An Update on Life, Failures, and Here-and-There

As you can notice, I have successfully abandoned my beautifully crafted, loaded-with-hopes NovPoWriMo project with the help of failure just after one week. Yes, and you know what? I am not even going to backhandedly revive it by turning one night into crazy and overload myself with too many metaphors to have a poetrorrhea and mass-post backdatedly. So, I am just gonna let it create its own grave in my museum of failures.

Anyway, life has been... life-ly. Not lively!

I am soaking my mind in the poetics of Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and of course English. Learning the nitty-gritties, the history, the style, the cross-connected meanings, etc. Letting each language tug me into its own rhythm, its own architecture of longing and breath. Each language opens a door into a slightly different version of me, a different pulse. I am learning how metaphors migrate, how grief changes shape from script to script, how love rearranges itself depending on the grammar it sits in. Some days I feel like a vessel being rewired; other days like a child relearning how to name the world. Each language carries its own temperature, its own memory, its own way of holding a wound. I’m letting all of them seep in (slowly, stubbornly) until they begin to braid themselves inside me.

On Sunday, I woke up around 8 a.m., then drifted back to sleep. Regretfully, I was woken by a lucid daymare. In it, I saw a series of vignettes: I had just woken up to discover that people had found out about my blog, and my sister had texted me saying she had opened some pages from my blog for an interview. The next vignette cut to her giving a news interview about my blog. The vignettes are slowly fading, but after I finally woke up, I spent a few hours trying to make sense of them. For a moment, I even thought it was all real. It wasn’t, at least, I hope not. I tried to ruminate, but the thoughts slipped away as the vignettes continued to disappear, like a dream dissolving before I could fully grasp it. Oh, the horror... if this hurled-up, vomit-stained mess of emotions were ever unmasked to the world I know. The thought alone coils in my stomach, equal parts panic and shame, as if someone might peel back the skin of privacy and parade the chaos beneath it.

Pain has become devoid of pain. It doesn't have the lazzat-e-girriya effect anymore in it. It lingers still in crooks and corners of my soul. But. I wonder about it a lot. I wonder about it a lot. I don't get sad like I used to. Like nails uprooted after scratching the rock bottom trying to write a prayer that is not prayer to a god that is not god. I have been working on multiple projects, papers, and I have my meagre social justice job. But the desperation is devoid of desperation. It doesn't have that catastrophic urgency anymore. I think about it a lot. I don't spiral like I used to. Like the mind used to split itself into thin, trembling threads and tie every loose end of my life into nooses.

Now it just… pauses.

Maybe it is age coupled with exhaustion, or it is the quiet uncelebrated work of healing, you know, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with trumpets but arrives like a guest who didn’t knock, just slipped in through the kitchen door and started making tea. I do think about the days when there was the old sharpness of longing with that feverish, foolish belief that destruction is a kind of art form. Now everything is softer, dull-edged, almost bureaucratic in its sadness, like a societally approved melancholy that is romanticized, the kind that pops up when you fill out forms, stand in queues, and make beautiful, aesthetic reels about it. I write, still (please let this be the proof of this statement). In fragments, in stolen ten-minute pockets between work emails and existential sighs. Some of it is ugly, some of it is startling, some of it is just me talking to my past selves like a group chat that refuses to mute. And through all this, life keeps happening in its strangely indifferent way... the tea gets cold, the laundry demands diplomacy, the moon refuses to mind its own business.

But somewhere in me, a small voice, the one that survived all the museum-of-failures exhibitions, has started saying: “We’re still here. We’re still trying. And, guess trying counts.”

So this is the update: I am unfinished. I am uneven. I am learning and unlearning and mislearning. I am losing track of my own projects and still pretending it’s all part of the grand artistic plan. I am alive in that half-feral, half-domesticated way that all people with too many thoughts and too little time tend to be. And in this slow, uneven season, I’m learning that surviving is no performance but an ordinary whisper of the hand resting quietly on the edge of the day, like it is the permission to not be extraordinary. Sometimes, that’s where hope hides. Maybe the truth is that life never straightens out. It just spirals differently, in wider circles, gentler curves, fewer sharp turns. And maybe the point isn’t to escape the spiral at all, but to walk it with a little more grace, a little less frenzy, and a little curiosity about where it leads next. And maybe one day I’ll walk back into that graveyard of abandoned projects, brush the dust off a headstone, and feel a pulse under it. Not a resurrection, but just a reminder that even failed things try to live. So yes... this is the state of the union of my chaotic little universe. No fireworks, no epiphanies, no triumphant “I have healed!” banner. Just a person updating her life like a glitchy software patch with minor fixes, unresolved bugs, performance issues. But hey! It’s still running. Until then, I’ll keep moving. A little crooked. A little lost. But moving nonetheless.

So I’ll keep at it... writing, overthinking, accidentally ghosting my own goals. The usual. At least this time, I’m doing it with better metaphors and slightly fewer breakdowns (I do miss the broken-reset effect it had). Call that growth. Or delusion. Same difference. And honestly? That feels… enough for now.

~ Oizys.

NovPoWriMo 2025: Day 7 — Marginalia Poetry

DAY 7. Marginalia Poetry

Marginalia are the notes, arrows, grumbles, doodles, and side-whispers readers leave in the edges of a text. In medieval manuscripts, scribes glossed, quibbled, even sketched snails doing battle in the borders while scripture marched down the center; the margins became a parallel drama. Later readers think Coleridge’s dense annotations, David Foster Wallace’s hyperactive underlinings, classroom copies with five owners turned books into conversations layered over time. Billy Collins’s poem “Marginalia” catalogs this readerly graffiti; entire editions of “author’s marginalia” exist because the commentary sometimes outlives the text. And, there are some great, genuinely “underground” cases where the main text is prose and the poetry lives in the margins (or rides the edges of a prose book):

– “Pangur Bán” (9th c.): A short Old Irish poem written by a monk about his cat, copied into the margin of a Latin primer (the Reichenau Primer). The prose core is devotional/educational Latin; the lyric lives in the edge space. It is a classic proof-of-concept for marginal poetry.

– “The Blackbird of Belfast Lough / Loch Laíg” (early Irish): Another tiny Old Irish lyric scribbled as marginal verse by a scribe taking a break from copying ecclesiastical prose. It is frequently cited as an example of Irish marginal nature-poems alongside Pangur.

– Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1966–2016): Phillips “treated” a Victorian prose novel (A Human Document) by painting, collaging, and extracting poem-lines in little islands and margins of the page. The original prose remains the substrate; the poetry is literally carved into the borders/whitespace. It’s the modern, maximal version of marginal lyric.

– Here's a near-inverse for context (useful as a counterpoint in our Day 7). Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817 ed.) where the center is verse and the margins carry a prose gloss (so, flipped), but it’s a powerful example of how margins become a second voice/story. Handy while we understand why margins have such poetic charge.

And of course, the cult novel S. (2013), conceived by J.J. Abrams and written by Doug Dorst, takes the idea of marginalia to its limit: the book itself is layered with two readers’ handwritten notes in the margins, postcards, maps, and slips of paper, so the story is told as much in the scribbles as in the “main text.” There are stranger rabbit holes too:

– The Voynich Manuscript (15th c.), an undeciphered book covered not just in mysterious text and drawings but with later readers’ puzzled notes trying to crack it.
– Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a Renaissance dream-book where marginal glosses sometimes contradict the text and scholars suspect secret authorship games.
– The “Dartmouth Dante” copies from the 19th c., where anonymous students scrawled jokes, prayers, and insults in Latin beside their assigned cantos.
– And the Ars Notoria, a medieval grimoire, often copied with cramped side-notes that supposedly gave the scribe magical power if read aloud.

Why are we doing this? Because the margin is where thinking shows its work. It’s where the raw voice: contradictions, edits, hesitations; escapes the clean surface. A marginalia poem lets your poem be the commentary: restless, argumentative, alive. It also echoes your Week 1 themes (palimpsests, errata/corrigenda): we’re writing next to a text, not erasing it, by layering, correcting, complicating.

How can we do this?
Take a short passage (a paragraph from a book/article, a past poem of yours, even your own Day 1–6 lines). Copy it plainly as “main text.” Now write only in the margins: side notes, arrows, strike-throughs, caret insertions, contradictions, tiny glosses. The poem is the marginalia; the “main text” remains as ghost or foil.
– Minimum 8 lines of marginal notes.
– Include at least one “angry correction” (e.g., no—this isn’t it).
– Include at least one doodle-word (onomatopoeia, glyph, or nonsense syllable).
– End with a note-to-self (a private instruction or reminder).

Optional intensifiers (choose one or more):

• Let one margin note spill into (overwrite) the main text.
• Use editing marks (→ ↑ ↓ ^) and a visible strike-through.
• Make the marginalia argue with the central passage’s thesis.
• Write the whole thing as if you’re grading in red pen (brief rubrics, “awk,” “clarify”).
• Add one footnote number and a single-line footnote at the end (a sly reveal).

Micro-samples [Use as a feel-check or a template!]

(Main text:) The leaves fell in silence across the field.
[marginalia:] silence? — it was never quiet
[↑ add] the crows, the rust in their throats
strike “field” → write “vacant lot”
!!! autumn is not your metaphor; it is your mess
(why pretend the fence wasn’t there?)
[nnngh] skrr—skrr—(rake teeth on gravel)
^ move “fell” later; let them hover first
no, not “gold”—tobacco, old envelope, bruise-edge
[note to self:] remember: you were there too.

(Main text:) I meant to say I was fine.
[marginalia:] you meant to say—different from meaning it
→ insert: after the bus left
delete “fine”; set “functional”
(angry correction) stop tidying the wreckage
[scribble] o o o o (beads you kept worrying)
footnote¹

¹ you did not call back; that is the whole weather.

Food for thought for all of us: In the modern era, especially during the heyday of long-form blogging, comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, threaded replies — weren’t they a kind of digital marginalia? A chorus scribbled in the edges of a main post? Could those count as part of this lineage of poems-in-the-margins? You could argue yes: blog comments, pingbacks, even forum threads are marginalia. They’re written in the “edges” of a main text, they talk back, they annotate, they contradict, sometimes they even outlive the original post. They’re lateral voices, just like medieval glosses. In some ways, blog comment threads are the 21st-century equivalent of the scribe’s doodle or gloss — a palimpsest of readers layering over the original. But you could also argue no: online comments aren’t literally sharing the same physical margin; they’re architecturally separated (below the post, or on a different page). They’re “paratext” rather than “marginalia.” And unlike scribal marginalia, which usually had one reader at a time, internet commentary is multi-voiced, asynchronous, often cacophonous. And... unlike medieval ink, blog comments are fragile: platforms collapse, links rot, archives disappear. Maybe the internet’s margins are even more ghostly than parchment. So it comes down to definition:

If marginalia means “any writing in conversation with a main text,” then yes, digital comments and pingbacks fit neatly.
If it means “literally inscribed in the physical white space around a text,” then no, the analogy only works metaphorically. 

And honestly, that tension — between metaphorical lineage and material practice — is exactly the kind of ambiguity poetry thrives on. What would it mean to write a poem in the comment box itself? To let the margin become the poem, and the post the silent backdrop? And what about now, in the age of fleeting tweets and DMs? Maybe our marginalia aren't even in the margins anymore, maybe they're the whole page?

Marginalia Poetry

I opened the window to let the morning in.

Marginalia:
→ add: it hesitated, like it knew better
no — not “morning,”
   ~morning~ → uninvited memory
↑ this is where the draft pretends it’s gentle
(angry correction) stop romanticizing the ache
scribble: skrrt-skrrt (wingbeats / nerves)
^ move “opened” later; you only thought you did
question?? did you close it afterward
why does light always feel like an audit
o o o (three hollow suns, mocking)
→ insert: the birds weren’t singing — they were warning
you should say it plainly: you weren’t ready¹
[note to self:] next time, lie slower.

¹ yes, you kept the curtains drawn after.

~ Oizys.