#209: For the love of all things poetic🌻

On blood moons, poetry and a deep dive down the Tumblr wormhole 🤷🏻‍♀️

Nov 07, 2022

Hello!

I’m sorry I didn’t pop into your inbox last week. There was just so much going on during my visit home, I gave up on all my commitments for the week. What I did do was explore Calcutta with a cleaned up lens of curiosity. I changed things up.

I visited the flower market by the Ghats with my mother, and documented the experience, and sent out The Floral Dispatch, a newsletter on flowers x art.

hoovufinds

A post shared by Hoovu Finds (@hoovufinds)

I took a drive around the city by night, and wrote a poem titled Calcutta: Night Poem in transit, breaking my writer’s block after months at end.

An excerpt:
“I see trucks with bright shiny horns
The prehistoric looking trees
In maidans, horses with solemn faces,
Grazing at the patchy grass.
There are men going home in rikshaws
Chewing paan
Spitting and staining the streets as they please.

Time stops every now and then in Calcutta.”

I dug up old photographs, and revisited memories that made me laugh.

I’m in the black tee that says ‘I was born intelligent. Education ruined me’ :/

And I spent some time on Tumblr, the most delightful place on the Internet. A few things I discovered during my deep dive:

1. Tracey Emin's installation My Bed, 1998, after a long, bedridden bender following a bad break-up. Read more.

2. Vintage endpaper designs.

3. A Book in the Hand (Love it)

4. This photograph of Andy Warhol working on Flowers at the Factory, 1964

5. “We do not see the connection between things, but live under the illusion that things are separate. In the same way we exist only in a moment. Actually things interact continuously. Interchange goes on without ceasing. Because we fail to see this, we see the world as dead. For the same reason we fail to realise that we ourselves are a process.”
— Mme Sophie (Sophia) Grigorievna Ouspensky

6. Emlen Etting's Poem 8

7. Lego Flower Bouquets!

8. Trippy GIFs by dotroom ^

9. Hossein Goshtasbi's gorgeous photography

10. Free Chapbooks

Poems I fell in love with

Painting: Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob, 1914 by Frederick Childe Hassam

What I Have Learned So Far by Mary Oliver

Meditation is old and honorable,
so why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of – indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

In This World by Izumi Shikibu

In this world
love has no color
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

I Love The Dark Hours Of My Being by Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Innocence by Linda Hogan

There is nothing more innocent
than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
neither of us knowing what it will become
in the abundance of the planet.
It makes a living only by remaining still
in its niche.
One day it may struggle out of its tender
pearl of blind skin
with a wing or with vision
leaving behind the transparent.

I cover it again, keep laboring,
hands in earth, myself a singular body.
Watching things grow,wondering how
a cut blade of grass knows
how to turn sharp again at the end.

This same growing must be myself,
not aware yet of what I will become
in my own fullness
inside this simple flesh.