Book Box: How to grow your own poem
Dear Reader, The Table from ‘How to Grow Your Own Poem’
she places her rucksack on the dining table
her bunch of keys, her laptop, her notebook
she puts them down on the table.
she puts the sunlight streaming in from the French windows
the hum of a grass cutting machine, the beating of temple drums
the cosiness of a patchwork quilt, the chewiness of bread
things that happened in her mind
what she wants to do with the rest of her life.
her mother’s illness, her father’s frailness
the worry that her girls will be alright
she reaches out and places on the table longing
so many days she wanted to be light
she puts on the table the clenching of her stomach muscles
her to-do lists, the door handles she must buy
the sum of Rs. 21,970 that should have been paid to the electricity board
all this she piles upon the table.
the table stands like her, firm and strong
this is the power of this table.
it doesn’t complain about the load
it wobbles once or twice, then stands firm.
As I write this poem, sunlight pours in from the French windows. By my side, on my grandparents’ cedar wood dining table is How to Grow Your Own Poem by Kate Clanchy. Here I find a range of poems, picked to be prompts to help you write your own poems.
I write my poem with Clanchy’s help. The first chapter of her book takes me to The Table by Turkish poet Edip Cansever. “This poem will not let you down. If you use its frame to hold your own experience you will create something beautiful,” Clanchy says.
Earlier this year I wrote about William Sieghart. The editor of The Poetry Pharmacy, Sieghart spoke about rescuing poetry from the dusty shelves in a corner of a bookstore and bringing it into mainstream life. Since then, I have been reminding myself of why I love poetry and looking for ways to bring it back into my life.
I love poetry for the kaleidoscope of images it brings, like “three village houses/one pregnant woman/ and a couple of cows/ named Gopi and Brinda” from A. K Ramanujan.
Poetry forces me to slow down, to listen to the sound of words, and to the music in them, to go beyond their surface meanings. It strips things down to the essentials—“I remember the night my mother was stung by a scorpion/ Ten hours of steady rain had driven him/to crawl beneath a sack of rice”, from Nissim Ezekiel.
Poems sing me songs of unlikely heroes in faraway lands where “The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees/ The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas” from The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.
So this April, which is celebrated worldwide as Global Poetry Writing Month, here are three things I am doing:
1. Reading aloud a poem a day, once, twice or even thrice. Yesterday it was ‘Yeshwant Rao’ , a biting, breathtaking poem by Arun Kolatkar, thank you to my friend P who posted it on our book club WhatsApp group.
2. Writing a poem each day, and thank you Kate Clanchy for helping me do this in such a rewarding way.
3. Immersing myself in the world of poets, watching the web series Dickinson on Emily Dickinson, reading my friend R’s Substack newsletter called Lines From a Logophile with stories on scientist poets, Sanskrit poets, Western poets, and reading poets’ memoirs like Journeys by A.K. Ramanujan.
As I get up from my poetry break to return to my day, I look back at my grandparents’ cedar table, and see it up close, its rough matte finish, the ancient grain of its lines. And realize how uncannily poems capture all our lives, and how they make our private worlds feel shared. For we each have our own tables.
What are you piling onto your table today? And can writing or reading a poem, once, twice, or even thrice, help your table stand a little firmer?
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
