Weekly Edition #100 / #1244
Art by Roberto Ploeg
Dear Reader by Billy Collins
Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.
Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.
But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.
Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.
The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.
Links of the Week:
The Fluffinton Post + Stuff on my dog's head
What does hope look like?
String Quartet Performs Puccini for an Audience of 2,292 Green Plants
Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded
Book Pickings: a visual way to explore the Brain Pickings Book Archive
Dear Reader,
This edition happens to be the 100th weekly newsletter and #1244 of all The Alipore Post emails I've ever sent (This newsletter used to be sent daily for the first three years!). So much has happened since then, and for this special newsletter, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite moments with The Alipore Post:
On February 2, 2015, I started The Alipore Post as an email to connect with my friends and strangers, and share my poetry discoveries and other curiosities with people.
Newsletter #1
On June 5th, for #123, I forgot to add the subscribers on BCC by mistake, which started a 90s style chain mail reaction among the subscribers :) This made me realise that there was a community across different parts of India and the world, and I decided to start social media pages for more people to access the poetry, art, music and other articles I was finding and sharing.
As the newsletter and my curation evolved, I switched from Gmail to TinyLetter. I also started putting together events to bring the online community together to learn, hang out, read poems and experience the newsletter offline, in many ways. On September 17th and 18th, 2016, I organised The Alipore Post Offline at the beautiful Courtyard House. GIF below for the event by Soniya Bhase.
I ended up returning to the venue for Offline II in 2017, and hosted a Summer Camp at Bohemian House in the next year. Photographs below from The Courtyard House.
These events gave me the confidence to host smaller poetry and zine making workshops all across India - an orange orchard in Arunchal Pradesh, in the forests of Himachal Pradesh, at cafes and institutions in Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Chennai and even in my own home. This year, before the lockdown was announced, I even hosted a day-long online festival The Alipore Post Online! Poster below by the talented Mayur Nanda.
Some other dreams that came true along the way:
-Getting my own postbox (Thank you, Karthik)
-Starting an independent journal (www.thealiporepost.com) to showcase contemporary poetry, art and photography, and carry out interviews with people who inspire me, without worrying about word length.
-Collaborating with amazing people and organisations like HarperCollins India, Art&Found, Airplane Poetry Movement, Mindful and Body, Action Aid India among others. Many more cool things in the pipeline!
-Hosting #TheAliporePostPoetryMonth - a month-long prompt based poetry writing challenge + Organising #TheAliporePostSecretSanta for the past three years and playing Master Santa!
The idea of this newsletter has grown and taken on a life of itself, and even today, I'm in awe of all that I have read, seen and experienced thanks to The Alipore Post. I'm taking this chance to say Thank You to every single person who has been a part of my journey.
To anybody who believed that my labour of love meant something, who offered to share their work and stories with me, who signed up for the newsletter, who replied back to the emails, who helped with posters and collaborations, who inspired me by being themselves...this newsletter is full of my gratitude for you.
Here's a playlist with nearly 1000 recommended songs from the newsletter over the last 5 years.
Love and gratitude,
Rohini
P.S. I hope to send out this newsletter for the rest of my life. :)
If you enjoy the newsletter, you can consider supporting me on Patreon + following on Instagram / Facebook.
“There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.”
– Washington Irving