2016 – A Poetic Year

As promised to myself two years ago - to buy one book every month every year, this year has been fantastic with a total of 35 books and indeed very poetic with 50% of the books being those of poetry - from classic to contemporary, from love and longing to erotica and despair. 
In 2006, one for my faculty at NID had given me a feed back saying - "...learn to be poetic". Now, after 10 years I know what it actually meant and that life is beautiful and we have to make it more beautiful.  

The year started by reading Crafts of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh by Jaya Jaitley and ended by adding a biggest book to my library- Michelangelo: Complete works. This book is so huge that it fits neither in the book shelf at studio nor in the one at home – precisely explains why this book is about Michelangelo!

Now when I have listed out the books, I see that each book has a story associated, a story about me - my state of mind and work at that time of the year. 

It’s so beautiful to review ones year this way!

It has been a wonderful year –

from travelling across the country to making a home by the hills

creating huge art to developing minute skills
meeting old friends to not making new

reading books to learning music

falling in love to writing poetry

So here is the list of books added to my library this year: 

Poetry

1.      Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing (April)

2.      The Book of Questions – Pablo Neruda (April)

3.      I swallowed the Moon: The poetry of Gulzar (May)

4.      Essential Haiku (May)

5.      Kabir: Ecstatic Poems (June)

6.      Lullabies – Lang Leav (July)

7.      Love and Misadventure – Lang Leav (July)

8.      Memories – Lang Leav (July)

9.      Bitter Sweet Love – Micheal Faudet (August)

10.   Erotic Poems – Goethe (September)

11.   The Inability of Words – Harnidh Kaur (September)

12.   Milk and Honey – Rupi Kaur (September)

13.   Mouthful of Forevers – Clementine Von Radics (September)

14.   Chasers of the Light – Tyler Knott Gregson (October)

15.   Sylvia Plath - The Collected Poems (October)

16.   The Universe of Us – Lang Leav (November)

17.   Bitter Sweet Love – Michael Faudet (November) 

Art and Design

1.      Crafts of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh – Jaya Jaitley (January)

2.      World Textiles: A Sourcebook (January)

3.      I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail – Urveti, Ram Singh (February)

4.      10 books of illustrated short stories – K.G. Subramanian (March)

5.      The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images (June)

6.      Mudras of India: A Comprehensive Guide to the Hand Gestures of Yoga and Indian Dance (June)

7.      Basketry: A world Guide to Traditional Techniques (July)

8.      Slow Stitch: Mindful and Contemplative Textile Art (September)

9.      Michelangelo: Complete Works (December)

Reading (assorted)

1.      Concerning the Spiritual in Art – Wassily Kandinsky (January)

2.      Creative Confessions – Paul Klee (February)

3.      Blank Canvas – Prabhakar Barve (February)

4.      My Gita – Devdutt Pattanaik (February)

5.      Love Letters of Great Men (March)

6.      Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (June)

7.      Business Sutra – Devdutt Pattanaik (September)

8.      Vishwakarma’s Children – Jaya Jaitley (September)

9.      A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (October)

u n f o l d

This is a poem composed of a series of my tweets with rhetoric questions and corresponding hopeful answers.

Periodic excerpts from this also compose small poems-

i am the moon         

i am the star           

i am the earth         

i am the sea            

i am a zephyr         

i am air  
         
~

slide open the curtains

look at the sparkle in your eyes

walk barefoot

stand by the shore

untie your hair

and

b r e a t h e    

(now read first line of the first short poem and first line of second short poem. continue this way..)

winter mornings