A. Anupama
Here is a flat, seamless year’s end, in a pandemic seemingly without end. Given a lot of reflection, my hope has been to give it contour. Loss and hope weave themselves together, like threads in chambray melding into a single color. Love and anxiety as weft and warp conspire to drape us in silk. These…
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.…
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…
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…
Painting while listening to virtual programs on Zoom, Crowdcast, Vimeo, Coursera and other platforms has given me a new appreciation for those students who sketch and doodle in my classes. I’m not sure if my topics ever influence their artwork, but I know I find interweavings in my experiences of observing sound while engaged in…
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…
Our dogwood tree has already set its fists for next spring’s blossoms. I don’t want to believe that autumn is so near. But I try to convince myself of the truth with a painting. I wanted to copy the beautiful tree in the center of this folio page, which was painted in Herat in the…
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