Wednesday, September 30, 2020

From Pratik's Current Issue: American poet, David Axelrod's new poem, "The Guru gives me advice"

 DAVID AXELROD

The Guru gives me advice

(For Dr. Bob Schenck, aka Swami AnandVeetkam)

 


Your laugh tickles my telephone

as you tell me, “There is no evil.

It’s all the same. Just how things

are.” I’m infuriated when some

bureaucrat says, “I understand,

but there’s nothing I can do.”

You cackle, “Perfect! Of course

there’s nothing anyone has to do.”

Someone stymies my plan. You

ask, “Why do you complain?

You picked this.” But I’m like

the man at the zoo who is told

that hyenas mate infrequently.”

Imagine that sad fact. You say,

“Broken plans just teach us that

our desires are just our vanity.”

I wonder why the hyena is laughing.

 

 

David Axelrod, Ph.D., is an alumnus of the University of Iowa Writing Workshop (MFA/Poetry) and a self-proclaimed “populist” poet whose mission is to promote the appreciation and writing of poetry. He is a three-time Fulbright grantee, and was the first “Fulbright Poet-in-Residence” in the China. He has shared the stage with such notables as Robert Bly and Allen Ginsberg, and has performed at the United Nations.



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Tuesday, September 29, 2020

From Pratik's Archives: Irish Poet Steven O’Brien's new poem, "Nimue"


STEVEN O’BRIEN

Nimue

 


Dark is the loom tide of the lake.

I have flickered through blind fathoms

To the clear still shallows

Of the water-fasten that holds

My country apart from yours.

 

I bring a wish blade made itself all of water

To the upper world

Hammered from deep cold stone water

In the springs of midnightwater

And the higher I reach the more it becomes.

 

I have nursed it for a moon time;

A silver fin etched on both sides

In a hoar frost tongue of blue verglas -

‘Take Me Up’ it says and ‘Cast Me Away.’

 

Skim-ice along its edges clave

The pitch of the currents  as I rose.

Now it shears the surface of the pool

That was unbroken by rain.

 

This man approaching  

Has walked a holloway of alder and willow.

His face eddies like a lily,

Wary eyed, as if he is questioning his journey,

This proffered treasure.

 

Well might he hesitate,

As I hang among the trout glades

With the washed steel singing above me,

Its point biting my palm.

 

For all his life will be a racing torrent

Like a mountain beck in the spring thaw.

 

When first he draws this sword

It will shriek like an eagle

And dazzle his enemies.

It will also bind him and he will forever 

Be a man wading the marches

Between waking and dreaming.

This is the gift.

 

Yet now

It is enough

To see how the hairs on his arm move

As he reaches to take the hilt.

And then I sink.

 

Steven O’Brien is a poet, novelist and mythographer. He has been editor of The London Magazine since 2009. He leads the MA and PhD programmes in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth. He is also a Trustee of the Vatican Patrons of the Arts.


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Sunday, September 27, 2020

HIGHLIGHT from Pratik's Current Issue:American Poet Charles Bernstein's Two New Poems

  

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Two Poems

 


1.

because they

see my scraggly

beard, my crooked

hat, and the dark

shine from my

glasses, they say

I am a poet

 

 

after Leon de Greiff

(Medellin subway)

 

 

2.

After Stephen Ratcliffe

 

Horizon line shimmers

At edge of light

Umbra calls echo

 

            Branch’s horizontal intrusion

            Or is it claw?

 

            Not even quite white or blue

            Turquoise smudge winks

 

Fading pink fingers of mist

Evanescent liquid dissolving

Moment of change

 

Recipient of the Bollingen Prize from Yale University,  Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He  is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Eor Language poets. His selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 

 


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Saturday, September 26, 2020

Submissions Open for New Writing from South Asia

 

Submissions open for New Writing from South Asia

Pratik Magazine invites submission of New Writing from South Asia, especially Poetry and short fiction/non-fiction of the subcontinent. The work will be published in the 2021 issues of the magazine.

The very next issue of Pratik will have special focus on the Nepalese writers writing in English.

The submissions are free, please send your poems (Not more than five poems) and a short story written in English or translated into English only.

Please send  your work as one Word Document to:

pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com

The deadline for general submission is 15 December, 2020.

The deadline for Nepalese writers based in Nepal or elsewhere is 7 October, 2020.

Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing

Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma

White Lotus Book Shop,

Hanumansthan, Kupondole,

Kathmandu Nepal

Phone:5520248, 9803171925

whitelotusbookshop@gmail.com





 

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Thursday, September 24, 2020

Pratik Current Issue HIGHLIGHT: American poet, SYDNEY LEA's new poem, "Tricky Road at Night"

 

SYDNEY LEA

Tricky Road at Night



My radio’s crackle sounds

like judgment on me for driving

mud roads in this stiff rain. 

As your own life changes, so

must your life insurance change,

some huckster’s voice insists.

I thump the tuner and hear

–from who knows where?– the gravel

rant of a Gospel zealot:

Tell me, brothers and sisters,

ain’t you a long ways from home?

Amens resound. I’m moved,

a bit strangely.

                             My prospect’s blurred

by  mist and steamed-up glass.

My life could be snipped like a thread.

Young spring, ice still in the ditches

on the old McHenry Turnpike,

once a thoroughfare

as busy as any here.

I drop into Cummings Hollow.

In mind, the word protracts

itself into echo. Hollow. 

How sinners must feel when they change

their road! I imagine the tears.

As a college kid, I camped

nearby.

                             Oh, aroma of liquor!

Oh, love and promise: the girl,

the flagon of rotgut wine!

She was sweet, the young woman, the drink

seemed endless, and late at night,

our minuscule tent gone calm,

I projected a vibrant future:

placidity and excitement

in welcome alternation.                       

Like elixir, those youthful thoughts.

Now I’m here in an actual future.

My headlights sweep an old dump,

where a gutted, antique Victrola

looks ready

                             to offer up song;

a spavined Buick juts

over the shoulder, as if

it might suddenly take to the highway;

rain-slicked bottles wink

at my creeping pickup’s headlights;

dead shovels lie next to dead barrels;

a rat scats hole to hole.

I can even make out some shears,

gleaming, open-jawed.

They seem to me metaphors–

for something. I’ve driven through

a thousand thousand lives,

                             not one of them insured.

 

 


Sydney Lea is a former poet laureate of Vermont. Founder and longtime editor of New England Review, Lea has published thirteen volumes of poetry (most recently Here, Four Way Books, 2019), a novel, five collections of personal essays, and three critical books. He lately collaborated on a book of essays with former poet laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, and will soon present The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic narrative poem with  James Kochalka, Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate. He and his successor as state poet, Chard de Niord, co-edited the authoritative anthology of Vermont poets, Roads Taken.



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PRATIK HIGHLIGHT: Vermont’s poet laureate, Chard deNiord's new poem, "Tenkwatawa" in the Current issue

 

Chard DeNiord

Tenkwatawa



I sit all day on the lawn in front of the mountains

remembering one thing after the other

in no particular order, so that when I’m asked

to recall something in particular, like the name

of Tecumseh’s brother, I am at a loss, staring at the haze

on the ridge for clues, giving the impression

that I’m ignoring my inquisitors and have lost my mind.

I am waiting for a burning wheel to descend

from the sky to cure my memory with fire.

I’m waiting for names to fly down in the form

of birds I thought were extinct but live

in my hair without my knowing it, nesting

              there like the hat I wear with long dark wings.

 

 

 

Vermont’s poet laureate, Chard deNiord is author of six books of poetry, including In My Unknowing, Interstate, The Double Truth  and Night Mowing (All from University of Pittsburgh Press). He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets, I Would Lie To You If I Could and Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Song. A professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust, deNiord lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz. 





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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Pratik's Fall 2020 Issue Highlight: American poet, Major Jackson's "You, Reader"

 MAJOR JACKSON

You, Reader

 


So often I dream of the secrets of satellites

and so often I want the moose to step

from the shadows and reveal his transgressions,

and so often I come to her body

as though she were Lookout Mountain,

but give me a farmer’s market to park my martyred masks

and I will name all the dirt roads that dead-end

at the cubist sculpture called My Infinity,

for I no longer light bonfires in the city of adulterers

and no longer smudge the cheeks of debutantes

hurriedly floating across the high fruit of night,

and yes, I know there is only one notable death in any small town

and that is the pig-farmer, but listen, at all times

the proud rivers mourn my absence, especially

when, like a full moon, you, reader, hidden behind a spray

of night-blooming, drift in and out of scattered clouds

above lighthouses producing their artificial calm,

just to sweep a chalk of light over distant waters.

 

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming volume The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the poetry editor of Best American Poetry 2019. He serves as poetry editor of The Harvard Review.

 



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Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Highlights from Pratik's Current Issue: New Poems by Flaminia Cruciani & Zairo Ferrante

 

Flaminia Cruciani





We are not yet ourselves

we continue to become ourselves every day

and when we are finished we die.

Death is therefore a form of perfection.

 

Translated from the Italian by Stephen Greco

 

Flaminia Cruciani is an archeologist and Near East scholar who has worked in prehistoric Ebla, Syria, and written a remarkable book about her experiences, Lezioni d’immortalità (Lessons of Immortality), in which she also writes compassionately about the Syrian villagers she meets. She lives in Rome.

 


Zairo Ferrante



TRAVELING THOUGH SILENCE

Only driven by the wind

I hear how it sings

and by its charm

find myself in the sun.

It’s morning!

 

Translated from the Italian by Margaret Saine

 

Zairo Ferrante is director of radiology at a hospital in Venice, Italy. He has founded the successful experimental poetry movement Din-Animismo, a portmanteau of Dynamism and Animism, where he is the principal editor.

 


Margaret Saine
was born in Germany and lives in California. She has taught French and Hispanic literatures and writes in five languages, also translating other poets between these languages. Her books of poetry in English are Bodyscapes, Words of Art, Lit Angels, Gardens of the Earth and A Book of Travel. Saine has also published four poetry books and a childhood memoir in Germany.





 

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Sunday, September 6, 2020

Pratik's Current Issue Highlight: Legendary Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal's "What a shitty trip"

ERNESTO CARDENAL 

What a shitty trip

Translated  from the Spanish by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt




That unexpected telephone call from Managua

to the last Antilles island—

“Ernesto, Laureano’s dead.”

On the flight — Trinidad-Barbados-Jamaica-Havana-Managua —

looking at sea and more sea, I could think of nothing else.

Since we’re born to die

the best way is for the Revolution

like you did.

Of course it would have been better if you’d never died

so long as your wife and your kids and your friends and

everyone in the world

never died.

When I baptized him, 20 years old, in Solentiname

because he wanted to leave his insular

protestantism for our revolutionary christianity

he didn’t want a godfather or a godmother —

the entire campesino youth club were his godfather and godmother.

Above all his obsession with the Revolution.

Fascinated by marxism but never wanted to read Marx.

Very intelligent but never wanted to form an intellect.

The most foul-mouthed person I ever knew,

but the one who said “bad words” most purely.

One time, commenting on the Gospel at mass:

“Those wise men sure fucked it up, going to Herod’s first.”

Or, on the Holy Trinity (summing it all up):

“Those three assholes are just one asshole!”

The night he confessed to me facing the calm waters of the lake,

“I don’t believe in God or any of that shit —

Well I do believe in God only for me God is people.”

But he always wanted to be my altar boy.

No one could take that office away from him.

His most frequent expression: kiss my ass.

Laureano my son and my brother

son sweet and headstrong

like every son with his father —

and what’s more since I was not your real father

you were more my brother than anything,

my brother much younger in years,

but above all my compañero —

you like that word better, don’t you?

— the one you loved most after Revolución.

Compañero sub-comandante Laureano,

Chief of the Frontier Guards,

I say it with you: death can kiss our ass.

I did not want to write this poem.

But you would say to me in the poetic language you spoke in those masses,

— translated later into so many languages, even Japanese

(that must have cost them!) —

“Poet bastard, tell those fucked-over compañeros of mine in Solentiname

the counterrevolutionary sons of great bitches killed me

but death can kiss my ass.”

Like that “tell your mother to surrender” of Leonel’s.

You were always telling me you couldn’t wait to be a guerilla. And I:

 “With your lack of discipline, up there they’ll execute you.”

Until your dream came true in the assault on San Carlos.

“Now we’re gonna fuck those motherfuckers.”

The bullets the Guardias shot at you. And you telling it later: “Thwat! 

Thwat! Thwat! — that time, I thought I was dead!”

Brawler. Party-lover. Womanizer.

Bursting with life but never fearing death.

Not long before he died he told me quietly in Managua,

“Up there it’s crazy. I could be killed any day in an ambush.”

You have not stopped being:

You have always been

and ever shall be

(not only in this

but in all universes.)

But sure

you only lived

thought

loved

once.

And now you’re dead.

Shall we say existence is like earth, or like stone,

which is the same, “stone endures because it feels nothing.”

But no, nothing stone endures, if you’re alive to feeling there

beyond the speed of light

beyond the space which is time

completely conscious,

within the most vital

consciousness

of all existence.

LAUREANO MAIRENA, PRESENTE!

Fucking airplane, delayed at every stop.

Deepest night already, over the ocean. I could not stop thinking...

I would like to die like you, brother Laureano.

And send word from what we call heaven,

“Fucked-over brothers of mine in Solentiname, death can kiss my ass.”



Yuyutsu Sharma with Ernesto Cardenal at Nicaragua International Poetry Festival, Managua





Ernesto Cardenal
(1925-2020) was a Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art and religious community in the Solentiname Islands of Lake Nicaragua, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). He was Nicaragua’s minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. He was prohibited from administering the sacraments in 1984 by Pope John Paul II, but rehabilitated by Pope Francis in 2019. He published a score of volumes of poetry, was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2005, and was honored with many awards, including the Ibero-American Poetry Prize Pablo Neruda (2009), the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class (2010), the Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry (2012), and the Mario Benedetti International Award (2018).  New York based, 



Christopher Hirschmann Brandt is a writer and political activist.  Also a translator, theatre worker, carpenter, furniture designer. He teaches poetry and Peace and Justice at Fordham University. His translations of Latin American poetry and fiction have been published by The New Yorker, Seven Stories Press, U California Berkeley, and several US journals.
 

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt  





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