Ruchira's Ramblings

  I’ve been looking for things to say.   I have been afraid of staring at blank pages. What if someday I have nothing to say anymore? What if nothing I say interests anyone anymore? What if no one hears me? What if they hear me and laugh at my naiveté? So what am I going to write about? Like most of my recent posts, this too has been weeks and months in the making. I’ve been running away from saying the things I want to say. What if I say too much? Share too much? What if they laugh and roll their eyes, muttering about my presumptions? What if no one says a damn thing and I fall through the rabbit-hole of silence once again? On some days, I listen to one song on loop, willing it to weave a story in my head that transports me from my present. On other days, I run through my playlists, discarding old favourites like a moody teenager picking at food, too distracted to allow for the distraction of music and rhythm. Somebody perhaps I’ll sit down and write songs again, feel the...

NaPoWriMo may be over, but poetry never is. On the last day of the month long challenge, the prompt from napowrimo.net was to write a minimalist poem. I looked at some short forms and wrote two other poems that I eventually didn't share. This is the first of those two other ones. I was experimenting with a form called Magic9, which uses the rhyming scheme abacadaba (Basically,  spell Abracadabra and take out the R) but I was also trying to revisit the prompt from Day 28 to write a metapoem. So here you go,  a somewhat minimalist metapoem written in the Magic9 form. And here's the second poem, written in the form of a Korean sijo poem, a 3-line poem of 44-46 syllables. I meant to share those poems ages ago but then I was writing my neverending PhD thesis and the blog kinda got put on a back burner, but then a couple of days ago my mind veered off into an existential ramble during morning papers and so I thought I would share that. Ahem. So here goes nothing. You ...

NaPoWriMo Day 24. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today’s prompt is to write a poem that is inspired by a reference book. Locate a dictionary, thesaurus, or encyclopedia, open it at random, and consider the two pages in front of you to be your inspirational playground for the day.". The book I opened was the  'Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms'. And I thought I would give the villanelle form another shot. 

Last week, someone I knew on Facebook posted a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon.   It was one I had seen before- did I mention I was a big Calvin & Hobbes fan?- and shared with my academic friends, sort of as a light-hearted in-joke- a nostalgic reminder of our experiences as clueless students trying to hand in assignments within looming deadlines. As one classmate very memorably said on encountering a discomfiting question- “What’s the point of studying literature for all these years if you can’t use the language to fib and improvise?” Strangely enough, I had never seen this joke as a specifically literary one, but found its humour revolving around the fact that Calvin didn’t actually know anything substantial to say about the subject. As a teacher one knows that the less a student has studied, the more likely she is to “inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning” and write longer and more convoluted sentences. However, my Facebook friend graced this little strip with a...