Hello friend!
Welcome back to Anonymous Grocer, a 30-day audio adventure in backwards poetry. Each day: a new poem, a new collection of words in unfamiliar and spiraling patterns, a new audio message to ease you into your day.
This week, I’ve been immersed in the poetic palette of Derek Jarman’s 1994 book, Chroma — an extraordinary meditation (liberation?) on colors, gardens, art-making, and illness. Elastic and visionary, fusing the ancient and modern, autobiography with quotes and puns and poetry, a whole carpet of voices and colors emerge: chapter by chapter, each color a chapter, Jarman traces the cultural and emotional histories of color, the lightness and the shadows, the multiplicities of every hue. Even more extraordinary, Jarman wrote Chroma on the edge of blindness — with lesions on his retina, he becomes a conduit for a new way of seeing and expressing the world.
One such lyric he weaves into Chroma is the 19th-century poet Christina Rossetti’s “What is Pink?” — a rainbow of a poem that encourages wondering, wandering, and the awesomeness of possibilities.
Do you have requests for poems or poets you’d like to see featured in future Anonymous Grocer
Peace and love,
Cam
