Megan Muthupandiyan

CONTACT:
Email: megan.muthupandiyan@gmail.com
Website: poetryintheparks.org           

BIO:
Meg Muthupandiyan is a poet, artist, and educator. A 2019 Fellow at the Poetry Foundation’s Teacher’s Institute, she is passionate about creating space for people to contemplate art, poetry, and the natural world, both in and beyond the classroom.  She is the founder of the Poetry in the Parks project (poetryintheparks.org), which explores the sacred beauty of our land communities through collaboratively created poetry films.

Meg Muthpandiyan's poems and illustrations have appeared in various print and online journals, including Chitro Magazine,  Great Lakes Review, Bent Paddle Press, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Stone Highway Review, Chicago Literati, and Wisconsin Poetry Journal.  

Her work has been included in a number of public poetry projects, including the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, Verse Wisconsin's Poetry Jumps off the Shelf Verse-o-Matic Poetry Project, and Seattle Poetry Lab’s annual Postcard Poetry Exchange.

PUBLICATIONS:
Her first volume of illustrated poetry Forty Days in the Wilderness, Wandering is now available with Finishing Line Press. 

Poetry

El Toro, Majorca

for Alex, Sina and Sona

Time was the first windmill 
to run into disuse; 
I have seen 
its ancient tower 
lie all but abandoned, 
a ruin of suggestion.  

 While night swimming
a satellite sails low overhead, 
its trow breaking 
the crest of darkness;
elsewhere the world burns,  
but we find it hard to remember.

Floating with arms outstretched
we catch the breath of night 
and begin to circle 
the summer constellations,
grinding coarse starlight
into the finest meal.

The State Without

So the world tries its hand at the sublime; 
everywhere the snows are steaming, 
bathing in their own fine mist, 
galvanized with light.

From behind this veil two geese are crying
with breath translucent as clouds within clouds 
as they seek fellows out of sight;
and the icy floe of the reed bed they stand upon 
has barely bared its mirrored skin,
as it cradles their soft reflections and lifts them up again.

But transcendence is a state without a season; 
it is you who peers from beyond the veil of sight
and perceives what is as if it were a soft reflection —
the world is everything, and nothing more.