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Language itself is a mask. It's the first mask in the series of invented selves - they've come right out of language. The way you speak changes you, because when you are speaking, you are representing yourself in a certain way.

Vijay Seshadri

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Vijay Seshadri
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: February 13
Poet
Writer
Namma Bengaluru
Firsts
Invented
Come
Mask
Self
Speaking
First
Series
Right
Changes
Way
Language
Speak
Selves
Certain
Representing

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We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And there's trans-nationality. There are people like me, for example. I mean, what am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? And I'm not alone in being between things.
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Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.
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I could say that in the essay, as it has developed historically, success is determined by the writer's ability to express, through an individual voice, a collective experience - you are speaking individually but you are representing collectively.
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I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.
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I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.
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Society imposes an identity on you because of the way you look. Your struggle as a self has to do with an identity being imposed on you that you know is not your identity.
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We all think of ourselves as our subjectivity, our consciousness.
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I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.
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I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills...and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.
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I resist thinking of myself as a teacher. I think of myself as a writer who has pulled a fast one and hoodwinked this institution into giving me a job and health insurance.
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Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.
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Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
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All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.
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You don't think of yourself as your external representation, or even your national origin or anything like that. You don't reduce yourself to that. That's kind of unthinkable.
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Technology is transforming everything. Who knows what it's doing, we don't really understand it.
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These new theories of the universe, that there are multiple universes just bubbling up constantly - it's all pretty wild.
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