#205: Why we show up
On poetry, paying attention and a month of drawing flowers 🌷
Hello!
I realised today that the newsletter has been off-schedule and not going out on Mondays for a little while now, so I apologise. Life has been happening is all I can say, and I’ve been trying to pay attention and be an active participant in it.
Today I was telling my aunt about Simone Weil’s essay on Attention and Will, where she, like Mary Oliver, talks of attention as a form of devotion, of prayer. Simone writes:
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
I’ve been going through a roller coaster of distraction and hyperfocus this month, and just trying to stay on top of things. But despite feeling generally tired mentally and physically, I am quite creatively recharged though. Over the past weekend, I’ve met so many people in Bangalore through the Hoovu Finds community events I hosted. We made zines with flowers in our hair, wrote poems together in the park and I got to put faces to so many of you readers, many of whom have been hanging out with this newsletter for years now.
It was a potent reminder of why I do what I do. It took me back to the first few The Alipore Post Offline editions, to the early days of this newsletter, which in turn made me reflect on the past seven and a half years since I started this. (what what! 🤷🏽♀️) This general state of memory walking has been totally amplified off the charts because of a podcast episode that just came out, where I had a long chat with Sangeetha Menon aka The Moody Marshmallow on her podcast The Closet Writer Chronicles.
Listening back to myself attempting to articulate my own creative journey as a human being and the person behind The Alipore Post, the different projects I’ve done over the years, and my own mental health made me feel too exposed. But at the same time, I could feel the dots connecting. I started The Alipore Post to archive my curiosities for myself but in the process, I have found a community. Thank you for being that. It means the world.
You can listen to the full podcast here:
Poetry Corner
Three poems I loved reading + one by me :)
1. Now That You're 21 by Kristina Hayes
These years will be glamorous—all the
magazines say so. You’ll learn what not
to mix tequila with, what shoes to pair
with that dress, what your default lipstick
will be, the book and movie and song
that will save you after every failed relationship,
each summer-at-the-beach fling. You will learn
the measure of patience and most important,
how to be alone. You will collect lonely like
some people collect stamps, and you will
learn to keep the light on for it, because lonely
needs company, too. You
will learn that self-love is not
dragging a random from the bar home to
sleep in your bed, but that it
is making your bed before you leave the
house for the night.
On these nights, you’ll stumble home—drunk,
in a dress that clings to you like a second skin
and shut the bathroom door behind you,
tired heels hanging from your hand
as you get down on your knees in front
of the toilet. You’ll greet it like an old
friend or a past lover, wrap your arms
around its porcelain neck and
whisper apologies after vomiting all of
your awful down its throat.
And then there will be boys, gloriously pale
boys whose veins you can count at the
wrists and jugular, boys buying you drinks,
handing you a cigarette despite your
refusals, leading you with your hands
twined down the street in a city
whose name tastes like smoke
in your mouth. Boys with coffee eyes
asking you if that seat is taken. Boys
who look like sin as they shrug themselves
out of their leather jackets. Boys
your mother warned you about. Boys
your father keeps a knife in the drawer for.
Boys who will break your heart, leave
you for dead on the side of the street and
you, not knowing what to do or say to
keep it from happening all over again.
Soak in these years like sunlight. Re-position
the needle over the vibrancy of your youth. Get
up from the lawn, brush the grass from your
kneecaps. Hail a taxi.
Find your way home.
2. Warning by Jenny Joseph
When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples' gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
3. I want by Jordan Jace
I want to write poems for construction workers and dreamers
For revolutionaries
For deadbeats and those on the low
I never want to ask please fix us all
I want for us to want
to patch every heart
and pave every road
and destroy every system
that has ever left us
broken. I want to sing
like frank ocean, like wonder
like sonder, like mereba, like the sea
I want to recite the line
Took the wretched out the earth
Called it baby fanon,
I want to call someone baby.
I want to stop smoking because I want to live,
I can only love my comrades if I live,
and I want to clean my room,
I want to clean my room every week
and make my bed and put peppermint in my hair
to stop needing my inhalers
and to inhale solidarity, and to eat the rich,
I want to eat the rich, to cancel the rents,
to know my neighbors
and to know my neighbors
are safe. I want to move like water, to move
from unity to struggle to unity,
to have no perfect world we haven’t fought for.
4. Stop the Press by Rohini Kejriwal (Excerpt)
The news so dark –
It keeps us up all night.
We watch the country burn
The flames, too bright.
Read the full poem on EPW.
Things that made me go YAY!
Farheen’s latest post on Instagram ^ Ooooof.
I love Kimiko Nishimoto’s spirit and self-portraits!
Me, But Online. (A collection of minimalist, original personal websites with great typography. Curated by Kabir.)
My recent visit to Tenpy Heidi near Bangalore to doodle and spend time in nature, hiking and embracing slow life.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is out in the movie theatres! Finally.
Advancing to the Ruby level on Duolingo. Heck yeah!
This fascinating analogy on reading poetry from E. B. White’s letter to Philip Booth:
“When it comes to poetry, I take my own sweet time and allow myself no more than one poem a day. A good poem is like an anchovy: it makes you want another right away and pretty soon the tin is empty and you have a bellyache or a small bone in your throat or both.”
Join Hoovutober, a month-long art challenge
I love flowers and art, and have been holding space for flowers and art through my other project Hoovu Finds. Instead of TAPTOBER, which I’ve been hosting for the past few October on @thealiporepost account, I’m sharing flora-inspired prompts this year on the @hoovufinds account, and invite you all to join the fun!
Back in 2017, Inktober was formative in me discovering the artist within through play and curiosity. And I’m ever so grateful. The best part of this challenge is that you don’t have to be an artist to do it. The only requisite is the willingness to make 31 doodles over a month, one day at a time. Come draw flowers with me?
Wishing you a month ahead full of small wins and rainbow puddings,
Rohini
P.S. If you feel like supporting this labour of love, you can become a paid subscribe, buy me a coffee, or tell a friend to sign up.