Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Yuyutsu's Cleveland Readings-- 18 and 19 November




Thursday, November 19th at 7 p.m.
YUYUTSU SHARMA & CELESTE MCCARTY




Mac's is pleased to welcome back two friends.
Yuyutsu Sharma is a Nepalese poet and writer who travels the globe when he is not at home in Nepal writing, publishing and distributing books. He last read at Mac's in March, 2008. Since then he has published Annapurnas and Stains of Blood: Life Travels and Writing on a Page of Snow(Nirala Publications, New Delhi) and Space Cake,Amsterdam and Other Poems from Europe and America (Howling Dog Press).
Yuyutsu has also translated and edited several volumes of Nepali poetry. He is the author of The Way to Everest, an exquisite collaboration with photographer Andreas Stimm. Sucheta Das Gupta from the Himalayan Times said this about Yuyutsu's poems: "The poems are shining jewels of passion, energy and splendid craft, redolent with vivid, dreamlike visual imagery, strengthened by realistic observation and powered by strong male eroticism."
Some of our long time customers may remember Celeste McCarty who worked at Mac's in the early 1990's. She is an artist living in San Francisco. She developed a reputation for her unique and colorful postcard size paintings when she sold them from her porch stoop in her SF neighborood. Curve Magazine profiled her in an Open Studio column in May, 2008. Celeste has recently published several books of drawings & words, including Friendly Fire andShroatables.



 Also Reading at
Visible Voice Books today
Wednesday, November 18, 7:00 p.m.
@ Visible Voice Books
1023 Kenilworth
Cleveland, Ohio 44113

Phone: 216-961-0084







Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Suny Orange Community College Reading

http://www.sunyorange.edu/lyceum/#sharma

Poetry from the Rooftop of the World

~ a Reading from his original works by Yuyutsu RD Sharma

Thursday, November 12, 2009 @ 7pm
Morrison Hall Mansion
Photo: description follows Yuyutsu RD Sharma,
Nepalese poet and translator
Admission: Free & open to the public
Poetry the Rooftop of the World is the poetry event on the Fall 2009 Lyceum Events schedule. The program features Nepalese poet and translator Yuyutsu RD Sharma who will read from his original works beginning at 7pm on Thursday, November 12.  The setting for the reading is Morrison Hall Mansion on the campus of SUNY Orange County Community College, 115 South Street, Middletown, NY. Morrison Hall  is ADA compliant. This Lyceum event is sponsored in part by the Department of English, SUNY Orange.
Presently on tour in Canada, Yuyu Sharma will come to Orange County in mid-November. At Morrison Hall, he will first acquaint the audience with Nepal and its poetry, and then read selections from his eight poetry collections*.
Sharma travels extensively for readings and workshops. Some of the cities where he has read his works include New York, London, Belfast, Dublin, Amsterdam, Bonn, Frankfurt, and New Delhi.  His writings can be found in eight languages including his native Nepali as well as German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, and Hebrew. Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal's leading daily, The Himalayan Times and Newsfront Weekly and The Kathmandu Post. He has also completed his first novel and a book of his prose writing on the ongoing political turbulence in Nepal entitled, Annapurnas and Stains of Blood. In addition to his books, his works have been published in several periodicals-- Poetry Review, Chanrdrabhaga, Sodobnost, Amsterdam Weekly, Indian Literature, Irish Pages, Delo, Omega, Howling Dog Press, Exiled Ink, Iton77, Little Magazine, The Telegraph, Indian Express and Asiaweek. Additionally, he has  launched a literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry.
Yuyu Sharma is the 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.
*Published poetry collections:
  • Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America
  • Annapurna Poems
  • Everest Failures
  • www.WayToEverest.de: A photographic and Poetic Journey to the Foot of Everest with German photographer Andreas Stimm
  • Jezero Fewa in Konj
  • Poemes de l’ Himalayas


Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Praise for Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s Works


Praise for Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s Works

The ‘blinding snows of the Annapurnas ridge’ inspire a poetry that confronts natural magnificence with exuberant humanity. Yuyutsu R D Sharma’s generous vision embraces not only the landscape and its people but the lesser fauna, like the pigeons that speak ‘a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use’ and the mules on the Tibetan salt route, exhausted and bow-legged from hauling ‘cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,/ solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans…’ These vividly coloured, muscular and energetic poems have an atmosphere of freshness, as though the snow itself had rinsed and brightened them. Like the ‘waterfall beds that/ smelled of the birth of fresh fish’, they have the tangy, dust-free odour of language born of lived experience.
Carol Rumens, The United Kingdom

Yuyutsu RD Sharma brings the bracing airs of the Himalayas to any city. His vigorous, expansive and elemental poems leave Yeti tracks on the streets and mule trails on the Tube. They are packed with rapturous couplings of the urban and the feral.
Pascale Petit, Former Poetry Editor, Poetry London

Yuyutsu is a first-rate poet in English and an excellent place to begin if you want to get in touch with Nepalese writing today. 
William Seaton, in Bylines Interview

Yuyutsu’s subject is the intertwinement of the social and geographic, namely, how even the Himalayas were dirtied and damaged by partisan politics. In the poems, sacred energy appears in sexual, rather than theological, form; his incredibly tangy descriptions of crags and cliff faces swell with eroticism.
Jim Feast in The Brooklyn Rail, New York

Each poem is a delight in itself, a discovery, a new turn of phrase, a new sensation, a world of sound and light, and visions all colliding against each other to provide an unexpected and haunting experience.
David Clark in Exiled Ink, London

Yuyutsu RD lives close to Everest.  His poetry climbs mountains, swims in rivers, and paints the falling leaves in copper.  This tango with nature also occurs when Yuyutsu RD closes the window for a moment…
Ronny Someck in Iton77, Tel Aviv

The poems… are shining jewels of passion, energy and splendid craft, redolent with vivid, dreamlike visual imagery, strengthened by realistic observation and powered by strong male eroticism. His is an unabashed return to the male gaze that is refreshing and solemn by turns, reminding one of the stirring sounds of rolling drums, and beating rain…
Sucheta Das Gupta in The Himalayan Times, Kathmandu

A fiercely sublime poet …the book confirms an enormous talent, as well as purity of purpose with which he approaches his calling.  Lines jump out, burning themselves into your consciousness.
Eddie Woods in Amsterdam Weekly

With this buoyantly audacious work, Yuyutsu RD should be assured of his place in the canon of Asian poetry.
In this new volume, he conveys the people and places, the flora and fauna of the Annapurna area of Nepal with an exhilaratingly fresh vision.  It is poetry where pastoral elegy becomes fused with magic realism; where earthy common-sense mysticism becomes interlaced with a lush sexuality. The book is a voluptuous and loving evocation of Nepal and I admire its dramatic intensity.  
Cathal O Searcaigh, Ireland

Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s poetry runs clear, tender, and passionate with a rage that often erupts volcanic in the face of the cruelty, despair, and injustice that saddles the disenfranchised poor of the earth. Poems powerful and devastating, yet gentle as flower petals wafting to earth in a summer breeze.
Michael Annis, senior editor, Howling Dog Press, Colorado

This is what Asiaweek has to say of Yuyutsu’s translations of Nepali poetry:
‘… magnificent achievement evoking lives of Nepalese peasants while remaining highly readable…  The reader will come away breathless from these short, wonderfully concentrated poems’

These vivid and readable translations show the poets coming to terms both with political development and with the influence of Western modernism in literature.
­— Allen W. Thrasher,
Library of Congress, Washington DC

Young, versatile energetic, he is rocking and rolling with new impressions...  Yuyutsu’s poetry touches on concerns of global matters, acknowledging that we can never with violence create a Utopia or “construct a gorgeous pagoda from/furious flames/and whistling winds … Such lines capture for me the futility of the Iraq War, which I refuse to dignify with its official title, even more euphemistic and tainted with doublethink than earlier misadventures.  We can’t build even a humble pagoda from furious flames and whistling winds.
 — David Ray, The United States of America

“Yuyutsu R.D. brings to the Indian readers a distinct flavor of the Nepalese landscape and culture, in a sequence of poems that pulsate with needle-sharp images—Equally sensitive is his language that, scrupulously avoids stilted diction-words or phrases. His writing is so densely imagistic that he holds reader’s attention all the way through. Behind plethora of packed images is a genuine concern for the human predicament the trials and tribulations of the destitute everywhere. Hunger is the theme that runs as an under current-hunger that gnaws into the vitals of both humans and animals.”
Shiv K. Kumar in The Hindustan Times

“Something is always happening in Yuyutsu’s poetry.  Like some burning concern for truth, something that, I think, a poem should do. For this, we owe Yuyutsu much.
— Jayanta Mahapatra, Cuttack, India

Yuyutsu has a good eye and a good ear:
The rain stopped in the jungle.
The cicada stopped its chirr.
To have an ear for a sudden silence in unique.
— Keki N. Daruwala in The Hindustan Times

“Yuyutsu’s poetry has long been a part of the Nepalese consciousness: We use his more aphoristic lines as a paradigm of contemporary Nepali political and social changes.”
—The Kathmandu Post

Some Female Yeti is a tribute to the various changing as well as timeless aspects of the Himalayan Kingdom. There is crippling touch of stark and naked reality in these poems. They remind us of the time when women were raped, men were killed and human rights were abused. Yes, some of the poems deal with the democratic upsurge and its aftermath in Nepal.”
 Connection

“It is an agony ride through the darkness of modern times. The symbols are powerful and disturbing, the metaphors violent.  The female Yeti becomes as icon for man’s sexual angst...  This collection marks an important phase in the poet’s evolution, revealing a more mature poet in terms of symbol, diction and style.  ‘Hitting notes of a secret language of lust’, Yuyutsu has made his poetic presence felt.”
—The Observer

“...Highly vibrant portrayal of the individual’s existential issues, ranging from the mundane deprivations to the primordial lust and passion, anguish and anger…  Equally powerful is the author’s projection of the public life in all its shenanigans, conspiracies and treachery.
The most redeeming aspect of Yuyutsu’s poetry is his powerful writing style that brings forth the human experience directly without the binds of sophistication that tends to dissipated original spirit. The rawness of his writing is so exhilarating; it brings the full flavor of the locale to the sense.”
—The Rising Nepal

Yuyutsu’s poetry is the poetry of agony and anger.  It does not soothe; it shocks. It does not lull; it awakens the reader to a reality he is least bothered about.  Also, it has a distinct native flavor: maize fields, bare cots, hearths, querns, mud-plastered wall, and a grain of monsoon. It is different from the poetry of those who roll in the labyrinth of inner life or rejoice in the cities where skyscrapers bloom.  His poetry is evidently akin to the regional literatures he is familiar with, Punjabi, Hindi and Nepali.
— The Indian Literature

In Yuyutsu R.D.’s poems you can feel nature — the rainbow, the river, the day and night.  Nature is a metaphor to express human agony and Yuyutsu draws this situation in strong and rich colors. In his poems about poetry, Yuyutsu metaphors are galloping, noble and wild. He shows us other specials ways we need in the face of poetry.                                                                              
— Ronny Someck, Israel

Yuyutsu R. D. is a superbly gifted poet.  His volumes may be small in size but they are massive in scope and immense in vision.  His poems are lovely artifacts of craft and ardor, patiently distilled perceptions; finely polished insights.
I love the lyric accuracy of his Lake Fewa poems.  They are linguistically taut and melodically lithe.  Heart stunning stuff where every word tells, where every line flows.  It is clear that Yuyutsu R. D. loves the heave and surge of language; the swell and swirl of syllables; the roll and rush of sound.  In these poems, he rafts the roaring river of language with the whirl and whoosh of a true master rafter.
Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Ireland
 



Monday, November 2, 2009

Space cake, Amsterdam and other poems from Europe and America - New book



Space cake, Amsterdam and other poems from Europe and America




EMPLOYING A SURREALISTIC BLEND of Asian mystic and worldly Beat adventurer — worthy of a Ginsberg, a Corso, or a Tom Wolfe — Yuyutsu RD Sharma invades\ the lowlands of Amsterdam with its concentric circles of SpaceCake consciousness, then sojourns through Europe and back to the United States, romping like a Hindu gargoyle
spreading poetry and passion wherever he alights. Sharma’s poems celebrate mind-altering perspectives on politics, social foibles, riotous living, and the hopeless giddiness of depraved and damaged humanity in the urban sprawl of tanking economies. In Sharma’s stanzas, the melancholic shadow of a shaman living life towards its ubiquitous
overflow passionately unfolds. In lines concealed by humorous overtones, the dark truth of decaying squalor is suspended like the husk of a fly in the spiraling web of conflict created by the Lost spinning smoke rings around tales of their past glories. Like Diogenes peering through a glass darkly, he seeks out garrulous men and beckoning women straight from the plays of Synge—their souls dead, their teeth chattering, plated in fools gold. Sharma writes, 

“Later in the bar as I stretched / folds of her skin back on her luscious face // years receded
into / the faint drawers of my age, // time stepped down / the ladder of my lifespan, // a monkey-thief / in my youth’s backyard. … 

Her tongue curled like a dry leaf in my ear / and crackled, ‘How much did you take, / just a piece? I took thirty-eight grams once. … / You can pat my back, /tickle my belly or stroke my breasts / for awhile, if it comforts you … // it can be heavenly, / licking the rim of the forbidden frontiers of human life.”
 The surreal tension of a man from the highest point on earth reveling through the eros and addictions of those from one of the lowest produces poetry that captivates and compels the reader to transcend the moment of spiritual impact like a lotus exploding from a lion’s heart. Sharma’s poetry frees us from the mundane tribulation of karmic oppression of day by day struggle, elevating us to view the world with the third eye of the shaman, to find the 10,000-eyed serpentine Buddha laughing in the midst of psychological pandemonium.

HOWLING DOG PRESS, 2009, POETRY, $18.95, 6”x 9”, 109 pages, softbound with
double covers, black inner, full color outer; color endsheets; Designed & edited by
Michael Annis. Artwork by Henry Avignon & Michael Annis.
ISBN: 978-1-882863-95-2. Reviewers contact publicity@howlingdogpress.com.
Ordering: www.howlingdogpress.com/Publications/Publications.htm. Request complimentary
review copies by e-mailing, or by regular mail on publication letterhead.
For radio, television, internet, and print interviews, contact Michael Annis at
970-231-8106 [in USA], or by e-mail at publicity@howlingdogpress.com