Sunday, October 1, 2017

A Poem for Gandhi Jayanti Celebration --Yuyutsu Sharma

In the Absence of the Towers,
Gandhi
Yuyutsu Sharma
















In absence
of Twin Towers, it was his statue

in Union Square
that became the solid shaft

of my light in the whirling city
of rattling trains, my memory key

to the numbered streets
of this mandala of steel, siren and seeds…

Larger than life figure
standing in the grassy triangle,

his feeble staff
from South Africa shining from

the glow of his compassion,
his eyes looking onto

the Green Market
stalls from Upstate,

Apple cider, wine, pretzels,
Organic cupcakes, Dead sea salt

and across the Square
Barnes and Noble store, Occupy Wall Street kids,

skating Latinos
and that black boy from Hudson River Valley

his chessboard
of Power Games spread on a small table

with an empty little chair
in the freezing cold

waiting for someone to come
and invest his precious coin or a dream

and spend some quality time
under the murky skies

likely to turn cobalt blue,
a flame of a feather

of a singing blue jay…


From A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500729





















The Gandhi Statue at Union Square, New York

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Yuyutsu Sharma to read in the Poetry Express Berkeley Reading Series in November

http://poetryexpressberkeley.blogspot.com/p/calendar.html

11/13/2017 Yuyutsu Sharma hosted by Jim
(Need a prompt? How do you explain your position on the planet? -- you don't have to use those words.)


http://poetryexpressberkeley.blogspot.com/p/calendar.html



Yuyutsu R D Sharma has  published nine poetry collections including, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems (Nirala, 2016).  He has translated Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh and Hebrew poet Ronny Someck into Nepali.  Eternal SnowA Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma is his most recent publication.  Yuyutsu’s work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch.  Yuyutsu is the Visiting Poet at Columbia University, New York and has just returned from China where he had gone to read at Beijing International Book Fair.

Mules                           by Yuyutsu Sharma

On the great Tibetan
salt route they meet me again

old forsaken friends ...

On their faces
fatigue of a drunken sleep

their lives worn out,
their legs twisted, shaking

from carrying
illustrious flags of bleeding ascents.

Age long bells clinging
to them like festering wounds

beating notes
of a slavery modernism brings:

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.

Butterflies of 
the terraced fields know their names.

Singing brooks tempests
of their breathless climbs.

Traffic alert
and time-tested, they climb

carrying
dreams of posh peacocks

pamphlets
of a secret religious war

filth
of an ecologist's sterile semen

entire kitchen
for a cocktail party at the base camp

defunct development
agenda of guilty donors

the West's weird visions
lusting for an instant purge.

Stone steps
of the mountains embossed

on their drugged brains,
like lines of aborted love

scratched
on the historic rocks of waterspouts.

Starry skies
of the dozing valleys know

the ache
of their secret sweat.

Sunny days
along the crystal rivers

taste
of their bleeding eyes.

Greatest fiction
of the struggling lives lost,

like real mules
clattering their hooves on the flagstones,

in circling
the cruel grandeur

of blood thirsty

mule paths around the glaciers of Annapurnas.

Upcoming Brooklyn Launch of Eternal Snow and Poetry Workshop with Yuyutsu Sharma at Yoga Sole, New York


Upcoming Brooklyn Launch of Eternal Snow and Poetry Workshop with Yuyutsu Sharma at Yoga Sole, New York


Upcoming Brooklyn Launch of Eternal Snow and Poetry Workshop with Yuyutsu Sharma at Yoga Sole, New York
http://yogasole.com/eventskarma/yuyupoetry.html
Brooklyn Launch of
Yuyutsu Sharma’s Eternal Snow
& A Workshop with the Himalayan Poet
Saturday, Oct 21st
Workshop will be 6:00pm – 7:00pm $25pp
(includes reading)
Reading will be 7:30pm – 9:00pm $10pp
In the workshop
Yuyu will share his experiences and recite mantras and prayers to evoke the Himalayan world, especially, Devataatma, a Sanskrit word for the Himalayas, meaning the place where Soul of the God lives. After years of traveling the globe as an itinerant poet, Yuyutsu Sharma has earned the respect and admiration of thousands of people all over the world. Yuyu will unravel the secrets of Himalayan spirituality, inducing the participants to write fresh poetry likely to be published in the second volume of Eternal Snow.
The Reading will be the
The Brooklyn launch of
“Eternal Snow:  A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma
will take place.

Editors will share their experiences of editing this mammon anthology.

Select Poets include:
David Austell, Kathleen D Gallagher, Ruth Danon, Carolyn Wells, Catherine Gigante-Brown, Jack Tar, Nancy R Lange, Bill Wolak, Robert Scotto, Michael Graves, Bari Falise,  Christi Shannon Kline, Dan Szczesny, Jack Tar, Marion Palm, Eugene Hyon, Patricia Carragon,
Jan Garden Castro & others will read from the book.

Friday, September 8, 2017

'Eternal Snow', an anthology reflecting Nepal and the Himalayas: Nepal National Agency News

'Eternal Snow', an anthology reflecting Nepal and the Himalayas



2017-09-09 09:58 Kathmandu, Sept 9:


A 320 – page poetry anthology dedicated to Nepal, Nepali, Kathmandu, the Himalayan Range, rivers and the country's cultures has been published.

'Eternal Snow – A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty – Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma' explores the interaction, collisions, and intersections of 125 poets from four different continents.

The anthology – published by Nirala Publications in New Delhi and edited by American litterateurs David Austell of Colombia University, New York and Kathleen D Gallagher of the University of Akron Ohio – constitutes poems written by professors, scientists, social workers, photographers, priests, yoga teachers and stewardess among others.

They wrote the poems on Nepal following interactions with the Himalayan Poet during his world tours. Sharma said the anthology is a testament to the power of words to inspire, encourage, and heal across vastly disparate cultures and distant places.

The anthology also contains poems penned by nearly a dozen Nepali poets' including Srijana Bhandari, Revegya Joshi, Bishwa Sigdel, Arun Budhathoki, Civa Bhusal, Gaurav Bhattarai, Dom Kafle and Varun Bajracharya. RSS

Thursday, August 3, 2017

The Wait is Over: Eternal Snow is finally out, available on Amazon



Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of  One Hundred Twenty Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma
 Edited by David Austell & Kathleen D Gallagher
ISBN : 81-8250-088-5 2017 Paperback pp 309 plus  24 Photo page
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8182500885
http://www.amazon.in/dp/8182500885



Eternal Snow is a testament to the power of words to inspire, encourage, and heal across vastly disparate cultures and distant places. Over one hundred and twenty-five poets from around the world come together in this anthology to explore their interactions, collisions, and intersections with Yuyutsu Sharma, renowned Himalayan poet, journalist, translator, and editor from Kathmandu, Nepal.The book is a clear example of the new world itinerancy of the modern poet, and the global efficacy of poetry, in that Yuyu's world travels have touched the hearts and minds of thousands of people who have heard his readings around the world and read his words in print and on-line. Not all the contributors are professional poets. Eternal Snow also captures the poetic voices of a hairstylist, a photographer, a Yoga teacher, a priest, a nurse, and a social scientist. In these pages, a young poet in Kathmandu sees her late father in Yuyu's face; a social worker conjures the Goddess of the Children while serving the Bhutanese refugees in California; a New York University professor ponders an Asian challenge: setting her house on fire to become a real poet. The results captured in these poems attest to the literary collisions which occur when global poets meet. Eternal Snow is a singular, remarkable, and moving work of art. Includes poetry by John Clarke, David Ray, James Ragan, Ravi Shankar, Eileen O'Connor, Gorka Lasa, Pascale Petit, Elena Karina Byrne, Chuck Joy, Amarendra Khatua, Ruth Danon, Tim Tomlinson, Verónica Aranda, David Axlerod, Tony Barnstone, Art Good Times, Kim Nuzzo, Robin Mets, Barbara Novack, Hélène Cardona, Irene O' Garden, Agnes Marton, Carolyn Wells, M. L. Williams, Diane Frank and Others


When you first meet Himalayan poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma, you are taken immediately by his quiet passion and reverence for the art and purpose of poetry, which, when taking the stage, he transforms into a voice that crosses continents and soars like the snow in wind that permeates “the solemn silence of sacred sounds” in his beloved Nepal. Through his intercession, poems become chants of eternality.  He has sought the same in the poets represented in his anthology “Eternal Snow,” a hundred voices who, like him, give reverence to the power of words in translating truth through passion into a universal poetic of sacred sounds.”
–James Ragan, Distinguished American Poet  & Author of Too Long a Solitude & The Hunger Wall among others
Yuyu has touched the hearts and minds of a multitude of people and writers around the world, as evidenced in this wonderful book, Eternal Snow…The poetry included in this volume speaks to the constant intersections with Yuyu Sharma, collisions of persons, spirits, literary visions, affect and effect, all of which have at their center this remarkable person and precious talent. It is my delight and honor to be among such a cloud of witnesses.
–David Austell in Preface to Eternal Snow
No matter where the poets live, from a small city to large, to countryside or village, Yuyutsu’s poetry and teachings transform writers from across the world, allowing them to reach into their own writing dreams and visions. Indeed, each poet no matter his or her walk in life, whether professional poet, performer, professor, minister, or word-loving hairstylist who scribbles down thoughts about her love for her dying mother, all have discovered his or her own creative awakenings when encountering Yuyutsu Sharma’s work. Yuyutsu’s work has far-reaching effects in personal transformation.
–Kathleen Gallagher in Introduction to Eternal Snow

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Nepal’s Earthquake Through the Eyes of a Poet: Yuyutsu Sharma The Diplomat Interview


Nepal’s Earthquake Through the Eyes of a Poet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzrusDPNe3U&feature=youtu.be

India-born poet Yuyutsu Sharma is known as a “Himalayan poet,” as he has spent years in the Himalayas in Nepal listening to the silence of the mountains and using that as an inspiration to write poems. However, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, which killed at least 9,000 people, shattered his celebration of the quietude that he had been relishing. That’s when he wrote a series of poems on the calamity, published earlier this year as a book, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems.
In this video interview with The Diplomat, held in Kathmandu in June 2017, the poet recalls his emotional reaction to the earthquake and recites stanzas from his poems.

India-born poet Yuyutsu Sharma is known as a “Himalayan poet,” as he has spent 

Monday, June 19, 2017

Father by Yuyutsu Sharma

My hair go aflame
as you hiccup and breathe the last of this earth.

A grey wart appears on my forehead.

I clasp your cold palms
to feel blackout of your blood vessels.

On your chest, I burst
a silent pitcher of my life’s sleep

Darkness,
a savage silence of Sunya’s eternal ocean.

I glisten your rubbery body
with honey, curd and milk of seven rivers;

a tear keeps rolling endlessly
on the naked wound of my secret grief.

For the last time, I hold
this face of yours in my trembling hands;

the blast of a wail
ravages sunlight of my faith.

On your body, I place
heavy logs damp from a history of vanquished hearths.

In the crack of your still mouth
I drop grain of a rainbow

and light the last fire
that shall blacken quiet pages of my youth.

I hit the centre of your skull
aflame in the sputtering pyre

to ignite a bejewelled passage to eternity.

On the flooded banks of the Ganges
I knead your limbs all over again;

I make your head
heart, hands, life-veins, lines of your fate.

From the mantras of my breaths
I feed hunger of your blood vessels

and see you go alone
along the blazing fields of The Garuda Purana

eating crumbs of the blessed food
lost in the memories of my childhood

when once you had lifted me up
in the fragrant stretch of the blue hillside air

and probably for the first time
in life, smiled…


From Annapurna Poems

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Philip Nikolayev in Cambridge, MA




Poets Yuyutsu Sharma and Philip Nikolayev

Saturday, June 17, 2017, 4:pm to 5.30 pm
Free to Public
Outpost 186
186 1/2 Hampshire St, Inman Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02

Born in Moscow and raised in Russia and Moldova, poet Philip Nikolayev is the son of a linguist. He grew up speaking both English and Russian and immigrated to the United States in 1990. Nikolayev earned a BA and an MA at Harvard University and a PhD at Boston University. His poetry collections include Dusk Raga (1998), Monkey Time (2003), which won a Verse prize, and Letters from Aldenderry (2006).

In his poems, Nikolayev pairs philosophical questions with daily life, frequently combining formal and experimental approaches. In an interview with Jack Alun for The Argotist Online, Nikolayev stated, “Writing is largely spontaneous for me and improvisation and self-surprise are important parts of it. ... I write in hopes that what moves or interests or surprises me may also cause a similar response in someone else—the providential reader, in Mandelstam’s phrase, if you will. Often I don’t know exactly where a poem—a certain kind of poem—leads me until the very end, where with some luck everything just happens to click sharply into focus.” 

Nikolayev is one of the founding editors of Fulcrum, “an annual of poetry and aesthetics,” and his work has been featured in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (2005). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, the poet Katia Kapovich.
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 a distinguished 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),  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 also brought out a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection entitled, Kathmandu: Poems, Selected and New (2006) and a translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual edition, Baghdad, February 1991 & Other Poems. 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.

Two books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) just appeared in French and Spanish respectively.

Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places including Poetry Café, London, Seamus Heaney Center for Poetry, Belfast, New York University, New York, The Kring, Amsterdam, P.E.N, Paris, Knox College, Illinois, Whittier College, California, Baruch College, New York, WB Yeats' Center, Sligo, Gustav Stressemann Institute, Bonn,  Rubin Museum, New York, Cosmopoetica, Cordoba, Spain,  Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, Columbia University, New York, The Guardian Newsroom, London, Trois Rivieres Poetry Festival, Quebec, Arnofini, Bristol, Borders, London, Slovenian Book Days, Ljubljana, Royal Society of Dramatic Arts, London, Gunter Grass House, Bremen, GTZ, Kathmandu, International Poetry Festival, Granada,  Nicaragua, Nehru Center, London, March Hare, Newfoundland, Canada, Gannon University, Erie, Frankfurt Book Fair, Frankfurt, Indian International Center, New Delhi, and Villa Serbelloni, Italy. 

He has held workshop 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 and New York University, New York.

His works have appeared in Poetry Review, Chanrdrabhaga, Sodobnost, Amsterdam Weekly, Indian Literature, Irish Pages, Delo, Modern Poetry in Translation, Exiled Ink, Iton77, Little Magazine, The Telegraph, Indian Express and Asiaweek.

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. He just published his nonfiction, Annapurnas & Stains of Blood: Life, Travel and Writing a Page of Snow, (Nirala, 2010). He edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.

He was at the Poetry Parnassus Festival organized to celebrate London Olympics 2012 where he represented Nepal and India. Yuyutsu is the Visiting Poet at Columbia University, New York and has just returned from Argentina where had had gone to participate in International Poetry Festival, Buenos Aires.

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.

More: 
www.yuyutsu.de, www.niralapublications.com