leave the philosophizing behind—“Unsignificance isn’t a philosophical concept or term; it’s a poet’s liberating word for what imperceptibly burdens our consciousness.” In the coffee shop, as I read Reddy’s book, I was suddenly aware of the small splash in the Bruegel painting; in that moment, I was also a fellow-perspective filled to the brim with unsignificance. As Reddy writes: “We may even come to feel an inkling of our own unsignificance through our absorption in his little disaster.” Icarus drowning, his feet barely visible as he disappears in that small vortex in the frame, is at once timeless and particular, momentous and missable. And anyone who reads a poem or looks at a painting feels that too.

In “Like a Very Strange Likeness and Pink,” Reddy introduces psychology (in particular, what can be learned from the Rorschach test), bridging Rorschach to the reach of association in poetry. In a brief but dense chapter, he considers how poets move between likeness and unlikeness for revelation; he offers the stretch of Emily Dickinson’s similes and a look at Pablo Picasso’s 1911 cubist painting “The Poet” through the lens of Rorschach inkblots. From there, Reddy neatly ropes Gertrude Stein back to Picasso in a discussion of her “portrait” poems, including a “completed portrait” of the painter. In Stein’s language, Reddy ultimately finds a “likeness” between two of the more dissimilar poets one might ever read together. He writes: “For the silent heretic in Amherst, and for the queer Jewish poet under a Nazi collaborator’s patronage, ‘internal difference’ is ‘where the Meanings, are.’” This is where he aptly brings in the idea of “echolocations”; Dickinson and Stein rely on this process to describe individuals, emotions, community. Given the number of poems I saw making their way through cyberspace in the days after the election, “echolocations” as a concept truly captures the way we seem to make sense of where we are as we match tenor to vehicle, following in Dickinson’s footsteps. Nothing is simple—sometimes “a poetic vehicle achieves escape velocity” in the midst of great upheaval particularly.

Reddy’s final lecture, “Wonder: A Syzygy,” begins with Achilles’ shield, which has found representation in a range of works from the writings of Homer to the paintings of Cy Twombly. Reddy zooms in for an up close look at the detail of the shield before telescoping out into the age of Galileo and John Milton. But it’s not as if finding ourselves in the universe and looking at our world from above or below is the place to stop. Reddy then begins to consider the world of erasure and eclipse: 

Three centuries after Paradise Lost first lit up the Western literary firmament, an American poet, cookbook author, and marijuana enthusiast named Ronald Johnson purchased an 1892 edition of Milton’s poem in a Seattle bookshop—and promptly began to black out most of the text from its pages.

The result: Radi Os (1977). The project that became Radi Os was the exploration to find within a world the worlds that seem fixed. “Compose your own holes in any book […] and you’ll unearth a manifold matrix of worlds within,” Reddy writes. He performed a similar experiment with his book Voyager (2011), a lesson in redaction and revelation that draws from Kurt Waldheim’s memoir In the Eye of the Storm (1985) as a source text.

In these lectures, Reddy allows us not only to step outside of the paintings but also to step outside of ourselves, to question and to be informed by art. Sometimes this happens through well-loved poems, and sometimes the art he introduces is known to us only tangentially, if at all. But it was the lectures’ resonance with what was happening in my moment that made this book so meaningful to me. Given the time period of many of Reddy’s examples, I may be not too far afield to quote Ezra Pound—these lectures prompt us to remember that, as Pound said, “literature [and art, if I may insert on Reddy’s behalf] is news that STAYS news.” The lectures that comprise The Unsignificant insist that we stay open to echolocation and sift through language, with its endurance and wonder. Reddy also reminds us that sometimes it is easy to forget we are all inhabiting our own perspective: “We are all bad planets circling the pictured worlds that we behold.”