POETLY

For today's imagist post I'm excited to share three poems written by my dear friend and collaborator Aranya. A young poet like me, aranya thinks seriously about poetry and seeks to create a space of sensitivity and creative fervour through his writing. and most of all. to connect. to communicate 😊 i thought it'd be nice to have another fellow poet Raju thai (who has been featured here in the past) write about aranya... Here are her words... "...He inhabits the same spaces

Ramanujan was a genius. He was a polymath- a polyglot, an academic, a scholar, a philologist, a folklorist, an educator and literary critic, a translator, playwright, and, of course, a poet. This poem embodiess his keen eye, his sensitivity, and, for me, the humility and distancing of the self as ego, the act of creation requires. What is interesting to me is, of course, the vibrant and many-layered application of metaphor, but his exploration of dualities. I think arti

another poem... for Emily. who knew. "The newly emerged insects are attracted to lights in riverside towns and villages and the local authorities deploy snow clearing vehicle to remove their rotting corpses." - https://freshwaterblog.net/…/the-mayflys-lifecycle-a-fasci…/ the mayfly: a biography from her liquid prison she escapes, winged nymph lusting after light. a few hours of breath - then blessed before she falls, with the dance of the possessed - wings askew, sussed

Humans have had the privilege of language and rational thought. an evolutionary gift that I often think, we might have been better off without. This gift has allowed us the luxury of locating ourselves at the centre of the universe. Quite literally. Galileo and Copernicus are sitting together somewhere with a glass of wine, and a cigar, having the last laugh. We are living in the age of the “anthropocene”. The debate for nomenclature and this kind of self-definition, howev

"...a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways..." A poet could find a universe between the gap of a word and its meaning, a phrase and the shadow it casts on reality; between language and her paramour, meaning. This is the joy of metaphor. There is a hiatus between two imaginations, or domains of experience, and that is where the magic happens. The moment Maggie Smith speaks about life with a dry conviction, almost mocking the hollow, syrupy tones that well-meaning adults bes

"I'm ready my lord" he knew. I'm convinced he knew. this was his last album (well, his son is releasing another one posthumously). It has all the usual suspects - the metaphors, the conversations with god, the dealer, the healer, the negotiation for truth. and dignity. for the meaning of absolution, and, for beauty. he knew. "there' a crack in everything... that's how the light gets in" what can I say about Cohen? I wanted to meet this man. this poet. lover. earnest pilgr

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are refreshing in their brusqueness. There is a sense of irony in her seemingly clear convictions. She seems to be speaking about her beloved, saying deep emotional truths with a straight face, and by the end, letting a wry smile gently crease the side of her lips. There is honesty in her articulation of love. What I love is the way the persona's convictions slowly shift, how her sarcastic critique of those who make great sacrifices fo

The second poem in the series on sonnets is a Petrarchan sonnet about the joy of discovery; about the moment when we chance upon a thing of beauty, when we see something that is outside our “ken”. Isn’t that what we live for? Novelty is the only kind of immortality that I aspire towards. what I seek, in every relationship, in every collaboration, in every work of art. that I get to witness something that I haven’t before. that new knowledge finds its way to my mind’s e

I remember reading this poem in my library at school on a poster. I then saw it on the London underground. I read Vikram Chandra’s book ‘red earth and pouring rain’, curious about how he’d related with this piece of writing attributed to an anthology composed close to 2000 years ago! Chandra isn’t the only one who drew inspiration from these words - it has even made its way into the lyrics of a british folk rock band’s title track for an album. Imagine! This poem was s