Tag: Carnatic Music

  • That Evening Music Class

    This was the prompt on the NaPoWriMo website for Day 5:

    First, pick a notation from the first column below. Then, pick a musical genre from the second column. Finally, pick at least one word from the third column. Now write a poem that takes inspiration from your musical genre and notation, and uses the word or words you picked from the third column.

    I cannot say I completely followed the full instructions here. This was not because I did not want to follow the instructions. It was because it was not clear to me what it meant.

    Picking up 3 things from 3 columns seemed simple enough. I did that. I picked literally go nuts, folk song, and centaur.

    This time, instead of writing on thinkdeli where I have been writing for the past four days for GloPoWriMo, I wrote in my notebook. When I typed the poem into thinkdeli I rewrote it more concisely.

    In the notebook, the poem was 13 lines long. I made it 12 lines long on thinkdeli. I did this without removing any content details.

  • GloPoWriMo Day 1 – Swarajathis and Youth

    April is Global Poetry Writing month. The theme for the prompts this year is around cultural institutions. As the website says:

    This year, our daily resources will take the form of online museum collections and exhibits. Hopefully, you’ll find these to be at least entertaining, and you may even be able to use some of what you see as inspiration for your poems – particularly given that our prompts this year will all be themed around music and art.

    I am writing the poems as is on a platform called thinkdeli. Here, I want to provide a little more context.

    The prompt for Day 1 is:

    As with pretty much any discipline, music and art have their own vocabulary. Today, we challenge you to take inspiration from this glossary of musical terms, or this glossary of art terminology, and write a poem that uses a new-to-you word. For (imaginary) extra credit, work in a phrase from, or a reference to, the Florentine Codex.

    I looked up the glossary of Carnatic music terms on Wikipedia. I learnt about something I missed learning in my Carnatic music education – Swarajathis. This became the basis of the poem.

    I learnt swarams, geethams, and varnams.
But not swarajathis.
I seemed to have pranced over them,
Unknowingly.

I lived through boyhood, adulthood, and parenthood.
But not youth.
I seemed to have pranced over those years,
Knowingly.

    I don’t know why I skipped learning swarajathis between geetham and varnam. After varnam, I went directly to learning keerthanams.

    In my mind, I similarly skipped over youth. I was eager to get into adulthood as a child. Once I got there, though, I was eager to do many things I wanted to go back and do things I could have done in my youth. Like solo travelling, hiking, etc.