Blurring - Poem (Seekstill)

Blurring around the edges
torn against the night shade
midnight is bluing
into the winter ice moon,
I move between the spaces of my fluidity

continued..

That was well done. Death leads,we follow. Where else can we go?
Aparna

The nights are tough (Rahul Pandita)

Eleven years have passed in this city. Next to where you are breaking your promise of serving breakfast only to me, I remember buying a book from my first salary: Safdar Hashmi - The fifth flame. Life had just begun to explore new theatres of existence. I was raw; I did not know how to cut a slice of pizza. I would lose my way almost every day, thinking South Extension was nearer to Saket than IIT Gate. There were no counters of boiled corn those days; people would eat peanuts while waiting for the bus, warming their hands on a small bonfire lit by a friendly watchman. Very few people had cars those days. The roads were emptier. There were no malls, no Cafe Coffee Days. The lawns of the National School of Drama offered solace to lovers. Holding hands in the darkness of a cinemahall would rid the heart of triglycerides. Mosquitoes would still die from Tortoise coils.

continued..

I liked it immensely. Holding on to memories, painful as they may be and reliving them through a pilgrimage of old haunts.

I found two corrections.
'pilgrimages' has an extra 'm'
Coconut oil on (not in) his head

Aparna

Why? (Madhumita Chakraborty)

why?

when we got to know
each other so,
that there were no more
spaces to explore;
was it exciting at all;
to be 'us' anymore?

continue...

I liked the rhythm, and it's well edited.
Perfect balance between questions and answers.
Aparna

Nothing malafide (what the ?) (C Ravishankar)

Intimacy unmatched,
sowed in me, seeds
of unwarranted affection

But clinging protectiveness
stifled.
Never-changing constancy
bored, cloyed.

continue...

The title did shed (like the snake) nothing meaningful On what poesies grew shining, coiling, under Startling, the eye that followed A dead husk, to find A living swaying wonder (commenting in verse, hope its not annoying) Aparna

O Father, who are you? - A Theory (Amit Mehra Productions)

Background 1: I have been married for a while now & we have decided not have kids.
Background 2: India, where I belong, has the 2nd largest population in the world

Years after we took that decision of not having any kids, I still ponder if we took the right decision. Largely because I look around myself and everyone keeps producing kids, irrespective of their financial, social or physical state. There's just nothing that can make people stop producing kids. Most people, at least in India, are going to great lengths & pains to have kids. Marriages are broken; relationships are made based on the abilities to produce kids.

continue...

Interesting article, and I like your theory, although I think it may be a complex of needs - power, a sense of hope/renewal, love, to exist in some form beyond death, feeling a purpose to life, etc.

Aparna


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(Actually, I thought it was very interesting, and close to the truth in a good many cases. But given our capacity for self-deception, our assumption of noble motives for everything we do, I can see why this theory exercise would jar a lot of people. So the brief comment there.

Already there is a good deal of cynicism about what used to be old ideals - work is about money, life is about getting ahead, patriotism is about right to be treated better than foreigners more than duties, romance is no longer about feeling but a score-card of things given and gotten. The last bastion of selflessness is parenthood, so attack it at the risk of rousing wrath among those who worship it.

I'm not a parent. Neither is the author, according to this article. Presumably, people who are parents are shaking their heads and going "What do these people know?".

Becoming a parent is a biological process. As Elaine says in the Seinfeld show, "It's not like it takes some kind of talent!". Being a human parent, though, is a lifetime job. Unlike dogs and cats, we don't walk away and leave our offspring to survive on their own, after a while. And in that way, we have more vested interests in our offspring than just their survival or our need to reproduce. By the time the kid is an adult, we have spent more than two decades taking care of them and teaching them what we know. Is there anything else in life you would give this much, without expectations in return? I don't know why we expect parents to be selfless.

For delicious irony, I quote my aunt to her own son, "I did so much for you when you were young, without ever thinking of my own comforts, for what? So that now you will ignore us and call once in six months? Why should I be so selfless had I known you are going to be so self-centered?"

It's a rare parent that says "I've done my job, now go live your life, and it doesn't matter to me if your life no longer needs my presence". That would be a selfless parent.)

Verbose Monotony (Thomas Jacob)

A man who never failed to please
Put you at ease, did John Verghese.
A man so true, a man so nice
But alas, logic was his vice.

"Hey John Verghese, 'geese' is plural
but you are just one, not many!"
A singular person in logic's noose
He changed his name, to John Vergoose.

continue...

Yay! Wordplay, my favorite. Both poems are similar, but the first for whatever reason has a special zing.

If John Vergander had married writer Virginia Woolf, would he turn into a Ver-Woolf? (Aoooooooo)

Mukarrar, as the man said before..
Aparna

POEM: Tell me i see alright and it's only the rain (facts and calcuated conveniences)

is that dust from under her feet
on your shoulder?
is that the little girl
living
by the lies he told her?

continue...

'Is this music I hear
Or the silence in my head'

Amazing. It has the lyrical effect of a ghazal. A ghazal not just translated to English like many, but living in English.

"did you go easy on yourself;
was it really
so hard?"
Deep stuff.

You could use the "It's the rain that wont stop" refrain a couple more times, to break up the series of 'Is it/that' beginnings.

Last para has a spell fluff, 'too' spelled as 'to'.

Aparna

Dreamer's Noon (Ozymandias)

He swung himself up into one of the branches of the temple’s banyan-tree, surprised that he was still quite agile. He made his way to where a bough branched off the tree making a cup-shaped hollow; the refuge where he would escape to after he had successfully raided the mango grove. From the folds of his dhoti he extracted a mango, purloined from the high-priests, and bit into it greedily, thrilled as the juice flowed down his chin.

continue...

Are you continuing this?
Refreshingly different topic and I like its regional historical flavor. The names seem straight out of some epic story book (although I admit its probably Amar Chitra Katha versions of them that I've read).

Aparna

Between this breath (Ratna Rajaiah)

Between this breath
And the next
Crouches
A possibility
Death

continue...

Really really good.
I like how the first 5 lines form a poem, a brilliant one, by itself.

In fact, maybe it should end there, because it is so good, it is hard to top it.
However, moving past that...
Using your metaphor, the crouch is the suspense, the leap is action, more dramatic. So I'd expect the last few lines to likewise rise to greater dramatic heights, describing death and its devastating effects, rather than continue with the suspense about when it'll happen. That was a bit anticlimactic.

I hope this makes sense. I've been thinking about it ever since the poem was posted.

Aparna

Wine Ramble (Anita Vasudeva)

I read to you
- my words may slur
and run around the room –
my tongue may slip.
I began toasting tonight pre-lunch
and into the hot eye-burning evening
hoping that words and grapes will hold me up.

continue...

A lyrical heady ramble this, made for wines and remembrances.
"for is it not laden with wine and words today as you had always imagined,
a tryst in sepia colored movies on canvas screens in which you lived many times, not
knowing whether it was the movie or the wine or the vineyard
or the biblical breaking bread and sharing wine"
Must have shared the same bottle - same questions :-) but yours read much better.

Only the last stanza seemed to bring it down to earth, from a high. Different somehow, from the rest of the poem. Can't put my finger on it.

Aparna

Older - 4 (Peter Griffin)

You look at me and think
Old man.
You don’t see the toddler
Gawping at a world
Where all was new.

continue..

Thanks for the formatting tips.

If that was irony I felt in the capitalized Work Bag and Work Clothes, I thought it might be extended to First Paycheck.

The following is only point I thought is a little overstated.
"The bald scalp
The crumbling face
The stumble
The stiffness"

Will wait to see the new version.
Aparna

The First Rain Saudade (John Matthew)

First Rain Saudade

The first showers fall,
Syncopated percussions,
Like memory of first love.

continue...

The monsoon comes through really well in all the descriptive imagery. I found myself thinking more about the monsoon than love.

Esp. the phrase "buildings reflected in recent clouds", the urban connection to nature is simply felt, expressed, and beautiful.

Aparna

Story Teller (Short Story) / Vineesh Krishnan

The bus lurched forward. It had been trapped in a traffic jam for the last fifteen minutes.

“The girl mismatched the heads with the torsos. Tell me why she did it? Give me the correct answer or I am going to tell you another story.”

She thought hard. She wasn’t concentrating. She had been practicing the aahs and ahas for long and had learned to do it without actually listening. There was a girl, there were two guys… Then what?

(Continue..)

I did miss the connection with the two pieces, until your comment. I was thinking she chopped some body part into two pieces, but didn't know why.

It's dark, I like it. You have so many echoes from the stories that were complex mythologicals, open to many interpretations. Hayavadana's transposed heads, Ganga. Like a subterranean river flowing underneath this woman's life, the memories of ancestral women and their dilemmas.

At one point, I wondered if you were going for the King Vikram and Betal reference, where the Betal (vampire) tells stories and asks questions, failing to answer which will explode Vikram's head.

Lots of possibilities here. I think the ending was in a way a little modern, Bobbitt-like banal. Would be fun if you thought of a way to align the ending with all those story references.

Aparna

I am want to suiciding (Poem) - Ozymandias

O well! O well!
Why you are not having water?
I am failed in exam.
I want to suiciding.
Why you to be cleaned now?

(Continue..)

Oh no, _____(how do you like to be addressed by lazy writers, Oz, Ozzy, Ozman, Sir Oz ? ) Pardon me if this is a bad question, I don't wanna be Oztracised in da community.

Do you really want to lead all those suiciders to this here forum :-)

The thought makes me want to be suiciding, and quickly.
Aparna

Run...

What all I escaped
Colors, textures, and words
All that was mystique
Crystal clarity blurred

continue

That was good. I feel the second stanza about aging is particularly good - "Beckon to unbecome". As the above comment says, couple of places where the beat changes could be tinkered with. The first line "what all I missed" is a literal translation of a phrase from the native tongue, the English usage would be "All that I missed", or "Everything I missed".

Aparna

I'm sorry, but that first line's just bad English.
It does not add anything, it's jarring to the ear.
Were it the intent, there would be consistent use of it in the rest of the poem.

Aparna

As the crow flies (Ashish Gorde)

This story could read like a fable, but it is not. It is simply dressed like one, and might even give the impression of one of those quaint moral tales with deep underlying meaning, but it is nothing like that. It is simply an account of a bizarre experience in our garden, which may or may not have moral implications but we could take a chance.
continue..

(This is more about the story...)

One possibility is that while the crows didn't know how to help the baby get back to the nest, they didn't want any other people venturing near for fear that their intent was to harm the baby. After all, they have no way of knowing you're trying to help.

We ran into a bunch of elephants blocking the road near a coffee estate. A young elephant had stuck its leg among some rocks and was unable to get free, and the herd didn't know how to help, but they were guarding it, so no one else would take advantage of its helpless state. Unfortunately they were also preventing the forest department trying to get close to the trapped one so they could free it.

Aparna

The shocking truth about the slush pile [Article excerpt and link] (Peter Griffin)

...
The envelopes and emails rolled in, and I rolled them out with the standard knockback letter. It stopped being funny; it felt arduous. I hated that it was my job to shatter people's dreams of being published, but I also hated that so many of them had such illiterate dreams. The physical act of writing a book may not be difficult, but there's a big difference between smacking away at a keyboard and writing something that anyone who doesn't really love you wants to read. The majority of people who submitted their work went wrong after the first few pages at best, if the cover letter wasn't dreadful.

From "The shocking truth about the slush pile" by Jean Hannah Edelstein at the Guardian Blogs. Read the whole thing at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/05/the_shocking_truth_about_the_s.html (and don't forget to read through the huge number of comments from both sides of the fence).

Caferati link...

I read the entire post and the comments with a good amount of chuckling. The divide between the publishing world view and those on the wrong side of the slush pile - who serves whom ? - never really gets smaller with all the discussions.

I started to read the blog of one Miss Snark, agent extraordinaire in 2005. I was reading it purely for her snarkisms, but she is both funny and informative, and discovered a whole new vocabulary starting from SASE and slush pile that I had no idea even existed :-)

She stopped writing recently, but the blog archives still exist at http://misssnark.blogspot.com

Aparna

When Our Writing Becomes Us (John Matthew)

Jump to it..


Dan,
Thanks for the tip. Next book on my list. :-)

John,
Critics can judge, applaud, point to flaws, and compare with other writers, but they cannot tell a writer what to write. They don't decide what books must be written.

I recently read that the number of new English books published in 2004 was 375,000. Total number of English books available for purchase the same year: 450,000. The average reader probably goes through 10 or 20 in a year.
This of course excludes all magazine articles, blog posts, newspapers and every other form of printed information a person comes across, online or offline.

What an avalanche of advice, impressions and thoughts! It seems impossible for anyone to leave any lasting impression behind. I hope we all write at least in part to please ourselves, and those who may chance on it today, rather than posterity.

(If this realization isn't the stuff of Kafka, what is :-) )

Aparna

Making Poetry Submissions [Article excerpt and link / Peter Griffin (Moderator)

Making Poetry Submissions
Chris Hamilton-Emery

Why do I write?

Before considering making a poetry submission to any publisher it is important to consider what you want to contribute to a publishing relationship and precisely what you want to achieve within your writing life. This is certainly not a financial contribution, we're not talking about vanity presses in these notes, it is a far more important contribution than just money. Understanding your intentions and efforts as a writer will, to a large extent, determine what choices are to be made and provide you with a few opportunities and very many challenges. It might surprise you to discover that being published may not be the best choice for you and your work.

(continue...)

--------------
"However, this is not a test for the financial viability of your poems in a published work."

Like everyone else, I'm curious - so I'll hijack this thread, with the dumb question of what is the test of poetry that can sell. I know, it's the million-euro question.

Is there something we can learn by asking - What do we know about the poetry we like to pay for, as readers? Obviously, these are the successful poets.

Hope there'll be more discussions, tips, and questions/answers from people here.

Aparna

Run... [Verse] / Vyom Prashant

Run...

What all I escaped
Colors, textures, and words
All that was mystique
Crystal clarity blurred

(continue reading)

That was good. I feel the second stanza about aging is particularly good - "Beckon to unbecome". As the above comment says, couple of places where the beat changes could be tinkered with. The first line "what all I missed" is a literal translation of a phrase from the native tongue, the English usage would be "All that I missed", or "Everything I missed".

Aparna