PRATIK SPECIAL CITY WRITING HIGHLIGHT: AMERICAN POET JAMES RAGAN POEM, "The Tent People of Beverly Hills"

 JAMES RAGAN

The Tent People of Beverly Hills

 

Faceless on the Boulevard of Mirrors,

north along the flats of Rodeo Drive’s

stripped bald head mannequins,

they come treading on

the fears of high fashion, wandering

homeless, tents on their backs

and on their cheeks the beach

black tar of tasteless chic.

 

              As if to dress were not enough,

              we would have them wash

              our backhand slap

              from their Rimbaud faces.

 

And all through the supple stick lash

wands of their eyes, all

through the wind whiskers

of fishbone and sour cream

curdled by fame,

they see along the fruit stalls and deli box bins

of Wilshire Boulevard,

 

the world in the room

of their small walk-space.

They are never certain

whether they are merely asked

to fill a role like memory

in some thoughtful dream of place

or live always short of major

in some dying minor sort of way.

 

              As if to live were time enough.

              We would have them end

beyond their means.

 

Hours long they scrabble

onto hotel walls and mirrors

the words they would like to leave us,

the haunted prints of thought-falls

drifting out of mind’s possession

like nostalgia or grief.

The world has lost its face.

 

There are no hobo kings or pioneers

late to live by. When they lie above

Beverly Drive’s windy steam of sewer grates,

dream-still and all-mind gone,

they warm their body holes to sleep.

They wake to be awake.

In the dreams of many

who never took the road

to gypsy sorrow, breathing is enough.

 

              It is a mistake to feel themselves alone,

              to fill their skyholes up with darkness.

 

There has never been a need

for crying, the dying always say.

Once we move within the final

inch of breath, there is no other.

There are a million tents in the universe

with holes we mistake for stars.

 

 

American poet James Ragan is the author of 10 books of poetry, including The Hunger Wall and Chanter’s Reed. With poems in Poetry, Nation, LA Times, and 36 anthologies, he has read for the U.N, Carnegie Hall, CNN, NPR, PBS, BBC and 7 Heads of State, including Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev. Honors: 2 Litt. D’s, Fulbright Award, Emerson Poetry Prize, NEA, 9 Pushcart nominations, Poetry Society Citation, and Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award. With plays staged in U.S, Moscow, Beijing, Athens, he’s the subject of “Flowers and Roots,” awarded 12 Documentary Festival recognitions, and Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival. Director/Emeritus of USC’s Professional Writing Program (25yrs).

 

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PRATIK'S SPECIAL CITY WRITING ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : YUYUTSU SHARMA EDITORIAL POEM. "Thrissur in her Dream"

 

YUYUTSU SHARMA

 

EDITORIAL

 

Thrissur in her Dream 

 

On the first night of our arrival

in Thrissur, the famed sadhu of Pashupati

with his sandal-smeared forehead

dotted with U-shaped scarlet tika

holding a ting brass trident

found in most of flashy tourist

brochures and guidebooks,

the one who otherwise

lived a delightful worldly life

with his wife and numerous children

in a tin-roofed shack

outside Ram Mandir vicinity

across the Bagmati river

appeared in her dream.

The sadhu pulled a three-headed naga

out of his wicker basket and let it

crawl towards her in the dream.

She panicked; in due course

he persuaded her to honor the deity,

allow it to slither atop her shoulders

and cover her head under the canopy

of its fangs as a protector.

Birds whistled shrill notes

in the Ramanilayam Guest House

as she woke up in a town that

circled round a Shiva shrine on a hilltop.

As we walked around the town that

reminded me of my own Punjabi birthplace:

smelly granary stores, quiet

Malgudi squares dotted with street vendors,

blobs of lazy dozing dogs,

old time Raymond and Philips showrooms

along with Gandhi handicraft outlets.

When we finally rode a beautiful

green auto rickshaw that actually

ran on a regular meter to the Shiva shrine

and entered sacred grounds with bare bodies,

the same three-headed naga

stood in the dark hole of the shrine

protecting the Lord's head.

She flipped out, her big black eyes

opened wide: It's the same naga

I saw in my dream earlier in the dawn.

"Lord," I closed my eyes, "I've walked away from

sullen glaciers." I prayed.

"I've come to the summer of your backwaters

to let blood rush back to my groin

in your little town that resembles

the one I grew up in

and where as she once confided

we had the best love of our life

in the courtyard after a bath at

our ancestral water pump,

just a week after my father passed away."

 

 

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, The Alchemy of Nine Smiles: Nine Long Poems (Red River, New Delhi, 2024) and Lost Horoscope ( Nirala, 2023), 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 curated the Himalayan Literature Festival 2024 in collaboration with New York Writers Workshop in Kathmandu. He also edits Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

 

More: www.yuyutsusharma.com

 

 

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PRATIK'S SPECIAL CITY WRITING HIGHLIGHT : GUEST EDITORIAL BY PIIA MUSTAMÄKI

  

PIIA MUSTAMÄKI

GUEST EDITORIAL

Do cities have souls? We feel as if they do because we see cities as living organisms, feeling as strongly about them as we do about people: we love some of them passionately, while we loathe and fear others. Some are off-putting, while some others make us feel safe. Some evoke tenderness, some oppress, and sometimes our home cities change and start alienating us, as happened to Rúnar Helgi Vignisson’s Reykjavik and Charlson Ong’s Manila. But where do we locate a city’s soul?  In a detail we love about it and hence it’s the city’s soul for us, in its collective beating heart, or in the city’s opposing characteristics of “goodness and suffering,” as James Ragan puts it? 

City writing as a term is as elusive as a city’s soul. This collection of poetry, essays and short fiction about cities around the world – Lagos, Dakar, Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, Nicosia, Lahore, Kathmandu, Delhi, Varanasi, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto – does not provide a clear definition for either. But it maps the kinds of diversions cities – whether our homes or travel destinations – provoke as they stage the mundane alongside desire and violence, morphed into being by history, inequalities and movements of people. These diversions disclose cities as beautiful but unfair. They provide belonging, shelter or slaps in the face. They treat men and women differently, as they do people of color and those who have less than others. But what they do all have in common is the ability to conjure up the writer’s imagination.

From Charles Bernstein’s desolate Brooklyn Park to Nathalie Handal’s Rome apartment where green muslin gives way to passion, to Anand Thakore’s Constantinople at the eve of the Turkish conquest where a courtesan prays for mercy for herself and for those who have scorned her, the poetry in this collection captures moments in cities that are undeniably soulful. But cities can be soul crushing, too: Philip McLaren’s fictionalized true story “Black Cul-de-sac” reveals the murderous dead-end Sydney can mean to Aboriginal Australians, Tim Tomlinson’s short story “Sir” a domestic worker’s plight in Hong Kong and Manila, and Sally Breen’s “Embassy” the soulless expat luxury in Hanoi.   

In their essays, Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka wrestles with his sometimes nemesis, sometimes soulmate city of Lagos, Vagneux Yann with Varanasi’s tangible holiness, Neelam Hanif with the soul-searching Lahore inspires, and Ravi Shankar with envy for Nicosians’ passion for their city despite or because of its troubled history. In “The Night Driver,” Pratik editor Yuyutsu Sharma takes a Kathmandu taxi that reveals both corruption and deities in the post-earthquake cityscape, while in “She Stares at Me,” Dakar’s Museum of Black Civilizations compels me to look at the legacies of colonization in the eye. The photography chosen by Tadej Žnidarčič echoes the issue’s global scope and the diversions its cities instigate, whether the pandemic’s effects in NYC or Dhaka, weightlifting at a Bangkok cemetery, nighttime street scenes in Kampala, or the quieter side of the megacity of Chennai, captured by Julie Williams-Krishnan.  

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the aim of cosmopolitanism as us “getting used to one another.” In today’s fragmented world, it’s the city where this can happen, where people of all walks of life make homes, work, pray, fight, love and wander the same streets, miraculously more often in harmony than not. This collection bears witness to how in the end the city doesn't only spark creativity but, as Teju Cole puts it, “might be our greatest invention.”

 

 

 Photos by Julie Willaims-Krishnan, Tadej-Znidarcic, Imran Ahmed & Samsun-Helal

Piia Mustamäki is a Finn, a New Yorker and an academic wanderluster, currently located in Abu Dhabi, where she teaches at NYU’s Writing Program. A Fulbright scholar, she has a PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University and her research interests include travel narratives, global south urbanism and gender and postcolonial studies. Her travel writing and essays have appeared in Meridian: The APWT Drunken Boat Anthology of New Writing, Literary Traveler, Memoir Magazine, Panorama: Journal of Travel, Place and Nature, among others. Piia has traveled to more than 120 countries. web: www.1001worlds.com.

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PRATIK SPECIAL CITY ISSUE : AMERICAN POET CHARLES BERNSTEIN'S 'SELDOM SLENDOR'

 

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Seldom Splendor

a fine cold mist descends

 

                    on Carroll Park

 

     the swing swings empty

 

        benches bare

 

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=E or Language poets. His selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 

 

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PRATIK CITY SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: French-American Poet Nathalie Handal's poem, "Viale di Trastevere, 230"

 

      NATHALIE HANDAL

 

Viale di Trastevere, 230

 

I knew that first evening

I wanted more—

 

The way he tore the green muslin

from my body and bit my upper arm.

 

The way his lost breaths

sunk in my breast.

 

I wanted to keep the room,

gather the sheets like a small hill

to stand on together—

 

sometimes the simplest action

keeps sorrow from swelling.

 

For years we bought wine from Bernabei,

plants from Fleur Garden

 

and walked San Cosimato

as if the truth was merely a guest.

 

Who can say how many

lost passions are too many?

 

He never liked

any photos of himself.

 

Now when I zoom into his face,

such poor resolution,

 

he almost looks good.

 

 

Nathalie Handal is described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” She has lived in four continents, is the author of 10 award winning books, translated in over 15 languages, including Life in a Country Album and The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Arab American Book Award. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Africa Institute, and featured at the United Nations for Outstanding Contributors in literature She writes the column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders. 

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PRATIK SOUTH ASIA SPECIAL : Indian Poet ASHWANI KUMAR's "Secret History of Silk Routes"

 

ASHWANI KUMAR

Secret History of Silk Routes

 

When I travel

I leave my eyes in the corner of my home in Susa-

They make the journeys difficult.

In my stories,

There is truth and falsehood alike;

Foxes are symbol of collateral love and

Cranes are atheists from our folk tales.

 

With an army of stone soldiers, exiled poets,

And rogue traders, we go down crooked, perilous

Roads of memories,

Buying and selling cruelties of nations along the way.

Most days were yellow and dusty, but

Often, the sky in Gobi Desert was sliver green as in Aleppo.

 

All summer, all winter, we walked with greed and grief

Searching for burnt emeralds and

Thin arrowroot biscuits for Buddhist

Monks in Kublai Khan’s court.

When we reached the city of Shandu, we saw

Upon a colonnade of handsome pillars, 

Corpses of newly married young men and women

 

Hanging together, whispering, counselling each other

Against using unlicensed spices from Indus.

There were no frontiers between

Madness and non-madness. A perpetual

Unfettering of desires to become travelling

Gods led us from one city to another-

Selling picture postcards of savage Samarkand cliffs.

 

Slowly, we became accustomed to ancient habits-

Petty haggling over occult mysteries of War and

Peace in the bazars of Kinsai. 

Now, you can imagine why

We could not fault our austere mules

Flirting with dragons with five- claws in cold Mogao caves.

 

When we arrived at the noisy roadside taverns

Heavy-breasted dancing girls 

Refused to serve us sumptuous meals;

They were so fed up with sleeping and slimming pills that

They had turned carnivorous in

Good times and hermits in hard times.

By the time we realized

They were obsessed with the perfume of freedom

We had abandoned them to rebels,

Camouflaged in militia uniforms.

 

With all my spoils of fish and flesh

I return home

find a snake hiding in the eyelids of my

Abyssinian slave mother,

vaccinated against the poison of silk worms.

I kiss her forehead, confess my sins, and

Watch happily my Mangolian dog Pelle

Chasing frightened gazelle on the shores of Tigris.

 

 

 

 

@ Names of cities used in the poems are taken from Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa

 

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, writer, and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. His major poetryanthologies are My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter and Banaras and the Other first of a trilogy onreligious cities. Widely published and translated into several Indian languages, his poems are noted for ‘lyricalcelebration’ of garbled voices of memory and subversive ‘whimsy’ quality. Recently, a collection of his selectpoems titled Architecture of Alphabets has been published in Hungarian. He is also author of Community Warriors, and one of the chief editors of Global Civil Society’@ London School of Economics. He is co-founder of IndianNovels Collective for translation of classic novels from Indian languages, and writes a regular book column in the Financial Express.

 

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Pratik Noir Issue Highlight: American poet DAVID LEHMAN's "The Double Agent: A Screenplay for Michael Caine"

 

DAVID LEHMAN

The Double Agent:

A Screenplay for Michael Caine

 

1.

It was going to snow and then it didn't snow.

He loved her like a dying man's last cigarette.

 

2.

The dog was planning his next betrayal.

It was, he reasoned, in the nature of dogs

to betray their bitches. The man at the bar

was wearing a dark suit and tie as thin

as the excuses given by an unfaithful mate

to her homicidal husband on the phone.

 

3.

“You want results, you have to pay for them.”

“All right, but are you sure this is the guy?”

“This is the guy.” And in he walked, wearing

eyeglasses and speaking with a Cockney accent.

He had made his bones when he killed his wife

with a lightbulb in the cellar, made it look like

an accident, got away with it, and celebrated

by pushing a man in front of a speeding train.

 

4.

The assignment was to convey a private message

by public means, as in the headline of a news story

of seeming insignificance whose secret meaning

only his London controller would understand. 

 

5.

The dog was dead. That was the message.

 

6.

Lights out. His name on a list. And beside

his name, a sum: fifty thousand dollars.

They had lied to him, put his life in danger,

only to test him. Yet he delivered, though

it meant he had to cross from West to East

Berlin and back in the back of a hearse

in a dark tunnel, a live body inside.

 

7.

In that second, he had to make up his mind:

was he bluffing, or would he pull the trigger?

“Three men have been killed for those papers,”

the chief barked, indignant at the cost

of this little operation. “Sorry, boss.”

The agent held up four fingers.

The chief crushed his cigar. “Four!”

 

8.

“Enlighten me, Mr. Lane, if that is indeed your name.

Why didn't you leave at once when you could?”

“Loyalty,” he replied with sarcasm so thick

you could be sure he was carrying a false passport.

 

9.

The man reading the paper in the hotel lobby

heard every word. There was a short silence.

Suddenly he put the paper down.

“I am the stranger of whom you speak,” he said

in the formal English of a Spaniard

in a Hemingway novel. That was the tip-off.

 

10.

Even the girl was a ruse.

Only the money was real.

 

11.

He could see it from the balcony:

freedom; there it was, across the river,

in the brown haze of dusk:

a row of dead birches like the bars of a gate

with blue water and green hills behind it.

 

12.

Was it worth it? You didn't ask yourself.

You just grabbed your case and went.

You didn't even know the date, the month

and year, until you got there. Afterwards,

if you were lucky, there would be time

to remember. Well, he would have to do

the remembering for the whole unit. And once

a year, in a hotel room in Switzerland,

he would take out the girl’s photograph

and shake his head.

 

 

Born and raised in New York City, American poet David Lehman is Series Editor of The Best American Poetry anthology. He is the author of The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. In 2019, he and Suzanne Lummis engaged in a season of exchanges on noir for The Best American Poetry blog, for example: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2019/08/the-images-of-noir-by-david-lehman-and-suzanne-lummis.html

 

 

 

 

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