The Pencil (Transcreation, Vijay Nair)

Confined inside its box,
to an impish sharpener,
the pencil extolled its virtue.
“I am like Saddam. The one,
who faced the noose with a roar.”
Soon arrived Maalu,
the owner of the box.
Into the mouth of the sharpener,
she thrust the pencil, and

Click…!!

Allah-o-Akbar!!
A poem in Malayalam by Abhirami
Translation by Vijay © 23rd July, 2007 on Caferati

Made me smile.

Writerly sites (Rajiv Mudgal)

Good Word processors...

ZOHO WRITER:
AjaxWrite:
ThinkFree:
Liquid Story Binder XE:
PageFour:
Book Writer:
Rough Draft:
Celtx: (the second best after Rough draft)
ClicheFinder:
Dictionary.com:
Rhyming Dictionary:
Roget's Thesaurus:
The Slot:  (Dedicated to the correct usage of words, phrases and grammar in the English language.)

AND HOW (darknite)

AND HOW

And how will you
feel then, when the joy
sets back in
and you're no longer left
to wonder what to do
with what was?
O how you will feel then!

- darknite on Caferati.

I wish I could say how much the size of this poem appeals to me. A single clear thought in just as many words as needed.

In many poems, the words run on long after the thought is over. In my cartoon-obsessed brain, its like Tom chasing Jerry over a cliff and past the edge, continuing to run impossibly on, until mid-air, he looks down and realizes he's run out of ground.

What defines poetry (Caferati exercise)

We hear these often:
"What makes a piece of writing a poem?"
"Those are just prose sentences with weird line breaks."
"I don't know anything about poetry."
"That's really poetic!"
"It's all about self-expression. I write from within my heart."
"I never edit my original poem. That would destroy the sacred words that marked a divine moment."
And so on.

So let's hear it from you. What is poetry to you?

-------------
I have the same take on poetry as art. No one seems to be able to define what art is, nor what poetry is. So we must accept that everything is art - from your kid's crayon masterpiece to Van Gogh. Maybe it's the process that is art, not the end-point. Maybe that's the same with poetry.

But greatness, that is a different matter. I think most people are aware of the distinction between art and great art.
I'm obsessed with greatness. Great art or poetry is very dense in content, that much is for sure. What bothers me about some Caferati poetry is the unbearable lightness. Yet, it is so very very hard to create anything great, one cannot fault them for it.

RUINED (by ssT)

Don’t tell me
what you would have done
or what you’re going to do
It’s what you’re doing now
that holds my interest
I may not know everything about you
but I’ve learned the habits
that keep you occupied
I cross you out like a wrong word
I bang you just to make some noise
Let’s see you dance
to that beat sucker

Love goes on
never pretending to be anything else
Lord deliver us
from people with good intentions
doing things to us for our own good
When is the last time
you saw a strange person
glaring at you from a passing window
& then discovered
it was your own reflection?

Forget all that reflecting
Let’s open ourselves up on the highway
& see what kind of ground we cover
Nothing’s louder than silence
rushing in our ears
or hearing the ocean roar in a sea shell
Birds sing with their lives not their beaks
The less I say
the less trouble I get into
& still I keep talking

Acting in bad faith
is always self defeating
Is the world inhabited by poets
or infested with poetry?
If your love isn’t fast
it will run in the rain
& get ruined
Your love is a thunderstorm
that has ruined me
for any other

ssT (on Caferati)
-----------------------
I suppose "learned the habits that keep you occupied" was where I began to take interest. The interest peaked at "Let's open ourselves up on the highway and see what kind of ground we cover"
But the last para lost some ground. "Your love is a thunderstorm that has ruined me for any other", sounds  to me like a bad pickup line. And yet, someone could say that and really mean it. So, now what?

Caferati on Ryze is now members-only

Until further notice, you can no longer access the posts that I link to, unless you are a member of Ryze.
I am unsure if I can quote entire posts here without violating some Caferati or Ryze rule. So sorry about not being able to read these posts, but Ryze is free to join, and Caferati welcomes new members, so you don't have to miss reading them. You will also find some selected posts at Caferati's blog, which is accessible by all.

The Swansong (Villanelle) /Vyom Prashant

The Swansong...

Mother I hope you do not cry
Remember you said life is a war?
In every battle a few men die

I'd never turned to say goodbye
And in memory of the farewell hour
Mother I hope you do not cry.

continue reading..

What is a Villanelle?

This was a strongly worded one, probably will make you turn misty, as a foregone thing, and you don't even need to be a mother. The only line I felt out of place was "Remember you said life was a war?", It seems the sort of thing a father would say, not a mother. I'm going here by my own mother as reference, of course, and she is the sort of woman who would neither make declarative statements beginning with "Life is" (one-line summaries of life seem frivolous compared to her outlook), nor be in a position to compare anything to war, which she has not experienced. Vyom's reference may be different.

Aesthetics of Loneliness / Ashish Gorde

"...It is a very inspiring article on 'The Spectacles of American Isolation' written by Mark Feeney and was reprinted in the Gulf News' Weekend Review. It's not included in the Review's web edition, and I guess, it could be partly because it's a syndicated article from the New York Times News Service. The main focus of the article is an examination of Edward Hopper's paintings, and how he could be considered to be the Great American Artist. Fenney writes, 'the sources of his popular appeal are obvious enough: immediate accessibility; a subtle yet vivid colour sense; familiar, but not too familiar, subject matter; a fondness for picturesque settings such as New York, Maine and Cape Cod; even a whiff of prurience.' However, he goes on to describe what he feels to be a "Hopperesque" quality, and calls it loneliness. "

I missed reading this because of the recent flood of new posts on the board. But reading Ashish Gorde's essay, in relation to the original article by Mark Feeney at Boston Globe which triggered it, was interesting, because I've always thought the opposite about Hopper's creations, that it was about the healing power of solitude, rather than the pain of loneliness. I call it the elevator consciousness ( a post on this later) - it brings to me that moment when you surface for air from being submerged in a group of people, forced to breathe in their exhaled opinions, purposes and personalities. I'm an extrovert, no sociopath, but I feel no pathos in Hopper, only respite and relief. I feel the transience of the situation.The person reading in the train, or the lonely diner in the highway restaurant is alone, but only in passing. Tomorrow he will reach home and be inescapably among people again.

It could be entirely my take, maybe Hopper did intend for them to portray loneliness imposed, rather than solitude chanced upon, that I tend to read into it. Maybe I find solitude rarer than company, living in a crowded urban scene, and long for the spaces, so American as the article says, where one can breathe free. But I find his other attractive aspect, his matter-of-factness, revealing and supportive of my reading. He does not portray a permanent loneliness, he does not portray tragedy. The people are all placid in their aspect, inward looking, but not mourning. The loneliness seems more located in the space they are in, and the oddness of their position in it, rather than in the person himself, and the person seems acutely aware of his position, but chooses to accept it, because it is not permanent. In this acceptance, a loosening of norms of sociability, in this tendency to revel in the aloneness, rather than seek a superficial conversation with a stranger, a waiter in the restaurant or a fellow passenger, Hopper highlights a moment of self-sufficiency that I have admired all along.