Making Poetry Accessible: Poems, Resources and Prompts
My fourth newsletter is all about poetry :)
Hi everyone!
What does poetry mean to you? Where do you find your regular dose of poetry?
Poetry Foundation? The Alipore Post? Paris Review Poetry? These are good places to explore if you’re looking for poems that can make a difference in your life.
I wanted this newsletter to be about poetry because poetry is taking over social media in April due to National Poetry Month. In school, I thought that poetry had to rhyme and my initial poems were doggerel. The only poet I knew and revered in school was the confessional poet Sylvia Plath. Years later, I ended up reading her book, The Bell Jar, and absolutely loved it!
I started reading different kinds of poems over the years, learnt about the craft and found out that good poetry didn’t have to be abstract and confusing! Poets have different styles and only if you read a variety of poems will you figure what kind of poems work for you.
I wanted to share 5 poems with you that have resonated with me:
1) Love Poem by Tishani Doshi
Ultimately, we will lose each other
to something. I would hope for grand
circumstance — death or disaster.
But it might not be that way at all.
It might be that you walk out
one morning after making love
to buy cigarettes, and never return,
or I fall in love with another man.
It might be a slow drift into indifference.
Either way, we’ll have to learn
to bear the weight of the eventuality
that we will lose each other to something.
So why not begin now, while your head
rests like a perfect moon in my lap,
and the dogs on the beach are howling?
Why not reach for the seam in this South Indian
night and tear it, just a little, so the falling
can begin? Because later, when we cross
each other on the streets, and are forced
to look away, when we’ve thrown
the disregarded pieces of our togetherness
into bedroom drawers and the smell
of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet
decay of lilies — what will we call it,
when it’s no longer love?
Published online here
2) Medical History by Urvashi Bahuguna
After Nicole Sealey
Alprax for my aunt’s divorce. Alprax for the nights
my sister isn’t coming home. Two disprin and a glass
of lemonade for the bi-weekly headache. I have never
been pregnant, though I’m told often it buds and ebbs,
and no one ever knows. A whole pond of possibility
quietly blooming and evaporating on its own. Crepe
bandages for an old football injury. Iron supplements
monthly for dizziness from blood loss during periods.
Anti-allergy tablets for cockroaches, mould, and milk.
My mother had a knee surgery at 50 for a bone sliver
dislodged at age 15. In the 70s, no one paid attention
to breaks and scrapes. Anti-depressants after heart
surgery for my grandfather. Back brace and around
the clock bed rest for one grandmother and a walker
for the other. Sleeping tablets for travel, for bad fights
before bed-time. Heart attacks on both sides of my
family tree. I have nightmares from the afternoon
the doctor suspected I might have cancer, and thrust
a probe inside me without warning. I counted from one
to a hundred after she called me very, very difficult
for screaming in pain. Forgive me if I can’t complete
this history. If there are facts I don’t want to record.
I tried my best to both be honest and to redirect
my punches towards the water behind the house.
Published by Scroll here
3) Ugly by Warsan Shire
Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.
As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
They said she reminded them of the war.
On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
how to tie her hair like rope
and smoke it over burning frankincense.
You made her gargle rosewater
and while she coughed, said
macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
of lonely or empty.
You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?
What man wants to lay down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?
Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things
but God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well.
Published online here
4) Sweet Sixteen by Eunice D’Souza
Well, you can’t say
they didn’t try.
Mamas never mentioned menses.
A nun screamed: You vulgar girl
don’t say brassieres
say bracelets.
She pinned paper sleeves
onto our sleeveless dresses.
The preacher thundered:
Never go with a man alone
Never alone
and even if you’re engaged
only passionless kisses.
At sixteen, Phoebe asked me:
Can’t it happen when you’re in a dance hall
I mean, you know what,
getting preggers and all that, when
you’re dancing?
I, sixteen, assured her
you could.
Published by Scroll here
5) Aquarium by Kim Addonizio
The fish are drifting calmly in their tank
between the green reeds, lit by a white glow
that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank
glass that holds them in displays their slow
progress from end to end, familiar rocks
set into the gravel, murmuring rows
of filters, a universe the flying fox
and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose
pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet
the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping
occasionally, as if they can't quite let
alone a possibility—of wings,
maybe, once they reach the air? They die
on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.
Published by Poetry Foundation here
____
Resources:
1) Dissect A Poem With Jen Campbell-
Jen Capmbell is a poet I admire. I loved her collection ‘The Girl Aquarium’. She started this series on YouTube to make poetry more accessible. Check it out.
2) Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop by Douglas Kearney (Coursera)-
I have found this course to be very helpful. The basics of poetry is conveyed in an interactive format.
This initiative was started by Cha Journal to analyse poems they had published in their magazine. I found them to be quiet interesting. Check it out if you want to learn how to read poems closely.
4) Indian Literary Magazines-
Here are a few places you could explore to read quality poems.
Poetry at Sangam, Vayavya, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Nether, Bengaluru Review
A digital platform that curates sessions for poets. They started during the pandemic and now they have completed 100 sessions!
——
Prompts:
Three magazines provide prompts on a regular basis, they don’t charge for submissions. Submit away! I have not been able to place any poem of mine on Rattle but Visual Verse and Eclectica carry a few of my poems.
1) Rattle Ekphrastic
Provides a visual prompt every month.
2) Visual Verse
Provides a visual prompt every month. This is my poem ‘Anxiety’ based on this image:
Mix 2ml Ventolin
and 4ml saline –
Breathe through mist.
Voice of Machine
drowns your own.
Breathe in Breathe out
In Out
In Out
In Out
Rhythm brings calm.
Results will show up
soon.
I breathe in,
they’re inside me.
I breathe out,
the three-headed baby crowns.
Mist disappears, Machine makes
choking sounds.
3) Eclectica
Provides word prompts for every issue.
This is my poem ‘Titanic Phase’ based on the words ‘brew, indigo, paper, cruise’
Our indigo pinafores never betrayed
us the year we began to menstruate
unlike the girls with the morning sky
uniforms. Stains went unnoticed while
we ran around, brewed relationships
in our bloated heads. Made paper planes of
love letters and aimed them at our crushes.
Closed our eyes, imagined we're on a cruise,
and stretched our arms like Jack and Rose.
——
2021 has been kind to my poetry. I just got to know that a couple of my poems have been accepted for reprint in the Yearbook Of Indian Poetry In English edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal. ‘The Titanic 'Phase’ which is pasted above is one of the poems :)
Do let me know if you have found this newsletter helpful. Would love to hear from you :)