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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.

Vijay Seshadri

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Vijay Seshadri
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: February 13
Poet
Writer
Namma Bengaluru
Fact
Medium
History
Mediums
Dramatization
Social
Poem
Essay
Facts
Genre
Genres
Certain
Historical
Essays
Character
Writer
Impose
Self
Interesting
Involves
Kind
Upon
Engage

More quotes by Vijay Seshadri

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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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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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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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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.
Vijay Seshadri
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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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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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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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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.
Vijay Seshadri
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You probably have to split yourself in various ways just in order to survive, and to think of yourself as a multitude.
Vijay Seshadri
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We all think of ourselves as our subjectivity, our consciousness.
Vijay Seshadri
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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.
Vijay Seshadri
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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.
Vijay Seshadri
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Technology is transforming everything. Who knows what it's doing, we don't really understand it.
Vijay Seshadri
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I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.
Vijay Seshadri
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The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.
Vijay Seshadri
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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.
Vijay Seshadri
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It's important for all writers to try to figure out what they're doing.
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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.
Vijay Seshadri