Chris Butler is an illiterate poet scribbling gibberish from the Quiet Corner of Connecticut. He has published 10 collections of poetry, including his most recent book “Beatitudes”. He is also the co-editor for The Beatnik Cowboy.
We are thrilled to announce a call for submissions for the poetry anthology Prism of Consciousness. This anthology will accompany the upcoming VI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE CAESURAE COLLECTIVE SOCIETY, jointly organised by the Centre for Indian Arts and Cultural Studies (CIACS), Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, Department of English, Cooch Behar College (affiliated to the university), and Caesurae Collective Society in collaboration with Sri Vishnu Mohan Foundation, Chennai. The conference will be held from 9–11 April 2025 at Cooch Behar, the erstwhile princely state in West Bengal, India.
The anthology seeks to weave a fabric of poetic expressions that resonate with the theme of consciousness—exploring the mind, the self, and the infinite cosmos—weaving together poetic voices that reflect on what it means to be aware, alive, and interconnected.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE CAESURAE COLLECTIVE SOCIETY
Date : 9, 10, & 11 April 2025
Venue : Cooch Behar College
Place : Cooch Behar, the erstwhile princely state in West Bengal, India
THEME
Prism of consciousness—a profound interaction of thought, emotion, and awareness that shapes our experience of reality. We invite poets to explore this theme in all its dimensions:
A THOUGHT TO EXPLORE
Mind and Self: Reflections on identity, awareness, and the inner workings of thought.
Interconnectedness: The interplay between individual consciousness and the external world, including nature, society, and the cosmos.
Altered States: Dreams, meditations, mystical experiences, and other states of awareness.
Cultural Perspectives: Diverse interpretations of consciousness across traditions, philosophies, and spiritual practices.
The Future of Consciousness: Technological influences, artificial intelligence, and the evolution of awareness.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
1. Eligibility: Open to poets worldwide. Submissions in English are preferred.
2. Submission Limit: Up to three poems per person; one poem will be selected.
3. Format: Submissions must be in a single Word document, with each poem on a separate page. A high-resolution headshot photograph (JPEG format) is required.
4. Length: Individual poems should not exceed 37 lines. The bio should be a succinct biographical narrative of up to 111 words, written in the third person.
5. Originality: Submissions must be original and unpublished works. We kindly request that you refrain from simultaneous submissions and choose to share your work exclusively with our anthology.
6. Declaration: Include a cover letter affirming that your submitted work is entirely your own and has not been published elsewhere.
7. Personal Information – Provide the following details in the body of your email: full name, postal address with landmark, email address, and mobile number.
SUBMISSION CONTENT
Your submission must include the following:
1. Poem(s)
2. Bio
3. Photo
4. Declaration
5. Personal Information
IMPORTANT
1. Submissions will only be considered for selection once all five required items are provided as per the guidelines.
2. The decisions of our selection process are final and irrevocable.
Subject Line: “Submission: Prism of Consciousness Anthology”
AVAILABILITY OF COPIES
1. For Co-authors:
Co-author may purchase copies at a discounted rate before publication.
2. Paperback Price:
Market Price: Rs 600/- (for international authors: $60/-) plus delivery charges after publication.
Discounted Rate for Co-authors: Rs 480/- (for international authors: $45/-), including delivery charges before publication.
BOOK LAUNCH, POETRY READING, AND DISCUSSIONS
The book will be launched during the conference in Cooch Behar (West Bengal), with featured poets invited to participate in a special poetry reading session and discussions.
𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐏𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐒 @ 𝐂𝐨𝐨𝐜𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐫
Please note that the poetry reading session and discussion will include participants whose work has been selected for the anthology Prism of Consciousness.
If your poem has been selected and you wish to participate in the conference at Cooch Behar, kindly email us. We will send you the registration form.
FOR REGISTRATION
Same as the conference email.
REGISTRATION FEE
Same as the conference registration fee.
Registration will close on 22nd February 2025.
Join us in creating a poetic philharmonic that resonates across minds, hearts, and worlds.
The conference is an interdisciplinary gathering of thinkers, researchers, philosophers, and artists, united in the pursuit of unraveling the mysteries of consciousness. It will feature academic sessions, poetry readings and discussions, book launches, music workshops, an exhibition based on the theme, lecture demonstrations, and cultural events. By linking this anthology to the conference, we aim to celebrate the poetic voice as an essential element in exploring human awareness.
The conference Paradigms of Consciousness and Its Cultural and Aesthetic Expressions seeks to investigate the diverse ways in which consciousness and spirituality are understood, experienced, and articulated across disciplines and cultures. Consciousness, as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, transcends disciplinary boundaries, integrating philosophical, artistic, scientific, cultural and psychological perspectives. This conference offers a platform to explore these intersections, delving into the deep connections between the mind, self, and the world, as expressed through various cultural and aesthetic forms.
Selected papers will be published in a volume by an international publisher and in our ejournal: Caesurae: Poetics of Cultural Translation (ISSN 2454-9495)
Registration process should be completed within 7 days of acceptance of Abstracts
Registration Fees – Rs 2000 for participants in India and 25 $ for overseas participants + Caesurae Membership Fee – Annual (Rs 500 / $6 for overseas participants) / Life (Rs 5000/ $ 60 for overseas participants).
Accommodation (On request) for twin sharing rooms: Rs 3500
(Registration fees will cover access to the plenaries and panels of the Conference, including the musical, literary and Zoom sessions of the international speakers, as well as a Participation Certificate. A working lunch will be provided and a conference kit.)
** It is mandatory to take Caesurae membership for participating in our conferences. If you are a Life Member you must only pay the Registration Fee. If you are an Annual Member and have not renewed your membership you either you become a Life Member or take an Annual Membership.
How to pay Registration fee and Membership fee?
Once we accept your abstract, we will send you our Bank details and a Google Form link.
✓ For Registration and Caesurae Annual Membership: Rs 2500/-
✓ For Registration and Caesurae Life Membership: Rs 7000/-
✓ For Registration + Annual Membership + Accommodation: Rs 6000/-
✓ For Registration + Life Membership + Accommodation: Rs 10,500/-
When you moved from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles all those years ago, you didn’t know that you were losing your relationship with muskrats, and now watching one building his lodge in the stream and culvert out behind the restroom of a rest stop in Missouri, you realize that you missed them. He is getting ready for winter, and the water has just partially frozen. He’s down there diving and building, swimming under the ice. The ice is clear, and he swims with his back against it so you can watch his progress.
“There you are,” Ellen says, coming up behind you. “I came back to the car and wondered where you’d wandered off to.”
You point down to the little creature and say, “Check that out.”
Ellen, who has lived in Los Angeles her whole life, watches it for a moment and asks, “What is that?”
“A muskrat,” you say.
“God, it looks so,” she takes a breath, trying to find the word, “odd.”
Of course, you realize that it is strange to her who has never watched muskrats in their daily chores, but you and your grandfather used to walk down to the creek and watch them at work, and he used to tell you how muskrats and beavers shared their lodges with each other. He used to tell you that they were two of a kind and shared everything, the way that he and you were two of a kind. He used to paint word pictures about the happy lives that beavers and muskrats lived during winter.
And if it is alien to Ellen, it’s like coming home for you. What has been alien for you all these years in Los Angeles has been coyotes walking the streets at night and lizards crawling up through gutter spouts and across the pavement of parking lots. Something in your body tells you you’re getting closer to being back where you belong.
You think about an ex who you thought that maybe you were going to marry, and then she found out that you liked baseball, and you found out that she was into bondage, and these discoveries were too much for either of you, and then there was no more talk about marriage and soon enough you just weren’t calling each other, and come to think of it, you never even really broke up because some things are just so obvious that they don’t need to be spoken. Maybe the way you relate to muskrats is as big as that. Maybe there’s no coming back from something as fundamental as the fact that you don’t both love muskrats. Or maybe you spend far too much time in your own head.
You ask, “Do you think that you’d ever want to live anywhere but LA?” It’s the kind of thing you’re starting to talk about, where you both want to live. This big trip you’re taking is a kind of test, you understand, to see if you might want to share a home some day.
She exhales a laugh, “And leave the sacred soil? You must be joking.” She punches you on the shoulder, and you know that she does think you’re joking, that the idea of leaving Los Angeles is so foreign to her that no one would ever talk about it seriously. This is, you understand, another test for the two of you, one that you didn’t know you were taking.
If you are to stay together, one of you has to live in a place that feels alien. One of you has to feel out of step for the rest of your life. You suppose that your grandfather would say that you and she are simply not two of a kind. She takes you by the hand and pulls you away. “Come on,” she says. “It’s cold out here.”
It is cold, you suppose, but you like the Autumnal chill. Back in LA the Santa Ana winds have started up again, and you know it’s hot. You wonder if Ellen misses it, and you suppose she does. In the decades you lived there, you never once got used to it. You wonder if maybe you already know the answer to this test. You suppose that you probably do.
He listened to audio books on his bus ride to work. He couldn’t read, the motion made him queasy if he tried to read. He usually chose nonfiction. He preferred to read fiction, to give the words his own inflection, not some actor’s or even the author’s.
A man a few rows up from him, on the other side, where he could see him from his own seat, was making nervous, jerky motions. He wondered if it was Tourette’s. Gilles de la Tourette was the neurologist who first described the condition, not some random guy who went around saying “merde” all day.
It was a book about the Indo-European language family. Linguistics interested him, ever since he took a college course in it. It was read by a man with a very mannered way of speaking. The voice reminded him of the Romanian-American historian Eugen Weber, who had hosted a program on public television called “The Western Tradition” when he was younger. But it wasn’t Weber.
He found bus rides relaxing, which he couldn’t say for the subway, which he had used regularly during the year he spent studying in New York. He enjoyed looking out the window, watching his progress from his own pleasant, almost suburban neighborhood, through the poorer areas, home to many Central American families, and then the central business district with its modest skyscrapers, nothing like New York. He and his wife loved pupusas, and would often visit a modest Salvadoran restaurant in one of those poorer neighborhoods. She was fond of loroco, a flower grown in El Salvador, but he usually stuck with plain cheese. He was fascinated by the correspondence of number names from farflung members of the Indo-European language family, do, dva, due, two, for instance. Not to mention dos.
I should have peed before I left, he thought. Now he’d have to deal with a little discomfort until he got to the office. It always happens when the caffeine really kicks in. Then, a couple of stops before his, the audio book just stopped. His bluetooth earbuds had run out of juice. The man who may or may not have had Tourette’s got off the bus. He’d charge them at work, after he visited the men’s room.
His Brother
He got together with his brother, who was in town, just for a couple of days, for business, and whom he hadn’t seen since their mother’s funeral, for dinner. His wife decided to stay home. “You see him so infrequently,” she told him. His brother lived by the ocean, yet they had never been out to visit him. “Send my regards.”
His brother had come for his firm’s national sales conference, which was being held at the Sheraton. He, on the other hand, didn’t have the temperament for sales. The brothers, who were five years apart, made mostly small talk.
They had agreed to meet in his city’s small Chinatown. The restaurant, Wo Hing, had been there forever, already an institution when he and his wife moved there, originally for her work. The place even served some of the old-school dishes the brothers remembered from childhood.
The previous year the conference had been in New Orleans. He’d never been to New Orleans. His brother told him about the beignets and chicory-accented coffee at Cafe du Monde and the oyster po boys at Acme and then asked him about his new consulting position, to which he supplied scant details.
The dishes all came out at the same time. They ate their spare ribs, wor shew opp, moo goo gai pan, and roast pork fried rice in silence until his brother told him about the tumor and insisted on picking up the bill, saying, “Expense account,” even though it was a pretty cheap dinner.
His Destination
It was the kind of drizzle that puts one in a quandary, to open the umbrella or not. Were he wearing a hat, he probably wouldn’t have even considered opening one, but he didn’t enjoy the feel of even small amounts of rain on his rapidly thinning hair.
His destination was a quarter of a mile away, more or less. He decided to hold the umbrella in abeyance until the rain picked up, if the rain picked up. He remembered a song. Or was it a nursery rhyme? “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day.”
Few people on the street were using umbrellas, mostly older women. When it rains in movies, it pours. It makes sense, he reasoned. A torrential downpour is dramatic. You wouldn’t even notice a light drizzle in a film.
He still carried the Marks & Spencer compact umbrella he had bought during his first trip to London 30 years earlier, when he and his wife had separated briefly, early in the marriage. Amazingly it had held up all these years, but he did only take it out when there was a slight chance of light rain. He had bigger umbrellas for the cinematic torrential downpours. He’d had a one-night stand, at his hotel, with a woman named Vix, short for Victoria, he had met at a pub. A Fuller’s pub, if he remembered correctly, but otherwise it was pretty much a drunken blur. All he could remember of Vix was her short, curly hair and her calling him “Luv” all night. But he did remember her name after all these years. She probably forgot his right after he told her.
When he was greeted at his destination he removed his shoes and was ushered to a room. A nice, soothing massage was just what he needed, one without a happy ending.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is stuck in suburbia, plotting his escape. He has been recently published at The Beatnik Cowboy, The Dope Fiend Daily, Disturb the Universe Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash and Yellow Mama. His next book will hopefully be out sometime in 2025. In the meantime, you can find him daily on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
If dappled light forms the contours of gathered rivers
Tree shadows are paper molds pressed into flat earth
Birdsong is nature’s scattered engravings
Each frame of crowd leaves floral prints
Attribution to birdsong masterpiece
Hemp ropes pull taut the sunshades
Fences bind tight the hemp ropes
Only birds sway in carefree leisure
Finding peace within chaos
Erasing rust marks from fences
Concealing the cracking sounds of hemp rope
A solitude within the bright world
I know not where they dwell
Their calls spiral like water weeds
If I had a brush
I’d paint vigorous orchids and woven grass
I’d paint nameless green trees
Reflecting birdsong lingering hues
影子
我们将要远离
从我学会高飞
我的一片实羽穿过光地
你用虚体叼起
我们将要远离
从我意识身技
我的一隆叱呜掠起芦髻
你用波纹抚藉
伏羽绿湖，我与你最近的距离
跨过门梯，我与你在同一世界隐蔽
炎阳下你是人们察觉我的痕迹
月光下我是人们分析你的证据
你是我在光明里的印记
我是你在黑夜里的暗喻
当我们在高窗的檐廊相聚
谁都能穿透时空
留在世里
Shadow
We shall part ways
From when I learned to soar high
My solid feather pierces through light-bound fields
You grasp it with your ethereal beak
We shall part ways
From when I became aware of bodily skill
My resonant cry sweeps past reed tassels
You soothe with rippling waves
Floating feathers on green lake, our closest distance
Crossing thresholds, we hide in the same world
Under scorching sun you’re the trace by which people notice me
Under moonlight I’m the evidence by which they analyze you
You are my imprint in brightness
I am your metaphor in darkness
When we meet at high window eaves
Anyone can traverse time and space
To remain in this world
雨声
其实的雨声
是梧桐叶由内到外的震动
其实的雨声
是后窗栏参差受礼的回应
雨声是方位里的回响
与永远提前的行踪
我在模糊里找波澜
摸触尽头的源泉
雨声是从划破云层开始
雨声是从撞到叶瓦开始
雨声还是洼地的激起和同躯的牵依
哪怕没有风雷与乌地
此声此生用生命定义
雨用撞击证示着自己的游历
Symphony of Rain
True whispers of the rain
Are leaves trembling from soul to skin
True echoes of the rain
Are latticed windows bowing in gentle din
Rain’s sound is an echo from each corner
With footsteps forever ahead in time
I search for ripples in the haze
Touching springs at journey’s end
Rain’s voice begins with clouds torn asunder
Rain’s voice begins with leaves and tiles struck tender
Rain’s voice remains in puddles’ splash and kindred souls’ embrace
Even without thunder or darkened earth below
This voice and life by life itself is vowed
Rain proves its journey through each pearled collide
Su Yun , Whose real name is Chen Ruizhe, he is a 17-year-old poet. He is the member of the Chinese Poetry Society. His works have been published in more than ten countries, including the poetry collections “Spreading All Things” and “Wise Language Philosophy” in China, and the poetry collection “WITH ECSTASY OF MUSING IN TRANQUILITY” in India. He won the 2024 Guido Gozzano Apple Orchard Award in Italy.
Please send your Abstracts in about 500 words to 
