Apart from the necessary task of revision etc, some other things I find useful to improve the work:

1. Reading more poetry - I attempt to find and read one new poet a week.
2. Memorizing poetry - "the music of what happens" (as Seamus Heaney called it) is better heard when engraved in one's head.
3. Reading, or attempting to read, books on craft (forms, prosody,history,ideas to jump start writing etc) and criticisim, along with essays on related subjects (about poets, aesthetics, history etc)
4. Putting aside a day in the week to the exclusive task of reading and writing.
5. Walking around.
6. Updating lists of subjects I want to write about/on, but for which I don't have the words yet.
7. Finally getting hard hitting or what I term "slash & burn" criticism (The Chinese say, to become a master, one has to eat bitter. Also more recently there was this evocative passage in Marquez's memoir about the music he faced when he unveiled his first short story - his critic friend burnt it in an ash tray. How nice!) is always a good idea.

Enjoy writing.

A time comes when we no longer can say: my God. A time of total cleaning up. A time when we no longer can say: my love. Because love proved useless. And the eyes don't cry. And the hands do only rough work. And the heart is dry. They knock at our door in vain, we won't open. We remain alone, the light turned off, and our enormous eyes shine in the dark. It is obvious we no longer know how to suffer. And we want nothing from our friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age? Our shoulders are holding up the world and it's lighter than a child's hand. Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings prove only that life goes on and not everybody has freed themselves yet. Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel will prefer to die. A time comes when death doesn't help. A time comes when life is an order. Just life, without any escapes.

I picked up Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City" at the bookstore, and found it to be a very well written book. I have read some 100 pages of it, and I shall return to the bookstore to polish off the rest this weekend. On the same note, I found an old copy of 'Natural Capitalism' - I had read parts of this book, all of which is available online, previously - and this gave me further fodder to think on the subject of cities, city planning, closed loop systems etc.

In a chapter titled 'Human Capital' ( www.natcap.org ), the authors report on and about Curitiba, a city in Southeast Brazil, and the remarkable stratergies this city had adopted to deal with all the typical 'third world' megaplois problems - explosive population growth, traffic, pressure on greenspace, water etc.

Further, it was interesting to read this chapter, thinking of Hyderabad, the city I grew up in, and how 'fucked' it is currently. To solve the same problems, notably traffic, the acclaimed technocratic ex Chief Minster, ringed the city with "flyovers". However the last time I visited, in 2004, traffic had overtaken the little effeciency these flyovers created. As my father joked, as we were crawling around, soon a time will come when people will have to heft their vehicles over their heads and walk to get anywhere.

Coming to poetry, I have begun chewing on the tomes you gave me over course of 2004 (thank you again for these), starting with that thick A.K. Ramanujan collection. 'Speaking of Shiva' - his volume of translations of Kannada Shivate poets gave me an idea of taking up, at some distant point of time, the task of bringing over into English poetry, the great Indian epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana. There are some fine prose translations/re-tellings, C. Rajagopalachari's are my favourites.

As I wrote to a friend, in all Indian vernaculars, bringing one of the epics over from Sanskrit is considered to be the foremost literary task - Tulsi Das's Ramayana in Hindi; Nannaya, Tikkana & Errana's Mahabharata in Telugu etc - why shouldn't such a thing attempted in English, given that it too has become another Indian vernacular? I was also thinking of this as I was re-reading, in bits and pieces, Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf, especially the ship burial ending:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief; with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

I wonder how and where I will find the voice to such a thing for these epics of ours.