A World in Syllables

Normally (if one may use the word “normally” for a Walter Mittyesque scenario), if one of my literary heroes were to reach out to me, for any reason, I reckon my reaction would run along the following lines:

Spin of disbelief,
beside joy in grand jeté.
Both upstaged by doubt:

How could it ever be me?
Surely they meant someone else?

Yes, normally. Yet the aforesaid disbelief and its kin were oddly absent when Marilyn Hacker—from whose work I gain insights, over and over, into everything from the subversive power of the pantoum to the wingspan of the sonnet—wrote, inviting me to write renga with her. 

All I felt, at first, was relief. 

Perhaps I should clarify: Marilyn’s email arrived in mid-March 2020, a time that was far from normal. While the direct, clinical consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic made themselves felt in varying degrees on different latitudes, the reverberations of normalcy shattering overnight spread across the planet with the swiftness of a sonic boom. Borders closed, even in nations spared the horrors of overflowing ERs and mortuaries. Scores of countries woke up to shortages in protective gear. Millions saw their jobs vanish. I could go for reams, and yet not cover all the seismic changes to lives everywhere.

On a personal note, it was a rough patch. I had just begun a six-month course of chemotherapy, whose side-effects were proving to be vicious, exacerbating RDEB inversa, my congenital disorder. My skin and mucous membranes tore with the ease of wet toilet paper. The nausea triggered a return of dysphagia, making it impossible to eat for days. The arrival of an unknown airborne and direct contact disease made it a bad time to be immunocompromised—and the shortage of masks in France did not help , though it did allow us to replenish our stock of gallows humor (“left like a trussed duck on a shooting range,” as a fellow patient quipped). 

In those early weeks of chemo, I often felt drained of thought, especially after each gut-tearing night of vomiting, and the esophageal lesions that followed. Since childhood, the page was the wormhole I used to leave RDEB behind; it was the one site where I could face, if not escape, the body’s hectoring. Not anymore. Not writing was the most terrifying part—not the carcinoma, not the lurking danger of COVID-19, nor chemo’s mandated tyranny. All the love and care showered on me could not remove a greedy, multi-fanged fear that I would not be able to write, not merely during the treatment, but in the shapeless days that might lie ahead.

The overriding relief I felt on reading Marilyn’s email came from her certainty that there was still a space for words, for poetry; a space for me to be something other than pain-ridden, torn, bundles of tissue and screaming nerve. (It came from a place of knowing solidarity; Marilyn had undergone chemotherapy years ago.) Several weeks later, well into the writing and the sharing, other reactions percolated past the chemo fog and neuropathy and nausea: surprise that I could still write; awareness of how fortunate I was; and gratitude for Marilyn’s thoughtfulness, not only with the invitation, but with her choice of the renga for our poetic correspondence. 

The renga (literally, linked poem) is a centuries-old form of Japanese collaborative poetry, which poets build by taking turns to write stanzas (now called tanka) of 5-7-5/7-7 mora, or sound units, with a word contained in the last line of one person’s tanka picked up in the opening line of the other’s. Marilyn had already written one such book with Palestinian-American poet Deema K. Shehabi back in 2014: the quietly devastating Diaspo/Renga—a collection whose opening poem imagines a little girl’s account of her just-blitzed home in Gaza. 

In our pandemic-era renga, the sheer economy of the 31-syllabled stanzas (for we transposed the mora to syllables in English, retaining the 5-7-5/7-7 structure of the tanka) predicated the entire exercise and sustained it for more than a year, eventually resulting in a poetry collection, A Different Distance. During those early months in particular, the syllabic limits of the renga helped me gather, then decant, thought and experience through the contours of the poem. Its inherent spareness ensured there could be neither thematic dispersion, nor room for furbelows. I could not have written free verse then. 

It was engrossing to test (and watch!) what an individual line could mean in itself, how much it could reveal and withhold, even as it added a layer to the stanza, the tanka, and the larger, shared, sequence. I still marvel at the enjambments in Marilyn’s poem of April 19th 2020, how they crescendo into this final, astounding, image:

Overarching, the night sky
blankets the city

we’re immured in, or opens
it up to ghazals of rain.

Equally relevant was the dock line we threw to each other: the word/s linking our successive poems. On the one hand, the linked word/s ensured connection and continuity. On the other, they had to permit a change of course. So, my concluding 7-7 stanza from 6th April 2020:

Chemo-shorn, brow-less beings
in masks could spell one more germ.

was steered by Marilyn’s hands (later on the same day) into

One more spell, one more
incantation — it’s only
“The Art of the Fugue”

To paraphrase Marilyn, this grounding device of the renga held us midway between unknowing (“not knowing where it would go, in terms of geography or emotion”) and assurance (“knowing exactly where it could go, in terms of length and cadence”). And, as the words we handed over to each other oriented the opening lines of subsequent poems, our correspondence grew into a chronicle of bodies traversing a time, and also of the time itself. 

The renga’s combination of freedom and constraint meant that on some days, it could become an indignant commentary on haphazard protocols governing the vaccination drive. On others, it could accommodate a celebration of found families, the people who kept us relatively safe, and strove to reduce the loneliness of our lockdown existence, particularly stringent in France during the first semester of 2020. 

The larger world seeped into the poems, too, the world that entered our isolated spaces through print and electronic media, through the digital interfaces that connected us to loved ones. During this lockdown, as time both expanded and collapsed without the usual markers and rituals of work and sociability, our epistolary exchange became an almanac of events that scored immediate memory, whether personal ones like a “Zoom cocktail,” or harsh measures like overnight workplace bans and their impact on migrant laborers. 

In retrospect, it seems absurdly ironic that we found solace in this form by defying—not willfully but from necessity—its trademark attribute: the physical presence of people creating verse together, in real time. The renga has seen many incarnations, having first flourished in the imperial courts of Japan, before finding a home in monasteries, and, later, in less rarefied milieu, such as public gardens. But whether accompanied by bacchanalian revelry or scholarly debates, it has always entailed a gathering. Marilyn and I met only three times in the year we wrote A Different Distance, and not once to write together.

But in that year of unprecedented isolation, what we each had was the absolute certainty of being heard by the other, heard with total intentness. When it comes to gifts from the cosmos, I could not have received a more precious one.