I am in a strange state of soul and mind Poorvi, and your story reminds me very much of a series of distressful pieces I wrote on and off over the last few years here in America with similar themes.

I can only say it was a fine piece, even if it was a quick sketch.

Thanks. Sashi

Hi Sashi,

I did not mean the visual placement, I meant the sounds. I agree that poetry is vocal, but line breaks, as in pauses, are part of teh poetry, I think. It is distracting to have line breaks that appear more random than not, or appear to be there instead of a punctuation mark. Line length in terms of syllables is a general rule-of-thumb I have used in the past and it has helped me a lot.

I will get to the Gulzar. But not if you don't comment on the prose :-) (just joking!)

I just checked out your website - you've got a lot of stuff there - can't get to it now, no matter how many distractions I seek.

Poorvi

Thank you Poorvi for your (very late night) feedback.

The problem I realised now is that the placement of the verses on the page has been destoryed because of the lack of formatting in plain text!

While I generally don't do fancy stuff with how lines appear on a page, mainly because I think poetry is vocal than visual, those lines were written to be somewhat visual as well. Perhaps I will try to do something about the formatting later!

As an aside (or gossip) today I ate lunch with a poet(Thomas Lux) with whom I am friends, and we talked about Ms Vizrani and her sucide/murder. She along with Komunyakaa were slated to come to Emory University, whose portals I occasionaly haunt, to teach poetry this fall. However it appears that this not going to happen. So in a perhaps more personal(or selfish?) level, I would miss meeting these two poets down in Georgia.

Joy! Sashi