A. Anupama
At least it’s beautiful when the feminine divine is completely enraged. Does someone point out the real beauty to us? Will it help us shift into what is good? My cousin sent me this viral video today— a bharatanatyam and hip-hop fusion dance. Laughing and smiling is a good break from roaring. https://youtu.be/Saj65ySCOSo This morning’s…
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,…
It’s the season of white wildflowers here: honeysuckle and briar roses and horse chestnut trees in bloom. It’s infuriating, trying to paint them in watercolor. The process requires restraint, a yielding to the blank white of the paper, which is in a way quite the opposite of a writer’s training. But I like the challenge…
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…
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…
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