A. Anupama
Walk somewhere, and you know that place better, even if you’re resisting it. I’m reflecting on many days at my alma mater Vermont College of Fine Arts, which announced this week it is letting go of its beautiful campus atop Montpelier’s steep hillside. The programs will continue, thankfully, with a new location for in-person residency,…
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…
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 wonder if I’m noticing enough, even as I pause over fresh red leaves in the roadside next to the curb. There’s pleasure in writing poems, even breathless with exertion of reluctance. The last robin in our neighborhood to fly away for winter might have gone already, or might not yet. A poem waits and…
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.…
What do butterflies say? If a child asked me that, I’d say “listen.” This past Sunday, my neighbor and I walked up the newly built section of trail that leads from Nyack Beach State Park to the Long Path, which climbs to the peak of Hook Mountain. We met a woman named Felicia, who teaches…
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…
I should know better than to look at social media on my phone while still half asleep in bed in the morning. But I do sometimes, probably because the intensity of the collective pain to be found there helps to efface my own restless, anxious dreams. Sometimes it just amplifies them though, as yesterday when…
The clouds glance down and move off in great billows this afternoon, and I’m reviewing notes for the creative writing course I’ll be teaching again. It’s a busyness that I like, even though it’s really summer’s end when I do this. I had so many ideas at the beginning of summer, but now it’s all…
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