A Different Distance: A Renga - Softcover

Hacker, Marilyn; Naïr, Karthika

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571315519 ISBN 13: 9781571315519

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2021

Synopsis

An Indie Next Selection for December 2021

A Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021

In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—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, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tōki and tōza: 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 Naïr’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 aging 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.

About this title

About the Authors

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons and A Stranger’s Mirror (longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award), a collaborative book, Diaspo/ Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi, and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices. Her eighteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz, Jean-Paul de Dadelsen’s That Light, All at Once, and Claire  Malroux’s Daybreak. She is a former editor of the Kenyon Review, and of the French literary journal Siècle 21. She received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award for her own work, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris. 

Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance. She is a poet, fabulist and librettist whose books include The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tate Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), was shortlisted for the Atta Galatta Prize and highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. Naïr has scripted and coscripted performances for choreographers Akram Khan (DESH, Chotto Desh, and Until the Lions, adapted from her own book), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Damien Jalet (Babel 7.16), and Carlos Pons Guerra (Mariposa). She is the co-founder of Cherkaoui’s Antwerp-based dance company, Eastman, and executive producer of several of his and Damien Jalet's works.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Tonight, an empire
of pain reigns over attempts to write, think; to be.

Fall, even summer, graze past
ears as would submerged boulders.

RDEB – four
horseless, shapeless, ageless words – must play first fiddle;

second, third, and last as well, while all others earn exile.

― KN, 5 May 2020

***

Home becomes exile
in the punished city. Leaves green beyond grillwork,

Nazim Hikmet's post-card from prison poems on the sill.

Locked-in lovers make
love until it bores them . Once through a hurricane

in Crete . . . but that was three days, decades ago, two of us.

― MH, 7 May 2020

***

This, decades ago,
was how I gaped at the sea. Reaching Rue Manin,

the years sublime, suddenly-
much-younger selves drink from this

downpour of gloaming, we gasp at the carnival corralled within Parc

des Buttes-Chaumont. Cedar, elm, and linden, pine, plane and beech,

arch towards the sky; hazelnut and cherry trees flaunt wanton blossoms;

and the cascades underground serenade us from afar.

― KN, 8 May 2020

***

From afar, but it
wasn’t, thunder, rush of dark clouds, then crash of rain,

just after I noticed, no
gates blocked the berges of the Île

St-Louis. No way
but, run under the rain, no café shelter.

Strip off once indoors, shower. Flu, or worse, I’m on my own.

Later, on my own,
I slice shallots and mushrooms into olive oil

and begin to imagine
I might not cough tomorrow.

― MH, 9 May 2020

***

Tomorrow might bring
the unknown – new foes, allies of Taxol; blitzkrieg

within the chest; skull afire (the mind sentinels one front

alone, these days) – but also Philippe, bonne fée, by the hospital doors,

strafed by showers or barraged – joyfully – by vernal sun.

― KN, 12 May 2020

***

Lengthening vernal afternoons to evenings sometimes we would walk

Bastille to Concorde, halfway back, talking, stop for coffee

in a nondescript
café, touching each other’s arms for emphasis.

Where the métro took someone home’s a foreign country now.

― MH, 13 May 2020

***

Foreigners but both home: this body and Paris, the only ones I

have known dearly for thus long, inconstant, heedless satyrs

but mine, always mine.
Now, though, they turn hesitant, unfamiliar to

their mirrors, shorn of birthmarks and lush with other beings.

― KN, 14 May 2020

***

Budding, lush, wilting, lilacs, then roses, behind iron grills: locked gardens,

each with some reminiscence. There, we ate ham sandwiches

on a bench, talking
about Homs, and Aleppo. There, a France Inter

reporter interviewed me two months after I finished

chemo. I stared at
green leaves, blue sky, found something more appropriate

to say than “I’m still alive.”
And am, outside the gates, now.

― MH, 15 May 2020

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571315519
• ISBN 13: 9781571315519
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96