refused were the best
like the poems
on the Lake I did not write.
–“Best Poems’’, Yuyutsu Sharma
In the end of June as our internationally acclaimed poet Yuyutsu Sharma flew to London to participate as Guest Poet at Poetry Parnassus to celebrate London Olympics 2012, we too celebrated the cause of poetry and the attention the Himalayan poetry will get with celebrated poet’s historic visit.
This seems like the culmination of Yuyutsu’s decade-long travels to the Western world to spread the fragrance of the Himalayas and the beautiful people living on the top of the world.
In our parts of the world, poets are often considered traveling prophets and wandering bards. But what Yuyutsu has done remains unprecedented.
I’ve known him since 2005 and from what I remember he’s been traveling zealously and with unchallenged devotion to the Muse, spreading the verses oozing from the Himalayas. It’s fascinating to observe that his Himalayan poetry has gained a stronghold not only in Nepal but also in Europe and the United States.
Unlike Western mountaineers who always seem determined to conquer the Himalayas, Yuyutsu worships the mountains and channels emotions and feelings in the verses he composes during his travels to the rough Himalayan terrains. But again, he is not just a worshipper of the Himalayas composing poems on the rugged splendor of the high mountains in his drawing room but an actual trekker. And his treks to various places of Nepal have resulted into splendid mountainous poetry that has stunned the world.
“’The blinding snows of the Annapurnas ridge’ inspire a poetry that confronts natural magnificence with exuberant humanity,” writes distinguished British poet, Carol Rumens. “Yuyutsu R D Sharma’s generous vision embraces not only the landscape and its people but the lesser fauna, like the pigeons that speak ‘a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use’ and the mules on the Tibetan salt route, exhausted and bow-legged from hauling ‘cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,/ solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans…’ These vividly colored, muscular and energetic poems have an atmosphere of freshness, as though the snow itself had rinsed and brightened them. Like the ‘waterfall beds that/ smelled of the birth of fresh fish’, they have the tangy, dust-free odor of language born of lived experience.”
On reading his works, one discerns the passionate intensity of the Himalayan landscape and lives of the people struggling with it. As a mountaineer goes through the physical turmoil to attain private glory, a poet endures hardships of the people living for bare survival there. This agony is truly reflected in the Yuyutsu’s marvelous works.
In one of his columns in the Himalayan Times, Yuyutsu describes how at the Heathrow Terminal, London, the officer looked at his passport and asked, “What brings you to London, Sir?” Yuyutsu promptly explained that he was there to launch his book of poems and photographs, Nepal Trilogy, published in collaboration with distinguished German Photographer, Andreas Stimm. After a speedy look at the book, the officer replied, “Wow! You are lucky to be in the Himalayas and have this wonderful vocation of writing on world’s highest mountains. Look at me,” he laughed stamping the passport, “I am stuck here for a lifetime!” The incident made me believe in the vocation of a traveling poet as most sublime in the world.
Before taking to the road, Yuyutsu used to teach at Tribhuvan University. Though he abruptly left his teaching position and started traveling to the Annapurna region to seek inspiration, it was only in 2005 his work devoted to the region was published asThe Lake Fewa and a Horse. Later in 2008, Annapurna Poems, Selected and New appeared. Also during his visit to Frankfurt in 2004, he met famous German photographer, Andreas Stimm and his collaboration with Stimm resulted in three books of picture/poetry book in black and white, has been collected in a 900 page book in three volumes, entitled, Nepal Trilogy: Photographs and Poetry on Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de, Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010).
It’s rewarding to know that over the past decade Yuyutsu has been invited the world over to hold a workshop in creative writing at several universities including Queen’s University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University, California. He was visiting poet/Professor at New York University, New York this spring.
Someone kissed my dark eyes
in sleep as she laid her silvery head
on my shoulder, a book in her hand –
midsummer night’s dream.
Someone left warmth
of a Sun from her lungs,
a warm mouth, zaika of a scented tongue,
Dutch, Deutsch, English. French.
Someone offered a bottle of wine,
a cigarette, twig of cannabis,
pod of a familiar fragrance
aroma of a forgotten paradise,
whiff of wet warmth of a burning bush.
Someone left a pen
on the palpable table of my travels
I leaned
to pick it up
and place it
in the black bag of my memory.
‘’Someone Left a Pen for me’’, Space Cake, Amsterdam
Strength and fervor that poet Yuyutsu has in store are truly amazing. The passion and spirit embodied in his poetry are unique, surpassing national and geographical boundaries. Interestingly, the poet’s father was a saint and he himself was a shaman in his early years. He describes this experience as not so pleasant but later in the life transformed the out-of-body experience into poetry writing. Perhaps his involvement in Nepalese literary circles equipped him to deal with strenuous and critical poetry readings abroad. If reading poetry on the pages of his book takes you to the high Himalayan canyons, listening to him read his work in public is also a sublime thrill.
Unlike Nepal, Poetry readings have the significant position in the contemporary Western world. True poetry or say real poetry is hard to find in Nepal. One may find academics, or party-owned, state-owned poets. But real poets are hard to find. The poets writing in English are confined to the set boundaries, which in return skews poetry for bad. I believe this is why Yuyutsu has crafted himself as a touring poet, instead of being a poet of some amateur institutions.
Before leaving for the US, he described to me the challenges of a touring poet. It includes fun, toil and hardships, not to exclude the emotional pain of living away from home that comes along. As this came from an experienced poet, I remembered his passionate reading I attended a couple of years ago at London’s Poetry Cafe.
Yuyutsu has been traveling in the US since March. His noteworthy appearances include a reading at New York University with Pulitzer-prize winner and current US Poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, an NYU Bookstore reading with American poet David Austell, a reading at William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative of Southern Bergen County, New Jersey and a reading from his latest book Milarepa’s Bones, Helambu, at JujoMukti Tea Lounge, New York. He also toured Florida and read at Cinematique, Daytona Bay and later had several readings in Key West. Currently, he is London, joining scores of poets from across the world to attend biggest poetry festival ever, Poetry Parnassus, at South Bank Centre.
“Formed by 20th century South Asian and North American poetry movements,” discerns Dr. Christoph Emmrich, of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism at the University of Toronto, “and himself a verbal renewer of his country’s literature, Yuyutsu indefatigably writes along rivers and paths, mountains, valleys and villages, verse after verse…”
Due to his tireless service to the Muse, and his readings across far-flung continents, Yuyutsu has earned a high Himalayan stature in the world of world poetry:
Lost a T- shirt
near a crystal waterfall
a notebook
with names of birds and shamans of the canyons
finches, larks and red billed coughs
swifts, lammergeiers, griffins and redstarts
my rainbow colored umbrella
with flowers and million butterflies trapped in it…
lost fears
of finding right words
perfect dreams,
faultless partners along
narrow cliffside tracts
skirting utter horror of highest precipices
lost my unease
along with my troubled heart
to the glaciers
of Annapurnas…
“Lost in the Annapurnas”, Milarepa’s Bones, Helambu
