triveni spotlight: 27th May 2025
- Anju Kishore
- May 27
- 1 min read
triveni spotlight A FEATURE EVERY ALTERNATE DAY hosts: Anju Kishore and Mohua Maulik GUEST EDITOR: Shloka Shankar
27th May 2025
triveni spotlight May 2025
if I say umbrella the poem loses its juxtaposition
— Alfred Booth
Sonic Boom, Issue #20
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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
Thanks to Treveni authors for once again selecting this strange poem. Lakshmi has some great takes on it.
This poem was featured in November of 2023, at Triveni SAMVAAD. Here is what I wrote about is at the time.
Here is its genesis.
“If I say umbrella…“ has a very strange, unique and/or surprising history. I wish I could say it was an interesting one filled with aesthetic contemplation, that I had spent time carefully piecing together a monoku with its intentional multiple readings.
“If I say umbrella…” started out with this following haiku:
nature
upheaves modern items . . .
drenched
On January 31, 2021 I posted this haiku on My Haiku Pond Academy’s Facebook page for workshopping.
Here…
It's such an open endfed poem.
On one reading I seen to understand it and on another reading it flies over my head.
I wish the poet could tell us something more about this poem.
A question mark again?
An exclamation !!
A pause . . .
finally just empty
maybe if we add an adjective, the umbrella may retain its juxta?
or with the banyan tree
or something bigger in its role?
the mushroom umbrella after the nucleur bomb??
guesswork