Yuyutsu Sharma with Arturo Mantecón at Sacramento Poetry Center

Yuyutsu Sharma with Arturo Mantecón at Sacramento Poetry Center||| Mon, June 27 @ 7:30 pm ||| 1719 25th St

Posted on June 24, 2016

Yuyutsu  Sharma and Arturo Mantecón       Monday, June 27 @ 7:30 pm Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street Host: Wendy Williams Yuyutsu Sharma is the recipient of fellowships and grants from TheRockefeller Foundation, the Ireland Literature Exchange, the TrubarFoundation, Slovenia, among others, and is a distinguished poet and translator. He has published nine poetry collections including, A Blizzard inmy Bones: New York Poems (Nirala, 2016), Quaking Cantos: NepalEarthquake Poems (Nirala, 2016), and Milarepa’s Bones and 33 NewPoems (Nirala, 2012). Arturo Mantecón is a poet and translator born in Laredo, Texas andraised in Detroit, Michigan. His poetry has appeared in La Ventana Abierta, Poetry Now and various anthologies. A collection of his short stories, Memories, Cuentos Verídicos, y Otras Outright Lies, was published by En Casa in 2014. He has translated the poetry and prose of the mad Spanish poeta maldito, Leopoldo María Panero. He is currently translating the work of Francisco Ferrer Lerín. Poem by Yuyutsu SharmaI see my world shaking… I see my world shaking— my floor, my bed, my table, my house my pen stumbling across the soggy span of my page the stanzas splintered from the kicks of a demon awake after a sleep of million years…I see my squares mangled from the litter of a wheezing earth I see top of our towers crumble and topple onto the dried up riverbeds I see rickety bridges shudder, waters undulating in the turquoise lakes on the lofty Himalayan heights, a bowl of milk held in the hands of a fearful grandma. I see dagger of snow crashing onto the mule paths, salt routes threading through rocky terrains clogged, the sheets of snow stained from mammoth avalanches the pinnacles of snow thrust from the earth’s heart tumble and disappear in a fraction of a second in God’s colossal mouth… I see domes of our stupas crack, five colored flags fluttering before Buddha’s  own eyes bend and break, oil lamps lit by Yeti’s hollowed skull dim out in the sunken canyons of the monks’ wailing eyes… I see famished angels coming out of snow-clad sanctuaries like the saffron flames fleeing their kingdoms in exile I see them come out and lean against the mossy fences on the threshold of great canyons to ponder over the loss of  lives uttering prayers as the earth cracks open and engulfs their settlements in front of their own bemused eyes… I see shrines of our deities shake, the Lord’s own body cracked into two lifeless boulders, his mace, his scepter, his lotus, his conch shell, his brass bowls of nectar, his splintered quiver full of blunt arrows… AND WHO WILL BOTHER by Arturo Mantecón how tell one from another another from one without killing the one without fating the other without forking the paths of the homeward lamb and the sinful goat without splintering the sharp arcs of the crow into irrational numbers it is the mayhem of the word burning drowning the soluble body of the sugar and the salt the high silk hat wherein the rabbit disappears over and over again to emerge from a sleeve as a starting bouquet of doves over and over again it is to loom the sierpinski carpet until it lifts up and grazes the crescent moons of the inescapable minarets of baghdad it is to sweep the dust of gentile cantors through those dream alleys of the souqs that loll and curl like ribbons of flesh like acute angles of smoke it is to present oneself weeping and as cock naked as the humbled jesus to the cruel gasping laughter of the stars     Coming Events:  SPC and Elsewhere        Events take place at the Sacramento Poetry Center 7:30 PM (unless otherwise noted) Poetry Center Gallery June: “Comrades in the heart” by local artists Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Helen Plenert June 26, SPC and SMAC present:  An evening with Dana Gioia at the Crocker Art Museum, 6:00 PM. July 1, Host Nancy Aidé González: Mosaic of Voices with Yuyutsu Sharma and Andy Jones at the Avid Reader, Sacramento, 7 pm July 2, Host Penny Kline:  ASIAN DIASPORA with Yuyutsu Sharma, Rhony Bhopla, Heera Kulkarni, Meera Klein and Jasmeen Kaur Bassi, 2:00 pm July 11, Host Emmanuel Sigauke:  Monika Rose and Sarah Pape July 16, Host Phillip Larrea: Sacramento Voices with Susan Kelly- DeWitt, Nancy Aidé González and Mary Mackey, 4:30 pm July 18, Host Bethanie Humphreys: Hot Poetry in the Park, Fremont Park, 7 pm Sacramento Poetry Center 1719 25th Street, Sacramento, CA 95816 | Phone: 916 240 1897