#227: The Alipore Post Poetry Month is almost here! ✍🏻
Poetry Prompts + Poems about Poets + Links and Music to inspire
Hello!
I’m back from the mountains to a hot city I call home though my heart is still up there. Some of that inspiration and light I felt last week still lingers, and I carry it with me into the new month, which is going to be all about expression and going inwards.
I’m excited to announce that this year too, I’ll be hosting The Alipore Post Poetry Month, an annual creative ritual that has ensured I immerse myself in poetry, along with so many of you. I invite each of you to write with me!
Time for the prompts…*DRUM ROLL*
The Alipore Post Poetry Month: Prompt List
April’s almost here, and I’ve loved writing a poem a day for 30 days for the past few years. This year too, I’m sharing this list of poetry prompts to use as inspiration points through the month.
The larger idea is to show up everyday, for however long it takes, to just write a poem, for ourselves, together but alone. My hope is to cultivate a poetry writing habit over a month (for myself), and to read/feel inspired by others’ words.
Anybody who wishes to participate can write a poem on the corresponding prompt from April 1st to 30th. Feel free to tag @thealiporepost and/or use #thealiporepostpoetrymonth when/if you feel like sharing your day’s poem. Just know that I won’t focus my energy on reposting or reading every poem every person writes. I’ll just try and stay committed to it, like you.
LET’S DO THIS! 😊
Recommended Listening
Poetry Corner
A few inspiring poems on poets and poetry before April arrives:
1. The poet dreams of the mountain by Mary Oliver
Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking
The rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
That we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.
2. The Collected Poems by Linda Pastan
They take you through my life
one poem at a time,
memory’s beast raging
through the pages
inventing as it goes—
the slap that was really
a caress, the tears no more
than a mirage.
My actual childhood
was a sapling
in the forest of years,
yet it shadows these poems
so that my mother’s death,
for instance, sheds its leaves
over everything.
So many leaves.
For years I wrestled
with syllables, with silence.
My stories were love
and its hazardous weather;
feathers of snow, of birds
ghosting the windows;
sharpened needles waiting
in every innocent haystack.
Now I rest
in a hammock of words, waiting
for the sun to rise again
over the horizon of the page.
3. End of Poetry by Ada Limón
Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.
4. I Want To Tell You by Kathleen Spivack
Sitting and writing on the dining room table,
I want to tell you what it is to be alive,
the yellow oilcloth table takes the imprint
of my thoughts; the tablecloth reads back
“I want.” The mark of my pen
presses on the floral print: “I want to tell.”
An explosion of daisies stands fading
in the flower pot, a used Dundee marmalade
jar, ivory. The ordinary daisies, as steadfast as a
woman, hold their yellow centers: he loves me,
loves me not; he picks me as he
likes: he steps on me.
The daisies make a still life
next to sour apples and, rotting
in a green bowl, artistic
sour lemons. They are trying
to look yellow. The children
are crying “We want milk” at the door. It
is dark, the sky’s uneasy; it will rain.
The swallows’ repetitions
swooping through my ears, the note
of the bobwhite, calling in the bushes,
remains, I feel, long after
any sound I make has gone:
when my hands have done the dishes;
after I’ve recorded what it’s like to mop the floor.
Why do I keep so clean, like all the other
animals? Why do I worry
if the children lie too thickly
dreaming their dreams, in a heavy sleep
like fog I write so much
on the inside of my brain
that I forget what it was
that I wanted to tell you. But
through the open door, warm
white rose petals blow in.
Links of the Week
Good Things: A personal compilation of good sensory things in life
Japanese manhole covers are works of art + Masstransiscope (art from a moving NYC subway train)
The natural history of a portrait: 'Attenborough in Paradise' by Bryan Organ
Nisha Vasudevan’s handcrafted Infinite Scroll poem is EVERYTHING!
My interview with Chila Kumari Singh Burman
I recently interviewed London-based artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman for Art UK on her playful yet political multidisciplinary art practice. An excerpt:
Rohini: How does your Indian diaspora identity play out in the work, which is a mix of pop culture, nostalgia, fantasy and storytelling?
Chila: That's very interesting how you've summarised those contrasts. Growing up, we had an ice cream van in front of the house with a tiger on top and nice patterns and shapes painted on it. When I was around 12, I was in a very academics-oriented grammar school. We didn't do much scribbling or painting and it was all a bit boring. That's probably what made my life more orderly.
I'd go home and get out of my uniform, speak in Punjabi and enter an Indian world. When I'd step out on the streets to play, it was again an English world. So school was very English, and home was very Indian. We'd have relatives over for dinners and make different subzis (Indian dishes) but dessert would be egg custard with cardamom. There was a lot of oral history from listening to the conversations at home. This was also the time my father was teaching other Indian families how to sell ice cream and shaping the ice cream trade in Liverpool.
Stay hydrated, dear reader, and good night.
Sweet dreams,
Rohini