The Ofi Press Magazine Review of Yuyutsu Sharma's Nine New York Poems & Space Cake, Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America by Agnes Marton

The Ofi Press Magazine

International Poetry and Fiction from Mexico City

By Agnes Marton

Poetry Review: Yuyu, the wandering poet

Both books are beautifully designed, with elegant bookmarks. I received them from India by post. When opening the envelope, the first thing I noticed was the spicy scent coming out of the pages. Then I started reading and couldn’t stop.

Yuyu, the wandering poet
Yuyutsu Sharma: Nine New York Poems. A Prelude to A Blizzard In My Bones. New York Poems
Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2014
Yuyutsu Sharma: Space Cake Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America
Nirala Publications, New Delhi, 2014
Poetry Review by Agnes Marton
Published in issue 39 of The Ofi Press

Yuyu is Mona Lisa’s hallucinatory lover, saying Namaste (‘I salute the soul of God that is within you’) (Mona Lisa Drunk). A shaman “chewing Tesco’s vegpledges” on the Tube (Miles on the Tube). A cityhopper who is not at all a tourist, who is at home everywhere, exploring urban fields through his Himalayan gaze. The master of observation, of detail, of compassion.
Half the year, Yuyutsu Sharma leads creative writing workshops at American universities and performs his poems all over the world, but then he returns to Nepal and India.
Yuyu’s New York poems are full of collisions and intersections, and his verse itself is also multicultural, with echoes of sounds and rhythms of the city:
“Meager, skimpy, bloodless,
punching the city’s famed roaches
my legs clanging, wheeling mantras
of angry and drunken avatars,
my breaths measuring menus
of Fast Food takeaways
like curses of the demented
on shaky subway tracks”
(The Scream, Subway Avatars)

and fractions of the everyday sightseeing of an expat:
“The day you stop taking the free
Staten Island Ferry to click a perfect shot
of the Statue of Liberty,
or stop visiting Times Square at night
and forget to find a way out of its labyrinth (…)
You are a New Yorker.”
(You are a New Yorker)

It’s glorious contemporary urban poetry where sometimes traces of pastoral elegy can be found, sometimes magic realism, sometimes the individual’s concerns of global matters, sometimes eroticism, sometimes the mythology of Sufi saints… Most often all of these together in harmony.

The collection ‘Space Cake Amsterdam’ is more like a series of colourful snapshots (of museums, of cafés, of castles), without any superficiality, on the contrary, time to time reaching the profound. Yuyu calls himself a “shaking frame” (Temple, London); inherits his role as a writer and he can accomplish it through his wandering (“Someone left a pen / on the palpable table of my travels”). In De Zuarte Ruiter Café he (“you man from the Himalayas”) is asked whether he can stop ghosts of relatives slipping into dreams, whether he can explain nightmares.

“I knew they wished me to wear
a shaman’s feathered crown for my head   
and dance round and round for several centuries
to avenge the atrocities of the male Buddhas
in the corridors of history for them.”

He depicts naked, noble, leopard‑like, shiny dances (Ruigoord) and talks about remembering long‑ago admired lovers (Look‑alike, Galway), about the uncanny language of husbands (Frankfurt), and about parrots flying out of the zoo to the city to sing (what else?) the song of survival (Heidelberg, Danke!).

Both books are beautifully designed, with elegant bookmarks. I received them from India by post. When opening the envelope, the first thing I noticed was the spicy scent coming out of the pages. Then I started reading and couldn’t stop.

Yuyutsu Sharma’s NYU Reading with American Poet, Kevin Prufer!

http://niralapublications.com/yuyutsu-sharmas-nyu-reading-with-american-poet-kevin-prufer/

Yuyutsu Sharma’s NYU Reading with American Poet, Kevin Prufer!

KEVIN PRUFER (United States) is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which include Churches (Four Way Books, 2014); In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011); and National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008). Kevin is also the editor of numerous volumes, including New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) and the forthcoming Into English (Graywolf, 2016). He is the recipient of multiple Pushcart prizes, Best American Poetry selections, and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Kevin is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where he also co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and is the Editor-at-Large of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

YUYUTSU RAM DASS SHARMA (Nepal) is a Himalayan poet, translator, and journalist from Kathmandu. Born in the Punjab at Nakodar, India, Yuyu is the author of ten books of poetry, the most recent of which include Nine New York Poems (Nirala, 2014); Milarepa’s Bones (Nirala, 2012); and Space Cake, Amsterdam (Howling Dog Press, 2009; Nirala reprint, 2014). Yuyu has also translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English, and recently authored a Nepali bilingual translation of Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s Baghdad, February 1991. At the center of the Nepali literary movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis), he has received key writing fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ireland Literature Exchange. Yuyu represented Nepal and India at the Poetry Parnassus Festival in London as a part of the 2012 Summer Olympics. A widely-traveled and distinguished public figure and journalist, Yuyu writes for The Himalayan Times, Nepal’s leading newspaper. He also currently serves as editor of Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

The Global Poets Series 2014 is Co-Sponsored by the Office of Global Services and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University.

Yuyutsu Sharma’s April Readings in New York City

Sunday, April 6, 2014, 1pm – 4pm: Yuyutsu Sharma Reading at Oceanside Library, Davison Ave. Oceanside, NY 11572 766-2360; Hosted by Peter V. Dugan,
pdugan@optonline.net

Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 7 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading at The Poets Settlement at Breuckelen Colony, Hosted by Ricardo Thomas Manuel Hernandez 274 4th Avenue and Garfield Place, Park Slope, Brooklyn, 11220, Two Blocks away from Union Street R Train Station

Wednesday, April 9, 2014, 6:30: Yuyutsu Sharma featuring in Tom Kane’s Boulevard Bards Series, Hosted by Anthony Vigorito, Boulevard Books & Café, 7518 13th Avenue (between Bay Ridge Parkway & 76th St) Brooklyn, NY 11228

Thurseday, April 10, 5:45pm Yuyutsu Sharma reading with Kevin Prufer, New York University at AIA New York Chapter House, located at 536 LaGuardia Place. Hosted by David Austell, NYU Office of Global Services, Open to the public. 212 998 4726 http://aiany.aiany.org/index.php?section=aia-new-york

Sunday April 13 4:00 pm; Yuyutsu Sharma with David Austell and Robert Scotto in Phoenix Reading Series @ The Upright Brewm 9944 : 547 Hudson Street NY, NY 10014 212-810- Hosted by Michael Graves, Open to public, An eight dollar ($8) cover buys a drink or pays part of a more expensive. Directions : www.uprightbrewhouse.com

Friday, April 18, 2014 6:15 to 8:00 pm: Himalayan Poet in NYC,Rubin Museum Reading: Internationally renowned Himalayan poet Yuyutsu Sharma reads from new book and launches his new book, Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to A Blizzard in my Bones.( Nirala, 2014) Poet David Austell to Introduce Yuyu and his New Book; Rubin Museum, 150 W 17th St, New York, www.rmanyc.org. Phone: (212) 620-5000. Free and open to public.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 7:30 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma reading with David Austell, William Seaton and Patricia Spears Jones at Brownstone Poets, Dada Café, 57, Seventh Avenue, ( Corner of Lincoln Place), Park Slope, Brooklyn, Hosted by Patricia Carragon, , 11217, 718-622-2800 pcarragon@gmail.com

Thursday, April 24, 2014, 6:30pm to 8:30 pm: Yuyutsu Sharma to read at Barnes and Noble in Ken Siegelman’s Brooklyn Poetry Outreach Series, Hosted by Anthony Vigorito, Barnes & Noble, Park Slope 267 7th Ave (at 6th Street), Brooklyn, NY 11215

Friday, April 25, 2014, 7:30 pm, Yuyutsu Sharma in the Poets in the Port Series, Caffe Portofino in North Poet on Friday, Hosted by Mary Jane Tenerelli

www.niralapublications.com : Announcing Yuyutsu Sharma’s Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems

Announcing Yuyutsu Sharma’s Nine New York Poems: A Prelude to A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems

Posted on November 14, 2013

‘Yuyutsu Sharma’s new collection is concerned with notions of home and being away in the exotic elsewhere. Home strikes deep, like ‘my grandma / asleep // on a plump / bubble // of a folk song’ but is then flung into the great proper nouns of New York, all detail, all observation and dazzle. The poems are registered at the tips of the eyes then connected with the sense of deep home. That is where the power lies. It emerges through ear and mouth as a kind of cosmopolitan love letter.’
-George Szirtes, British Poet, winner of Faber Memorial Prize & T.S. Eliot Prize

‘Yuyutsu Sharma, a Himalayan poet who studied his craft in the United States and on the mule paths of high Himalayas has brought a visionary sensibility to his New York poems. They read like Federico Garcia Lorca having a Hindu dream, or like Allen Ginsberg risen from the dead and howling out a peyote vision for 2013. Their ambition, like Lorca’s in his Poet in New York or like Hart Crane’s in his New York epic, The Bridge, is to write an epic vision of the city–and ultimately of America–in linked lyrics. Here are the Twin Towers flaming like the red tongue of Kali, goddess of destruction, a city like a yellow-eyed demon, Hurricane Sandy burrowing into the island’s groin like a furious porcupine. Sharma is “a shaman…black bag bulging / from magical rainbows, / serpents from an Hindu Heaven, / skull of an abducted female Yeti,” and he casts spells in these strange, visionary, outrageous and magical poems.’
-Tony Barnstone, The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English Whittier College, Author/Translator of Everyman’s Chinese Erotic Poems
A Blizzard in My Bones, Yuyu’s deeply moving new collection and a remarkable addition to modern urban literature. It is Nepal and Hinduism and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Greenwich Village drawn together in a new Space Cake: Amsterdam; but here the hallucinogen-stoked celebration is amid the concrete and steel heights of Metropolis.
-David Austell, Professor, NYU, author of Little Creek and Other Poems

If Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca and Frank O’Hara were exhumed to rub their recollections of New York City together over dal and black tea, they might produce a manuscript as rapturous as Yuyutsu Sharma’s love letter to the five boroughs. Infused with the mythology of Sufi saints and Hindu deities, Blizzard Go Delhi is nonetheless utterly contemporary, juxtaposing Duane Reedes and Occupy Wall Streeters alongside Punjabi wheat fields and muscular Halwai-confectioners working over huge cauldrons of oil. Unrepentant in its sensuality, self-assured and visionary, Sharma’s book is an extravagant tour de force that shows us that stepping off the train into New York City is to enter a realm “of wandering winter spirits and wavering speeches…a bedlam vision of a bedroom utopia that tries very hard every night to find a partner of sleep.” Tries, but thankfully for us, fails and instead stays up to channel the manic, long-limbed energy of the city in this memorable and original verbal jazz solo. This book is a poetic triumph.
-Ravi Shankar, Executive Director of Drunken Boat, author of seven books/chapbooks of poetry & co-editor of W.W. Norton & Co.’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond

Capacious and wild, offering itself energetically to contrasting continents and sensibilities, Sharma’s ambitious and honest New York collection offers a vivid tribute to Lorca, its presiding muse.
-Annie Finch, winner of Robert Fitzgerald Award and author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

A Blizzard In My Bones is worth the wait. The marriage of eastern angst and western jitters is beautifully realized, both in dreamscapes and in naturalistic description. The sexual suggestiveness is very powerful, as is the evocation of NY place time in all its gritty glory.
-Robert Scotto, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, CUNY

What we have here is the pan / promenade of an Annapurnian poet among the sidewalks of New York. With eastern wisdom, Yuyutsu Sharma dissects the modern city’s multifaceted body, and portrays colliding visions where ancestral meets cutting-edge. As a poet of refined lyricism and a flâneur of his age, Sharma revives the wandering poet’s myth and builds powerful images in a high-voltage and emotional language: “In my chest / I can hear a blizzard / carrying a litany / of ravaged whales, a crude commotion / of water / and winds in spacious streets…”
-Mariela Dreyfus, Peruvian poet, author of Pez

Yuyutsu Sharma’s Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems posits a pair of eyes up in their perch and looking down on the city of New York (and all of America) as they sweep across the pavement and finally settle on bit of muffin left on a table outside of a Starbuck’s. They are poems that look and venture deeply into the mannerisms of a young continent even as they insinuate themselves into a bustling scene. They suspect the “wandering lunatics,” “the basking brown seals,” and the “ceramic cells of Super gurus” stand as markers on this New Found Land, as the eyes behind the poems continue consuming everything on the move.
-Tim Kahl, poet, translator, Sacramento

In A Blizzard in My Bones, Yuyu Sharma reveals the divide that exists inside the professional traveler, who, though he must learn to be at home everywhere, finds he is no longer completely at home anywhere. Invited to ride alongside Sharma’s wanderer, we see from the inside out how he compares his worlds, one to another, trying to make sense of the new ones based on the sense of the old. When the gap remains, however, just wide enough to prevent easy passage back and forth, he is left to wrestle all his concurrent lives into one integrated, harmonious whole, perhaps at the cost of losing “the solemn silence of the sacred sounds
-Susan Keiser, Key West scriptwriter and traveler

Mariela Dreyfus, on Yuyutsu Sharma's New York Poems

What we have here is the pan / promenade of an Annapurnian poet among the sidewalks of New York. With eastern wisdom, Yuyutsu Sharma dissects the modern city’s multifaceted body, and portrays colliding visions where ancestral meets cutting-edge. As a poet of refined lyricism and a flâneur of his age, Sharma revives the wandering poet’s myth and builds powerful images in a high-voltage and emotional language: “In my chest / I can hear a blizzard / carrying a litany / of ravaged whales, a crude commotion / of water / and winds in spacious streets…”
Mariela Dreyfus, Peruvian poet, author of Pez

Susan Keiser on Yuyutsu Sharma's New York Poems

In A Blizzard in My Bones, Yuyu Sharma reveals the divide that exists inside the professional traveler, who, though he must learn be at home everywhere, finds he is no longer completely at home anywhere. Invited to ride alongside Sharma’s wanderer, we see from the inside out how he compares his worlds, one to another, trying to make sense of the new ones based on the sense of the old. When the gap remains, however, just wide enough to prevent easy passage back and forth, he is left to wrestle all his concurrent lives into one integrated, harmonious whole, perhaps at the cost of losing “the solemn silence of the sacred sounds

--Susan Keiser, Screenplay writer,  photographer and traveler

Tim Kahl on Yuyutsu Sharma's New York Poems

Yuyutsu Sharma's Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems posits a pair of eyes up in their perch and looking down on the city of New York (and all of America) as they sweep across the pavement and finally settle on bit of muffin left on a table outside of a Starbuck's. They are poems that look and venture deeply into the mannerisms of a young continent even as they insinuate themselves into a bustling scene. They suspect the "wandering lunatics," "the basking brown seals," and the "ceramic cells of Super gurus" stand as markers on this New Found Land, as the eyes behind the poems continue consuming everything on the move.

Tim Kahl, poet, translator