Yuyutsu Sharma

Celebrated London-based writer, director, producer, and cinematographer Stephan Bookas on Yuyutsu Sharma's "I See My World Shaking

2025-07-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Stephan Bookas

I See My World Shaking - A Deep Dive

Scintillating piece by London-based writer, director, producer, and cinematographer Stephan Bookas on the making of his short film inspired by Yuyutsu Sharma poem “I See My World Shaking,” from his book, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems.

https://www.movingpoems.com/2023/11/i-see-my-world-shaking-by-yuyutsu-sharma/

Recently I started posting short films from my archives and I thought it might be interesting to do some writeups on these periodically.

I've written before about how I've learned from other people's mistakes and failures, as well as successes and use those to my advantage. And I thought that maybe some people might be able to learn from mine. So a "deep dive" such as this one serves as a sort of episodic account of how I made these films: how they came about as well as a bit of insight into the craft of making them. Part travelogue, part diary, part journal, they'll be a sort of behind-the-scenes discussion.

The one I want to start with is the first one I posted in this series. A documentary poem called "I See My World Shaking". It was never meant to be a film at all. And for the longest time, it wasn't. So how did it all come about?

In 2016 I was asked to got to Nepal for an aerial unit on a feature film. The shoot was only going to be a couple of days, but the trip would be for a full week. It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Now when I go to places, not on holidays generally, but when it's for work, I normally take my camera with me. That doesn't mean I necessarily have an agenda or indeed any idea of what I want to get out of a certain situation. But it's a very important starting point for me.

You see, when I look at the world through my camera, I look at it in a different way. I start to notice things I wouldn't otherwise notice. I start to really see things.

An inconsequential gesture by someone suddenly takes on a new level of meaning, a look or a glance becomes imbued with all the gravitas and pathos of the world. It's really quite something.

I urge you to try it for yourself. Take a camera if you have one (I find it doesn't really work that well with a smartphone, perhaps because it's a bit too snapshot-y), and walk down the street. You don't even have to take pictures. Just looking through a viewfinder makes you look at the world with different eyes.

Don't be intrusive, always be respectful of other people and if someone turns away from you, move on. But most people will just become comfortable with you being there and eventually ignore you.

And then reality somehow shifts. You start seeing connections that weren't there before. And once you string those connections together, an idea starts forming. Whether it's for a moment, for a scene, or for a story. If you pay attention, these things happen all by themselves. You discover a theme, and once you've found it, you find yourself searching for other moments that fit that theme.

I'll talk more about this some other time, when I go into my experiences of making documentaries. But for now and for this example, I want to focus on this one thing: connections.

Take a novel for instance where in the first quarter of your readthrough you're struggling to get into the story. There are seemingly random characters in seemingly random scenes doing seemingly random things. And then, finally, the author connects them somehow. And then it clicks and it all falls into place and makes sense. And now, instead of just isolated events and moments, you find yourself in the middle of a story. Finally, you're engaged and invested.

Back to our example. So you're out on the street and you're taking snapshots. A wall, a building, a man walking down the street, a woman having breakfast outside a cafe. A dogwalker. What do all these have in common? At first glance, not very much. And they might actually not have anything in common at all. But if you pay attention, you'll be able to find a frame of reference. You'll be able to find or construct a framework that unites them all. You'll find the connection.

Okay, so what about this example? What if, instead of on a random day, you choose to take these photos in London on the 24th of June 2016, the day after the Brexit referendum? London overwhelmingly voted Remain, so chances are the people you're photographing are disillusioned, downbeat, dejected. And the woman having breakfast now might be thinking, how long before I'm having my last croissant? Overdramatic, I know, but lots of things were incredibly heightened on that day. And the man walking might be uncertain about his future. And the wall might have a mural on it that promotes voting Remain. And the building might be one that was partly funded by the European Union. And the dogwalker might just be the happiest they've ever been because the vote went their way.

I'm making all this up but the point is, once you have a hook - a frame of reference, everything you see through that lens takes on meaning.

Back to the film. There was a devastating earthquake in Nepal in 2015 which left death, destruction and displacement in its wake. A year later I was in Kathmandu. I didn't really know all that much about the earthquake at the time, other than what I had seen the year before in the news. I certainly wasn't aware that the consequences would still be felt a year on.

We had wrapped the aerial unit on day three or four and had a free afternoon to ourselves to spend in Kathmandu. Our location manager Aurelia Thomas, who had been to Nepal on previous occasions, kindly took me around the city and of course I had my camera with me. And I went and filmed people and places throughout the day.

But I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular. I didn't see the connections. Not yet. But I did notice the aftermath of the earthquake was ever present. Signs at construction sites signaling rebuilding efforts. People carrying building materials and constructing houses by hand. Brick by brick.

But also other scenes. People praying, prayer wheels being turned, solemn faces. And then other things started falling into place. A funeral procession at Pashupatinath temple and then the cremation of bodies along the Bagmati River.

Although this was a year on and those funerals taking place here most likely had nothing to do with the earthquake, it was once again all about finding those connections. And once you have your framework in place, everything else you document will be always be seen as being part of that framework. That's just how the mind works.

So I gathered what I could on my trusty camera and we left the next morning.

And even though I had a rough idea that there could be a little documentary piece in all this, I couldn't really work out what that might be.

A few years went by and I think it was during the first Covid lockdown that I went through some of my old hard drives and rediscovered the footage from Kathmandu. I might have forgotten about it or maybe it was in the back of my mind, but never at the forefront.

And rediscovering this footage made me ponder how best to fit it into a format that would work for a short film. It was always going to be about the earthquake and about people's resilience. So with that in mind, I selected shots that reflected the theme and collected them on an editing timeline.

But the missing element, the missing connection as it were, was going to be a narration of some kind. Otherwise all you have is a collection of shots. I didn't want a classical narrator giving a factual account of the earthquake. I also didn't want interviews. This wasn't ever going to be a conventional documentary in that sense. Instead, poetry was my way to find access to the subject matter, in a similar way to the short documentary poem "Refugee Blues" which I co-directed a few years prior.

So I started my search for a poem that would be able to capture all that despair and destruction and a poet who would allow me to use it. I soon came across "Quaking Cantos", a collection of poems by renowned Nepalese-India poet Yuyutsu Sharma. The piece of poetry which struck me as really connecting the dots of the footage I had was "I See My World Shaking." Its haunting, lyrical and somber quality immediately stood out as one that would help make the film possible and make it come to life.

As the footage is observational in nature and illustrates the aftermath of the earthquakes, the first person narration of the poem instantly worked. Every stanza begins with the words "I see...". The narrator sees everything through his own eyes. He sees and it disturbs him, disrupts him, pains him. It's as if it was tailor-made for a documentary poem.

"I see the tops of our towers crumble..."

"I see the domes of our stupas crack..."

"I see shrines of our deities shake..."

The camera sees all those things as well. And although the poem is set in the immediate aftermath and the footage is from months on, it just clicks when I put the words to the images. The towers no longer crumble and the deities no longer shake, but the fragments are present. Some of the wounds have healed, others are still wide open. And the scars are visible everywhere.

At first I had someone else read the poem. A professional narrator. But then Yuyutsu offered to record the poem himself. And that worked so much better. It was more authentic and tangible. And full of genuine heartbreak and sorrow.

The film started taking shape. After about four iterations of the edit I arrived at something that had good pace and rhythm. I found different pieces of music that I combined into a soundscape to complement the poem.

And then I needed a way into the film. This couldn't be a documentary about the fallout of an earthquake without us seeing the actual event in question. We needed to see glimpses of it. Nothing gratuitous, but the devastation needed to be felt.

So I found clips of the earthquake, obtained permissions to use them by the people who filmed them and wrote an introductory text and that's how the film begins.

I want to go back to how I started this entry: connections. The odd thing is that this is probably the least narrative film of all the ones I've made. Visually there is a progression, the shots are grouped into scenes and there are three overarching acts: reconstruction, religion and rebirth. And of course there's a narrative arc in the poem itself.

But there isn't a story as such, or central characters to follow. So what keeps this from being just a collection of random shots? It's that they're set against the backdrop of the event: we are introduced to the event through the opening shots of the earthquake. We are constantly reminded of the event through the words of the poem, even when the images on screen don't directly reflect this. And when the film culminates in the scene at Pashupatinath temple and the images of loss and death, even if those images aren't necessarily directly related to the quake, the connection that's been established makes us believe they are.

A lot more can be said about this piece, even though it's short. But I'll leave it at this. If there's one thing I've learned from making this film it's that I need to keep my eyes open and seek those connections early on, be deliberate in my shot choices and in the kind of thing I'm looking for. I always shoot with the edit in mind, and what is editing, if not connecting things?

https://www.stephanbookas.com/post/i-see-my-world-shaking-a-deep-dive

Yuyutsu Sharma’s 2025 Tour

2025-06-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, 17 June 2025, 6:00 to 8.00 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma at Petrichor Collective Poetry Series with Dan Beachy-Quck, Kathleen Willard, Sara Nolan & Xavier Pereira at The Center for

Creativity 200 Matthews, Fort Collins

Monday, 16 June 2025, 6:00 to 8.00 pm, Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu Sharma in Denver at Nepali community center 4001 W 76th Ave Westminster CO 80030 Organized by INLS Colorado Chapter

June 14 Saturday Yuyutsu Sharma speaking launching the legendry Nepalese folk singer and novelist Hiranya Bhojpure's novel Aang Sherpa & the Ocean of Heights in English translation by Bhuwan Thapaliya in Denver at Sherpa House Restaurant and cultural Center, Golden, Denver https://sherpa.house/ RSVP 7322213289

Yuyu at Lighthouse Writers Lit Fest, 2025

Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 8:30 to 9.30 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Suzi Q. Smith, Cynthia Swanson, Cass Eddington, Elissa Bassist, Kris Kova at Light House Lit Festival, 3844 York St Denver, CO 80205 https://lighthousewriters.org/content/lit-fest-2025-schedule

Thursday, 12 June, 2025, 4.00-6 pm, “How to Build Your Niche as a Poet: Online Workshop with Yuyutsu Sharma. Light House Lit Festival. https://lighthousewriters.org/workshop/how-build-your-niche-poet-v Financial Tuition Assistance link: https://lighthousewriters.org/content/writership-tuition-assistance

Friday, 6 June, 2025 Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Kristena Prater and Stephanie James at Poets Lifting the Veils: Poetry Revelations – The Himalayas, Mysteries of Eternity and Ingenuity of Death at Casa Poim Poim 2323 Calle Pava Santa Fe RSVP: krisprater@gmail.com

Sunday, 4 May 2025, 1:30 to 3.30 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Tashi Chodron and Tenzin Dolker at GRAND FINALE EVENT: AWE Awakening – Wisdom - Experience at Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, Staten Island, 338 Lighthouse Ave, Staten Island, NY 10306, USA https://www.tibetanmuseum.org/calendar +1 (718) 987-3500

Monday, 5 May 2025, 5:00 to 6.30 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma in Conversation with Tim Tomlinson at New York University School of Liberal Studies, 726 Broadway, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10003 Room: Conference Room B RSVP: https://events.nyu.edu/event/363722-tim-tomlinson-yuyutsu-sharma-in-conversatio

Yuyutsu Sharma reading alongside Tashi Chodron and Tenzin Dolker : A special afternoon of poetry and cultural reflection

2025-05-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Join me for a special afternoon of poetry and cultural reflection, alongside Tashi Chodron and Tenzin Dolker at Tibetan Museum in Staten Island, 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm, Sunday, 4 May, 2025

https://www.tibetanmuseum.org/event-details/awe-awakening-wisdom-experience-2025-05-04-13-30

AWE Awakening – Wisdom - Experience

Sun, May 04

Staten Island

Join us for a special course inspired by the themes of Global Resonance: Promoting human values. Encouraging religious harmony. Preserving Tibetan culture. Reviving ancient Indian wisdom

RSVP

Time & Location

Last available date

May 04, 2025, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM

Staten Island, 338 Lighthouse Ave, Staten Island, NY 10306, USA

About the event

Put some AWE – Awakening, Wisdom, Experience- Into Saturday!

Grand Finale, Art, Poetry, Mindfulness Meditation and Live performance May 4th!

Rsvp tickets here May 4 Free : from 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM Link

Please join us for a special course inspired by the theme of Global Resonance:

The Four Principal Commitments of HH The Dalai Lama, curated by Tashi Chodron, an expert in Tibetan art and Culture at JMMTA. The sessions will be ninety minutes long except for the 2 hrs special opening launch April 12th and includes a talk, art connection, Q & A and a closing discussion.

The Four Principal Commitments of the 14th Dalai Lama: Promoting Human Values, Promoting Religious Harmony, Tibetan Cultural Preservation

and Revival of Ancient Indian wisdom.

You can attend one or all three series.

Highly recommend reading His Holiness most recent book :

Voices for the Voiceless & Beyond Religion-Secular Ethics

Special launch : Beginning with a two-hour opening session that provides context for the course and examines the first two Principal Commitments the promotion of human values and Religious Harmony, each session will focus on a Principal Commitment and connect content to a Tibetan art from the exhibition, exploring the commitment’s significance, different ways in which it can be actualized, and its potential impact on our own experience, and personal transformation and on our global society’s well being and peace.

As part of the JMMTA’s Global Resonance Project, this program is offered free of charge supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

About the presenters: Tashi Chodron, Tenzin Dolker, and Yuyutsu Sherma

Tashi Chödrön , a lay Buddhist practitioner, is one of the first women of her generation in exile to receive the entire teachings of the Vajrayana path directly from HH Penor Rinpoche (one of the greatest masters of the 20th century). This training included Ngondro—the preliminary teachings, Tsalung and Dzogchen, the pinnacle teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, which emphasisethe direct realization of one’s true nature. This sublime path is the most direct path to awakening, focusing on recognizing our pure, basic goodness that is within each of us.

As the Himalayan Programs and Communities Ambassador at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, Tashi is the host of the Rubin’s popular weekly mindfulness meditation at New York Insight meditation center. She has taught a series of sold out Awakening Practice mindfulness meditation classes on selected Saturdays along with guest teachers, and educates university students and adults through gallery tours and classes on Himalayan Art and Culture. Tashi curated and hosted popular monthly program on Himalayan Art and Culture called “Himalayan Heritage”prior to the museum’s physical space closing in October of 2024. During the Pandemic She also lead virtual sessions with Tibet House New York, the Center for Adults Living Well @ the YMCA, and hosted virtual meditation sessions for Mayors Morning Mindfulness and Prayers (audio only) including virtual Himalayan children Sunday virtual Mindfulness meditation since the pandemic to help Parents and Children and led a meditation session on the 21 Feminine Attributes for UN Women’s USA. Tashi taught the Awakening Practice at Kripalu in partnership with NY Yoga and Life Magazine for many years and taught Awakening Wisdom Experience at Asia Society, Williams College, Baruch, Adjunct at Baruch and University Open Air at Brooklyn Public Library. She helped raise funds for Hospitals, winter warm cloths including raided funds for Heifer project founded by President Jimmy Carter for sustainable living for Tibetans in Tibet. Board of directors of UN Women USA, New York Chapter. Recipient of gold star award from American Himalayan Foundation for tirelessly sharing and preserving Tibetan Culture Heritage. Tashi was Recently awarded a citation of honor by Queens President Donovan Richards Jr. for her tireless contribution to the New York Community.

Tenzin Dolker :

Ms. Tenzin Dolker is a graduate from Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA), Dharamsala, India. She has deidcated her life to teaching and performing Tibetan Cultural music and dance throughout India, North America and Europe. A former Tibetan Music and Dance teacher at Central School for Tibetan (CST), Bylakuppe, Mysore District, India. She currently teachers Tibetan music and dance to Tibetan Children in New York City

in order to preserve its unique cultural heritage. After immigrating to the U.S.A. She has performed all over North American including Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, Baruch College, Tibet House and most recently performed at UBS area in Long Island in Aug of 2024 for His Holiness and Dalai Lama and more then 20,000 live audience.

Yuyutsu Sherma :

Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is an internationally acclaimed South Asian poet and translator. He has published nine poetry collections including, A BLIZZARD IN MY BONES: NEW YORK POEMS (Nirala, 2016), Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems (Nirala, 2016), Milarepa's Bones, 33 New Poems (Nirala, 2012), Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010), a 900-page book with renowned German photographer, Andreas Stimm, and more. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works and conducts creative writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

In-Person: The Second Buddha – A Poetry Reading with Yuyutsu Sharma at Rubin Museum's NY Insight Meditation Center

2024-12-29T08:19:00.000-08:00

In-Person: The Second Buddha – A Poetry Reading

with Yuyutsu Sharma

Thursday, January 2nd, 2025 | 1:00pm – 2:00pm

Location: New York Insight at 115 West 29th Street, 12th Floor

Experience an unforgettable afternoon of poetry and reflection with the Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma. This special event, “The Second Buddha: A Poetry Reading”, highlights the poet’s deep connection to Himalayan Buddhism and his extraordinary poetic journey.

Sharma will read from The Second Buddha Walk, a poetry collection inspired by the Rubin Museum’s “Second Buddha: Master of Time” exhibit, which celebrates the life and teachings of the ancient Tibetan teacher Guru Padmasambhava. Yuyutsu will delve into the spiritual landscapes that shaped his verses, weaving a rich tapestry of imagery and insight.

In addition to selections from The Second Buddha Walk, Yuyutsu will share recent works rooted in Nepalese Himalayan Buddhism, drawing from his acclaimed books, Milarepa’s Bones, The Nepal Trilogy, and Annapurna Poems. These works explore themes of meditation, pilgrimage, and the enduring power of sacred geography.

Beyond the readings, Yuyutsu will offer a rare glimpse into the transformative role of meditation and shamanic practices across South Asia in shaping his journey as a global traveling poet. His reflections will interlace personal stories, cultural observations, and poetic wisdom, creating a vibrant dialogue between tradition and modernity.

The event will conclude with a brief Q&A session, allowing the audience to engage directly with the poet, followed by a book signing opportunity.

Don’t miss this rare chance to witness the lyrical magic and profound spiritual insights of Yuyutsu Sharma, a poet whose words transcend borders and touch the soul.

Registration:

This gathering is open to all, and if you are able, we invite you to offer dana to New York Insight. Although there is no registration fee and your presence remains the greatest gift, please consider making an offering through the form below. Much gratitude and appreciation for whatever you may offer.

If you are registering via a mobile device such as a phone or tablet, you can scroll right and left and up and down within the below form if it is partially obscured or cut off.
CLICK HERE to open the registration form in a new browser window.

The Alchemy of Nine Smiles: Nine Long Poems By Yuyutsu Sharma

2024-06-23T04:28:00.000-07:00

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Red River; First Indian Edition (16 May 2024); Perfect Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎9392494815 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9392494819 Rs 295 Indian

Aamzon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9392494815

"World renowned Himalayan poet."

—The Guardian

“Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the finest poets on Planet earth.”

—Sean Thomas Dougherty, Erie, Pa

"Yuyutsu Sharma is a United Nation of poetry with absolute integrity and honesty. The great poets W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams would applaud him. If the Lord were in the audience or classroom, he would applaud too. If you read “The Offer” and ‘You are a New Yorker” you will see his range that includes England, France, 42nd Street, the Netherlands, and Spain, the homeless stops of the imagination. He walks through water and weeds in the rivers Ganges, the Tiber, the Yangtze, and Hudson. All these rivers are part of his bloodstream. (Somehow people manage to swim and drown in his bloodstream). He doesn’t forget the Amazon or the Mississippi or the everyday steam of the black tea pot. There is a faint sweetish smell of a temple in Nepal on everything he writes. There are wild exchanges of words and ideas that abide with him.

When I say hello to him, I sing the hymn, Abide with Me.

I don’t know the word for genius in Nepali Yuyu is a gifted Himalayan Mountain climber. If the Buddha gave fellowships, he’d grant one, perhaps two immediately to Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma."

—Stanley Moss, American poet and editor, Sheep Meadow Press

The poems here weave an epic narrative of the poet’s travels across continents, displaying a wide range of experiences replete with indigenous myths and legends and surreal narratives evoking agony of innocent lives torn apart by natural disasters and inhumanity of a corrupt polity. They range from his early struggle to survive as a full-time poet in the sweltering alleys of Delhi and remote Himalayan canyons to his inexorable ramblings across continents to sing songs of the innate spirituality of the high hills and humanity of the people he meets. Bold and kaleidoscopic, solemn and joyful, the poems show a grand poet at work, constructing a blazing narrative of our contemporary times. From seven epigrammatic constructs that caused the earthquakes in the Himalayas to his meditations on his beloved lake Fewa and on the Atlantic shore, the poems delve deeper into the intricacies of his travels and elements that keep a traveler alive in forlorn lands. Later poems move on to the agony of extinguished hearths, sectarian violence and innocent lives caught up in the crossfire of South Asian geopolitics. An epiphany from his childhood where a black bird came to hit his grandma’s cagey chest brings the readers to the final sequence of the nine smiles where the poet uses shamanic ecstasy and trance to bring his late mother back to life, the one who waited for his arrival in his hometown in Punjab, leading us to linger in the poet’s magical world for a very, very long time.

https://www.amazon.in/dp/9392494815

About the Poet

Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry.

Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Michael Graves, Brand Called You), Punjab-born, Indian poet Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage.

He is also recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature. Author of eleven poetry collections, most recently, Lost Horoscope, he has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Heidelberg University, University of Ottawa, Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University, Belfast, The Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, Rubin Museum, New York, Beijing Open University, New York University and Columbia University, New York.

Yuyutsu was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate the London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in an Exhibit, “Travel the World at Kew.”

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts creative writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

Currently, Yuyutsu is curating New York Writers Workshop in Kathmandu and Himalayan Literature Festival 2024. He also edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing. More: www.yuyutsusharma.com

NYWW/ HLF in Kathmandu: May 22 -June 2, 2024

2024-02-06T00:25:00.000-08:00

NYWW in Kathmandu: Himalayan Literature Festival
May 22-June 2, 2024

NYWW in Kathmandu: Himalayan Literature Festival--an international literary conference hosted by New York Writers Workshop in a partnership with White Lotus Bookstore, Kathmandu, featuring Tony Barnstone, Ravi Shankar, Yuyutsu Sharma, Tim Tomlinson, and others. Panels, workshops, readings, cultural excursions, flowing into the two-day Himalayan Literary Festival, followed by five nights in the rural areas of the Pokhara Valley on Lake Fewa, and Chitwan National Park, home to tigers, the one-horned rhinoceros, and gharial crocodiles. In the city, visits to temples, yoga & meditation centers, interactions with shamans, and with local poets and writers. In the countryside, encounters with the landscapes of the Annapurna mountains, and with the wildlife of Chitwan.

Dates: May 22 - June 2, 2024.

The Package

eight workshops* – generative and evaluative (*two workshops in temples)

eight panel talks – a range of topics inc translation, voice, neutrality, image

welcome drinks + canapes, three dinners, three lunches

outside cultural events (optional)

four readings – three faculty readings, one participant reading

generous free time for writing & exploration

airport pickup

inner city transportation to conference events / RT coach to Pokhara

accommodations at KGH Group properties (links below at †) at each location, breakfast included

The Cost* [register thru paypal button, or via wire transfer -- details below]

Early Bird Special (until Feb 15): US $1475

After Feb 16: US $1845

*NYWW Members: 20% off full price

*NYWW Athens/NYWW Sardinia participants: 20% off full price

*APWT Members: 10% off full price

The Schedule*

May 22

6:00 PM Orientation/Meet the Faculty (reception)

7:30 NYWW Welcome Dinner

May 23

9:30 AM Convocation

10:15 AM Workshop

12:15 PM Lunch

2:00 PM Workshop

5:30 PM Reading

7:15 Dinner (open)

May 24

9:30 AM Workshop

11:15 AM Workshop

1:00 PM Lunch

2:15 PM Monkey Temple / Shaman House

6:00 PM Reading

7:15 Dinner (open)

May 25

9:00 AM all day excursion/pack lunch

7:00 PM Dinner (open)

May 26

10:00 AM Workshop

12:15 PM Lunch

2:00 PM Workshop

7:00 PM Dinner (open)

May 27

Himalayan Literary Festival Day 1

workshops/panels/readings/cultural events

May 28

Himalayan Literary Festival Day 2

workshops/panels/readings/cultural events

7:00 PM NYWW Dinner (celebration)

May 29

8:30 AM depart for Waterfront Resort, Lake Fewa, Pohara

Evening: discussion/panel

May 30

9:30 AM Workshop

Evening: discussion/panel

May 31

8:30 AM depart for Chitwan National Park

Evening: discussion/panel

June 1

9:30 AM Workshop

Evening: Reading

Farewell Dinner

June 2

return to Kathmandu

June 3

departures

† The KGH Group will be our hosts at the following properties:
May 22 - May 27: Park Village
May 27 - 29: Kathmandu Guest House (home base for Himalayan Literary Festival)
May 29 - May 31: Waterfront Resort (on the lakefront, Pokhara)
May 31 - June 2: Maruni Sanctuary Lodge (Chitwan)

TD Bank, N.A. Wilmington, DE

New York Writers Resources, Inc.

Acct # 791-5960855

SWIFT CODE NRTHUS33XXX

ABA/Routing # 026013673

NOTE: if registering via wire transfer, please notify us at newyorkwritersworkshop@gmail.com and we'll follow up with confirmation.

NOTE: prices reflect PayPal processing fee

The Faculty

TONY BARNSTONE teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 22 books and a music CD, including Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (bilingual); Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure. He is also a translator or co-translator of world literature, primarily Chinese but also Spanish and Urdu. Among his awards are: The Poets Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, The John Ciardi Prize, The Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council. He co-edited the anthologies Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States; Dead and Undead Poems; and Monster Verse. His new publications are a co-translation from the Urdu, Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib and a creativity tool, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity. He is currently working on a libretto for an opera. Click to visit Tony’s website.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a Delhi-based poet and professor of linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology. Described by poet Keki Daruwalla as the author of “the first significant volume of post-modern poetry written by an Indian”, she has published three books of poetry: The Hyoid Bone (1992), The Ayodhya Cantos (1999) and Yellow Hibiscus (2004) as well as a highly acclaimed novel Mad Girl's Love Song (HarperCollins, 2013) and most recently a linguistics monograph, Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century. (Bloomsbury Academic. 2020). Nair studied in Kolkata and England, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1982. Widely recognized for her work in the areas of linguistics, cognition and literary theory, she has taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Washington at Seattle. Her creative and critical writings are taught on courses at universities such as Chicago, Kent, Oxford and Washington. Her ‘polyphonous’ literary style seeks to connect her varied interests in literary theory and cultural studies. She claims that the impulse to turn out “fat academic volumes and fragile books of verse” is the same in her case – to discover the limits of language. Her ambition, she says, “is simply to write and research, whatever the genre and whatever the odds”. In 1990, Nair won the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition. Her work has since appeared in Penguin New Writing in India (1992), Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002), and several other anthologies. It has also been translated into languages as varied as Swedish, Macedonian, Bengali and Hindi.

Jami Proctor Xu is an award-winning bilingual poet and translator who writes in Chinese and English. Her poems and translations have been widely published and anthologized in many countries. She has co-organized international poetry events in China, South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Ethiopia, and she frequently reads at poetry festivals around the world. Her current projects include Pagoda, her second full-length collection in Chinese, The Black Sheep of Jilebute, translations of poems by Jidi Majia (forthcoming in Ireland), Say to the Soul, translations of poems by Xiao Xiao, and The Rain Train, co-translations of poems by Biplab Majee (forthcoming in Kolkata). She loves teaching poetry workshops to children and adults, and spending time with poets and artists from around the world.

RAVI SHANKAR Pushcart-prize winning poet, author, editor, translator, and professor, Ravi Shankar is the author and editor of over fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including, most recently, Tallying the Hemispheres: Selected Essays, and the award-winning memoir, Correctional. Other books include Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems: 1998-2018 ; Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East, and Beyond; Autobiography of a Goddess; Deepening Groove; What Else Could it Be; and Instrumentality, poems from which have appeared around the world. Translated into over 12 languages and recipient of a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner as well as winner of the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, Shankar has taught at such institutions as Columbia University, Fairfield University, the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney. He has held fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Jentel Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Blue Mountain Center and many others. He currently teaches for New York Writers Workshop and Tufts University and lives a nomadic existence centered around Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia.

YUYUTSU SHARMA Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma is a world-renowned Himalayan poet and translator. Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the few poets in the world who make their living with poetry. Named as “The world-renowned Himalayan poet,” (The Guardian) “One-Man Academy” (The Kathmandu Post) and “Himalayan Neruda” (Mike Graves, Brand Called You), Yuyutsu is a vibrant force on the world poetry stage. He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris), Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and Jezero Fewa & Konj (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively. In addition, Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma has also appeared. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe. When back home, he goes trekking in the Himalayas. Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

TIM TOMLINSON Tim Tomlinson is the author of the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the short story collection, This Is Not Happening to You. Recent work appears in Bangalore Literary Review, Live Encounters, Tin Can Literary Review, and Best Asian Short Stories 2023 (ed. Dr Anitha Dev Pillai). A new collection, Listening to Fish: meditations from the wet world, will appear on Nirala in Spring 2024. Tim has lived in the Bahamas, China, Italy, the Philippines, Thailand, and various cities in the US, including New Orleans, Miami, Boston, and New York City. He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches writing in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies.

Annie Zaidi is the author of City of Incident; Prelude to a Riot; Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation. She is also the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing. Other published works include the novella Gulab, one collection of short stories Love Stories # 1 to 14, and a collection of essays Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. She is also the co-author of The Good Indian Girl (with Smriti Ravindra) and a short book of illustrated poems Crush (with Gynelle Alves). She received the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020) for Prelude to a Riot, which was also shortlisted for the JCB prize the same year, and the Nine Dots Prize (2019) for her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus. She won The Hindu Playwright Award (2018) for her script Untitled 1 and her radio script ‘Jam’ was named regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition (2011). Her work has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including The Griffith Review, The Aleph Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Portside Review, The Missing Slate and Out of Print. She trained as a journalist and has published essays and columns in several magazines and websites, including Caravan, Republica (Italy), Griffith Review (Australia), Frontline, The Hindu, Scroll.in, BBC Hindi, Outlook, Mint Lounge, First Post, DNA, Open, Elle, GQ India and Conde Nast Traveler. She has also written and directed several short films and the documentary film, In her words: The journey of Indian women. She is currently a doctoral scholar at Durham University.

Julie Williams-Krishnan is a fine art and freelance photographer, artist, and educator who teaches photography and leads workshops at university and community level. Julie served as the Director of Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts (USA) for five years. She has served a juror for the Somerville Arts Council and the Winchester Public Schools, a committee member for FlashPoint Boston photography festival, and on the committee for the Renaissance Photography Prize, an international photography competition that raises money to support younger women with breast cancer. Julie’s personal photographic practice investigates identity and personal narrative. She has exhibited her photographs at Melrose Tiny Gallery, The Sanctuary, Cambridge Art Association, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Khaki Gallery, and Zullo Gallery in the Boston region, the Colson Gallery in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, A. Smithson Gallery in Texas, as well as other venues in Boston, London, and Oxford. She has also been included in online exhibitions with “Don’t Take Pictures” and “Lenscratch.” She earned her MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in London, UK. Based in Boston Massachusetts (USA) since 2010, Julie lived in London (UK) for more than 16 years and has traveled to more than 75 countries. She lives in a multi-cultural family and travels regularly to India. Learn more about Julie’s work at www.jwkphotography.com and on instagram.

Widely anthologized, Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. She is the author of Four Degrees of Separation (poetry), Paper Asylum (haibun) - shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020, and Bombay Hangovers (short fiction). An alumna of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2015) and a Charles Wallace Writer’s fellow, University. of Stirling (2017), her poetry film Skirt featured on Shonda Rhime's Shondaland via the Visible Poetry Project. She is on the syllabus boards (English Lit) of two top universities in Mumbai. As a creative-writing mentor, she conducts online poetry workshops for the Himalayan Writing Retreat and was invited thrice to Iowa’s International Writing Programs: Summer Institute 2019 and Between the Lines 2022, 2023 as a creative-writing teacher. Her prize-winning manuscript of poetry Coins in Rivers is due out in April 2024 by Hachette India. (@rochellepotkar)

Yuyutsu Sharma’s 2023 Tour

2023-12-14T08:13:00.000-08:00

Monday November 20, 12: 30 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading at Women’s Club of Redondo Beach, 400 S Broadway, Redondo Beach, 90277 CA

Saturday, November 16, 5 pm-8 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Tony Barnston and Suzanne Lummis at the formal launch of Pratik’s Noir Issue at Whittier College, 13406 E, Philadelphia St, Whittier, CA 90602 Host: Tony Barnstone

Sunday, November 16, 5 pm-8 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading James Ragan Host Elena Scota. 1436 2nd St, Santa Monica, CA 90401-2302, United States

Saturday, Nov 18, the launch and readings from Pratik’s Noir Issue at Chevalier Bookstore 133 N Larchmont Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90004 Host: Chevalier Bookstore

Saturday, Nov 14, 5 pm-8 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma Reading at Fairleigh Dickinson and the Screening of “I see my world shaking’ short film based on a Yuyutsu poem by Stephan Bokas at School of Arts, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey

Monday, 30 Oct, Yuyutsu Sharma Guest Lecture at Liberal Studies, NYU. 726, Broadway, New York Host: Tim Tomlinson

Saturday, Oct 28, 5 pm-8 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading Marguerite Maria Rivas, Staten Island Poet Laureate, Tim Tomlinson and Ravi Shankar at ETG Bookstore, Staten Island Host: ETG Bookstore

Sunday Oct 17, 2023 5.30 pm Yuyutsu Sharma Art of Literary Translation: Master Class at NYU Spanish Department. Host: Mariela Dreyfus

Sunday Oct 12, 2023, 3 pm Yuyutsu Sharma at Round Table on Poetry and Artificial Intelligence reading, The Americas Poetry festival of New York, City College, 25 Broadway, New York

Sunday Oct 12, 2023, 4 pm Yuyutsu Sharma at Round Table Poetry Reading at The Americas Poetry festival of New York, City College, 25 Broadway. Host: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York

Sunday Oct 12, 2023, 4 pm Yuyutsu Sharma at Multilingual Poetry reading at the Consulate General and Promotion Centre of Argentine Republic in New York, for The Americas Poetry festival of New York, 12 W 56^TH St. New York Host: Argentine Republic in New York

Thursday Oct 5, 2023 7 pm Grantwood Poetry reading with Tim Tomlinson at 207 Edgewater, Cliffside Park, New Jersey Hosts: Raymond Turco and John Barrale.

Tuesday Sept 14, 2023, 4-6 pm Magical Poetry from the Himalayas: Celebrations and poetry with Yuyutsu Sharma & Annie Finch 40 Loisaida Ave, St. Francis Kites Club, East Village, New York

Delighted to be featured in Italian poet and editor, Igor Costanzo's column in Bresciaoggi today!

2023-04-27T02:34:00.002-07:00

Mother's Day Poem from Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming book, "In Lord's Messy Workplace: New Poems

2023-04-20T23:11:00.003-07:00

My misgivings

Yuyutsu Sharma

Mother’s Day

I don’t have anything

to post on my wall today.

I see them debating

forgotten frontiers of humanity’s walk.

Lysol, Liberty, Languages

lighting lamps, banging plates

pranks to raise demons

from their hidden dungeons.

Mother’s Day.

I don’t have anything

to post today.

Only shady sketch

of my loud betrayals

slowly eating the innards

of my fast-fading body

where the Lord rests,

keeping a rigorous

record of my misgivings.

Upcoming ALS SINGAPORE LIVE: EPISODE 3 focused on Lost Horoscope

2023-04-01T08:33:00.005-07:00

Upcoming ALS SINGAPORE LIVE: EPISODE 3

focused on Lost Horoscope moderated by Alka Balain.

Link: https://www.facebook.com/asianliterarysociety
#asianliterarysociety #livesession #alssingapore #YuyutuSharma #losthoroscope

Indian poet CP Surendran on Lost Horoscope by Yuyutsu Sharma

2023-03-05T23:04:00.002-08:00

The Lost Horoscope is a longish, Gerontian type of poem; an old man trying to come to grips with his life. The narrator in Yuyutsu Sharma's poem is looking for his horoscope - ‘A scroll of homemade scented paper’. In the process, he realizes that all the predictions that the ‘lanky priest’ made, may have been already lived in a series of ‘monstrous Nostradamus moments.’

How are these moments suffered or even survived? By means of a phrase. In poem after poem, Yuyutsu Sharma negotiates his experiences in terms of language, the only tool that the poet has: the word is the way out of the world bearing in on him like a tidal wave.

In Dai, Chengdu, for instance, the overtures, even invasions, of a lady (‘Her eyes shone like blackbirds/in the white nest of her singing face’) are made sensible as attempts to find the name of a relationship that can explain the attraction she feels for the poet. The poem is a search for a word that resolves the violence of the interactions: Dai, meaning brother.

Yuyutsu’s poetic persona perceives himself, naturally, as an endangered species. Its sanity and even survival are wholly dependent on words, a means to re-live and make sense of the little catastrophes that the hour hands of the clock tick through. Words and phrases, that eternalize the near-apocalyptic Nostradamus moments.

Words and phrases that help the narrator to wrap the universe around his eyes; with the verbal shades on, he can gaze deep into the heart of the moment that nearly destroyed him. An accurate word is born when the poet dies a little every time he brings his experience-at first an event, then meaning-to speech. It is in this sense that in these new poems, Yuyutsu Sharma finds his lost horoscope.

--CP SURENDRAN

C.P. Surendran is a poet, novelist, journalist and screenplay writer. His poetry collections include Gemini II, Posthumous Poems, Canaries on the Moon and Portraits of the Space We Occupy. He is the author of three novels, An Iron Harvest, Lost, Found and most recently, One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B. He divides his time between Bombay and Delhi.

Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma

ISBN 978-8195781638 pp. 72 Hardcover Rs. 495

Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amzon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon CANADA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

Her Excellency Ms. Felicity Volk, Australian Ambassador to Nepal at the Kathmandu Launch of Yuyutsu Sharma's Lost Horoscope & Pratik's Special South Asia Issue

2023-02-18T09:08:00.007-08:00

"...Yuyu takes my breath away with the unexpected and the new. He has an unwavering capacity to startle with the perfect image, with his attention to small, revelatory detail and his sly, understated humour, often directed at himself."

Book launch – Yuyutsu Sharma – 18 February

Lost Horoscope/Pratik South Asia Vol 18 No 1-2

Photo by SN Misra

With the words of Yuyu’s own invocation at the beginning of his new volume of poetry, I greet this gathering of book lovers:

“Believe me,

I’m risking my life here

coming out in the open

to sit in Café Mozart

to resume my routine

of pouring sparks

from my tamed sleep

onto the pages of my moleskine

notebook that had remained

blank for more than a year.”

Namaskar distinguished guests, friends and Happy Maha Shivaratri.

I’m delighted to join you to celebrate Yuyutsu Sharma and to thank him for risking his life at the Café Mozart, for resuming his routine with his notebook and for unravelling the vermilion thread of his lost horoscope, inviting us into that most intimate space of birth chart and poet’s heart.

Yuyu, I’m grateful for the honour of speaking for a few minutes at the dual launch of Lost Horoscope and Volume 18 of the journal, Pratik.

I first had the pleasure of meeting Yuyu last year. He appeared in an email having heard that I was a writer as well as diplomat. We began a correspondence that led to a book exchange. Indeed, Yuyu first manifested physically in my world as a package of books – Annapurna Poems, A Blizzard in my Bones, past editions of Pratik. He assume the shape that all writers take, namely a universe delivered in the most economical confines of bound pages.

And soon after, Yuyu appeared in the flesh when we had a long lunch at my residence at the Australian Embassy compound. We talked for hours about books and writing. I count it as a gift from Nepal that I’ve had the chance to experience this country through the prism of Yuyu’s eye and painted by his hand.

In addition to crossing paths with Yuyu last year, I also crossed paths with myself - as in the self that is ordained in my stars.

For the first time in my life, thanks to a Nepali artist friend, I had my birth chart drawn up by a priest and read to me by an astrologer who lives in the shadow of Pashupatinath. In a drawer in my Bansbari bedroom, I have a red and gold woven pouch. Within this is my own ‘scroll of scented homemade paper’, the sort that Yuyu writes of in his titular poem, Lost Horoscope; a ‘crumpled calendar of chaos/ with astral lines and circuitous loops’.

In my case, I went searching in the stars to make sense of a brief, doomed love. It was one in a series of exercises to exorcise the loss. A tarot card reading and numerology by a soothsayer, a Tantric meditation retreat led by an anagarik, Sunil Babu Pant, (not nearly as racy as it might sound to those with a stereotypical western understanding of Tantra). I joined a puja led by a lama at a monastery in Boudhanath, lit butter lamps, and had regular shiatsu massages with a dreadlocked dog whisperer in Budhanilkantha.

As Yuyu writes, I was ‘Humming the prayers drenched in the Monsoon showers/ of the Himalayan valleys/ rolling in the world of spirits and sages.’ But ultimately, my healing sprang from the reliable doctoring of time and distance, the medicine of all peripatetic wanderers.

So, when Lost Horoscope arrived a couple of weeks ago, penned by another peripatetic wanderer, I was reminded of the universe’s love of symmetry and the comfort it takes in overlapping orbits of space and time, something we might call destiny. And I’m so happy that my destiny has overlapped with Yuyu’s here in Kathmandu.

I have welcomed Lost Horoscope as an old friend. Yuyu’s wry pitting of mysticism against the prosaic is deeply familiar to me as a way of viewing the world.

He writes of (quote):

‘a dingy world of my Punjabi town

where God was the only resort’

and:

‘a moldy world of rickety realities

a hyperbole of spirited domes

a medley of omens,

spirits wheeling in and out of our sleep’.

But as much as I might read such observations and think, I love this because I recognise it, because I know it; on page after page Yuyu takes my breath away with the unexpected and the new. He has an unwavering capacity to startle with the perfect image, with his attention to small, revelatory detail and his sly, understated humour, often directed at himself.

In Dai, Chengdu, we meet a girl named Xio Xio, who asks the writer ‘How old are you?’. We’re told her ‘eyes shone like blackbirds in the white nest of her singing face’, and in her slender waist is ‘a gold-spangled ring with a tiny lotus dangling out of it’.

But romantic possibility dissolves when she dispenses the writer with the delicious flick of her observation regarding his age, ‘You must be Dai then, an elder brother, I was wondering how to address you’.

In "Unstitching a California Poem," a woman tells Yuyu ‘You dress too elegantly to be a poet from Tibet or wherever you say you are from’. She calls him ‘Yoyo’ and, when she asked him to gift her his tie, he ‘looked into her green eyes, and saw wild animals prowling there’ and meekly handed the apparel over.

Yuyu demonstrates an immaculate capacity to weave his personal narrative into the warp of the historical, at once illuminating both.

In Lost Horoscope, he writes:

‘I’ve faint memories of a lanky priest

his small-pox face, his tiny head wrapped up

in a large white starched cotton turban.

Under the light of a marooned sky

we went to his cubicle-shaped shop

along the narrow brick lanes

leading to the main bazaar that

the Muslims of our town/ had left behind in rush,

prior to crossing

the bleeding borders,

almost a decade

before my birth.”

The sweep of Yuyu’s canvas in Lost Horoscope, the richness and piquancy of the tableau of characters to which Yuyu introduces us, including himself at different ages, renders this poem at once epic in its ambition and yet intimate in its invitation into the poet’s private navigation of destiny and memory.

This collection underlines Yuyu’s reputation as one of the region’s foremost poets, ‘The Himalayan Neruda’, as American poet, Mike Graves, puts it. But as we move to the subject of today’s second launch, Volume 18 of Pratik, we are reminded that Yuyu is not just a formidable creator, but a talented and diligent curator.

And so we celebrate his capacity to choreograph both his own work in the Lost Horoscope collection, and the assembled works of others in his careful editing of Pratik. And we are grateful to him that he devotes as much, if not more, effort to discovering and amplifying the voices of other writers, as his own. His is an uncharacteristic generosity among the writing tribe.

Looking at the extensive list of contributors to the South Asian issue, it is clear that Yuyu has a covening power second to none. And I am honoured to have an excerpt of my first novel, Lightning, included in the collection. I join the South Asian edition as a writer currently based in the region, and with a protagonist in Lightning who is a Pakistani, Ahmed, who has made himself out to be an Afghan to gain asylum in Australia in the early 2000s.

Travelling through the pages of Pratik, has been a miraculous and joyous travelling back in time for me, to my first diplomatic posting in Bangladesh in the early 1990s. Through this issue of Pratik, I have been reacquainted with women I knew at that time: Nasima Sultana, Taslima Nasrin and even Carolyne Wright, their translator from Bengali and herself an accomplished poet who was in Dhaka on a Fulbright scholarship, if I recall correctly, when I was posted there.

So, in addition to feeling grateful to Yuyu for making space for my Ahmed’s story in Pratik, I deeply appreciate that he has reunited me with friends from over thirty years ago. Another Lost Horoscope, rediscovered. Another reminder of the way destiny calls us back to itself whatever detours we might make. Another reminder that, however far we might journey away from a place and its people, we are ultimately travelling back towards them, because we walk the surface of a round earth. Because time, as we know from Yuyu’s Lost Horoscope, is not linear.

This notion of travelling away from home to travel towards it leads to themes in my own writing. And Yuyu has asked me to read a section from my novel, Lightning, as appears in Pratik.

By way of introduction, my protagonist Ahmed, a Pakistani surgeon, is recounting the story of his journey by boat to Australia as a refugee, only to be incarcerated in a migration detention centre on Christmas Island, off the Australian mainland. Ahmed describes his journey with the camouflage of third person to his companion as they drive through the Australian desert. He says:

‘The man lost everything when the boat capsized — his photos, his medicine, his money, his clothes, such as they were, and so on. For the first two days after he arrived, he simply lay on the grass outside his quarters in the detention centre. He lay face down on the ground and the grass thatched his forehead and his cheeks. He felt the earth solid beneath his fingers, his wrists, his forearms, his upper arms, his chest, groin, thighs, shins, the tops of his feet, his toes. He breathed in the sand around the roots of the ground cover; he inhaled the dust. He discovered that dust is not the same wherever you are in the world. And that sand is not sand. The fact that the ground smelled unfamiliar was painful to the man, yet he was glad to be attached to something that in its mustiness proclaimed its age and promised not to shift too far, too fast, something that assured him it wouldn’t drown him nor draw him down into its depths. The back of his head was hot with the sun and his neck burned. The soles of his feet too. It hurt him to walk. It hurt him to breathe. It hurt him to be alive.

‘He told the Christmas Island detention centre officials that he was an Afghan and that he had fled religious persecution. The other refugees knew this was not the man’s truth but they also knew that truth wears many guises. If truth were dressed in an Afghan chadri rather than a Pakistani burqa, was it any less the truth under its cloth? If it were fleeing from Islamic fundamentalists in Kabul instead of an equally dangerous threat in Islamabad, was it any less the truth behind the particularities of its fear? The survival instinct teaches you that truth must be supple, pliable. The molecules that comprise it are the same whatever state they take. H2O is H2O, whether liquid, ice or vapour. The words truth uses to describe itself must be allowed some licence, some flexibility. A brittle truth breaks and then its essence is spilled, wasted, lost.’

And this reflection takes me back finally to Yuyutsu’s poetry in his Lost Horoscope collection. Yuyu’s work, like a Bohemian artist’s, embodies the four ideals of truth, beauty, love and freedom. He writes with a raw honesty, supple candour and with great elegance. His opening lines are a perhaps unwitting metaphor for this stance : ‘Believe me, I’m risking my life here, coming out in the open…’

Yuyu takes us with courage and conviction into the ambiguous layers where we are reminded of the mystical and often painful essence of our living.

And as he races to Café Mozart, hoping to recover what lay in the horoscope he lost decades ago, he helps us, his readers, to rediscover and understand ourselves better, too, as part of the crumpled calendar of chaos where destiny and self-determination intersect.

Thank you. Dhanyabad.

Photo by Bikas Rauniar

Australia’s Ambassador to Nepal, Felicity Volk has published two novels, Lightning (Picador Australia) and Desire Lines, (Hachette Australia). She studied English literature and law at the University of Queensland before joining Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). After diplomatic postings in Bangladesh and Laos, and following the birth of her two daughters, she began writing for publication while continuing to work at DFAT. Volk is recipient of a grant and fellowships from artsACT and the Eleanor Dark Foundation, (Varuna, the Writers’ House). Several of her short stories have won awards. “No place like home,” was a prize-winner in The Australian Women’s Weekly/Penguin Short Story Competition (2006), “Steal it with a kiss” won the Angelo Natoli Short Story Award (FAW National Literary Awards) and “Ite, missa est” (Go, you are sent forth) won the 2013 Carmel Bird Long Story Award.

From the Archives : Nabina Das : "A Trek with the Buddha Bard," A review of Yuyutsu Sharma’s ANNAPURNA POEMS: Poems New & Collected, 2008

2023-02-04T10:09:00.007-08:00

Nabina Das

A Trek with the Buddha Bard

A review of Yuyutsu Sharma’s ANNAPURNA POEMS: Poems New & Collected, 2008

http://dansemacabre.art.officelive.com/atrekwiththebuddhabard.aspx

Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s face is like a mountain terrain, when the earth emerges in the gods’ peaks after a flash flood or when a river has receded after the monsoon’s regal fury. I noticed this as soon as I sat down opposite to him in the surprisingly sparsely populated Barista coffee shop in New Delhi’s fashionable Khan Market shopping area. Poet of the Himalayas, Yuyutsu’s greeting resounded almost true in what he wrote in “In the Mountains”:

Fragile my eyeglasses

fragile and foreign

I take them off;

There’s a speck of a scar in them.

On the mule path

I take them off

to face the green

stretch of mountains

beneath the saddle of Annapurnas.

Well, almost true, because he didn’t wear eyeglasses at our meeting! His dark irises reflected the green he writes about and the twining paths he sees better without his educated eyeglasses. And since we met to chat – we didn’t waste time to get on first-name terms – the discussion rightfully turned quickly to his meditative collection Annapurna Poems, a Nirala Series book published in 2008.

On that sweltering summer evening, leafing through the Annapurna poems brought in a sudden whiff of cool mountain air. Musical and reflective. Indeed, Yuyutsu’s poetic tenor is pretty much that of a bard, his voice that treks higher and higher into the wild beautiful upper Himalaya bringing alive the smile of the Buddha and the semiotics of the region’s everlasting gods and goddesses, the Yeti and other resident animals, the soulful rivers, and the ice-kissed rain. True, Yuyutsu laments the loss of a familiar landscape he witnessed prior to political trouble fanning out across Nepal. But his enthusiasm is very much rooted to the peoples’ grasp of their own surrounding, the Nepal that is home to communities and creeds, whether he sees them in the backdrop of the Maoist insurgency or that of a defunct monarchy.

On the level of language, this poetry takes us straight into the heart of the mountain country, Nepal’s unique ethos and the nature that entertains both snowy seasons and hidden eternal gardens. The mule paths, the ‘leech-greasy’ forests, the spells under which the mountain people live and tell fantastic tales, the ‘magnificent daggers of snow’, all build up a world where nature is more than just a phenomenon. It is a companion to the poet and his perception. The cognitive faculty of the poet and the reader works in tandem in recognizing the many layers of meanings unfolded in each aspect of “Annapurna Poems”, exactly like the different layers of the snow. The permafrost is made of the century-old legends and tales on which have grown new fables and events.

Yuyutsu is a poet of expressions as he traverses a train of simplicity. He does not twist language in any show of wizardry. He believes in words and sentences, as they are known and heard in the Himalayan reality, to take him along the mountain journey to rediscover the known nomenclature and trusted actions. All he does is re-paint the scenes of Annapurna in unique details and from surprising angles. Like little Tibetan thangkas. In these scenes, he tells us about those place names that ring out the jeweled eco-system of a mountain town or village as familiar as our recurrent dreams. With him we walk the salt tracks, the gorge trails and visit Birethanti. Ghorepani, Gandrung, Tadapani, Lake Fewa, and many such tongue-trilling spots. For him,

Hillside roosters

Punctual, announcing the dawn

are known elements. If sometimes they might appear delightfully alien to our practiced eyes:

Possessing floral

Faces of riverside birds

They still draw us into the world of Annapurna like ice drops in the cracks (Yuyutsu himself says in the foreword of the book that his poems exist in each crack of this magnanimous mountain world).

Even in this pristine surrounding something troubles the poet who watches the spray of the white surf:

on greasy crotches

of huge mossy rocks

started singing

…

coughing out

the cacophony of cruel cities

In Yuyutsu’s poetry one might like to find the Blake-ian dilemma of having to dividing the human soul between Nature and its sufferance, mingle her own fate and existences with that of gods, the Yeti and shamans, and the myriad mysterious of Shangri-La, where imageries take fantastic shapes and have their own sensual and sensuous existence (River: Morning)

…

each time I come

to her deafening banks

to gleam my dreams

over the plump flanks of her warm body

…

and a wrinkle appears

across the shriveled leaf of my life.

However, he is not merely a romantic poet. What comes across is his deep admiration for the Annapurna region as a system tied to the rest of the world – those parts of the world where he is a traveler of a different kind, giving talks and workshops, reading his published work and attending literary events. In the context of these ‘worldly’ acts where he attributes his own poetry having the “otherworldly” and “archival” quality, he is very much a realist. The book’s first section, “Little Paradise Lodge”, is an account of Nepal and Annapurna’s past and present. Interestingly, ‘lodge’ appears to be a pun on ‘lost’ as if he was talking about a ‘little paradise lost’. To me the poems in this section are very much a ‘lost and found’ affair.

On the other hand, quite prominently, his Eliotesque sarcasm for the modern city life and the external influences on his much loved landscape of rains and snows adorn the images he paints in “Rains”:

…

This summer they held me up

In the deserts of their skyscrapers.

…

my face in the dark

feeling tips of snow sacred fishtails of Machapuchchare.

In “Mules” too, their ringing bells are but ‘beating notes of a slavery modernism brings’. While mapping the ‘bloodthirsty mule paths around the glacial of Annapurna’, Yuyutsu watches:

cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,

solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards

sacks of rice

and iodized salt from the plains of Nepal Terai.

…

human and mule lives meet

Rain, river, snow, singing gorges and brooks rule the landscape of Annapurna Poems. The romance is palpable between the poet and his subject, almost Sufi in character, ‘madness’ being one of its virtues. Yuyutsu is in complete enchantment of his terrain as a lover is and this love’s longing is realized in a woman’s physical quest (A Lonely Brook):

a lonely woman

waits for a stranger to come

and burst

the ice frozen between her thighs

to make a flame

of her cold sleep

…

Conversation with the river (River) is a personal history, a sequel to the secret rendezvous with the beloved and is artistically lusty.

Between your decisions

and my flickering lamps

the river mad

you, you poet, you bastard, go away!

With Yuyutsu we travel to Ghandrung where a ‘young girl of the scarlet shawl waits/for the colorful procession/of mules carrying cartons of Tuberg beer to pass’ or to Ghorepani, all the while delightfully apprehensive or even curious if a Yeti was following ‘your trail in the desolate mountains’.

Among these portraits resembling eternity’s passing of time in the mountain world, we empathize with the pain in the poets voice (Fish):

Wives wait the final winter

of my rot, opening up

the greed

of their slithering fish

I return to a poem

I postponed decades ago

to touch the mating serpents

slithering on the tip of illicit door

called death.

The book’s second section “Glacier” takes this sentiment to a crescendo as one feels literally like climbing heights with titles like Kala Patthar, Gauri Shankar, Summit and The Buddhist Flag Flutters and looking below with a rooster’s eye view at the fields, the forests and the (once) playful courtyards with their brass bells. The overture continues with the third part “Sister Everest”, a pithy and less descriptive section. In that, the latter is highly evocative. If the first sections read like an ethereal ‘inward’ trek through the upper Himalayan terrain, this section readies us for the fourth one – “The Annapurna Man” – rooted more in the poet’s ‘outward’ experiences. A very brief section, it spews more pain than pleasure. To some extent, I came out of the book through this section with a sense of abrupt termination, as if Yuyutsu’s pain had to invite a quick clinical surgery. For this, the poetry in this section seems disjointed from the book’s original spirit.

Especially, I felt “Silence” is too much of rumination, too personal and reads more like purgation than poetry. The best piece in this section is “Space Cake, Amsterdam”, a witty poem combining introspection and observation by ‘this man from Kathmandu’ (one may well imagine, the rest of our chat that evening centered around that one fantastic experience Yuyutsu recounted to me). The air-conditioned air at that Barista throbbed at my mirth on reading and re-reading the line – ‘whatever happens, you can always make a comeback’!

Yuyutsu R D Sharma’s website is http://www.yuyutsu.de where one can find recent updates about his work and readings. And he has made a comeback, for he has just released “Space Cake, Amsterdam” from Howling Dog Press (I am yet to have a copy) and is currently working on Pratik, a collection of contemporary Indian poetry, with the renowned Indian-English poet Jayanta Mahapatra.

Nabina Das

The Quataquatantankua

"The pigeons strutting freely in your courtyard

coo like exhausted porters

climbing the mule paths in the singing gorges.

Their guttural quataquatantankua --

they seem to be using human language,

a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use."

-- ("Little Paradise Lodge" by Yuyutsu RD Sharma; Annapurna Poems, 2008)

Emeralded into the crevices

of words

our roads emerge with

coffee and brine

to fan out far towards a city

a peak, a town --

each an odd-eyed rooster

in one legged-patience.

I see one losing its blue

in the smear of newsprint

another being pocketed

by hands that grope --

grope my soft tissues

benath the skin of gauze

but the ones bunched deep

inside my throat go untouched!

So, I can gurgle: "Quataquatantankua,

Quataquatantankua, Quataquatantankua."

Ramro chha, ramro chha, ramro chha?

And the reply bubbles

up in the foothill methane:

All is good, nothing's amiss

where gods sleep; we keep awake to

sharpen our verbs in the dawn.

Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her poetry and short stories have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies across North America and India. A 2nd prize winner of a recent all-India Poetry Contest organized by HarperCollins-India and Open Space, she is a 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference. An Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years, she now freelances. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in India classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. She blogs when not writing.

From the Archives: Yuyutsu Sharma : BOMB Magazine Interview, "Subtext: Kathmandu Poet In New York by Susie DeFord"

2023-02-03T21:03:00.000-08:00

Subtext: Kathmandu Poet In New York by Susie DeFord

I became familiar with Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s poetry on his recent long stay in New York to promote his latest collection Space Cake Amsterdam (Howling Dog Press 2009). Space Cake is a beautifully designed book with artwork by the artist Henry Avignon.

I became familiar with Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s poetry on his recent long stay in New York to promote his latest collection Space Cake Amsterdam (Howling Dog Press 2009). Space Cake is a beautifully designed book with artwork by the artist Henry Avignon. In the Beat tradition, the Nepali poet chronicles his travels through Europe and America. Some of his experiences are comical—in the title poem “Space Cake Amsterdam” the poet accidentally eats hash cake in Amsterdam. Some are beautifully imagistic, like “Temple, London,” where he describes seeing a homeless woman at the top of an escalator as if she is “a hillside shrine/ that our goddesses/ always prefer to live on.”

Yuyutsu RD Sharma has published seven previous poetry collections including Annapurna Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2008), Everest Failures (White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu, 2008) Way To Everest: A Photographic and Poetic Journey to the Foot of Everest, (Epsilonmedia, Germany, 2006) with German photographer Andreas Stimm, and a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection entitled Kathmandu: Poems, Selected and New, 2006. He is a recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, amongst others. His works have appeared in Poetry Review, Chanrdrabhaga, Sodobnost, Amsterdam Weekly, and several other magazines. Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times and Newsfront Weekly. He recently published his first novel and a book of his prose writing on the ongoing political turbulence in Nepal entitled Annapurnas and Stains of Blood (Niral Publications 2009).

Susie DeFord What was your first introduction to poetry?

Yuyutsu RD Sharma My first introduction to poetry took place in holy places in India. My father was a devout follower of Naga ascetics and my grandfather’s place, Nakodar, Punjab, where I grew up, had great religious flavor. Our family deity was a serpent spirit, Guga Sian, and my grandpa and I would go to the shrine during the annual festival. On one such visit, I became possessed by the serpent spirit and started crawling around the shrine like a serpent. After the incident, everyone in my family started respecting me as a demigod. But I was going to an English school and felt very upset about what my friends would think of me. They would think, I feared, that I am crazy.

I was also getting acquainted with the Western science and logic and over the years I carefully suppressed the ecstasy. Only later when I grew up, I learned how I had ignored a very spiritual awakening in my life and that the experience was a gift from the gods for me. Only sometimes now the gods visit me and I feel a rush of that frenzied forgotten wind when I write poetry.

SD American poet David Ray, who you met while attending the University of Rajasthan, encouraged you to write and publish your poems. Will you tell us about your relationship with him and how it’s influenced your work?

YRDS Meeting David Ray was a watershed in my life. I was aspiring to be an actor before I met him. But meeting him and working on the special issue of New Letters with him as his assistant made me aware of contemporary Indian as well as American poetry.

David was very humble and kind and unlike other snooty and pedantic professors at the Department of English and taught me what would later become basics of a Western Creative Writing course. We would often meet in the evening and wander in the local streets and university gardens discussing poetry. He introduced me to William Carlos Willaims, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Synder, Robert Bly, John Ashbury and other American poets’ works.

His wife poet Judy Ray would often feed me as I had very little money to survive and my friendship with David made me very special on the campus, to the extent of annoying many prudent Indian professors who thought it below their high pedestal to befriend a research scholar in a casual intimate way.

SD Your poems in Space Cake Amsterdam seem very Western-thinking in nature and somewhat reminiscent of the Beats. What are some of the similarities and differences you see in European/ American poetry and Eastern/ Nepali poetry?

YRDS Well, if you go to India not many poets know much about American poetry. But almost every poet is familiar with Whitman and Ginsberg. I recently wrote a column in the Kathmandu Post called “Chasing Ginsberg.” Ginsberg traveled a lot and made friends all over the subcontinent and his use of Mantra as one breath unit format for his poetry is so remarkable. Howl is very well known in the subcontinent and Beats employed Indian devotional traditions to see deliverance from grinding sterility of a Western world obsessed with work and material success.

SD You write a lot of travel poetry. How did you become so interested in travel? What was the big trip you took?

YRDS Many people think I am a big traveler. But it’s not true. I started traveling only a decade ago. I loved my mother so much that I didn’t want to leave her. I always feared something would happen to her the moment I leave the subcontinent and I won’t be able to come in time to help her in case of emergency.

But luck had terrible design in store for me and my mother.

My mother had a stroke and I stayed by her bed for couple of weeks. The doctors said it would take some time, maybe few months for her to recuperate. She had lost her speech and had difficulties in eating. My brother Shakti and I brought her home and started taking care of her. After a while, I decided to go to New Delhi for couple of days and take care of some urgent pending business. Two days after I took a night train and found her on the floor…

The very thing I feared happened. Since then I have been traveling without any fears because you get exactly what you fear the most in life.

SD At your book party at Bowery Poetry recently you talked about having to do a “cleansing ritual” every time you return from your travels to Kathmandu. Will you tell us a bit more about this?

YRDS That was just a joke, I meant my mother would have done it, as she never let me eat any meat and even onions and garlic never entered her kitchen. If you cross an ocean in the Hindu worldview, you lose your caste, that’s why the Hindu kings never ever made any expedition to conquer any world, inviting colonial monsters to ravage innocent populations for centuries.

SD Your book, The Way to Everest is a gorgeous poetry and photography collaboration between you and Andreas Stimm about trekking in Everest. How did you two meet and decide to collaborate on this project?

YRDS Well, Andreas and I met at Frankfurt Book Fair. He came with his girlfriend to my stall and asked me to sign The Lake Fewa & a Horse and sought permission to use some of the poems for his photo exhibition in Stuttgart. Later he asked if he could use the poems in his book on Annapurnas. I had no idea what the book will be like.

Later when I was in Heidelberg doing a workshop at South Asian Institute that Andreas came to my friend Professor Christopher Emmrich’s residence and he showed me the book.

I was overwhelmed by his stunningly superb gift. This was so special and I have never seen a book of poetry like this. Andreas is an amazing photographer and truly cultured European and works in black and white panoramic format only. Now we are doing a trilogy on the Himalayas, bringing together Everest, Annapurnas and Helambu in one big 700 page book that will be first of its kind: a poetry/picture book on the Himalayas..

SD You edit Pratik magazine and translate poems from several languages and are very active in the Nepali literary scene. Who are some Nepali writers you’d like to see get more attention internationally for their work and why?

YRDS Pratik is a very historic literary journal. It was published in Nepali by very significant poets for many decades and later in 1990, I revamped it and started editing it in English. We have done several special issues and introduced almost all the significant writers of the Indian subcontinent with a focus on Nepal. We also recently published special British and Dutch issues with British poet Pascale Petit and Dutch poet Harry Zevenbergen.

I know you won’t believe it but it’s true that everyone in Nepal is a poet. Nepal has vibrant literary scenario and poetry and politics have always remained inseparable in Nepal. Poets have protested against despotic rulers and helped in ushering democracy in Nepal. One great Nepali poet I have translated is Gopal Prasad Rima. He was very much instrumental in bringing down the downfall of oligarchic Rana regime and later when the democracy came, he was ignored until his death. I am working on a full length book of his poems.

SD Your bio says you have “completed his first novel and a book of his prose writing on the ongoing political turbulence in Nepal entitled, Annapurnas and Stains of Blood is due 2010. Will you tell us more about these projects?

YRDS Yes, Annapurnas and Stains of Blood came out just this year. I got a copy in New York. The book deals with my readings of the political turmoil as an average citizen or as a poet. I have been contributing columns to The Himalayan Times and The Kathmandu Post for a decade now and the books also uses some of my best known columns.

I have also been working on this novel and am looking for a literary agent to publish it in the West. The novel deals with life of an individual in a failed nation, and how he comes in terms with his own failures in a nation that’s constantly reeling under endless cycle of political turbulence. I hope you will see it soon.

You can find out more about Space Cake Amsterdam at Howling Dog Press.

Christmas Poetry Party and Reading from "STRONGER THAN FEAR" Anthology

2022-12-10T21:41:00.001-08:00

Yuyutsu Sharma’s Christmas Poetry Party and Reading from "STRONGER THAN FEAR" Anthology

Sunday 11 December, 2022, 2 pm. Flatiron Restaurant Parkslope, 397 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215 Phone 718 965 4000
Readings by
Yuyutsu Sharma
David Austell
Jill Hoffman
Ruth Danon
Stephen Massimilla
Hilary Sideris
Fran Antmann
Mervyn Taylor
Paola Corso
Mike Graves
Su Polo
Steven Klett
Jack Tar
Didi Champagne
Maharzan Rajan
& Others

Also there will be a Special Celebration of "STRONGER THAN FEAR: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice" Anthology(Edited by Carol Alexander & Stephen Massimilla)

Some of the contributors to the Anthology including Hilary Sideris, Mervyn Taylor, Paola Corso, Ruth Danon, Yuyutsu Sharma and Stephen Massimilla, shall read at the venue along with their fresh work.

"Artful Design" American Poet and Former Erie, Pa Poet Laureate's Amazon review of Yuyutsu Sharma's Lost Horoscope

2022-12-06T11:35:00.007-08:00

Artful Design

Consider the presentation of Yuyutsu Sharma's "Lost Horoscope", an artful design.

A slim volume in a sturdy hardcover, divided into three nicely diverse parts, each with its own title,

each part, and in fact the whole collection, comfortably sized to be read whole,

like three sides of a vinyl record.

--Charles Joy

Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma ISBN 978-8195781638 pp. 72 Hardcover Rs. 495

Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

Amzon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon CANADA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

Christmas Poetry Party and A Reading from "Stronger than Fear" Anthology

2022-12-06T07:08:00.004-08:00

Christmas Poetry Party

Plus A Reading From

"STRONGER THAN FEAR"

Anthology

Sunday 11 December 2022, 2 pm. Flatiron Restaurant Parkslope, 397 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215 Phone 718 965 4000 RSVP: pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com,

Readings by

Yuyutsu Sharma

David Austell

Ruth Danon

Stephen Massimilla

Hilary Sideris

Fran Antmann

Mervyn Taylor

Paola Corso

Mike Graves

Steven Klett

Jack Tar

Didi Champagne

Maharzan Rajan

& Others

Also, there will be a Special Celebration of

"STRONGER THAN FEAR: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice" Anthology (Edited by Carol Alexander & Stephen Massimilla)

Some of the contributors to the Anthology including Hilary Sideris, Mervyn Taylor, Paola Corso, Ruth Danon, Yuyutsu Sharma and Stephen Massimilla, shall read at the venue along with their fresh work.

In this timely and timeless collection, remarkable poets—both emerging and established—bring myriad traditions, styles, and vital perspectives to pressing questions, such as how poetry can help us to overcome obstacles to empowerment, compassion, social change, and educational opportunity. Drawing from the work of teachers, artists, and activists, Stronger Than Fear moves us into sudden and startling awareness. These poems arrive at their truths with insight and generosity, with courage and spirit.

"The sheer range is like a spectrum that incarnates divinity." Indian poet and scholar Divya Joshi's Amazon Review of "Lost Horoscope"

2022-12-05T07:41:00.004-08:00

Infused with stimulating wisdom, splendid craft and profuse imagery

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

A phenomenal bunch of poems that heal, inspire and rehabilitate.

Right from the sacred cover that asks to hold mind steadfastly to the feet of guru, the poems descend like salubrious air and the “jasmine jewels” “lost in the horoscope” spring “out again” to spread and sprinkle brilliance and magnificence. The images and metaphors amazingly fulfill their spiritual goals by expressing, through multiple forms “a scroll of a scented /homemade paper /tied up in a vermilion thread “of faith and culture.

The structure captivates and drips down “through the dank drawers” to a “dingy world of Punjabi town”. Also comes along a risk of life, a “decadence of beliefs”, of “prophecies being true”.

The sheer range is like a spectrum that incarnates divinity. Poems like the “Lost Horoscope” and “Where would my story end?” come once in million years.

Fascinating must read masterpiece!!!

American poet Ruth Danon's for Amazon review of "Lost Horoscope"

2022-11-30T15:36:00.004-08:00

Another world brought home" by Ruth Danon

Lost Horoscope takes us into a world we westerners don''t know - Yuyutsu Sharma travels the world and writes from and within that traveling connecting the urgent present with an urgent past, a modern world with an ancient one.

The title poem that opens the book is a knockout, bringing the poet back to writing after a time of silence and plague, connecting to memories of childhood even as it situates us in our present plague ridden contemporary reality.

Other poems are exotic, erotic, and deeply critical of a certain crudeness in the contemporary world even as the speaker finds himself embedded in it.

The writing is gorgeous; the journey well worth

undertaking,

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

Upcoming Sacramento Readings: Sacramento Poetry Alliance and Poetry of the Sierra Foothills

2022-10-24T09:19:00.005-07:00

Yuyutsu Sharma, Katy Brown and Allegra Silberstein

Saturday, October 29, 4:00pm - The world renowned poet from Nepal, Yuyutsu Sharma, will read his poetry at the Sacramento Poetry Alliance Salon, Residence in Land Park, 1169 Perkins Way, Sacramento, CA. He will be joined by the fabulous duo Katy Brown and Allegra Silberstein reading and dancing their poetry. Following the reading, there will be October Festivities … music by Mark Carlson on accordion, perhaps some lieder along with food, drink and merriment.

Yuyutsu Sharma has published nine poetry collections including, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems (Nirala, 2016), Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, (Nirala, 2016), Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, (Nirala, 2012), Nepal Trilogy, Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010), a 900-page book with renowned German photographer, Andreas Stimm, Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (2009, Indian reprint 2014) and Annapurna Poems, 2008, Reprint, 2012).

Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. He edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works and conducts creative writing workshop at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

Katy Brown, a resident of Davis, California, is a Supervisor of Social Workers in Adult Protective Services in Sacramento and has won awards in The Ina Coolbrith Circle, The Berkeley Poets Dinner, and California Federation of Chaparral Poets competitions. She has had poems in Glass Art Magazine, Wee Wisdom, Daily Word, Harpstrings, and Song of the San Joaquin among others. Her workbook, Poetry Potions, was used in schools for nearly twenty years and is being released in a digital format. Her other writing credits include automobile humor, greeting cards, a multiple-ending book, and a series of short mysteries for young readers.

In 2010 Allegra Silberstein was named the first ever Poet Laureate of the City of Davis. A longtime Davis teacher (now retired), dancer, and philanthropist, Allegra is known widely for her work as coordinator for The Other Voice, a reading series that takes place at the UU Church of Davis, and for her support of local writers. Her poems have been published in Poetry Depth Quarterly, The Yolo Crow, Blue Unicorn, Rattlesnake Press, Poetry Now, Iodine Poetry, Poetry of the New West, California Quarterly, and other journals. She has also placed poems in a variety of anthologies, including The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems, Gatherings, A Woman’s Place, and Where Do I Walk.Her first chapbook, Acceptance, was published in 1999. She is currently working on many full-length books of poems.

Also check out other Arts Events in Sacramento, Literary Art Events in Sacramento, Workshops in Sacramento.

Poetry of the Sierra Foothills

Sunday, Oct 30, 2022 at 2:00pm

Arts and Culture El Dorado

Chateau Davell Winery

3020 Vista Tierra Dr

Camino, CA 95709

530-295-3496

Website

On Sunday, October 30, at 2 pm at Chateau Davell, join Poetry of the Sierra Foothills for poetry readings and an open mic. This month the featured poet is world renowned Himalayan poet and translator, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma.

Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas, Poemas de Los Himalayas, and Jezero Fewa & Konj have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively.

He has held workshops in creative writing and translation at Queen's University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University, California, Beijing Open University, New York University, New York and Columbia University, New York.

The Library of Congress has nominated his book of Nepali translations, entitled Roaring Recitals; Five Nepali Poets, as Best Book of the Year 2001 from Asia under the Program, A World of Books International Perspectives. Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch.

Yuyutsu was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in the exhibit Travel the World at Kew. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts creative writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe, but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

Yuyutsu Sharma's Lost Horoscope Book Party in Brooklyn

2022-10-20T11:09:00.002-07:00

Yuyutsu Sharma's Lost Horoscope book party

Oct 22 at 2 pm at Flatiron Restaurant

397 5th Avenue , Brooklyn, New York, NY, United States, New York (718) 965-4000

Distinguished fellow poets David Austell, Ruth Danon , Fran Antmann , Michael Graves, Anna Halberstadt, Carrie Magness Radna Carolyn Wells, Ellen Lytle

and others will read from their books and speak at event

RSVP: pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com

Phone:3477233967

Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma ISBN 978-8195781638 Hardcover

“The world-renowned Himalayan poet”

—The Guardian

“Like “globes of light” along a narrow path through “blind night,” these syncopating couplets offer neither escape nor absolution, but something more tangible for “bleary-eyed wanderers”: Company along the way.”

—Charles Bernstein

“Yuyutsu Sharma should be known as The Himalayan Neruda”

—Mike Graves

“Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the finest poets on planet earth”

— Sean Thomas Dougherty, author, The Second O of Sorrow

Lost Horoscope is a grand poem of loss, healing and recovery in the Covid times by Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma. The title poem captures, in words of American poet James Ragan, “an enlarged memory of his childhood and his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago.”

The book also showcases 13 new poems that Yuyutsu wrote before the Pandemic and bear testimony to his evolution as a poet, celebrating diversity of multiple forms and faith. Here folk imagination fuses with the personal histories to recreate his encounters with the wayward shadows of his relentless travels around the globe: a young woman revealing her actual age in a Chengdu bar, a lost lover on the flagstone steps of the Annapurna’s steepest climb, a stranger’s request to compose a poem at a birthday party in a San Francisco, a scorpion scar on the marble shoulder of an Australian interpreter in Beijing Book bar, the sighting of jasmine flowers at Vishnu’s alter at a Boston Art Exhibit, a hillside grandma’s advice revealing the wisdom of eating ants to improve eyesight and a demon child on a giant swing ready to unhinge the hunger of the huddled huts in the high Himalayas. In the final poem, the poet reminisces on his life wondering where the story of his travels around the world would come to an end.

These powerful, humane and heart-rendering poems composed in the heat and hush of Yuyutsu’s travels are true jasmine jewels of the modern-day wisdom restored to seek solace in our turbulent times. Another tour de force from the maestro who makes his living as a poet and wears his world and his vocation like his coat to create eternal gems of the contemporary times.

“I feel unable to praise Yuyutsu Sharma’s new collection adequately. I think of Whitman, Neruda, Lorca. Sharma is a fever and river, at moments a rhapsody and the gods sing through him even his workshop is messy. Yuyutsu Sharma should be known as The Himalayan Neruda not only for the torrents of images and compassion and outrage in his poetry but for the range of his subjects, themes and imagery. Reading him I feel as I do when reading Neruda that he could make first rate poetry out of anything, as he ranges like a vartic voice of the Himalayas through the natural beauties of Nepal and cities of the world.”

—Mike Graves, American poet and teacher, City University of New York, author, A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders

“A mini epic of recovered and enlarged memory.”

—Robert Scotto, Author, Imagined Secrets, Professor, Baruch College

“There’s a brilliance in the mind of the poet whose imagination created this gem of a poem out of the “crumpled calendar of chaos,” aptly called the “Lost Horoscope.” I was hypnotically immersed in the structure of steps that each stanza offered, hurling the reader down into memory, into the “wingless realm of illogical proclamations” and the resultant “wasteful heap of despair,” while seeking “solace, sleep, and salvation” to arrive at the epiphany that “perhaps all those prophesies were true.” Like an Eliot poem, to gain the enlightenment inherent in this poem, you must read the poem again to capture the nuance and metaphysics of the allusions connecting each image, each stanza, to recover the revelatory “medley of omens” leading to the abyss of “imminent doom.” One must journey, “sight fractured,” through the “moldy world of rickety realities” –typhoid, covid– while “humming the prayers, drenched in the Monsoon showers of the Himalayan valleys rolling in the world of spirits and sages.” Like the poet, one must risk the life of his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago… a magnificent sight-healing journey.”

— James Ragan, the Emerson Poetry Prize, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award

He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Four books of his poetry have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian.

Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places including Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry, Belfast, P.E.N, Paris, Whittier College, California, WB Yeats’ Center, Sligo, Gustav Stressemann Institute, Bonn, Rubin Museum, New York, Cosmopoetica, Cordoba, Spain, The Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, Lu Xun Literary Institute, Beijing, The Guardian Newsroom, London, Trois Rivieres Poetry Festival, Quebec, FIP, Buenos Aires, Slovenian Book Days, Ljubljana, Royal Society of Dramatic Arts, London, Gunter Grass House, Bremen, International Poetry Festival, Granada, Nicaragua, Nehru Center, London, Beijing Normal University, March Hare, Newfoundland, Canada, London Olympics 2012, Frankfurt Book Fair, and Villa Serbelloni, Italy.

He has held workshops in creative writing and translation at Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Beijing Open University, New York University, New York and Columbia University, New York.

In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in an Exhibit, “Travel the World at Kew.” Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

Yuyutsu Sharma's Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems released

2022-10-14T09:06:00.004-07:00

Lost Horoscope & Other New Poems by Yuyutsu Sharma ISBN 978-8195781638 pp. 72 Hardcover Rs. 495 Amazon USA : https://www.amazon.com/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amzon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp Amazon CANADA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/8195781632?ref=myi_title_dp

The world-renowned Himalayan poet”

—The Guardian

—Charles Bernstein

“Yuyutsu Sharma should be known as The Himalayan Neruda”

—Mike Graves

“Yuyutsu Sharma is one of the finest poets on planet earth”

—American poet Sean Thomas Dougherty, author, The Second O of Sorrow

Lost Horoscope is a grand poem of loss, healing and recovery in the Covid times by Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma. The title poem captures, in words of American poet James Ragan, “an enlarged memory of his childhood and his creative will to recover and rediscover what healing eternal truths lay, lost and buried in our collective unconscious decades and centuries ago.”

—Mike Graves, American poet and teacher, City University of New York, author, A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders

“A mini epic of recovered and enlarged memory.”

—Robert Scotto, Author, Imagined Secrets, Professor, Baruch College

He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Four books of his poetry have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian.

Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Beijing Open University, New York University, New York and Columbia University, New York.

In 2020, his work was showcased at Royal Kew Gardens in an Exhibit, “Travel the World at Kew.”

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

| Tagged American Poetry, Annapurnas, Himalayan Poet, Indian poetry, Nepal, Pandemic poetry, Yuyutsu Sharma

Yuyutsu Sharma’s 2022 Irish and American Tour

2022-10-09T12:52:00.001-07:00

IRELAND

Sunday 2 Oct, 2022 2 pm Yuyutsu Sharma reading at Droichead Art Centre with Drogheda Creative Writers Host: Marian Clarke

Tuesday Oct 4. 6 pm to 7 pm Translating poetry to and from Nepali with Yuyutsu Sharma Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation 36 Fenian Street D02 CH22 Dublin, Ireland https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/421269106237/

Friday 7 Oct, 2022. 8 pm Yuyutsu Sharma reads with Michael Coady and Mark Roper, , Poetry Plus – Carrick-on-Sui Hosted by Margaret O’ Brien

Saturday 8 Oct,2022 5-7 pm :Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Irish Poets, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Michael O’ Loughlin, Gabriel Rosenstock, Emer Davis , Judith Mok, Anne Tannam , Patrick Chapman, (with Reeti Mishra as Special Guest), in Dublin the Foxrock residence, Indian Embassy in Ireland event 5 and 7pm A high tea with poetry and music Host: Indian Embassy in Ireland.

United States

Saturday, October 29, 4:00pm Yuyutsu Sharma will read his poetry at the Sacramento Poetry Alliance Salon, Residence in Land Park, 1169 Perkins Way, Sacramento, CA.. After the reading, there will be music and October Festivities with food.

Sunday, October 30, 2:00pm Yuyutsu will be reading his poetry at the beautiful Chateau Davell Winery, 3020 Vista Tierra Drive in Camino, CA. To be followed by an Open Mic.

Saturday, 12 November, 2022, Yuyutsu RD Sharma reading Live Poetry with Stephen Massimilla and Mary Lau Buschi, Beacon, NY Host: Ruth Danon

Friday, 18 November Time: 6:30-8:30 Yuyu reading at Yale Club with Jeton Kelmendi from Kosovo, Bill Wolak & Others at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue (between 44th & 45th Streets across from Grand Central Station) New York, NY 10017 either 17th or 18th floor (TBA) by invitation only Sultan Catto, Host: SCatto@gc.cuny.edu Bill Wolak, Coordinator williamwolak@netzero.net

Sunday, 20 November, 2022 Time: 6:30-8:30 Yuyu featuring at Ray MacNeice’s Monthly event, Cleveland Ohio,

Friday, 2 Dec, 2022 Calling All Poets reading with Mary Louise and Michael O’Mara, Beacon, NY

Yuyutsu Sharma to read with distinguished Irish Poets at Indian Embassy in Ireland

2022-10-03T10:10:00.001-07:00

To celebrate the 75 years of India's Independence, the Indian Embassy in Ireland hosts an evening of poetry where Yuyutsu Sharma reads with distinguished Irish poets, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Michael O’ Loughlin, Gabriel Rosenstock, Emer Davis , Judith Mok, Anne Tannam , Patrick Chapman, (with Reeti Mishra as Special Guest), in Dublin the Foxrock residence, Indian Embassy in Ireland event 8 oct, 5 and 7pm A high tea with poetry and music Host: Indian Embassy in Ireland

Yuyutsu Sharma's Five Poems in Converse: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poets published to celebrate 75 years of India's Independence edited by Sudeep Sen

2022-05-27T10:45:00.003-07:00

Yuyutsu Sharma's Five Poems in Converse: An Anthology of Contemporary English Poetry by Indians published to celebrate 75 years of India's Independence (Pippa Rann, 2022)

Edited by Sudeep Sen