She doodles, we ku

I swear I had tried my best to resist! After two consecutive months of AROS and NaHaiWriMo, i felt my energy level depleting and thought i needed a break from poetry. I badly needed a hair-cut , a facial and above all, i needed to put my feet up and have a foot massage. (Though i don't know why a foot massage! I guess all that walking on talus and standing in a queue had taken their toll!) So when i read about Aubrie Cox's "I doodle, you ku" at her blog Yay Words, I firmly told myself , "NO"! But then i thought there's no harm in taking a look...just one look and that would be it! But the sketches Aubrie had done turned out to be so captivating that i went to take a second look. After that i went for a third look to read the responses to her doodles by some of my friends and fellow poets who were participating. And so it went on... Until finally i decided, what the heck, i better join in the fun, because hasn't somebody said that the best way to overcome temptation is to give in to it?

So that's how i find myself doing this "I doodle you ku" challenge this month though with this small promise to myself, that if on some days i am not able to come up with something, i won't beat myself on the head about it. I've also tried to keep it impromptu as far as possible...just write whatever comes to mind then and there without much polishing or revision. Some days i write more than one, Aubrie has been kind enough to let us do that. But I decided not to post them on this blog right now, because without the doodles perhaps they won't make much sense. And especially with my decision to do the ku impromptu, many a times i find the words taking control of me instead of the other way round.The results are sometimes such that i don't understand it myself, why i wrote them and how they came to be there! So maybe i'd wait till the challenge is over, Aubrie Cox has done whatever she intends to do with them and then post some of them here.

Meanwhile, the doodles are awesome, the ku by many of the poets i know are amazing and i am having FUN! You can find out all about it here.


P.S. I still haven't been able to get that foot massage i had set my heart upon. The beautician is absconding!

A hundred gourds and the hare

The second issue of A hundred Gourds is out and I am glad to be part of it in a small way with this poem:

doomed
to sleepless nights--
the hare on the moon

I usually feel very shy to self-advertise in any way, but AHG editor Lorin Ford said something about this poem which i felt i had to share with all of you. She says, " A bit of mystery and yet wonderful lightness at the same time. Basho would be proud, I think."
That's very sweet of her...but wow! this made my day!!

You can read the whole issue of AHG here