Vidya Venkatramani talks to Geethanjali Rajan about her book Unexpected gift written in collaboration with Sonam Chhoki, a poet from Bhutan

Vidya Venkatramani, a poet, talks to Geethanjali Rajan about her book Unexpected Gift written in collaboration with Sonam Chhoki, a poet from Bhutan.

 

Geethanjali Rajan needs no introduction in the world of haikai. She is one of the pioneers of haikai style in India. Geethanjali is an editor at Café Haiku and editor of haiku at cattails journal. She is a Japanese and English teacher residing in Chennai. This is an exploration of the rengay book “Unexpected Gift” which Geethanjali has written with Sonam Chhoki, Bhutan.

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VV: Tell us about your Rengay writing experiences.

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GR: Haiku is now primarily written as an individualist activity and not as collaborative poems. However, in the 17th century, when Basho and his disciples wrote, it was as linked verse or the ‘haikai no renga’. In this context, a poet had to be able to write haiku in response to someone else’s poem.

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Writing collaborative haikai forms is not about your skill of writing alone, it is about reading, responding, linking and shifting from the previous poem in the rengay. This has been a very educative and enjoyable experience for me as it also involves conversations around the poem, the images, the season, the context.

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I met Sonam Chhoki at a conference in Mumbai that was arranged by the poet Raamesh Gowri Raghavan. Shobhana Kumar, Sonam and I spent a lot of time talking about haiku and the cultural and socio- political milieu that we were in. Let’s just say that we hit it off. But later, when we continued that conversation through email, Sonam led both Shobhana and me to start writing linked verse as an experiment that soon became the norm.

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Writing rengay has been an educative and wonderful experience. It is an exercise in close reading, responding. There are many things that we learn to hone in on – intuitive responses, tuning in to seasons, layers, metaphors – it is all quite magical if we continue the writing for a period of time and I have been writing with Sonam for nearly a decade. The spin off from rengay is also the friendships that it can foster across countries and continents.

 

VV: How did the idea for the book “Unexpected Gift “come about?

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GR: Sonam Chhoki and I had been writing collaborative haikai poetry (rengay and its variations) through an email correspondence for about 7 years. It wasn’t done with the idea of a book or publishing. It was more of a dialogue through poetry. In fact, to us, the conversations around each verse are as important as the verse itself. Through haiku and haibun or tanka, countless exchanges take place between us. When we had written 50 or 60 poems together, Sonam suggested that we probably have enough poems for a book. That set me thinking as well. She had mooted the idea and I latched onto it. Sonam had already published a book of haikai collaborations, Mapping Absences, with Mike Montreuil. Then we started the process of selecting and arranging the poems, looking at themes. When we put together the manuscript and sent it to Mike at Editions des petits nuages in Ottawa, he liked the whole manuscript, along with the cover and illustrations by Dhaatri Vengunad. It all came together.  Not too many publishers take on rengay and to find someone who was already a practitioner, was a blessing.

 

VV: Going through the book, I find that you were able to match each other’s mood and tone. How did you achieve this despite the distances and not being able to have face-to-face discussions?

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GR: Yes, we don’t have any face-to-face discussions but we’ve had many email interactions. It’s almost like the letter-writing days! As for matching the mood and tone, writing collaborative rengay is about responses after a close reading. I would say we managed it thanks to the process of ‘slow cooking’. We weren’t in a hurry. We took our time to enjoy the whole process of writing together. The process was more important than the focus on the finished product while we were writing. The idea of the book came later.

 

VV: What cultural similarities and differences do you see with your collaborator Sonam Chhoki?

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GR: Sonam Chhoki comes from Bhutan and her poetry is strongly grounded in the culture and geography of the land. She writes very evocative verse based on the ethos and the seasons of beautiful Bhutan. I fall back onto my own upbringing and life in the South of India, particularly Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where as you know, the traditions and seasons of the peninsula meld into festivals and celebrations. When we collaborated, we focused on our own roots while responding to the other’s images of seasons and song.

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The differences I see are the Buddhist traditions and the clear change of seasons in Bhutan whereas, where I live, festivals and the agricultural year are all timed to a tropical climate. That makes for an interesting contrast in writing and also, helps with the link and shift of ideas and images that are so important in rengay. The diversity is what makes rengay even more interesting, is what I believe.

 

VV: Which personal quality in your collaborator has helped you shape the book?

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GR: Sonam is an astute poet and her imagery is really one that can be called intrinsically ‘haikai’. On a personal level, she doesn’t intrude on the styles of the people she writes with. There is plenty of space, respect and a curiosity about the imagery in the collaborators’ verse. This leads to conversations and also, a trusting environment to write in. Of course, she is an eagle-eyed editor as well! In the final stages, that really helped to shape and hone the manuscript.

 

VV: I love the haibun “A sense of beginning”. Can you share the back story of this haibun with our readers?

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GR: We don’t discuss what we want to write about beforehand or while we are writing. It is an organic process. When I sent in a spring equinox verse, Sonam wrote very evocative prose about the Spring rituals in Bhutan. This in turn led me to my experience of the ‘niraputhari’ harvest rituals that signify the advent of the harvest season in agrarian Kerala, where I spent a bit of my childhood. The whole haibun ends with a happy beginning – Spring, first harvest, hope for the future. That led to the title. The beauty of the collaboration is perhaps that neither of us have been in the other’s land but yet, the poem comes together cohesively and coherently.

 

VV: Do you have any more Rengay books in the pipeline?

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GR: There are plenty of collaborative rengay that we have written together over the last decade. There’s one book that’s forthcoming. It’s called Fragments of conversation and it has haibun, tanka, haiku and tanka prose collaborations that Sonam and I have penned together. There are many more that the three of us have written together – Shobhana, Sonam and I. I feel that these things happen in its own rhythm. When it’s time, another manuscript may emerge.

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VV: Thank you. Geethanjali, for talking to The Wise Owl about your book of collaborative haikai forms.

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GR: Thank you, Vidya for your insightful questions. My gratitude to The Wise Owl team for this opportunity.