LETTER

LOL — Issue 27

Arihant Verma
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

Surprise Surprise!

I’m reading a lot, hence I couldn’t help but keep stacking what I was reading/watching in the drafts here on medium as well. So? Mid week surprise again!

I tried something different with this curation in the manner of presentation. I put a little narration/conversational touch to it, so there are no exact bullet points. I’ll try to be conversational in this email as well.

I’ve started reading and writing more poetry since I’ve read Shantanu Anand. I read about meters in poetry and structure of poems. Even though they seem very ancient, narly, heavy concepts, they could be actually quite useful in forming your own poems even when you choose to break from the regular stress patterns and rules (a.k.a meter).

So I read about Eunice de Souza’s recent demise and the poems 10 poets dedicated to her, including Sridala Swami and Arundhathi Subramaniam.

I found out that Jeet Thayil has less Instagram followers than those cliched self acclaimed poets with thousands of followers.

I found the most beautiful (for me) spoken word poem I’ve ever seen/listened to, primarily because it builds on something I deeply feel about. The poem’s called A Prude’s Manifesto.

Then there’s a beautiful photograph of a squirrel watching a tiny butterfly by craning his/her neck up.

And at last I finally find the answer to the question I asked myself about a year ago and which made me keep thinking about it all night, in a TED talk titled How our brain decides what is beautiful — Anjan Chatterjee. The question was:

Why in the world do I find fairer, taller, more symmetrical faces more attractive and beautiful than those which are not.

See you all soon!

If you even slightly like the content I curate. Please consider telling your friends and family about this curation and perhaps even make them (and yourself) follow to get regular email updates.

Until next time! 💛

LOL: Weekly List Of Lit

LOL is a weekly curation of poems, spoken word performances, essays, blog posts, visual and generative art, songs, visual jokes, patterns, humour and other articles, that I come across in a week. You can help curate with our chrome extension: http://bit.ly/2nFn1wa

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