Sydney Lea
Chard deNiord
David Huddle
Tony Whedon
Major
Jackson
Cleopatra Mathis
Joan Aleshire
Kerrin McCadden
Karin Gottshall
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Sunday, June 30, 2019
From Pratik Magazine's Winter Issue: A Poem by Russian Poet, Dmitry Legeza
Gloria Mundi by Dmitry Legeza
It’s good to live in a little country,
To publish books on the state budget,
To receive awards presented personally by the Governor General,
or even the Prime Minister.
Give me that award, Mr. Governor General!
I write about butterflies and tulips,
When I could be writing, after all, about the hungry and the dead,
About prisons, or what a great idea it would be to make someone else Governor General.
Everything’s different in a big country:
You could write about butterflies and tulips, like Poet X,
Or about prisons and corpses, like Poet Y.
But there’s also Poet Z,
Who ripped his own head off
Marched for four hours, head in hand, around the town square,
And then nailed it over the door
Of you can guess whose residence.
The head evened opened its mouth
It probably declaimed poems in a whisper.
And the award goes to Poet Z,
Along with the silk ribbon of the Order of the something or other.
All Hail the Heroes!
Translated from the Russian by Paul Smith
Dmitry Legeza is a member of the organizing committee of the St. Petersburg Bridges international poetry festival. Dmitry’s poems have been published in poetry magazines in the US, Denmark, Israel, Columbia, Italy, Poland, France, as well as in Russian magazines and poetry collections.
Available at Amazon
Monday, June 24, 2019
Edmund Miller reviews American Poet Diane Frank's Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place: A Journey though the Nepal Himalayas
Book Review
EDMUND MILLER
A work of recovery of the lost Nepal,
thrust back into the past by revolution and earthquake
The first thing that one notices about Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place: A Journey though the Nepal Himalayas is the beautiful earth-tone color photography (photographs are primarily by the author). This is a work of recovery of the lost Nepal, thrust back into the past by revolution and earthquake. While one expects majestic scenery in Nepal, despite the recent disasters, the interesting thing is how much the beauty of the country comes through in pictures of people and of places, that is to say, of ordinary people and things of the smaller rather than the monumental artifacts often highlighted to illustrate the grandeur of imperial civilizations past. These photographs bring to life subdued reality, not spectacle.
And yet the text is equal to the visual. An indefatigable epistolary, Diane Frank has saved and here publishes letters she wrote to friends before the loss of Nepal’s past. To Bret from Kathmandu, she writes reminding him that he told her to “Pay attention to every moment.” She recognizes the yantra symbol of wisdom painted all over school buildings as the Star of David. She picks up bits of language and chooses to observe local customs. As she does, she is hypnotized by the eyes of the children who sell trinkets in the streets to help their families live.
While climbing, she explains how Nepalese children help her group pass around water buffaloes on a high trail, mystified that the visitors seem to come from a place without mountains or rules of the road for a mountain pass. She learns how to survive a landslide. As she climbs higher, she notices that even the Sherpas begin to wear hiking boots. The Tantric gods pull her to “sacred places deep inside.” And when she must begin the climb down, she sums up this section of the book with a poem, finding herself moving up, not down:
Now we are climbing in the dark,
Straight up to the moon.
A “Pilgrimage to Buddhist Temples and Villages in the Solu Khumbu” follows as the second half of the book. Missing everything about the Himalayas in the flatness of Iowa, she takes to visiting a city nearby where she can hike up and down entry steps. Her “memories don’t follow the map anymore.” Dreaming herself back in the mountains reveals not the bigness but individual sensual moments of scent and colors and visual shards.
Returning to Kathmandu, she is invited to catch a glimpse of the Kumari, a goddess reincarnated as a beautiful young girl. She catches a glimpse of the child goddess at a window “blooming like a marigold” and discovers that no man will marry her because she is too powerful. Frank learns to walk the mountains unaided again, “trusting the future,” finding a “sacred place where every memory is a white rose.”
She acknowledges her first sight of Mt. Everest as the closest she has ever gotten to heaven. She dreams of her Buddhist friend, and her vision is of all the simple things of life. She opens her eyes after whispered secrets and finds herself “under the pull of the full moon.” A visit to the Everest View Outhouse finds it open on one side to the mountain. A visit to a tea house finds prayer flags waving everywhere to celebrate the sacredness of the place. Sacred and profane, day and night, awake and asleep, the place is a world apart.
After this illumination, Part II of the book turns back to letter format. She tells David of absorbing the spirit of the place in dreams, which dissolve “before breakfast.” Frank describes the altar in the lama’s house for John, writing by kerosene lantern. Afterwards, sleeping in a world “dark and silent,” she is awakened by an avalanche “full of demons” on a neighboring mountain. “Nepal lets you know nature is much more powerful than you are.”
About to leave Nepal by plane, Frank almost turns into a tourist, trying to buy two painted tankas, but the artist will not sell because he thinks she is haggling and these works are blessed by monks, not to be enjoyed as mere art. But when she tells the artist that she is building a Buddhist shrine in her home, he relents. In her last moments of this second trip, she listens to a fortune teller advise her friend:
“The peace has been inviting you.
Now you have to invite the peace.”
NAMASTE!
Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place
(Nirala, New Delhi, 2018)
ISBN81-8250095-8. Hardcover
Stories, poems and 55 color photographs $49
EDMUND MILLER
A work of recovery of the lost Nepal,
thrust back into the past by revolution and earthquake
The first thing that one notices about Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place: A Journey though the Nepal Himalayas is the beautiful earth-tone color photography (photographs are primarily by the author). This is a work of recovery of the lost Nepal, thrust back into the past by revolution and earthquake. While one expects majestic scenery in Nepal, despite the recent disasters, the interesting thing is how much the beauty of the country comes through in pictures of people and of places, that is to say, of ordinary people and things of the smaller rather than the monumental artifacts often highlighted to illustrate the grandeur of imperial civilizations past. These photographs bring to life subdued reality, not spectacle.
And yet the text is equal to the visual. An indefatigable epistolary, Diane Frank has saved and here publishes letters she wrote to friends before the loss of Nepal’s past. To Bret from Kathmandu, she writes reminding him that he told her to “Pay attention to every moment.” She recognizes the yantra symbol of wisdom painted all over school buildings as the Star of David. She picks up bits of language and chooses to observe local customs. As she does, she is hypnotized by the eyes of the children who sell trinkets in the streets to help their families live.
While climbing, she explains how Nepalese children help her group pass around water buffaloes on a high trail, mystified that the visitors seem to come from a place without mountains or rules of the road for a mountain pass. She learns how to survive a landslide. As she climbs higher, she notices that even the Sherpas begin to wear hiking boots. The Tantric gods pull her to “sacred places deep inside.” And when she must begin the climb down, she sums up this section of the book with a poem, finding herself moving up, not down:
Now we are climbing in the dark,
Straight up to the moon.
A “Pilgrimage to Buddhist Temples and Villages in the Solu Khumbu” follows as the second half of the book. Missing everything about the Himalayas in the flatness of Iowa, she takes to visiting a city nearby where she can hike up and down entry steps. Her “memories don’t follow the map anymore.” Dreaming herself back in the mountains reveals not the bigness but individual sensual moments of scent and colors and visual shards.
She acknowledges her first sight of Mt. Everest as the closest she has ever gotten to heaven. She dreams of her Buddhist friend, and her vision is of all the simple things of life. She opens her eyes after whispered secrets and finds herself “under the pull of the full moon.” A visit to the Everest View Outhouse finds it open on one side to the mountain. A visit to a tea house finds prayer flags waving everywhere to celebrate the sacredness of the place. Sacred and profane, day and night, awake and asleep, the place is a world apart.
After this illumination, Part II of the book turns back to letter format. She tells David of absorbing the spirit of the place in dreams, which dissolve “before breakfast.” Frank describes the altar in the lama’s house for John, writing by kerosene lantern. Afterwards, sleeping in a world “dark and silent,” she is awakened by an avalanche “full of demons” on a neighboring mountain. “Nepal lets you know nature is much more powerful than you are.”
About to leave Nepal by plane, Frank almost turns into a tourist, trying to buy two painted tankas, but the artist will not sell because he thinks she is haggling and these works are blessed by monks, not to be enjoyed as mere art. But when she tells the artist that she is building a Buddhist shrine in her home, he relents. In her last moments of this second trip, she listens to a fortune teller advise her friend:
“The peace has been inviting you.
Now you have to invite the peace.”
NAMASTE!
Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place
(Nirala, New Delhi, 2018)
ISBN81-8250095-8. Hardcover
Stories, poems and 55 color photographs $49
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Sunday, May 5, 2019
HAIG CHAHINIAN reviews celebrated American writing professor and memoirist Susan Shapiro's new book, "The Byline Bible"
Book Review by HAIG CHAHINIAN
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class.
For twenty-five years Susan Shapiro has been teaching students how to write soulful and successful essays, opinion and humor pieces, and book reviews. Her students at the New School, New York University, Temple, and Harvard have been published in international newspapers, magazines and literary journals. Using her “Instant Gratification Takes Too Long” method, they aim to “write and publish a great piece by the end of class.” More than 25,000 have followed her advice, landing work everywhere from The New Yorker to The Nation to The Sun.
Not only does Shapiro develop her students’ ear for writing lyrically, she helps them create work publishable in the marketplace. In the last decade, her protégés have authored 150 books. Zack McDermott’s acclaimed Little Brown memoir Gorilla and The Bird—in which Shapiro makes a cameo as an inspirational writing teacher—was optioned for a television mini-series. Aspen Matis dedicated her HarperCollins memoir Girl in the Woods to her teacher. Several—including Cat Marnell’s addiction chronicle How to Murder Your Life and Renee Watson’s novel Piecing Me Together—have landed on bestseller lists. One former pupil has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Along with being an award-winning teacher and mentor, Shapiro is a bestselling author. In her thirteenth title, The Byline Bible, she’s gathered all her wisdom in a poetic, inspiring guide that teaches the reader how to write and publish creative non-fiction pieces.
Full disclosure: Seven years ago when I told a friend I wanted someday to get my writing published, he suggested I take Shapiro’s class. Her New School University seminar was already full, so I waited months to register for her 5-week private workshop. Skeptical, I doubted she could live up to the hype. But I was taken in by her story of getting her MFA in poetry, struggling through years of rejection finally to see her work in print. Shapiro stressed the importance of reading what you want to write, taking criticism, and doing multiple revisions. I devoured the course packet, thick with her students’ successful publications. To date my only byline had been a poem in The Bangles fan club newsletter. “The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice,” she told us. “So write about your obsessions.” Her first assignment was to draft three pages on our most humiliating moment.
As a gay father, I revealed my rage when a toddler on the playground told me my daughter had five dads instead of two. I published it in Salon. Shapiro’s method worked. Taking her class again, I wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about the cruelties of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for same-sex parents. Since then, with Shapiro’s expert critique, my work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine and The Washington Post.
They say you’re supposed to teach the class you want to take and write the book you want to read. Shapiro injects humor on every page, including a section on “Cover Letters Editors Never Finished Reading” and “How Not to Deal with Rejection.” Her quick wit and self-deprecating style belie the massive feat she’s accomplished: taking the seemingly impenetrable newspaper, magazine, online and book worlds and demystifying the publication process.
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class. She details the same short nonfiction assignments given to her pupils. As in her course packet, she includes dozens of pieces based on her assignments that students published. Like a virtual teacher, she provides emotional encouragement, too. “No never means no,” she writes. “It means keep revising and try again.”
The Byline Bible
by Susan Shapiro
Writer’s Digest Books
2018, 268 pages, $19.99
Haig Chahinian is an executive coach and writer in New York City. He’s currently working on a memoir.
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class.
Not only does Shapiro develop her students’ ear for writing lyrically, she helps them create work publishable in the marketplace. In the last decade, her protégés have authored 150 books. Zack McDermott’s acclaimed Little Brown memoir Gorilla and The Bird—in which Shapiro makes a cameo as an inspirational writing teacher—was optioned for a television mini-series. Aspen Matis dedicated her HarperCollins memoir Girl in the Woods to her teacher. Several—including Cat Marnell’s addiction chronicle How to Murder Your Life and Renee Watson’s novel Piecing Me Together—have landed on bestseller lists. One former pupil has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Along with being an award-winning teacher and mentor, Shapiro is a bestselling author. In her thirteenth title, The Byline Bible, she’s gathered all her wisdom in a poetic, inspiring guide that teaches the reader how to write and publish creative non-fiction pieces.
Full disclosure: Seven years ago when I told a friend I wanted someday to get my writing published, he suggested I take Shapiro’s class. Her New School University seminar was already full, so I waited months to register for her 5-week private workshop. Skeptical, I doubted she could live up to the hype. But I was taken in by her story of getting her MFA in poetry, struggling through years of rejection finally to see her work in print. Shapiro stressed the importance of reading what you want to write, taking criticism, and doing multiple revisions. I devoured the course packet, thick with her students’ successful publications. To date my only byline had been a poem in The Bangles fan club newsletter. “The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice,” she told us. “So write about your obsessions.” Her first assignment was to draft three pages on our most humiliating moment.
As a gay father, I revealed my rage when a toddler on the playground told me my daughter had five dads instead of two. I published it in Salon. Shapiro’s method worked. Taking her class again, I wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about the cruelties of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for same-sex parents. Since then, with Shapiro’s expert critique, my work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, O The Oprah Magazine and The Washington Post.
They say you’re supposed to teach the class you want to take and write the book you want to read. Shapiro injects humor on every page, including a section on “Cover Letters Editors Never Finished Reading” and “How Not to Deal with Rejection.” Her quick wit and self-deprecating style belie the massive feat she’s accomplished: taking the seemingly impenetrable newspaper, magazine, online and book worlds and demystifying the publication process.
The Byline Bible reads like taking Shapiro’s class. She details the same short nonfiction assignments given to her pupils. As in her course packet, she includes dozens of pieces based on her assignments that students published. Like a virtual teacher, she provides emotional encouragement, too. “No never means no,” she writes. “It means keep revising and try again.”
The Byline Bible
by Susan Shapiro
Writer’s Digest Books
2018, 268 pages, $19.99
Haig Chahinian is an executive coach and writer in New York City. He’s currently working on a memoir.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Russian Poetry Today : A Contemporary Sampler By A. DMITRIJANOV -- AN EXCERPT
An EXCERPT from the Cover Story of Pratik’s Current Issue
Established tradition breaks Russian literature down into clearly demarcated periods. The first of these to gain international prominence was the so-called Golden Age, referring to the first third of the nineteenth century. Golden Age poetry was dominated by syllabic-accentual verse, with relatively strict and well-established patterns of rhyme as well as meter. In the first third of twentieth century, the so-called Silver Age, however, those poetic forms began to break down and the formal range available to Russian poets was correspondingly vastly expanded.
Now, in the early stages of the twenty-first century, no particular formal requirements are expected of a poetic act. The result is a blinding variety of literary techniques and devices makes the poetic space multidimensional and colorful. This is very much the case in European and world poetry today, except that in the West, this situation is the result of long-term evolution. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, formal diversity exploded upon the scene as Russian poetry raced at lightning speed through its own version of a century of literary history. As experienced from within, it was a genuine and stunning revolution.
This unusual historical arc has led to a unique feature of Russian poetry today – alongside the poetry we recognize as contemporary, there is a large and active school of poets continuing to write in metrically regular rhymed verse, in styles reminiscent of the early twentieth or even nineteenth century. Given this broad diversity, what stand out are individual, unique, and powerful individual authors’ styles (Russian literary criticism has a term for these – they are called idiostyles).
There has always been a tension in Russian poetry between tradition and innovation: on the one hand, those tensions arise from forces at work in the literatures of other (generally European) countries, which have tended to erode established Russian poetic traditions; on the other, they frequently arise from within, the impact of historically crucial poetic idiostyles – think of Pushkin, Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, Prigov and Dragomoshchenko, to name just a few.
The 70s-80s of XX century were also characterized by powerful tensions, of which the friction between “official” Soviet poetry and the swiftly developing underground poetry is only the most obvious source. Many new trends and tendencies appeared in this period: conceptualism (in particular, a group called the Moscow Conceptualists), for instance, poked fun at Soviet cliché and inherited views of art and culture; metarealism expanded the idea of a metaphor, and drawing new realities from that linguistic practice; and so forth. Each generation absorbed the previous experiences, but at the same time denied past achievements, thus creating a great number of “electrical discharges” inside the language. Today, as poet and critic Lev Oborin justly notes, “numerous options are possible – there is no mainstream in the developing context [of Russian verse], a state of affairs whose roots go back to the modernist splintering of poetic movements. Even now the scene continues to veer towards still greater individualization.”
Continued...
For Full Story Read Winter Issue of Pratik..
Winter Issue of Pratik available in North America on
Amazon.com, Special focus Contemporary Russian and French Poetry...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QBBYSM7?ref=myi_title_dp
Winter Issue now on Amazon India!
https://www.amazon.in/dp/B07QBBYSM7?ref=myi_title_dp
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Winter Issue of Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing released: Special Focus Contemporary Russian and French Poetry
The current issue has special focus on Contemporary Russian
and French Poetry. It features new work by fourteen Russian Poets including
Dmitry Grigoriev, Alla Gorbunova, Olga Anikina Andrei Polonsky, Danila Davydov,
John William Narins, Anastasia Romanova, Dmitry Legeza, Igor Karaulov. Valerii
Zemskikh, Dina Gatina, Maya-Marina Sheremeteva, Irina Evsa and Serge Tashevsky. An essay “Russian Poetry Today: A Contemporary Sampler” by A.
DMITRIJANOV has been included as a prelude to the Russian Section.
The Winter Issue also presents Eleven French poets including Michel Bulteau , Gabriel Arnou Laujeac, Maram
Al-Masri, Hélène Cardona, Véronique Joyaux, Marie-Claude Deudon, Jean-Claude Tardif, Pierre Rosin, Nicole Barrière, Claire Paulian, Cirène
Gayraud and Jacques Jouet. It also has
special France related poems by Four American poets namely, Willis Barnstone, David Austell, Robin Metz,
and Rebecca Morrison
Plus it has new work of non-fiction American Authors, Susan Shapiro and Elizabeth Enslin and a
short story by leading Hindi writer, Pankaj Bisht
The artist of the Issue is Lithuanian sculptor and painter,
Ruta Jusionytė.
In addition, new work by Tim Kahl, Amrendra Khatua, Usha Akella, Shailendra Sakar. Chuck Joy and Raghubir Sharma has been showcased. Besides, Haig Chahinian’s review of Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, George Wallace’s review of All Vows: New & Selected Poems By David B Axelrod, Edmound Miller’s review of Diane Frank's Letters from Sacred Mountain Place and Jeff’s Deck review Dan Szczesny’s The White Mountain are the highlights of the Issue. Stephanie Laterza Review Essay focused on Voices Carry (Shearsman Books, 2017) by Mervyn Taylor, Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2017) by Susana H. Case, and Out From Calaboose (Nirala, New Delhi, 2017) by Karen Corinne Herceg has also been included in the Winter Issue of Pratik.
In addition, new work by Tim Kahl, Amrendra Khatua, Usha Akella, Shailendra Sakar. Chuck Joy and Raghubir Sharma has been showcased. Besides, Haig Chahinian’s review of Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, George Wallace’s review of All Vows: New & Selected Poems By David B Axelrod, Edmound Miller’s review of Diane Frank's Letters from Sacred Mountain Place and Jeff’s Deck review Dan Szczesny’s The White Mountain are the highlights of the Issue. Stephanie Laterza Review Essay focused on Voices Carry (Shearsman Books, 2017) by Mervyn Taylor, Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2017) by Susana H. Case, and Out From Calaboose (Nirala, New Delhi, 2017) by Karen Corinne Herceg has also been included in the Winter Issue of Pratik.
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