Hi everyone!
2022 was wild. In so many unfamiliar ways. I was asked in many ‘gatherings’ that I have been a part of since my return from a very adventurous trip down south in Dec that how my winter vacation was, and it was a word for me- ‘retreat’ and three, ‘The Watering Hole’. If you wanted an essay, you subscribed to this newsletter. And so here we go. In bits and pieces, as always. In a manic, I tell you but also what.
The things I learned and discovered at The Watering Hole were absolutely bonkers for a girl from Bihar. The kind of diversity (all POC) it had and the kind of wisdom, tips, and workshops we underwent—I say underwent because I felt like a part of my brain was lobotomized before I met my kindred spirits, who made me double up in less than a week. A week that shall not be forgotten in the annals of learning and bonding. I wrote haikus like my parallel universe in Wiachin would. I wrote many golden shovels, never dreaming that I would be doing one on Vikram Seth’s All those who sleep tonight (one of my favorite poems ever) in McCormick County, which is a white county, and I was a brown girl writing poems with my black sisters and brothers. We laughed, we cried, we wrote, we slammed, and we all taught each other a lot. A lot.
Some of the people that I met and admired were those who brought us all together, Candace Wiley, a woman of steel. Dasan Ahanu (Chair), Jay Ward (Vice Chair), Angelo "Eyeambic" Geter (Secretary), Joyce Rose-Harris (Community Relations), Rahsaan Louris, and all the other facilitators are some of the best people I have come to know.
I lived in a cabin in the middle of a forest park in the southern wilderness of the USA, traversing the wildlands with Lydia (someone whom I had briefly known before), and the Detroit gal Catalina was the perfect post-Christmas present to wind up the year in the wilderness of South Carolina’s Hickory Knob State Park and Resort.
I met some amazing people (some I had only known virtually and would have never crossed paths with, and that thought makes me shudder), and that takeaway was the biggest giveaway of 2022. My soul was as high as a fly at the end of the year, cocooned in the presence of poets who knew what it took and what it had to be. The core purpose is to cultivate and inspire kinship between poets of color from all spoken and written traditions, thus creating a tribe with a mutual focus on poetics and craft-building.
The Watering Hole was created as a Facebook group by fellows of the Cave Canem South Workshops in 2009 and 2010. If you are a poet at a stage where you need a tribe, apply for The Tribe of Your Life. Even if not this, I hope you all have the opportunity to engage in various forms of education and learning. There is no one right way to do anything in life. I always feel like telling myself, again and again, that I am here unbeknownst to me. I don’t know where I will be. But, I like you, wish it to be fruitful and happy.
(!!!!!!)
Few things move more quickly than when you are motivated by something so good (!!!!!!)
Nagas
I.
The Nagas are Shaivite sadhus
who go around naked
or in loinclothes.
They cover themselves with ashes
from funeral pyres.
They resemble Rastafarians
in that they wear their hair
long and matted in a style
similar to dreadlocks
and smoke copious quantities
of hashish in chillums.
They arm themselves
with tridents and with
long knives, like ratchets
or machetes.
It was these tridents
that prodded the Buddhists
out of India.
They beg and often extort alms
from householders or passersby.
Most of them are celibate.
My friend the Swami
once saw a Naga
string his cock
between two wooden blocks
and then hammer the top block
down again and again
as though he meant
to pulverize himself
and in that way
diminsh sexual desire.
Mahādevī, a Vīrasaiva
bhakta saint,
was married to Shiva
like a nun.
All her songs
are about her
search for him.
She wandered around
twelfth-century India
naked, covered only
in her tresses,
like Lady Godiva.
She was of surpassing beauty,
and men pursued her.
Somehow she eluded them.
Finally, she was forced
into a marriage
with Kaúsika, the king.
But she escaped
to Srīsaila,
the holy mountain,
and died in a state
of god-intoxication
or oneness-with-Shiva.
She was 25.
II.
I think that Jesus was mad
when he cast the money-changers
out of the temple. The Johannine Gospel
places the incident at the beginning
of His ministry, but I believe the
Synoptics are correct, and it happened
only days before the Passion.
I don’t think He started a riot
just because they were selling some pigeons.
I think that Jesus was mad
because He didn’t want to leave
His own sweet human body
He knew that they were going to
torture Him to death,
but He had no idea
what the Resurrection Body would be like,
or how terrible it might be
to live in eternity.
He was afraid.
He thought the world was coming
to an end in a few years.
He was wrong about that.
He loved His human body.
He wanted things to stay the same.
I don’t think He knew
that He’d get to stay
around for a while
after the Resurrection,
and eat the honeycomb,
and cook some fish,
and walk on the road again
for miles in the dust,
explaining the Scriptures,
appearing and disappearing,
shoving Thomas’s hand
into the hole in His side.
Iowa City
for Tom Gallo (1951–1986)
I.
I remember punching
Larry Roe in the head
that time he came at me swinging.
We both had the same girlfriend, Judy Hilton.
He went down with blood gushing.
I had a longer reach
and he was blind drunk.
It was a shameful incident
and Dan Hottel came downstairs
and made fun of Larry.
And Dan died that year from whiskey and heroin.
I was Judy’s last boyfriend
and then I stole Barbara from Raymond
and I was her last boyfriend.
It was that year, I guess,
that a lot of girls went gay on us.
Well, Bill Larson said
that he’d fucked Judy
and I knew it was true
but it was much later
when he knocked me down
and kicked me in the head
with a pointy-toed cowboy boot
and I rolled against the wall
like a log out cold
and woke up the next morning
feeling just fine
and I still maintain that he
(Bill Larson)
was not well read.
And that winter John Haydon
came home drunk
and locked out, he fell down,
and slept and froze
right to the porch.
II.
And Hope followed me out from New Haven,
she hitched a ride with a truck driver.
Hope Payne was her name
I’m not making any of this up.
I used to say no hope
and lots of pain
and I didn’t want her there.
Well, R. G. had mushrooms
and I ate a whole bag
and drank a quart of George Dickel
and Hope and I fought and
fought and I ended up
trying to strangle her
and she ran out.
Well, I drank more
and the mushrooms came on
and I started crying uncontrollably
and I went out
and stamped through the snow
around and around for hours
crying “Hope! Hope! Hope!”
She was with you, Tom Gallo
and she tried to fuck you
I know she did
and it would have been fine
but you were afraid of hurting anybody
and you were loyal to me
and now you are dead
from vodka and heroin, Tom.
Fruit, as it is
She who paints
draws jackfruits
on the branches of the jackfruit tree
and on the roots
just as they are,
not fashioned as breasts on the female trunk
Not as split body parts
as openings and wounds
but
as if two minutes ago
Mother had
cut it in two with a knife
and laid it on the bare floor
Its skin, innards,
flesh, seeds,
the slippery seed-husks
none of them drawn separately
The body fully built in thorns
the burden a woman straightening herself bears.
The sticky stain
that refuses to be erased –
the seed that falls at the foot of the jackfruit tree
that rots and sprouts –
the smell that spreads all around –
Women who do not paint –
women with babies growing inside their bellies –
when they look,
they see fruits
for real,
stuck to the jackfruit tree trunk.
© Translation: 2010,C.S. Venkiteswaran- Anitha Thampi
I am that CAT with the 10 cool links
A cool cat tool for dyslexia in a world of MS Word for pro everything
Boston Public Library end year list (I visited the Cambridge public library and not this one but I wish to, someday)
Read as many chapbooks as you want for free! The McGill Library's Chapbook Collection contains over nine hundred British and American chapbooks published in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A rare interview of Vikram Seth, a writer I wish to study :)
How the Earth’s inner core affects weather and climate events?
Lovers part, from the tangle warm Of gentle bodies under quilt And crack the icy water to the face — from 'Kyoto: March' by Gary Snyder
Wrote this letter listening to many songs but this was a constant.
This ended me! What an amazing power packk of information
Hi, I'm Sasha from Entheoscope Magazine and I was wondering if you'd be interesting in submitting some of your poetry for publication. I read your piece DOULA DOES A E-E in Spectrum Literary Journal Volume LXV and found it deeply moving as well as thematically similar to what Issue 4 of Entheoscope will be about. Though this publication is centered around psychedelia, as the creative writing director I'm always looking to publish work that disavows psychedelic cliches: nothing you submit has to explicitly or implicitly reference plant/drug use or motifs. Hope to hear from you! You can learn more about us and find our submission page at entheoscopemagazine.com
P.S. My apologies for contacting you in this way. If you'd like to talk further I can be reached at sashasenal@entheoscopemagazine.com