triveni spotlight: 23rd May 2025
- Anju Kishore
- May 23
- 1 min read
triveni spotlight A FEATURE EVERY ALTERNATE DAY hosts: Anju Kishore and Mohua Maulik GUEST EDITOR: Shloka Shankar
23rd May 2025
triveni spotlight May 2025
sacrificial iamb
— Nicholas Mathisen
Sonic Boom, Issue #13
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Theme: Metapoems & Language
I have always been fascinated by the creative process—the sacred act of writing itself, the repealing of the blank page. To celebrate the ars poetica and the building blocks of language, my curation for the month of May centres around metapoems. What happens when whole lexicons, adjectives, verbs, apostrophes, and schwas lace haiku with nuance and layers? How can grammatical terms form the backbone of a poem? I hope you enjoy unfolding these questions—and more—as you ponder these sixteen poems.
Shloka Shankar
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Many thanks to our guest editor Shloka Shankar for this month’s selection and theme. Poets, we look forward to your company on this fascinating tour of what language can do to the poetry of haiku.
_()_ triveni spotlight team
This is a stunning one-line ku. Congratulations, Nicholas Mathisen. And many congratulations to Sonic Boom for publishing it. sacrificial iamb
I read it as - sacrificial lamb and sacrifical i am. What resonance between the two words. And then comes the third layer: In poetry, an iamb is a metrical foot consisting of two syllables, where the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed. It's a fundamental unit of rhythm in many types of poetry, including iambic pentameter, which is a line of poetry with five iambs.