A. Anupama
I pulled over while driving home to take this photo of sunflowers yesterday morning. A moment like that gives joy because one pauses for beauty. Just now, as I sit here in my porch-office, a couple of fawns charged ahead of their mother into the back garden’s open glen between maple trees. Now they have…
Happily, beautiful weather as the New York City Poetry Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary this weekend. Even my kids wanted to check it out… My favorite discovery today was the singer Ganavya Doraiswamy, who performed alongside headlining poet Kaveh Akbar. Her music walks gracefully between Carnatic and Western music, as in this YouTube video I…
My son’s supervisor at his summer internship in New Jersey is Indian, and suddenly my son says to me that he’d like to read more about India. His aim, I suppose, is to have more to talk about at work. But, being the ever-annoying poet-mom, I replied, “you can always know more about India, but…
Now everybody is a poet. After this year-and-a-half of pandemic suffering, social activism, and climate catastrophe, who among us hasn’t reflected very, very extensively on death, justice, and the nature of life itself? That’s exactly what makes people into poets. Of course, there’s also our predisposition to staring off into space, along with a strict,…
The world looks still damp, like me and my dog after getting ourselves caught in a midsummer-morning cloudburst. The writing circles and other literary events I used to organize before the pandemic are still on my mind. I only wanted it to rain poetry. Guiding creativity as work, as vocation, as dharma, is on my…
“BUTTERFLY - Among the ancients, an emblem of the soul and of unconscious attraction towards the light. The purification of the soul by fire, represented in Romanesque art by the burning ember placed by the angel in the prophet’s mouth, is visually portrayed on a small Mattei urn by means of an image of love…
Like that of a mountain, to make art. Especially classical styles, which I spent some time reflecting on at the Morgan Library today. Art requires painstaking, attentive gestures. Focused light. More specifically, a mind full of moonlight. Shahzia Sikander’s paintings and collage-style artwork in this exhibit, “Extraordinary Realities,” showcase her classical techniques and many layers…
“Cézanne is asking himself how exactly he feels about this rock, this cloud, this apple.”Jed Perl, “Interpreting Nature” in NYRB July 22, 2021 issue I think everything danced in Cézanne’s eye. “Still life” doesn’t describe the pictures he made. Today’s adventure took on the MOMA’s current exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings and watercolors. If there’s a…
Seen through water and glass, the stems of cut flowers have a presence like the trunks of trees to me. Just like that, paintings made of water and transparent pigments evoke the real as though it were transplanted from paradise. This week I’m educating myself with a mini immersion in visual arts around NYC. Actually,…
My middle-school homeschool students had a pool party today to celebrate the end of our year reading The Odyssey together. It was epic. They stood in the water scream-laughing about the crushes they dramatically recounted for each other from their pre-Covid schooldays. I was kicking myself: it never occurred to me to ask them to…
