Daniel Tiffany - "Cry Baby Mystic" - Srikanth Reddy

Daniel Tiffany will read stanzas from his latest book, Cry Baby Mystic (Parlor Press, 2021) and (with BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP) from a new manuscript, Our Prediction, on poetic logophobia. He will be joined in conversation by Srikanth Reddy.

This event will be held in person at The Seminary Co-op.

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About the book: Bobbing alongside Margery Kempe—an illiterate medieval mystic who dictated the first autobiography in English—the ragged voice of this book-length poem finds itself drawn into bizarre predicaments that are not its own and ferried into abandoned spaces by the gearing of stardom and shame. The revolving sentences overheard by the reader survive only as remnants of sorrow now craved by all who have known it, a sorrow that cannot be retrieved.

About the author: Daniel Tiffany is the author of six books of poetry, from presses including Action Books and Omnidawn, along with chapbooks from Noemi Press and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in journals ranging from Poetry and the Paris Review to Lana Turner and the Brooklyn Rail. He is also a member of Blunt Research Group, whose collection of archival poems, The Work-Shy (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), was lauded by Mike Davis as “an archaeology of inhumanity that should haunt us forever.” His work as a theorist (published in five volumes of academic criticism) has opened up new paths in thinking about poetry’s relation to materialism, dialect and slang, kitsch, logophobia, and correspondences between lyric “substance” and social obscurity (first articulated in an essay entitled “Fugitive Lyric” in 2005). In addition to his own writing, he has published translations of French, Greek, and Italian writers. His entry on the topic of “Lyric Poetry and Poetics” can be found in the present edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature, and he is a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy. www.danieltiffany.com. 

About the Interlocutor: Srikanth Reddy is a poet, critic, and literary editor who teaches at the University of Chicago. His latest book of poetry, "Underworld Lit," was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2021. A former guest editor at Poetry magazine, he is currently the poetry editor of The Paris Review, and a co-editor for the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press.