If literary genres were to have a popularity contest, poetry would be a distant last after fiction and non-fiction. Once the crown jewel of literature, the readership as well as the number of poets globally, as suggested by reports over the years, have been steadily declining since the turn of the century. In an attempt to go against the tide, poet Kala Ramesh took on herself, over a decade ago, the onus to revive poetry in general, and haiku in particular.
With its origins in Japan, haiku is a form of short poetry, three lines to be precise, and traditionally follows the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. As the form got adapted into different languages across the world, the phonetic pattern became less rigid. “Haiku is about the silences and the white space around words,” says the author of The Forest I Know (2021).
To bring together experienced and budding poets of the form in different languages, Kala founded INhaiku in 2013, an initiative that took the form of a festival over the years, and will be celebrating its 10th anniversary in Pune. The three-day event from February 3-5 is called the Triveni Utsav and will see participation by over 40 poets.
“I wanted to create a sort of mela (carnival) where poets with a shared love for haiku could bond. I also wanted to create a space where they can share their work with their peers, and the novices could learn the art of writing haiku,” says Ramesh, who shuttles between Pune and Chennai.
Interactive in nature, the event will have unique and innovative segments such as HAIKUcharades, where a dancer enacts a poem and the audience guesses the poet, and haibunSLAM (combining prose and haiku). It will also feature haiku masterclasses as well as book launches of poets such as Shobhana Kumar, Gautam Nadkarni and Paresh Tiwari among others.
Hailing from a literary family in Chennai—her mother and two sisters are writers—Ramesh’s introduction to poetry began early, but she sort of stumbled on haiku much later. “On my friends’ insistence, I submitted a poem I had written to an American website. When I went to check the published piece, I came across the word ‘haiku’. Intrigued, I opened the link, and that is how my journey began. It was January 14, 2005,” she says.
Since then, the poet has been actively promoting the literary form in India. Besides, single-handedly organising the Triveni Utsav, she has also spearheaded several haiku conferences in the country. In 2012, Ramesh started a first-of-its-kind 60-hour haiku course at Symbiosis International University, Pune, where she is a visiting faculty. It was during Ramesh’s time here that she initiated the haikuWALL where her students painted walls across the city with poetry.
Some of the poet’s best-known works include Naad Anunaad: an Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku, Wishbone Moon, a collection of haiku by women poets, Haiku and the Companion Activity Book and Beyond the Horizon Beyond, which was shortlisted for the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize in 2019.