A. Anupama
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…
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…
When a poem is about to be, keep your hands ready. It might have words, but sometimes instead it has sounds, flashes of light and color, pressure like an April gale, a lift of wing. I always thought it strange that such fragile things as bird eggs are laid high in tree boughs. There’s that…
It's as necessary to listen to rain, and then to go for a walk in it, as it is to sit down with pen and notebook. I'm writing a poem in hope of unraveling my thoughts about the shootings in Atlanta this week. Imagine how snarled up those thoughts are for many, between experience and…
Wren conversation - What is this watercolor shape — a pool of light or a sleeping fox, I ask myself. How much light does it take to make a feather, at rest in a wing? When does the number of brushstrokes accrue enough mindful interest to tell me the painting is done? Is a poem…
I call this walking off a cliff, knowing that a helicopter is right there to catch you. Knowing, but not seeing it in your conscious mind. Some of us write ourselves off the cliff and in that moment of falling, catch the void in a turn of phrase, in a poetic twist, or a sudden…
