#163: Poetry x Colour

Sep 06, 2021

Dear reader,

I recently discovered the term Magnum-muni, which means ‘To ponder, speculate, muse, or even meditate on something.’ A deep contemplation of something big.

One of the things I often find myself pondering over is the power of art and creativity in the healing process. As Louise Bourgeois correctly said: “Art is a guarantee of sanity.”

I hope to one day become an art therapist, someone like William Sieghart who runs The Poetry Pharmacy and prescribes poems as a cure to problems and conditions. Or like Margaret Naumburg, the ‘mother of art therapy’, who saw the creative process as a methodology for unearthing repressed, unconscious thoughts and emotions.

Another area I’ve been interested to learn about is colour therapy (chromotherapy) and how colour can be used is to correct physiological and psychological imbalances in the human body. I loved learning about Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion, a way to increase our emotional literacy by understanding emotions and colours, and seeing how I can add it to my emotional toolkit.

Another brilliant take on colour us poet Mary Ruefle’s Poet Color Spectrum of Sadnesses, which I found on Brain Pickings. Mary writes:

Purple sadness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echoing down a long corridor, it is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.

I invite you to contemplate on the place of colour in your life. What is your favorite colour? What colours evoke hope and peace? Which colours are triggering? Why?

Poetry Corner:

I’ve been doing some deep diving into the intersection of poetry and colour. I hope you enjoy reading these gems I’ve handpicked for you:

Sunday by James Schuyler

The mint bed is in
bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is
more than green and
throws up sharp and
cutting lights to
slice through the
plane tree leaves. And
on the cloudless blue
I scribble your name.
Fiction by Lisel Mueller

Going south, we watched spring
unroll like a proper novel:
forsythia, dogwood, rose;
bare trees, green lace, full shade.
By the time we arrived in Georgia
the complications were deep.

When we drove back, we read
from back to front. Maroon went wild,
went scarlet, burned once more
and then withdrew into pink,
tentative, still in bud.
I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.
When Love by Alicia Ostriker

when love floods a person
it cuts
a canyon

that deepens year after year
carrying silt
away leaving

the essential person
revealed
letting everyone see

the layers of yellow
sandstone, red basalt
grey granite

when love washes over a person
it washes
the person away
New Life by Taylor Mallay

When what happened
to me had finished finally, I left
with a deep abrasion on my knee,
bandaged in the driver’s seat

over 1000 miles of rough road
from the point of injury.
Cuts close inward
from the edges,

they say.
Healthy skin thins itself,
stretches across – desperate
to build a barrier,

let nothing through;
a paper wall
would do. Now,
the central air shudders

on as I stare at six
small succulents –
a worried friend’s gift
of new life lined up along

this kitchenette’s white windowsill.
Wounds need water –
my beetroot red heart-shaped
scrape craves moisture as it heals

so slowly, but these green spirals
yellow at my raining ignorance.
Who knows how
to keep anything alive?
The Lives of the Heart by Jane Hirshfield

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit.
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.,
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate --violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

Recommended Listening

Links of the Week

Yessiow's colourful giant mural in India reminds us of the importance of community
A Girl Who’s Afraid Of Touching People by Liang-Hsin Huang (Must watch)
Winnie-the-Pooh in Moscow (via)
September Goals: Do a life audit (with a 100 post-its)
Afghanistan’s War Rugs :(
What improved your quality of life so much, you wish you did it sooner?
Rebecca Solnit on a Childhood of Reading and Wandering (found this lovely essay on Kat's Kable)
via @ro.doodles
Mysticeti x Ro.Doodles (5 poets responded to my cloud doodle ^ Thanks, Mysticeti!)
Write a haiku
Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
Download: Spirit of Joy Planner
Do we see reality as it is? | Donald Hoffman

Upcoming Talk on Newsletters

I'm thrilled to be doing my first talk in years in collaboration with Wild City as part of Culture Connects: Newsletters – An Intimate Medium Of Expression In The Age Of Social Media. Amidst the clutter of social media and sea of blogs, newsletters have emerged as a powerful medium to express and build engaging, immersive relationships with audiences for creators. Newsletters offer a slower, intimate and more intentional form of content consumption in the digital age we're in.

I’ll be talking to Rajat Mittal of Boyish about our journeys as newsletter creators, community building, monetisation and offer personal insights into the world of newsletters.

We go live on Facebook on Tuesday, 7th September, 6pm IST! :)

Attend

Fundraiser: Rebuilding Post-Covid India

The Alipore Post is fundraising for Rebuilding Post-Covid India with Pravah Changelooms, Compassion Contagion and Atypical Advantage to help vulnerable communities in rural India with the devastating impact of Covid-19. Our fundraiser aims to address the long term needs of the people and get the people back on their feet as quickly as possible.

As part of this collaboration, we have put together a Heal with Poems kit, a set of 10 art + poetry postcards on Hope and Resilience for those who donate Rs 1500 to the cause. The campaign ends tomorrow, so please donate soon :)

Donate

A fun writing exercise

I can’t remember where I came across this writing exercise. But it helps me get my brain juices flowing. Whenever I feel stuck or uninspired creatively, I pick up a blank A4 page, and start writing:

“I _____ onto the white page and there I find…”

The idea is to start with I ___ and then use an action word like walk/stumble/bounce/run/fall etc and keep going. In case you do try it, I’d love to read what you write.

Wrapping up this newsletter with a comic by Wednesday Holmes, a London-based artist, designer and disruptor:

Look at you go!

Sending love and beauty your way,
Rohini

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P.S. I’ve already started collecting some beautiful links and scrumptious food poems for September’s special edition of this newsletter for all our supporters.

The Alipore Post