A. Anupama
Do you remember the classic Tootsie Pop ad with a boy and owl? The question — exactly how much effort would be needed to reach the chewy, chocolatey center — the owl leaves satisfactorily unanswered. That’s the taste of childhood all over: the not-knowing, the sweet cloy of simple wants, the imaginary owl asleep in…
Poems are just like that. A tiny fawn was dashing around the garden this morning. A new friend in the world, I thought while placing stakes around the daisies, which seem set to bloom next week. Also this morning, the tulip poplar started dropping its sunlight-and-saffron-colored petals from the heights. Now in my heart there…
My neighbor has a bonsai forest, which he inherited from a colleague at the New York Botanical Garden. One afternoon over tea with his wife, I painted it like this, with sunlight a slanting gamboge, glazing their petite trunks. I usually think of rooted trees as extensions of earth. Like living mountains. To contemplate a…
We could have courage, discipline or kindness for dinner tonight, so which’ll it be? They all sound good, right? I’m going with kindness right now. Partly because I have had to serve extra helpings of courage and discipline every night of this whole pandemic, just to get through. How does kindness taste? Is that what…
We can translate experience into poems. Also, poems can translate ourselves to ourselves. Also, literary translation can purify language into its best self. I’m happy to share this interview based on my recent conversation with poet-translator Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma about his forthcoming work on Tirukkural, a masterpiece of Tamil literature. A poem can express a…
My daughter told me that fear is a good thing to have because it makes people focus and learn and achieve. She is thirteen years old, and this is her personal experience, so far. I think that she will understand eventually that there are detrimental complications within fear, but, because I'm busily shielding her from…
It's a good day for a reblog of this list, in my slightly sardonic voice here, of reasons to give poetry books as holiday gifts. The shortest shortcut to peace is poetry. 'Tis the season... Top 20 reasons to give poetry books as gifts #20 - Won’t go out of fashion (because it isn’t fashionable…
I had forgotten about the way I kept “teaching shoes” in my car after this year-and-a-half in virtual classrooms. It’s so good to be with students, in living presence, and there’s no equivalent for it. Now that the school semester is fully underway, most of my thought and energy is in the lectures, discussions, assignments.…
A tree laid its crown on the ground, mindful of the saplings nearby, mindful to lay it across the meadow somehow, away from the sculptures. Now an attentive ear much taller than a poet stays cocked at the side of the footpath: an enormous ellipse of tangled root, rock, and earth. On a bright morning…
There are moments I don’t photograph or write about, though they are worthy of a creative expression. Maybe that’s partly why I took up painting and guitar this year, to see if more angles of approach could widen my praise of life. But it hasn’t really changed the level of silence I keep. A blue…
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