Coffee and poetry – didn’t miss that!

Now really, this is a red flag being waved infront of an intoxicated bull and there was no way I was missing something that had two of favourite three things in it – coffee and poetry.

So I landed up with Dil at Mocha, a place that readers of this blog by now should recognise as a favourite hangout of mine , though,I have never seen the place before 12:30 PM.

A morning filled with translations of works of poets from Venezuela, Germany, Japan, China and our own Tamil Nadu, it was a feast for people like me who have been simply starving for some good poetry reading. And there was a turnout on a rainy day that proves that poetry is still thriving here – this included two veteran poets (one of whose work I want to get my hands on asap) and a budding 16 (or 17 year old) poet whose original titled “23 Dec 2007″ reminded me of another favourite poet of mine – Elizabeth B Browning.

Following translations was original work and while humility seemed the order of the day (phrases of “I am not sure I rhyme well” made me think of my work which has never followed any meter), a piece that did grab attention was a poem dealing with a language dying out, read by Sharanya.

Of course, we had the notable ChandraChoodan, Chenthil with some great translations and even more interesting turns of phrases that he used, Gapp an enterprising young lad from SVCE, Suraksha whose piece was charming in its simplicity and yet deep when you thought about it, Shruti (whose blog url I do not have unfortunately) who read out a poem from a book called “Indian Love Poems” (and which I would like a copy of by the way) and some people whose names I really am not able to remember. I will update this list as I see the others post through (I think).

I tried this one, but I didn’t remember the words and definitely didn’t have a copy with me, so botched it up.

And yeah, my mouth ran ahead of my brain as usual and left me saying (to CC):

“Oh sad, no spouse? You still haven’t become civilized then!” (and then cursing myself saying, “Great! Tell that to an eminent blogger and get plastered over the net coming across as a cheesy female!”)

And CC might do the Rhapsody launch, I asked him if he could, simply because I think that he could do a better job.

And some interesting byliners that I heard/contributed to:

a) Should metblogs do a post on “Who/What is Partha?”

b) Ravages – the name and the man behind it

c) Can a person get a massage in front of a lot of other people (yes, if it is a massage chair )

d) What were four underage people (ok, just one underage person among the four) doing at Hard Rock Cafe in Bangalore? And did they enjoy that banana smoothie?