Poetry Chaikhana Blog

This is an interview I did with PMC last year about spirituality, poetry, and my own personal journey.

(The introduction and questions are in Hindi, but my responses are in English. Hopefully, an interesting puzzle to solve for non-Hindi speakers.)

The Welsh have a tradition of honoring the winner of their National Eisteddfod poetry competitions with with a custom made chair. These chairs are works of art, many of them, thrones dedicated to their great poets.

Several known chairs from the last century and a half have gone missing, however. This is a fascinating half-hour documentary of one poet’s search for those lost chairs, especially for the chairs awarded to Dewi Emrys, the only poet to have been awarded four chairs.

The video is in the Welsh language, with English subtitles, making it that much more of a cultural adventure.

I posted this on the Poetry Chaikhana’s Facebook page over the weekend, but I thought I should share it here, as well. This is a video of the actress Ashley Judd reciting a poem by a 19-year-old young woman about “Nasty Women.” As she speaks this poem, she stalks across the stage and channeling the shared experience of outrage combined with a renewed spirit of self-assertion. It is blunt, the language and imagery will be uncomfortable for many. But I share it for this reason: This poem, and the way it is delivered, is undeniably powerful. This poem has become one of the focal points of this massive movement. Refusing to mince words, this poem gives voice to the feelings of so many women who participated in this weekend’s events.

That is the power of poetry. Crystalizing and magnifying the sense of identity and purpose within the collective awareness.

Whether or not you like the poem or the mood it represents, I encourage you to watch in order to see the power of poetry as it operates within society.

Ashley Judd’s “Nasty Woman” Speech