A. Anupama
Yesterday at my annual eye exam, the optometrist told me to get myself a pair of reading glasses. Here they are--inevitable lenses through which I'll have to gaze at poems and paintings from now on. I'm not complaining. My blurry vision is a reminder to me -- don't take this for granted. This is also…
How thirsty will we have to get? Drought looks terrible on the Hudson’s palisade, where trees have browned all along the crest. The brook in my neighborhood had dried up completely last week, but got back a trickle at least, which I noticed while walking Old Mountain Road this morning. The beech saplings alongside might…
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.…
If suns grew in a field together, would they get along? If stars fell into fields, would we memorialize them? If the crescent moon mowed the field, what kind of hay would that make? Poems are made of heat, light, consciousness. On a hot day in August like this, maybe poems get lost. Maybe in…
My older daughter is a real entomophobe, and she protested by loud wailings my choice of subject for yesterday’s painting. I had said “dragonfly” and so I agreed that it did sound scary. Is “damselfly” more charming? They are, in fact, two different types of creatures in the order Odonata. But maybe they occupy a…
I like to think of literature and the creative writing process itself as a type of habitat for emotions. We can reserve a space of quiet, practice the discipline of gardeners, and protect our observational vantage points from those who might disturb the sanctuary. But does anyone know where an emotion comes from or where…
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…
poet | artist 