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

 

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

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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

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

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

“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

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.

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

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

“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”

—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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

 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 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

 

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

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

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

American Poet Mike Graves on Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming collection, "In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems"

 

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:

 

Michael Graves is the author of four chapbooks, two of which are digital, and three full-length collections. The chapbooks are Outside St. Jude’s (R. E. M.,1990), Blatnoy (madhattersreview3.com, 2005), Illegal Border Crosser (Cervena Barva, 2008), and Fifteen Villanelles (Robert Perron.com 2020). The full-length books are Adam and Cain and In Fragility (Black Buzzard, 2006, 2011) and A Prayer for the Less Violent Offenders: Selected Short Poems of Mike Graves (Nirala, 2017). He has published fifteen poems in The James Joyce Quarterly and has read from his “Joycean Poems” to a gathering of the James Joyce Society at the Gotham Book Mark, April 12, 2002. His poem “Apollo to Daphne” appears in Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford, 2001) The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation awarded him a grant in 2006. He organized the conference, Baptism by Fire: The Work of James Wright at Poets House, NY (March 27, 2004). And he has been coordinating and hosting the Phoenix Reading Series for about twenty years.

Charles Bernstein on Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming, "In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems"

 

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, author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry & the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for American Poet

ry

James Ragan on Yuyutsu Sharma's "Lost Horoscope," Epilogue to his upcoming book of poems, In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems

 

“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 has published 10 books of poetry and is translated into 15 languages with poems in Poetry, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today and 30 anthologies. Plays produced in the U.S. Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Prague. Honors include 2 Honorary Ph.D’s, 3 Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart nominations, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, and the Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival as subject of the documentary, “Flowers and Roots, Ambassador of the Arts.” 

Announcing CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS, Pratik's Australian Poetry Edition, Fire and Rain

 

Fire and Rain – Call for Submissions + $500 AUD Cash Prize

 

Fire and Rain – Pratik:A Magazine of Contemporary WritingAustralian Poetry Edition https://niralapublications.com/new-booksarrivals/pratik-magazine/pratik-magazine-2/ co-curated and supported by APWT https://www.apwriters.org+ $500 AUD cash prize for winning entry.

 

Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) and Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing invite submissions for Fire and Rain – a special edition of the magazine focused on Australian poetry. The theme acts as a kicking off point and is open to interpretation – we seek previously unpublished poetry that evokes a sense of Australia – either geographically, spiritually, politically, linguistically,culturally,or otherwise. This edition celebrates the diversity of Australian poetic perspectives and voices – we welcome submissions from both established and emerging poets, indigenous writers and LGBTIQ+ community. We are open to experimental forms and multiple submissions are permitted. Previous well received special editions of Pratik magazine have focused on writing from Ireland, Los Angeles and Nepal amongst others and we foresee Fire and Rain will contribute to this ongoing international conversation with vibrant new work from Australian poets. Pratik published quarterly is edited by the world-renowned Himalayan poet, Yuyutsu Sharma in Kathmandu and has become a significant international platform of creative writing. You can access previous editions of Pratik here http://pratikmagazine.blogspot.comand it is also available for purchase via Amazon. Readers for this edition will be editor of PratikYuyutsuSharma, Executive Director of APWT and author Dr Sally Breen and celebrated Australian poet Jennifer Mackenzie. One entry selected by the readers will be awarded the $500 AUD cash prize. Submission is open to financial members of APWT – not a member? Join here: https://www.apwriters.org/become-a-member/

 

Visit our Submittable Page to enter: https://drunkenboat.submittable.com/submit

Submission close: April 1^st2022

Submission Guidelines

• Submissions are open to emerging and established Australian poets who are financial members of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators. New members are welcome to submit – you can join APWT via the following link: https://www.apwriters.org/become-a-member/
• Unpublished poems only.
• We accept simultaneous submissions but please notify us if your work is picked up elsewhere.
• No more than five poems may be submitted. There is no line-limit. Poems may be any length, any style, but must feature reference to some aspect of Australia as identified in the blurb.
• Multiple submissions are allowed, but each new submission requires a new fee.
• Please include a brief cover note with your professional bio and a brief introduction via the submittable page where indicated.
• Submission fee of $5 USD.
• Deadline is midnight April 1^st, 2022.
• The decision of the readers is final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding work submitted. If you have a general query about the callthen please feel free to contact admin@apwriters.com

Social Media Call for Subs Version

Fire and Rain – Call for Submissions

 

Fire and Rain – Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing Australian Poetry Edition co-curated and supported by APWT + $500 AUD cash prize for winning entry

 

Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT) and Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing invite submissions for Fire and Rain – a special edition of the magazine focused on Australian poetry. The theme acts as a kicking off point and is open to interpretation – we seek previously unpublished poetry that evokes a sense of Australia – either geographically, spiritually, politically, linguistically, culturally, or otherwise. This edition celebrates the diversity of Australian poetic perspectives and voices – we welcome submissions from both established and emerging poets, indigenous writers and LGBTIQ+ community. We are open to experimental forms and multiple submissions are permitted. Pratik published quarterly is edited by the world-renowned Himalayan poet, Yuyutsu Sharma in Kathmandu and has become a significant international platform of creative writing. You can read more about the call and enter via our Submittable Pagehttps://drunkenboat.submittable.com/submitSubmission is open to financial members of APWT – not a member? Join here: https://www.apwriters.org/become-a-member/Submissions close on April 1^st 2022.