#222: For the love of letter writing 💌
Hello!
I wrapped up Chitthi Exchange last month, a penpal project I started in the pandemic and that got 3000 strangers sending handwritten letters and forging new friendships across the globe. There’s many reasons I chose to discontinue the project. But the one feeling that has remained from it is that letters/postcards are legit a great way to stay in touch with the people who matter.
I try to send postcards from my travels, write long letters to friends in moments of nostalgia and then forget what I wrote, and have a memory box full of my old correspondences. I especially love the letters from Ma and Nanima, sent to me during my years at Rishi Valley.
In Bangalore, I live close-ish to the GPO, and end up hanging around there to check out the newest stamps issued. Check out this gorgeous first day cover I got hold of recently:
I also dug up an ancient shape poem of mine that I feel like sharing:
I Hate India Post 🤓 *
It should have reached you
when the postmaster said it would
but it didn’t.
My first confession
of a newfound love
in someone else’s hand.
I should have opted for Speed Post:
thereafter the understood norm.
Perhaps, one morning,
my \ / letter
will \ / arrive
apologising for its delay
Do not hesitate to write back.
*I really don’t hate India Post. Quite the contrary.
**I wrote the newsletter title first and then decided to share my poem. ‘Coincidental Irony,’ I’m calling it.
ALSO, did you know about the existence of the Dead Letter Office? It’s a burial ground for all the ‘dead’ aka undelivered / unclaimed letters out there.
O’Keeffe & Stieglitz
“I’m in such a state that I could write about this all day—
Does it tell you how wildly hungry every inch of me is for you—even my toes. It’s no use to say it’s my soul crying for you—I know good and well that it is my body—my blood—my flesh—even my bones seem to cry for you—hunger for you—
I’ve always enjoyed revisiting Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs and correspondence with his wife - painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Of the 22 years they were married, 17 years — was spent apart. She at her ranch in New Mexico, he in New York.
From opposite sides of the country, they wrote one another up to three or four times a day, with some correspondences reaching as long as 40 pages. From their introduction as professional acquaintances in 1915 through their romance, marriage and ultimately Stieglitz’s death in 1946, the two exchanged more than 25,000 letters.
Read more about their love story and letter exchanges here, here and here.
Poetry Corner 📖
1. Light Is More Important Than The Lantern by Nizar Qabbani
Light is more important than the lantern,
The poem more important than the notebook,
And the kiss more important than the lips.
My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
They are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty
And my madness.
2. Postcards by E. Ethelbert Miller
When was the last time you mailed a postcard?
My mother kept the ones I sent her. My sister mailed them back
to me after my mother died. I had forgotten I had written
so many small notes to my mother. The price of stamps
kept changing. I was always mentioning on the back of cards
I was having a good time. I can remember the first time
I lied to my mother. It was something small maybe the size
of a postcard. I went somewhere I was not supposed to go.
I told my mother I was at the library but I was with Judy
that afternoon. Her small hand inside my hand.
I was beginning to feel something I knew I would never write
home about.
3. In your next letter by Carrie Shipers (Excerpt)
I hope your sleep comes easy now
that you’ve surrendered the upstairs,
hope the sun still lets you drink
one bitter cup before its rise. I don’t miss
flannel shirts, radios with only
AM stations, but there’s a certain kind
of star I can’t see from where I am—
bright, clear, unconcerned. I need
your recipes for gravy, pie crust,
canned green beans.
4. The Letter by Amy Lowell
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncertain window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.
5. Blue Aerogrammes – Brief Poems by Cid Corman
If these words
dont remember you—
forget them.
Links I Enjoyed 🙃
Write a Letter To Your Future Self
Lucian Freud's love letters to poet Stephen Spender
On the pleasures of hand-writing letters you’ll never send
Letter-Writing in a Era of Impulsive Interaction
+I’ve been digging up vintage film posters from India. Two noteworthy links:
The Art of Satyajit Ray and an Appeal for Sandesh
Hindi Film Posters // Art365 India
Call for submissions: A Taste of Home 🍅
A Taste of Home: Stories of food from Indian kitchens across the globe.
Sharing a home cooked meal is sharing a story. There is a transformative power in uplifting the differences in how people cook and eat together. Our hope is that through the act of telling these stories of what you eat, we will bring our worlds a little closer together.
This is why Nivaala and The Alipore Post are collating this very special magazine, A Taste of Home - to build a bigger kitchen, one with room for all of us. We seek to explore the intersection between food, memory, nostalgia and home, expand upon it and provide a space for these conversations in the form of art, stories, essays, photography, anecdotes, poems, comics et all.
We want to create a space that brings Indians across the world to celebrate their culinary traditions, and get inspired by each other to maybe try new ones.
You’re gonna be okay 🤓
Ending this newsletter with my new go-to video when I need to cheer myself up. Thank you Ketnipz for this gem. ❤️❤️
*You’re gonna be okay*
Love and light,
Rohini
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