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…
I know, that’s backwards. It’s usually “effortless effort,” the Zen approach to living. But I think it may be more realistic and compassionate to say that putting in a focused effort upfront pays off in the practice of most things. One of my friends asked me when I’m going to add “watercolorist” to my profile…
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…
Saffron mood — Surprise flowers are a good strategy in love. A friend just reminded me of some translations I wrote a while back of Tamil love poetry. Maybe I’ll translate more this spring.
Ghost stories and river imagery blew a few gusts in our free-write group yesterday afternoon. Among the paper coffee cups and notebooks, the lyric conversation turned to silent sketching of scenes and memories. Better than candy. The writing prompt I offered was a quote from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving, a beautiful…
What we writers say about our process in writing is the happiest sort of selfie. Thanks so much to my friend, fellow Vermont College alumna, and awesome poet Pamela Taylor for inviting me to join the tour. What are you working on? Right now, I'm writing new poems and some revisions of poems I wrote in…
