Srikanth Reddy and Dan Beachy-Quick in Conversation at BOMB

Dan Beachy-Quick and Srikanth Reddy talk about their new books, "poetry, history, repetition, and translation, among many other things," for BOMB this week. "We’ve been close friends since our days in graduate school, and we’ve collaborated on more than one occasion since then, so our exchange felt like the continuation of an ongoing conversation about concerns that have animated and haunted us as writers for many years," says Reddy. From that conversation:

[DBQ]

…I’d love to hear you speak of how death and repetition are at work in your poetry.

SR

It’s funny, Dan, the other evening I was musing about how my life is almost entirely structured and patterned by repetition—like everyone who sleeps, wakes, empties the dishwasher, takes out the trash, and so on. And it occurred to me that, if my everyday experience is so thoroughly shot through with repetition, why should those repetitions stop simply because I do? Maybe I’ve always been emptying the dishwasher and taking out the trash, and will continue to do so long after “I” am gone. There’s the uneasy feeling that you’re not repeating certain motions, but rather that you’re being repeated by them. I think that’s part of why the narrator of Underworld Lit continues to smoke, for example, after he’s diagnosed with cancer. He can’t imagine that quitting could ever be possible, even after his death.  

Of course, there’s something comic, as you say, about this vision of the underworld—as a place where you’re eternally emptying the dishwasher—but it’s also timeless if you replace the dishwasher with a cistern or taking out the trash with harvesting a field. Writing Underworld Lit, I found myself spellbound by that comic, or tragicomic, collision of history’s forward march with the timeless repetition of afterlives. Technology is one place where that collision becomes perceptible; Chen is guided through his underworlds not by Virgil or some other spirit, but by a motorized airport staircase, an error in translation that takes on a life of its own. The non-Western literature of reincarnation and rebirth is full of comic (and cosmic) mis-recognitions occasioned by a soul’s encounter with unfamiliar technologies—an elevator, a bullock cart.

Translation is another technology where history and timelessness intersect in language.…

The full conversation is at BOMB.