Tag: GloPoWriMo

  • 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.

  • 2 Poems

    I had to write two poems for the prompt given for Day 4 on the NaPoWriMo website. This is what the prompt is, in essence:

    Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.

    I began to think about the poem seriously at about 9 p.m. The thinking was interrupted by dinner. I watched something on OTT and did not notice the time pass 11.30 p.m.

    I typed my poem on thinkdeli. Then a voice came in my head.

    “You think what I do is not art?”

    I did think he does on our walls is art. I don’t quite know how I deciphered my son’s baby language but I wrote the second poem. Also, on thinkdeli.

    I had this photograph on phone’s lock screen and wall paper. I had kept this on the phone in the end of 2024. I thought this photograph was taken early in the morning.

    I imagined, waking up among this forest scene early in the morning. A little later, I would have missed it. A little earlier, I would have missed it. But the photographer, Arati Kumar Rao stayed up and took this photograph.

    I wanted this photograph to wake me up early. This is the art I describe having lived with.

    The second poem is about my son waking me up in the morning. Not at the time I could take a similar photograph that lives on my phone’s screen, but earlier than I would naturally have.

    I live with this artist, and his art is all around me. In the many places I look.

  • With Apologies to the Nakshatras

    This is my second entry for Global Poetry Writing Month (GloPoWriMo). I am not sure if I will be reproducing that poem here.

    This was the prompt given on the NaPoWriMo website:

    And just as many songs do, the poem directly addresses a person or group – in this case, the Muses. Taking (Anne) Carson’s translation as an example, we challenge you to write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word, an odd/unusual simile, a statement of “fact,” and something that seems out of place in time (like a Sonny & Cher song in a poem about a Greek myth).

    I wanted to see a parallel in Indian poetry. I stumbled on an article of translations of medieval Indian poetry. There is one that I particularly liked:

    svārthārambhapraṇataśirasāṃ pakṣapātāt surāṇāṃ
    dṛptātmānaṃ karajakuliśair dānavendraṃ nihantum |
    siṃhībhūtas tribhuvanaguruḥ so ‘pi nārāyaṇo ‘smin
    rāgadveṣapratihatamateḥ kasya na syāt paśutvam ||

    Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59

    The author, Anand Venkatkrishnan, translates it as:

    When the gods (to whom he was partial)
    started bowing to him
    to save their own heads,
    even Nārāyaṇa, the guru of all,
    turned into a lion
    to slay the proud demon-king
    with his pointy fingernails.

    I mean, if you were so
    swayed by love and hate,
    you’d become an animal too.

    Translation of Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59, Anand Venkatkrishnan

    A search for Sūktimuktāvalī shows that it is an anthology of poems commissioned by Jalhana. I looked up the original text and found it on the Internet Archive.

    I tried to find more by the writer than the four articles he wrote for The Revealer. I found a Tumblr account in his author bio. However, he has not updated it since 2020. He seems to be currently at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago.

    He has written a book on the Bhagvata Purana and about scholarly life in India. I like it’s opening lines:

    We often talk about the life of the mind as if it were the mind that mattered, when it’s really the life.

    Anand Venkatkrishnan, Love in the Time of Scholarship

    The book is an open access publication made available online [PDF link] by the University of Chicago.

    I realise now that this post has not been about the poetry I wrote about 45 minutes ago, giving it a lot of thought but not really satisfied with the output. Not yet.

    In short, the poetry is about the story of the Nakshatras and the Moon. Modern science posits these asterisms at different points in space and time. I tried but have not been fully successful in adding all the suggestions in the prompt.

  • 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.