28-04-2025
The summer of poetry is here in Chennai
April might scream summer, long weekends, school vacations but for a quiet bunch in Chennai, it means something else. It is the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), a celebration of poetry where poets around the world take up the challenge of writing a poem a day, all month long.
Every April, poetry organisations around the world dish out daily prompts to get creative, and Chennai's poetry communities are right in step. 'We share prompts at 6 p.m., in both Tamil and English on our social media, and many show up to write from wide-eyed first timers to published poets,' says Padmavathi, organiser of Deleted Drafts, who has been writing daily herself this month.
But the awareness and exposure about poetry communities and challenges still seems lacking in the city. 'We need more visibility, starting from colleges, to help more people discover these challenges,' she adds.
Varshini Rajasekhar, a creative strategist from Chennai is attempting NaPoWriMo for the first time, and she is proud to keep it rolling even as April nears its end. 'I spend the day collecting metaphors, words and stray thoughts for the next prompt. The next morning right after I wake up, I sit and string together. I have readers who wait for my poems, and this is my way of showing up both for myself and the little community formed around this challenge,' says Ms Varshini.
Vidya, a city manager at Kommuneity, has been setting the stage for poets to gather, hosting events where people write to prompts, create collective collages, recite their poems, and get feedback too. At one such event on Sunday, poets gathered for a NaPoWriMo workshop in Ashok Nagar, where they drew one word to sentence long prompts from a box. But they didn't stop at the words, they brought each prompt to life by sketching images inspired by them, then spun those visuals into Haikus and poems.
As someone also taking on the daily writing challenge, Vidya says, 'I dedicate at least 30 minutes to an hour every day to write this month. Challenges like this build consistency, discipline and a room to experiment,' says Ms Vidya.
'Poetry communities in Chennai are very reserved space. Even when well-known poets come to the city, the crowd is thin. These spaces need to be democratised and open to everyone,' she said.
'Of course, showing up every day to write is the real challenge,' says Ms Padmavathi. 'People picking up pen and paper again just to write makes me happy, especially after AI Ghibli trends,' she says. But the scariest part for the poetry community, the AI-generated 'poems' have already started sneaking into the challenge which prompt-givers were quick to call out. 'AI-generated work defeats the whole purpose of this challenge. Using that, your original voice gets drowned amidst the sea of identical AI generated work,' Ms Varshini points out.
