Ruchira's Ramblings

Day 17. Today I wrote a haiku for International Haiku Day, using the phrase 'gibbous moon'. This was the prompt from the Instagram page Kavyajananipoetry. The prompt from  napowrimo.net  was quite cool, it was just that I wanted to catch up with some of my reading lists, so I wrote only one poem. But I did think about the other prompt, you know, the prompt not taken, as it were, and it brought back memories. So what was it? Dogs, All the dogs you've known in your life. The prompt was  developed by the comic artist Lynda Barry, and it asks you to think about  dogs you have known, seen, or heard about , and then use them as a springboard into wherever they take you. Cool yeah? I have never had a dog. When I was young, I was terrified that the neighbourhood strays would bite me and then I would have to take 17 injections (I don't exactly remember if the number was 17, but it was a big number). As I recall, the dogs seemed to bark a lot and always seemed angry, but ...

Sorry, it has been a while. Things just pile up on one another, you know. But here’s the main news. The thing I’ve been waiting for since last December finally happened. Last month, on the 16 th , I got my TARDIS driving license. Which is to say, I successfully defended my PhD thesis. What? I’ve been waiting to make ‘Doctor’ themed jokes for a while now. But you know the strangest thing? Happy as I was (and still am) about the whole thing, the immediate aftermath of it felt a bit deflating. Like, what am I supposed to do with myself now? I mean, I have enough on my plate, don’t get me wrong- classes to teach, scripts to evaluate (how is about 80% of my life consumed by examinations and grading? I seem to remember these being a lot less frequent when I was a student myself!), data to collect and enter into endless excel sheets (did not sign up for this, smh) and then order and reorder, supervising student drama rehearsals, organizing intra-college poster contests and so on and so forth....

NaPoWriMo Day 29. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to produce a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement or you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to." 1 more to go. Yeah, we did it. Almost!

NaPoWriMo Day 28. Prompt from napowrimo.net: Write a metapoem or a poem about poetry.

NaPoWriMo Day 25. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "...I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that: Is specific to a season, uses imagery that relates to all five senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell), includes a rhetorical question, (like Keats’ “where are the songs of spring?”)". I love writing about the rain, but I generally don't engage the senses so this was an interesting prompt.  Favourite subject but different approach. How do you think I did? Do let me know. Love,

NaPoWriMo Day 23. Prompt from napowrimo.net for today was to write a poem about an animal. But then I came across @the.riya.roy (Check her out on Instagram) who had shared a poem she wrote for last year's poetry challenge, in response  to a prompt from Airplane Poetry Movement who had asked us to write a pantoum. So I thought, why not put the two things together and see what happens? N.B: My attempt is a rather loose interpretation of the pantoum structure where the 2nd & 4th lines of a preceding stanza are not necessarily exactly repeated in the 1st and 3rd lines of the succeeding one. But this was fun to write.  And now for some other stuff. First, my poem  'Scent ' is now up on Issue 7 of the Minute Magazine . You can also check out the podcast version of it on Soundcloud , iTunes or Spotify . Finally, last plug of the day, if you've not already read it, please check out my Antarctica travelogue . Pretty please? I love you. Thanks for ...

NaPoWriMo Day 18. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to write an elegy of your own, one in which the abstraction of sadness is communicated not through abstract words, but physical detail."

NaPoWriMo 2019 Day 14. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Our prompt for the day (optional as always) takes its inspiration from Mali’s poem. As he shows us, there many words in English that sound like other words. For that matter, English has lots of words that look like other words, Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates homophones, homographs, and homonyms, or otherwise makes productive use of English’s ridiculously complex spelling rules and opportunities for mis-hearings and mis-readings. Hoppy wrothing!" So far, this has been the hardest prompt for me. It took me several false starts to get this done, and I don't quite like the end product.  In fact, I seriously considered abandoning today's poem altogether but then I remembered that the point of  NaPoWriMo is to write a poem every single day, even if it is a bad poem. One thing I had decided was that I was not going to write a poem complaining about the English language, be...

Of Ordinary Things... The daily (optional) prompt from napowrimo.net today "is based on a dream that the poet Natalie Eilbert had. In the dream, she was taking a poetry workshop in which each student had to bring in two objects from home – one significant and one dull. The students then had to give away or destroy the significant object, and write a poem about loving the dull thing. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about a dull thing that you own, and why (and how) you love it. Alternatively, what would it mean to you to give away or destroy a significant object?" I chose to write about the "dull thing I own".

NaPoWriMo Day 10. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that starts from a regional phrase, particularly one to describe a weather phenomenon. " I chose to begin with an approximation of a Bengali phrase for an extremely harsh summer day but also included the British Isles expression (according to a link provided on the NaPoWriMo website) for a rainy day forecast- Noah's Day. Hope you liked this,  thanks for reading. 😘 Also, we now have the first ever photograph of a Black Hole (and it sort of looks like the Eye of Sauron), how cool is that? Next time I have a ring of power, I am throwing it into a Black Hole. One does not simply walk into space, didja say? Ah well, I shall burn those star-bridges when I get there. Also, Mandala Colouring is my new favourite way to procrastinate and I love it. See you tomorrow.