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.

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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

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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. 

Russian Poetry Today : A Contemporary Sampler By A. DMITRIJANOV -- AN EXCERPT

An EXCERPT from  the Cover Story of Pratik’s Current Issue

The strangely seductive power of Russian literature and language is so well known and widely attested as to be almost a cliché. Russian poetry, like all major poetic traditions, is rooted in its language, and yet does not exist in isolation. It lives and functions within an unending flow of intersecting influences, including European (English, French, Spanish, German, etc.), and Eastern (Persian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) poetry. It is also nourished and renewed by contact with folklore and the living language of the people. This is one of many sources its current remarkably diverse range of forms and voices.

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...
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Winter Issue now on Amazon India!
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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.

Ravi Shankar reviews distinguished American poet and translator Eleanor Goodman's new poetry collection, Nine Dragon Island

Book Review

RAVI SHANKAR

A resonant empathy 
and the long shadow 
of mortality 

I first learned about Eleanor Goodman’s work upon reading her translations of the Chinese poet Wang Xiaoni, one of the few women associated with the “Misty” school of poets and the prolific author of more than 25 books of poetry, essays and novels. Goodman’s book of translations “Something Crosses My Mind” was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and there’s a quiet ferocity in her translations which makes them utterly memorable. Therefore, it was with great interest that I picked up Goodman’s own first book of poetry Nine Dragon Island, published by Zephyr Press and in a handsome hardbound edition by HK Enclave Publishing House.

Goodman’s poems are also quiet and ferocious, but that’s where the similarities to Wang Xiaoni’s poetry ends, for the terrain traversed by Nine Dragon Island is distinctive and leavened with the sensibility of someone who has traveled across the world. The poems in the collection range geographically from Ohio and Indiana in America to Shanghai, China, even as far afield as Iceland and Zimbabwe. Furthermore, the forms employed by Goodman are equally as diverse, moving from sectioned lyrics to narrative elegiac remembrances to prose poetry, these places and modalities united by a resonant empathy and the long shadow of mortality under which we all labor.

Dedicated to the author’s father, Nine Dragon Island offers some of the most evocative and sensitive poems about dying and grief that I’ve read in a very long time. Never sentimental or cloying, the poems offer us a hard-eyed look at how we might confront our own bodies and those who we love, all of us caught in an undeniable process of decay. As the last stanza of the poem “Wanting Out” expresses:

But Lorraine says no
to mechanized breath, no
to priests and specialists, to catheters, to drugs, no to someone else’s blood.
She says no to life without life.
Now what’s left is the letting go
of what we think she should have said.

The final lines of this poem, demonstrate what Goodman is able to do with enjambment, overturning our expectations so that something wiser can emerge. Ultimately it’s not the speaker’s friend’s letting go with which we need to grapple, but our own expectations and wishes about what a person wants and how we want them to conduct their living (and their dying). We may crave they stay on life-support or undertake chemotherapy, but ultimately the most difficult thing is to respect another’s choice on the matter, and this poem depicts that effort with precision and grace. Or as the ending of another poem, “Oma’s Testament” puts it, “When my bones loosened, / I could not see, could not speak / there was no one. So this life asks nothing / of the dead, and the dead ask nothing of it.”
This book is about other kinds of death as well, like the ending of a marriage, and in one of the more poignant poems in the collection, “Since the Divorce my Mother,” the speaker discusses the dissolution of her parent’s wedding and how that has in turn has petrified her to the notion of everlasting union. The difficult truth, if we are able to be clear-eyed about it, is that such breakups are ultimately no one’s fault, even as we love to assign blame; relationships, like the ten thousand things of this world, just drift apart of their own inertia, and the realization of that fact, and our lack of control in the face of it, remains terrifying.

Another poem, one of my personal favorites, “Hummingbird,” begins with this very premise: “When I injure you, as must someday    do, my silence will be like a poison drained / from a wound, and a like a hummingbird.” The inevitability of harm, the hopelessness of repair, and our reconciliation to the fact of the small and large losses that accrue around and through us every day are elucidated with such devastating skill that the reader shivers a little, considering its ramifications. Time and again, the speaker of these poems implicates herself in the suffering she observes with such exactitude.

However, the subject matter notwithstanding, this is not a bleak book; far from it. “Nine Dragon Island” pulses with vitality and sensuality, with dripping tangerine juice and fish-skinned fruit, with coils of neon and volcanic plateaus, with heat and light, sex and desire. Some of the poems I found most compelling were the ones set in China, for in them, we see a side of the country far from the official view. Goodman has managed to depict the rural poor unflinchingly and with compassion, whether legless and begging, plucking a chicken into a bucket or living in a cadaver of a home. This is the China we don’t see in State-sponsored transmissions that highlight the rise of upwardly mobile and the middle class. These people are not depicted with a voyeuristic eye but with a sensitivity that makes the poet and by extension the reader complicit in their condition.

There’s also an easy erudition in many of these poems that speak to other poets, past and present, as in the poem “To an old farmer,”which calls to mind Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking,” as well as William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say.” The allusions are subtle, never heavy-handed, and they turn the original poems on their head, for the poet always knows that  poetry  is  her  comfort  and  not  the comfort of those who live in cities made of “rough-hewn cloth and the smell of blood.” In this way, the poems never feel superior to or beyond the people who populate the verse. Instead, the words share in the suffering of those for whom words, in and of themselves, are insufficient, which, to me, is one of the great strengths of this collection.

Finally, then, Nine Dragon Island is a virtuosic first book most of all for its restraint, for all that is held back and hinted at, for everything that lies outside of our control, for the slow, inexorable transformation of all our experiences into that of loss. Goodman’s poems are intimate transcriptions and they resonate with an inner life that is suffused with that Keatsian quality of “negative capability,” never satisfied with the easy resolution but possessed of an openness that allows for ambiguity and mystery to penetrate into the very act of perception, complicating the ways in which we love and injure one another, highlighting how the poor live in us. These poems are luminous with such suffering and ecstatic, full of a terrible tenderness and erotic charge that continues to radiate even after we’ve put the book down. That quality, its exultant sadness and clarity of perception, is the hallmark of a very fine collection, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this is Goodman’s first book. It’s the kind of debut that both devastates us and leaves us hankering after more.

Nine Dragon Island
by Eleanor Goodman 
Paperback: 114 pages
Zephyr Press (December 6, 2016)
ISBN-10: 1938890205
ISBN-13: 978-1938890208

Distinguished American Indian poet, Ravi Shankar published twelve books and chapbooks including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press). He founded Drunken Boat, has appeared on NPR, BBC, PBS, and in The New York Times and The Paris Review. The title of his memoir-in-progress is Correctional.