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…
And the sky might read over your shoulder. It has a color and a voice that can show you more of the poet’s intention. Yesterday I brought Adonis: Selected Poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa to a friend’s house to share in evening light, just at the edge of a storm front, taking the risk of…
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…
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…
Which is what I told my friend I was doing these days. But that was really a subterfuge. A creative mind never stops. Even when I seem still, there’s a process at work that I don’t understand or know anything about. I hide my process. I treat it like a living root: something that must…
Where this pandemic will take us all next is always difficult to see. Who expected this second round of Covid19 in India would be so dangerous and heartbreaking. While everyone is doing their best under the circumstances, we can’t help but wonder what should have been done. We can only work with what we have…
Sometimes a song does it. I'll suddenly remember being together with a group of people, playing a game or writing some poems, sharing food and drink. We've been watching some classic musical films at my house for that very reason: nostalgia for the simple joy of just being together. Today, not one but TWO in-person…
