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5 Revisions Tips To Polish Your Poems

Are your rough drafts piling up? Check out my post on Hugo House’s blog for 5 strategies to polish your poems.

Free Lineation Class with Blue Stoop!

Join me for a free Lineation Lab session with Blue Stoop this Wednesday at 4 pm ESTl!

We'll expand our strategies beyond "end-stopped v. enjambed."

All are welcome.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Draft).

Register here for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvde6vrTsrHNDvHnRaJIFmS22Xh3J-KHxb

FULL DETAILS: 9/22 @ 4 | Wednesdays on the Stoop: Lineation Lab w/Dilruba Ahmed.

Join poet & educator Dilruba Ahmed for Lineation Lab, a hand-on session designed to help you lineate poems with confidence and expression. Bring a couple of 1-page draft poems for experimentation.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares.

Poetry Reading with ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW

It was an honor to participate in a reading series celebrating Alaska Quarterly Review’s 40th anniversary with Matthew Zapruder & Jill Osier. Please check out AQR’s upcoming poetry line-up on their website - and donate to the journal if you can!

Poem "Zodiac" selected for NYT Mag by Naomi Shihab Nye→

I'm so deeply honored that Naomi Shihab Nye has featured "Zodiac" from my new book, BRING NOW THE ANGELS, in THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE.

MAY TAKE LONGER THAN EXPECTED

I type one e-mail and then find another, half-finished. Read one article, a rabbit-hole to many other articles.  Graphs, maps, stats.  Headlines, how-tos, alerts.  Must read more.  No: must read less.  Crave sleep.  Can’t sleep. I fling open our full cupboards, thinking of a neighboring town where more than 30% live in poverty.  What happens there now?  My ritual of making homemade pho becomes a greater luxury, star anise floating in a broth-pot, bowls topped with lemon-squeeze, torn mint. 

***

The mint I bummed off a friend last summer by offering a trade for kale seedlings.  The original mint sprig lives in a glass jar on my windowsill with siblings grown from cuttings, each in a separate container.  Bright green sprigs sprouting leaf after leaf from nothing but sunshine and half-cup of water, replaced each week.  So little they need in order to flourish, so little to survive and grow.  Humans need so much more: fertile soil for nourishment, shelter from storm.  Entangled roots, support systems, fertilizer, delivery routes for what’s essential.  Our country offers the equivalent of water, half-cup or less depending on who you are, a pandemic now casting a harsh light both on our infrastructure of indifference and our inescapable interconnectedness. 

***

The interconnected hospital rooms had lent little privacy when my older son was hospitalized a decade ago with pneumonia.  After two fevered nights curled together in a hospital bed, we returned home through a blizzard: restored, safe.  On the other side of a too-small curtain, the toddler of a young African American woman had cried continually, pausing only to inhale breathing treatments and to sleep in exhaustion.  A crossing guard at a local school, the baby’s mother explained tearfully to nurses that she had to report to work. She couldn’t stay.  When she left, the nurses lovingly held and bathed her screaming daughter, who couldn’t be consoled.  No livable wage, no back-up support systems, possibly no insurance.  What happens a family like hers, now? 

***

“What are we we supposed to do now?”  Playdates off-limits.  Libraries, schools, playgrounds closed.  When asked months ago, my kindergartner wrote in unsteady letters on a school project, “My dream is to play outside every day.”  In sunlight, we pedal past porches and parked cars, past the park gazebo that houses each year’s egg hunt, to the local creek where we turn over silent stones. We end our ride at an empty school parking lot, another tiny corner of freedom.  At first, my younger son gleefully rides into puddles, splashing water onto ankles and shoes. Soon enough, we distance from puddle-water, too.

***

I dream of water, a great slow wave washing up to the shore where I sit at an empty desk.  The swell pushes my desk up with a gradual, steady force that makes my stomach flutter.  To my left, a wet-suited surfer recovers and stands once more on her board; to my right, my local county council gathers on sand with dripping business suits to continue a meeting.  The swell diminishes, slowly, my desk returns to stable land.  We ride the wave—the surfer, the suits—we ride it out.  I call my mother to report the dream, as we’d promised to do long ago, when I wake. 

***

By the time I wake, my two boys have carpeted their floor with Star Wars action figures, Legos, clean socks.  School closed for two more weeks.  As we spread butter across waffles, I review key points of the detailed plan we’d developed together the night before: protection, preparedness, patience, and practicality.  In sum, we’d join the light side, unite our Jedi powers, and fight the pandemic’s dark forces.  “We’ll wash our hands a lot,” I remind them.  My younger son teasingly parrots my statements.  “Wash hands a lot,” he chirps.  “We’ll stop touching our faces,” I explain, and he repeats.  “Stay 6 feet apart from others,” I say.  Again, he parrots me.  “If we can be patient, creative, and flexible, we’ll save humanity together,” I say.  “Save humanity,” he squawks with a smile. 

***

No one will see our smiles after I tie winter scarves around each son’s face, then onto my own.  Outside, trees teem with cherry blossoms.  The breeze pulls on magnolia petals: pink, yellow, cream.  We look like robbers, my older boy says.  My younger son tugs at his multi-colored fleece, announcing, “I’m a rainbow bandit.  A leprechaun’s assistant.  Because the leprechaun is having trouble finding rainbows.” I nod slowly and repeat, having trouble finding rainbows.  We pull our scarves up and our helmets down.  We lean over handlebars and pedal more fiercely, scarves lashing around us as we narrow our eyes against the oncoming wind. 

Author Interview @ FOUR WAY REVIEW

This interview took place pre-pandemic, which seems to be a lifetime ago. Still, I want to be sure to thank the wonderful crew at FOUR WAY REVIEW for talking with me about my forthcoming book, BRING NOW THE ANGELS:

“The disappearance of our bearings and touchstones transformed the world into a place suddenly strange and unfamiliar….The situation was painfully personal, but everything happened within a larger context. We witnessed firsthand the cost of being ill in America: the associated expenses, maltreatment, discriminatory practices, and reckless over-use of painkillers. Not to mention access issues to dialysis centers and the related questions about quality of treatment and quality of life.”

"You Are Gonna NOT Fall Out" - Reflections in a Time of Pandemic

During this time of global pandemic, I reflect on my son’s fondness for roller coasters. Listen here.

Excerpt below.

“The Gesture”

My older son has always been a fan of roller coasters.  I accompanied him, many times, on the tiny train at Dutch Wonderland that dips and loops twice around a winding, hilly track. And on the giant spoked disk that twirls riders like a blender first forward, then backward.  And in the oversized, dizzying teacups that spin in place while also orbiting around and around a metal platform. These toddler rides quickly gave way to taller and faster rides.

As my son eagerly upgraded his amusement park adventures, my Roller Coaster Chaperone responsibilities become increasingly challenging… listen to the rest of the post.

Book Launch: The “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” Version

This little box just might have contained advanced copies of my book, BRING NOW THE ANGELS: POEMS.  

The official pub date is April 14. Pre-orders are available now from the University of Pittsburgh, IndieBound, & elsewhere. 

The book’s arrival is exciting, but like so many others celebrating the arrival of a new publication in the midst of COVID-19, I’m re-envisioning how a book launch might look, sound, and feel. I was especially thrilled about the prospect of bringing together several writer-friends and featuring my mom’s recitation of Bengali poetry.  Now the idea seems like a far-fetched dream: to gather with family & friends at a great independent bookstore in Philly, to celebrate our creative pursuits, and then to walk down the block to a nearby pub ready to celebrate some more, elbow to elbow. 

I’d love to retain that community feel…but with the necessary social distance, of course. 

Ideas? Please share them at my public Facebook page - I’d love to hear from you!

24 Poems by 24 Poets - Smithsonian’s “Beyond Bollywood” series, Irving Arts Center in Dallas

A giant thank you to Usha Akella & Pramila Venkateswaran, Directors of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poets' Collective - they’ve curated an exhibition of 24 poems by 24 poets of the South Asian diaspora. I’m honored to be part of it!

The poems are on display 3/29-4/12 at the Irving Arts Center in Dallas as part of the Smithsonian’s “Beyond Bollywood” series. On Feb. 29 at 4 pm, the co-directors will present a reading of their poems and discuss their work in conversation with with Ravi Srinivasan of Think India.

The poets are…
1. Pramila Venkateswaran
2. Zilka Joseph
3. Sophia Naz
4. Varsha Shah
5. Ravi Shankar
6. Rohan chhetri
7. Indran Amirthanayagam
8. Usha.akella
9. Sara Garg
10. Ralph nazareth
11. Phinder Dulai
12. Saleem peeradina
13. Sasha Parmasad
14. Vivek Sharma
15. Amit Majmudar
16. Kirun Kapur
17. Prageeta Sharma
18. Kazim Ali
19. Subhash Kak
20. Dilruba Ahmed
21. Monica Ferrell
22. Sweta Srivastava Vikram
23. KalpnaSingh-Chitnis
24. Subhashini Kaligotla

24 Poems by 24 Poets of the South Asian diaspora

Smithsonian’s “Beyond Bollywood” exhibit: Irving Arts Center in Dallas

Poetry exhibit Curated by Usha Akella & Pramila Venkateswaran, Directors of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poets' Collective