Usha Akella has authored three books of poetry, one chapbook and one musical drama, Ek: An English Musical on the life of Shirdi Baba. In 2018, she earned an MSt. In Creative Writing from Cambridge University, UK. She read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in June 2016. Her work has been included in the Harper Collins Anthology of Indian English Poets. She was selected as a Cultural Ambassador for the City of Austin for 2015. She has been published in numerous journals and magazines, and featured at many international poetry festivals. She is the founder of 'Matwaala' the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the USA. She is the founder of the Poetry Caravan in the New York area and Austin which has offered several hundreds of free poetry readings disadvantaged audiences. The City of Austin proclaimed January 7, 2015 as Poetry Caravan Day.
Mystic poets sang of wondrous cosmic harmonies and van- quishing space-time boundaries, they spoke of annihilating the ego in endless spiritual love. Though they wandered several centuries ago, they still race ahead of us towards the primal and often terri- fying terrain of the sacred. They burnt all boundaries of belonging to belong solely to their Beloved; they strove to possess and, equally, be possessed by grace that culminates in sacred union.
These philosophies of rupture, rapture and release go by many names: Bhakti, Sufi, Kabbalah, Dzogchen, Zen, Tantra... Nuances about the processes of enlightenment and the godhead may differ but not its source: the ocean of infinite wisdom and compassion. Yet mysticism's hold is also visceral. The roar, tick and ache for transcen- dence becomes unstoppable. Caught in its maw one is tossed between exaltation and ire, while each cell vibrates at fever pitch. Yet we crave it; we crave to shed the everyday and be clothed in its mantle of stars, be illumined, return home.
In the Indian subcontinent the voices of the mystics are pas- sionate and intimate, rebellious and reckless, lightning-nerved and lava tongued as they traversed poetic form and sensibilities. This living practice is a silsila, a chain and parampara or lineage, which has trickled down to us in several ways. Ambered by bonfires near city roads or alone in small shires, traditional bards and craftspeople continue to add their compositions to this multilingual corpus of litur- gies, as do anonymous women who sing while grinding rice or scrib- bling while commuting to work.
Influential modernist Indian Anglophone poets like Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and the not as well know Gopal R Honnalgere adapted the poetic traditions of the spiritual, the sensual and the profane in their own work. They also translated mystic poetry.
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