USES OF POETRY
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Some of the Renaissance’s most romantic love poems weren’t for lovers
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‘...Everything, everything is gone’: The aesthetics of First World War poems and what they mean now
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‘We love life if we find a way to it’: Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s enduring absences
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A/nil’s new book of poetry, ‘The Absent Color’, is a conversation – of, for, and by himself
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‘Don’t weep, my child; your mom will come’: A ghazal for a child in war-ravaged Gaza
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‘There is a ban even on breathing’: Leftist poet Birendra Chattopadhyay on the horrors of war
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Poetry on campus: Verses by two poets about the sights around their universities
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‘We pointed to the potential’: Priya Sarukkai Chabria as e-journal ‘Poetry at Sangam’ shuts down
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The inheritance of loss: ‘History may be written by victors but songs are sung by survivors’
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Ambedkarite poet NK Hanumantayya wrote lyrically to articulate the pain and hopes of the oppressed
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‘Ambedkar dwells within me, Ambedkar dwells within you’: Anita Bharti’s poetry tribute to Babasaheb
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‘A woman and fire are as ancient as civilisation’: Six Dalit-feminist poems by Poonam Tushamad
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Reflections on poetry and a ‘quiet friendship’ with the award winning poet Jayanta Mahapatra
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‘The hunger hidden’: Four poets and twelve poems to remember pride month
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Pride Month: Twelve poems by four poets that reflect on queerness
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‘Very old their sorrow’: Three political poems for our times by Adnan Kafeel Darwesh
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‘War tells lies about war: That war keeps you safe. Or you would be dead by now.’
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‘We are the angry men, loud and meaningless as screeching fighter jets in a war zone’
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What this verse from Thiruvalluvar’s ‘Thirukkural’ says about the state’s relationship with farmers
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How poetry can make less tangible subjects like climate change more real to readers
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How Kashmir’s emerging hip-hop scene could enable the revival of the fading local language of Koshur
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Adele, Taylor Swift: Why break-up songs owe a lot to the lovelorn lyrics of the Romantic poets
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Meet the mystic poets from subcontinental history: How Kabir blended faiths but accepted none fully
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Meet the mystic poets from subcontinental history: How Rahim combined war with poetry
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Meet the mystic poets from subcontinental history: Namdeo’s search for the formless god
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‘Head held high. Not pride, but need to survive’: Three poems from the libretto of ‘Giraffe Humming’
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Meet the mystic poets from subcontinental history: Baba Farid, the Sufi face of Islam
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How Binoy Majumdar re-wrote the grammar of Dalit poetry and politics, and was ostracised for it
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‘Polytheists, monotheists, infidels tell me there is no country for writers’: Five poems on freedom
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‘Books of an occupied land carry corpses of all ages’: Poems for Samir Mansour Bookshop in Gaza
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How the Partition contributed to the ‘queerness’ of Urdu poetry to make it non-normative
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Priya Satia: Why poetry remains a primary resource in remembering and understanding the Partition
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‘In the disconnected land’: How young poets in Kashmir are responding to the changed reality
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‘We text, text, text, our significant words’: Poems for those in long-distance relationships
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How poetry can make us both laugh and think (providing added reasons to read it)
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Christmas conjunction of planets: Ten anthems for the solar system
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‘How many more days this way, democracy?’: Five poems of lamentation and love from Assam
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Poet Hoshang Merchant reads and annotates academic Brinda Bose’s collection of Calcutta poems
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‘Breathing. One does it through masks these days. Unless someone kneels on one’s neck’
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‘How long does it take a hand of my country to reach a hungry mouth?’ Six poems by Kedarnath Singh
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Kalidasa was an early practitioner of ecopoetry, a genre that the world is waking up to now
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‘Hand on the placard, fist around the stone’: Five poems by Ranjit Hoskote viewing a ‘nation’s fate’
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Celebrating Kishwar Naheed and eight decades of poetry and rebellion
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‘We must talk remembering love’: Six poems from Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s new book of poetry
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Six poems that offer a virtual journey through Latin America in the age of the lockdown
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‘Nothing imagined is excessive’: Eleven poems for (and from) a world gripped by a pandemic
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‘The world in my solitary veins’: Three poems of air, water, and earth when locked down without them
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‘Jobless migrants arrive in the deserted city...With them the flamingos’: Five lockdown poems
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As writers document the pandemic through poetry, here is a chance to understand this form
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When isolation is considered a virtue, poetry reveals the play of intimacy and distance
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A writer in Goa and an artist in Kerala responded jointly to their isolation with art and poetry
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Can the body be a metaphor of protest? These poems by four women poets show us how
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‘Quarantine’: A sonnet for the lockdown by Mukul Kesavan
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Learning from the lockdown: Three poems by Jerry Pinto on lessons from living in isolation
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How a 13th century Persian poem reminds us that the coronavirus crisis calls for a global response
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Cats: Ghazal writers Mir and Ghalib composed these poems about the animal that rules social media
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‘When will you show your documents?’: The poem for which Kannada poet Siraj Bisaralli was arrested
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‘I gift you a rugged map carved from cracks between divorced nations’: Five poems from Kashmir
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‘They should have thought better of messing with a poet’: Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s grandson and biographer
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‘Hum Dekhenge’: Singer and writer Ali Sethi explains how to read (and interpret) Faiz’s poem
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‘But now these cruel times have almost run their course’: Eight poems for 2020 by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
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Why French poet Charles Baudelaire was the godfather of modern day Goths
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‘Each gulp is a dagger’: Five poets respond to the altered reality of Kashmir after the lockdown
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A case for memorising poetry in the age of search engines, social media and smartphones
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Poetry: How a worn, armless stone knight inspired different shades of love in Keats and Larkin
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Verses for a home foregone: Four poets on exile and being refugees
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Lab notes in verse: Science and poetry are more compatible than you think
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Imtiaz Dharker has refused to be Britain’s Poet Laureate. ‘The poems won,’ she said. She is right
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‘The Veiled Suite’: Rereading Agha Shahid Ali 10 years after his collected poems were published
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Why we don’t need one World Poetry Day a year to savour the joys of poetry
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‘How my debut poetry manuscript was edited to become a full-fledged book’
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How a poetic retelling of the Mahabharata warns us against the rhetoric of vengeance and sacrifice
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A brief journey through India as seen by the French poetic imagination of the 19th century
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What a poet learned from Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who was unabashedly in love with the world
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Almost entirely ignored by urban India, the farmer once held pride of place in literature and poetry
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Poetry has the power to inspire change like no other art form
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Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz is 72. These poems show she is in relentless pursuit of a new order
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Why we must not forget Robert Frost when we read modern poetry. He made the everyday extraordinary
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Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: Why no one has stopped reading the poet Shakti Chattopadhyay
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Rupi Kaur’s bad poems shouldn’t worry us – the myopic view of the literary establishment should
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If the Internet and social media have not destroyed poetry, then why all the criticism?
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Aditi Machado, Tishani Doshi, Sophia Naz: Poetry meets other passions in the works of these poets
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Poetry is more popular than ever. Then why are not all poets happy about it?
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Five poets join a chapbook movement to put more poetry in the hands of people
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Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary: These verses show us that Urdu poets revered the founder of Sikhism
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How Rupi Kaur introduces feminism through accessible verse
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How can Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ be a love poem in blazing hot India?
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Verse or worse: What has Nana Patekar got to do with Donald Trump in his mosquito net?
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Are the internet and social media an opportunity or a distraction for poets?
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India’s first poetry biennale shows that such events need to be held more often
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India’s new poetry is suddenly both political (is there a choice?) and personal
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Hope and disillusionment. Or, reading Derek Walcott’s poetry at 18
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Watch: What is poetry, exactly? Is an answer even possible?
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The poem that Faiz could have written for Delhi’s marching students
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Can poetry be one of the answers to misogyny in India (and the world)?
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'I was saved, mother, I was saved': A moving poem by Zehra Nigah (it's National Girl Child Day)
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Growing up in the North East with the poetry and literature of insurgency
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How the politics of protest uses poetry as one of its strongest voices
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Hoshang Merchant wrote his first ever poem after listening to MS Subbulakshmi
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Why reading Manohar Shetty’s poetry is like knowing the earth all over again