Smitha Vishwanath's Blog, page 7

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 25 : My Daughter Plays the Lead

Our daily resource is the online galleries of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, one of India’s foremost museums. It’s a pleasure to browse through the images here. I particularly liked these anklets that aren’t just jewelry but a sort of personal piggy bank, this portrait of the fabulously mustachioed J.M. Cursetjee, and this highly decorative flask, originally meant to hold […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 27 : The Message by Edward Lamson Henry

Gosh! Four more days to go (five for me as I still need to write a poem for Day 25) and this year’s NaPoWriMo will come to an end. Today’s daily resource is the online collection of the Harvard Art Museums, where you can find this bright and pretty drawing of a tulip poplar, a rather forbidding poster comparing […]

NaPoWriMo 2025 Day 26 : Escaping the conflict

I skipped day 25 because I was down with fever and a terrible headache, but I will get to it once I’m better. Since today’s prompt is to write a sonnet, which has a structure and is just 14 lines long, thought I might as well write one and be up-to-date. This sonnet is based […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 24: Holidays, Poetry, Cake and Music

Today’s daily resource is the Art Institute of Chicago, where just searching the collection for the word “stars,” I found this amazing quilt, a very fancy-looking Soviet plate, and an illustration of the constellation Leo from a medieval Arabic astronomical guide. And now for today’s (optional) prompt. One fundamental aspect of music is its communal nature. While music can be […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 23 : The Koel’s Call- a cry for mercy or for love?

Our resource for the day is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum’s online image collection is practically endless, and to call it varied would be an understatement. There’s over 2,000 images just of baseball cards! To say nothing of candelabra featuring what appears to be a scandalized swan, a processional sword belonging to the guardsman of a sixteenth-century German duke, and a […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 22 : Painting lessons, a gift to me from my Mother

And now for today’s optional prompt! Did you take music lessons as a child? Despite having all the musical talent of a dried-out lemon, I took two years of piano lessons. I was required to practice for half an hour a day, and showed my disgruntlement by playing certain very annoying songs – like Turkey in […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 21: A cooking show gone awry

Our daily resource is the Shanghai Museum, where you will find everything from a carved hairpin featuring two mustachioed fellows, to a hot-pink Taoist master, to a calligraphic ode to wine. And now here’s our daily (optional) prompt. Sawako Nakayasu’s poem “Improvisational Score” is a rather surreal prose poem describing an imaginary musical piece that proceeds in a very unmusical […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 20 : When I’m with you

Happy Easter to all of you who celebrate. Today’s resource is the online galleries of the Tate Modern, where there’s oodles to discover, including a sculpture that sort of makes us think of the Loch Ness Monster holding a beach ball, a swirly bit of op/pop art reminiscent of either candy or a mustache, and this interesting exploration of five […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 19 : Did you hear the scream?

And now for our daily prompt – optional as always. This one is inspired by Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song.” The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek for “goat song.” The song in Kelly’s poem is quite literally a goat song. The poem also describes a tragedy, both in the modern sense of an awful […]

NaPoWriMo 2025, Day 18 : Slow down, you crazy child

Today’s resource is a virtual visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gardner, who died in 1924, was a devoted and very wealthy art collector who built a Venetian-style palace (in Boston) to house her treasures. The museum building is beautiful and well known for its gorgeous courtyard. But the Gardner is also well known for […]