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....

In the spirit of National Poetry Writing Month, I thought of doing a prose-poem for the blog. But before that, a small announcement. I have a song up on an episode of the London Theatre Podcast- episode titled –We Need to Talk –New Writing Showcase Part 1. It’s only 11 minutes long and you can listen to it on Spotify , iTunes , SoundCloud , PlayerFM or Podbean . Let me know what you think. Longings What does a love story look like? What shape is it? What are the ingredients you need to make one, and most important, where can you find them? I feel like there is space in me for a story, if I could only write one. Or does it get written for you? How does this work? Does an island long for a ship? Do the walls of a little room long for rain to break in? Does a river raging in the rain forest feels incomplete for the space by your side? How does this work? When you speak your words, and no one hears them, were you alive? If you spoke at all, and nobody else spoke your lan...

(I have been having a difficult time this last week, and I needed to vent. I’m only trying to sort out my head. If you came here from one of Instagram videos, the YouTube link is at the end of this post. Just scroll down.) The monster never sleeps, never lets you out of your sight, lusting after your moments of quiet joy.  There is no hour of day that is safe from him, no place far enough. If I were to run to the farthest galaxy, the monster would still find a way to pounce upon my peace. There’s a choice I’ve been sitting on for two years, hoping for someone or something else to act for me. In my dreams, packed bags gather dust at thresholds where the door no longer fits, and I am always too late or too early for trains, never quite going anywhere. No one, I suppose, will make my choice for me. No one has been inside my head. No one has heard me stifle my screams in empty rooms. No one at all has seen me punch at invisible walls. I try my best. I really do. I get up in...

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 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 27. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "I’d like to challenge you to remix a Shakespearean sonnet. You can pick a line you like & use it as the genesis for a new poem. Or make a “word bank” out of a sonnet, and tlry to build a new poem using the same words (or mostly the same words) as are in the poem. Or you could try to write a new poem that expresses the same idea as one of Shakespeare’s sonnets..." I don't know if I got that remix vibe right but I did enjoy writing this one. Thank you for reading. 

The prompt from napowrimo.net for Day 26 was to write a poem using repetitions. 

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 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. 

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 22. Prompt from  "Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that engages with another art form..." The trouble with this poem is exactly the trouble of conveying an idea through words. Music is spontaneous. Colours are visceral, but words are made up things that you have work to string together to create coherence. But I guess the poetry is in the trying. Thanks for reading.