Sunday, June 23, 2024

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

 


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.

 

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

 


 



Tuesday, February 6, 2024

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

 



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)




REGISTER by wire/bank transfer to avoid paypal fees:

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.

REGISTER THRU PAYPAL

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 GoddessDeepening GrooveWhat 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)

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Yuyutsu Sharma’s 2023 Tour




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 YorkCity 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 York12 W 56TH 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 HimalayasCelebrations and poetry with Yuyutsu Sharma & Annie Finch 40 Loisaida Ave, St. Francis Kites Club, East Village, New York




Thursday, April 20, 2023

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

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.

 

 


Saturday, April 1, 2023

Upcoming ALS SINGAPORE LIVE: EPISODE 3 focused on Lost Horoscope

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



Sunday, March 5, 2023

Indian poet CP Surendran on Lost Horoscope by Yuyutsu Sharma

 


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


Saturday, February 18, 2023

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


"...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.