yuyutsu, she, thee and me

Nepalese poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma will be reading tonight at Cleveland’s Mac’s Backs at 7 pm Thursday 11.19.2009 along with San Francisco poet artist Celeste McCarty.

Here’s the Mac’s Backs p.r. release:

Mac’s is pleased to welcome back two friends.

Yuyutsu Sharma is a Nepalese poet and writer who travels the globe when he is not at home in Nepal writing, publishing and distributing books. He last read at Mac’s in March, 2008. Since then he has published Annapurnas and Stains of Blood: Life Travels and Writing on a Page of Snow (Nirala Publications, New Delhi) and Space Cake, Amsterdam and Other Poems from Europe and America (Howling Dog Press).

Yuyutsu has also translated and edited several volumes of Nepali poetry. He is the author of The Way to Everest, an exquisite collaboration with photographer Andreas Stimm. Sucheta Das Gupta from the Himalayan Times said this about Yuyutsu’s poems: “The poems are shining jewels of passion, energy and splendid craft, redolent with vivid, dreamlike visual imagery, strengthened by realistic observation and powered by strong male eroticism.”

Some of our long time customers may remember Celeste McCarty who worked at Mac’s in the early 1990’s. She is an artist living in San Francisco. She developed a reputation for her unique and colorful postcard size paintings when she sold them from her porch stoop in her SF neighborhood. Curve Magazine profiled her in an Open Studio column in May, 2008. Celeste has recently published several books of drawings & words, including Friendly Fire and Shroatables.

Mac’s Backs is at 1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights, Oh 44118 fone = 216.321.BOOK.

~ ~ ~

Lady and I met Yuyutsu for the first time yesterday when we picked him up at the bus station to stay with us a week, and then heard him read his work last night for the first time as well. I’d read his poetry before and liked it a lot, but he’s one of those poets who are even better in person. Between each poem he’d explain the portion of Nepalese history pertinent to the poem so we had a combination rap session, history lesson, travelogue, poetry reading. Only ten people showed up, but they were all solid poets and artists, so the creative density was high.

Listening to Yuyutsu, I realize I lost my faith and joy in life about a year ago and have consequently become a bundle of negative energy, a constant contrary curmudgeon. I now endure rather than endeavour.

I’ve forgotten about magic, and magic’s forgotten about me. Especially since moving back to the States. While we were traveling for three years, every ordinary day wasn’t ordinary because we were living on foreign soil and each day presented unAmerican images, unAmerican thoughts, and unAmerican cultures which excited my brain as it tried to balance my new life ways against my old life ways which kept my words, thoughts and images flowing.

I’ve become far too down and negative about being back on the Corporate Shores of America. I need to re-realize that life is what happens to you where you are, while you are. I’ve got to re-learn to live by my own motto that this it is the it it is.

If I don’t like my is and wish for what isn’t, it’s up to me to make my isn’t is. I’m a poet, goldarnit, I’m supposed to be positive.