In March 2020, when the world went into lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair — living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time — began a correspondence in verse.
Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, consists of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of toki and toza: this season, this session. Here, from the ‘plague spring’, through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Nair’s renga charts the ‘differents and sames’ of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists even thrives-in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. Between ‘ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones’, there’s cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an ageing body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are ‘mere atoms of water, each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward.”
At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.
LINKS AND TIES
It was end-March 2020. Yes, that moment when Covid-19 transformed, almost overnight, from a mysterious and highly contagious new disease to a global scourge that brought countries to a standstill. Borders closed like snares. Mortuaries began to overflow. Entire sectors of activity became redundant … I don’t need to itemise the list of unimagined changes the pandemic brought in its wake. They are hard to forget.
An email arrived from Marilyn Hacker, who had barely managed to return to France from Lebanon (where she had been teaching) before the abrupt and full lockdown in both countries. Marilyn, who has been one of my literary heroes since poetry entered my life, and from whose work I learn something new each time, whether it is the ghazal’s ability to inhabit all languages and themes, or how political the act of repetition can be within a pantoum. Marilyn, who was now inviting me to join her in writing renga around this strange new life.
Her choice of renga might seem bitingly ironic in the context of the pandemic. This ancient form of collaborative poetry (literally, linked poem)—originally written in imperial courts in Japan, then around dinner tables of monasteries, or in public gardens—had always been associated with a gathering, with revelry. Yet, there we were, physically cut off from each other despite being just a few kilometres away, thanks to the stringent rules of the lockdown.
Other differences exist in our pandemic-era correspondence. Traditionally, to create a renga, poets take turns to write stanzas (now called tanka) of 5-7-5 then 7-7 sound units (mora) and—much like in antakshari— absorb or include a word or words contained in the last
line of one person’s tanka into the opening line of the next one’s. In English, we tend to substitute the mora with syllables and retain the structure of the tanka as the basic building block. Marilyn and I each chose to write two or three stanzas before handing over the baton to the other.
Marilyn’s invitation proved to be a creative lifeline. I was in Paris, shuttling between home and hospital those days, having just begun chemotherapy, following surgery for a recently diagnosed tumour—all of it complicated by RDEB, a chronic disorder which reduces the skin
and mucous membranes to something like wet tissue, easily torn and hard to protect. The nights brought long, gut-tearing bouts of nausea, and internal lesions.
The subsequent pain and exhaustion made me doubt my ability to write again. Marilyn’s gesture of quiet solidarity—she had undergone chemo years ago—gave me purpose and restored a sense of self outside the tyranny of the body. It was a sanity-saver.
A Different Distance: A Renga
One more spell, one more
incantation—it’s only
The Art of the Fugue
or Hildegard of Bingen
or Alice Coltrane: music
calms anxiety.
Abida Parveen sings
a Hafez ghazal,
cross-legged, eloquent hands …
I pick out a word or two.
—MH, 6 April 2020
Two words, now, for me:
Hum dekhenge—We shall see.
Iqbal Bano soars
skyward on Faiz’s refrain, and
something steelier than hope
lights the heart once more.
Heart that fluttered last evening,
stalled a few instants:
a frog in the throat these days
hearkens to beasts less winsome.
—KN, 9 April 2020
