To accompany our new edition – live online – this latest essay offers insights into ‘tanka twins’. Our co-editor Jo McInerney looks at tanka-doha by esteemed South Asian poet Kala Ramesh. These paired pieces owe debts to Kabir, a foremost poet from her own country, creating links between poetic traditions in India & Japan. Catchment will encourage such contributions as a further option with tanka in our seventh issue.
‘Throw colours on one another’ – a discussion of the tanka-doha of Kala Ramesh
by Jo McInerney
In this essay I’d like to introduce readers to a type of tanka sequence they may not have encountered before: tanka doubles, or tanka twins.
The term I will use is tanka-doha, in deference to the celebrated Indian haiku and tanka poet Kala Ramesh, who has developed the form over several years and given it a name that reflects one of the influences behind its creation.
Among the earliest practitioners of tanka doubles were three of its most highly regarded exponents: Jane and Werner Reichhold and, later, Sanford Goldstein.
However, the double tanka they created were collaborative. As Goldstein explained, ‘A poet writes the first five lines, and the person you are working with writes a connected tanka.’
This is not Kala’s process. She is the author of the two pieces that form the whole and the sort of connection she seeks between them is partially inspired by the work of 15th Century Indian poet and mystic Kabir. ‘Kabir,’ as Kala notes, ‘is renowned for his Doha — couplets of 24 sound units.’
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The two lines of the Doha couplet play against each other as can be seen in the following example:
Drop falling in the ocean — everyone knows.
Ocean absorbed in the drop — a rare one knows.
There is a clear allegorical undercurrent here. Within the tradition in which Kabir wrote, the single drop can be seen as representative of the individual human soul. Line one suggests its incorporation into a larger spiritual reality, during life or after death.
In line two, Kabir suggests what may be a far more unusual insight, ‘a rare one knows’. The line carries the implication that the individual consciousness can encompass a potentially infinite spiritual awareness.
It is not only the philosophical perspective that is of interest here. Within her comments and her work, Kala has highlighted the importance of the interplay between the two elements.
The second line reverses the first, but each retains its validity. For Kala the space between the two insights is where the cross-fertilisation – what she refers to as ‘the magic’ – occurs.
‘Space’ in tanka-doha does not refer only to the reader’s internal contemplation of the overall effect achieved, akin to ‘ma’ or dreaming room in haiku. Physical ‘space’, as in the precise layout of the poems, also plays a major role.
The tanka-doha discussed in this essay are reprinted in full at the end. Readers will note that the two tanka within each pair are separated by only a line. However, the second tanka is deeply indented.
This arrangement does two things. The single line break indicates the two pieces are connected. However, the indentation alerts the reader to pause. It signals a clear distinction between the two tanka.
Indenting highlights a significant change – the second piece is not simply a continuation of the first. It is related to but distinct from what precedes it. In that point of connection but difference Kala’s magical fertilisation occurs.
The physical indentation acts as a visual manifestation of Kabir’s conceptual space between two insights.
The first of Kala’s tanka-doha we will look at follows. It was published in 2019 in Presence #59.
All Kala’s tanka-doha are untitled. She believes that, unlike many sequences, these paired pieces should stand unsupported in the same way as haiku and single tanka do. It may be that she prefers the imaginative openness that this allows.
The first half of this first pair is:
on rangpanchami
fisherfolks throw colours
on one another …
the moon emerges
with indigo stains
It opens with an immediate sense of joyful release. Rang Panchami is the culmination of the Hindu Spring festival. People sprinkle coloured powder on each other or splash coloured water.
Kala enacts the carnival rather than explains it. She compounds the words and names the day without capitalisation, as it might come from the mouths of those celebrating it – an exuberant string of syllables.
Kala’s celebrants are ‘fisherfolks’. These are people who have hard and hazardous lives, for whom Rang Panchami is a celebration of renewal and continued survival. The coloured water is a brief transformation of their usual struggle and the more joyous for that.
Kala is a master of the link and shift, or, in the terms prompted by Kabir’s work, the continued validity of reversed elements.
The closing two lines:
the moon emerges
with indigo stains
achieve that partial alchemy. The moon appears to be changed, marked, by the human festival. Its basalt-mottled surface is seen as being stained, just like the hands and faces of the people below.
But Kala is subtler than this. The moon is stained ‘with indigo’, a colour both accurate as a description of what is seen, and in a different emotional register than the reds and yellows among the swirling crowds. The world is transformed but the transformation is partial.
The second half of the first pair reads:
undulating desert sands
touch the open sky…
memories of you
blossom from somewhere
deep within
The shift is obvious. We have moved from a crowded coastal scene to somewhere inland. Bare sands stretch beneath ‘the open sky’. However, the setting is not bleak. The sands are ‘undulating’, suggesting a soft, moving landscape and more significantly, they ‘touch’ that open sky.
There is an expansiveness here that is not threatening but almost welcoming or embracing and there is a feeling that there are no arbitrary divisions. The elements are connected.
Then, Kala again achieves a partial transfiguration through the link and shift. With the last three lines:
memories of you
blossom from somewhere
deep within
the address becomes overtly personal, made to someone who may no longer be physically available.
The feeling, however, is not simply one of loss, any more than the first two lines hold only emptiness. The memories ‘blossom’, an image of re-emerging life, and a partial contrast to the desert above.
But the contrast is only partial. The first two lines present a quiet vista of apparent lifelessness. The closing three lines, though deeply internal, are emergent. It is as though something has been drawn forth, blossomed, from that soft, sky-touching desolation.
It is fascinating to see how the two tanka within this pair speak to one another, how that subtle interaction occurs.
The first tanka presents a beautifully nuanced image of celebration and partial rejuvenation. The fishermen’s lives are briefly transformed, the emergent moon both shares that change and carries the marks of a persistent darkness.
In the second tanka in this pair the movement is almost reversed. The opening scene appears devoid of life but holds intimations of softness and connection. The emergent memories are of someone lost but paradoxically still retained, born of that initial emptiness.
Across the pair we have a delicate movement from brief joyous celebration, through partial reaffirmation in the physical world to a beautiful if indifferent landscape and finally to a recollection of love lost yet retained in memory.
This last dynamic is very close to the second line of Kabir’s Doha, where the ocean is discovered within the single drop.
We will conclude our exploration of this form with a discussion of another of Kala’s tanka-doha.
Readers are advised to make a clear distinction between the two tanka-doha presented in this essay, because although they share common elements, they are very different works.
The following is the first half of a tanka-doha published in Heliosparrow Poetry Journal on June 16, 2021:
festivals
curried by strong winds
quite sufficient
to make September special . . .
I was born this month
The opening of the first tanka in this final pair is remarkable for its economy and lightness of touch.
The first four lines come in a rush, as though mimicking the September winds that blow through the festivals held during this month.
There is a strong personal voice. This is a judgement offered by an engaged participant. It reads almost like part of a dramatic monologue.
The use of the verb ‘curried’ is highly atmospheric. Amid lines that read as simple direct speech, it adds a wealth of suggestion.
It creates an image of the winds stirring the crowds, the parades, and stalls with a worrying action like a currycomb.
The shadow of ‘curry’ adds other notes – the implication of tantalising smells and rich tastes. It serves to sharpen the specialness claimed for this month and its festivities.
The final line in the tanka is both a shift and a confirmation. ‘I was born this month’ – is an intensely personal statement. It further explains the speaker’s attachment to this time but also suggests something more expansive.
It can be understood as more than a statement about a personal birthdate. It becomes a statement about coming alive, entering life itself.
Read in this way the two halves of this tanka work together beautifully.
What could seem a reduction into mere biography becomes an indication of the way in which a vibrant external world enlivens, indeed prompts, one’s interior life. Here again we have echoes of the second line of Kabir’s couplet.
The final tanka in the second pair reads:
waves
leave their songs
woven in sand
riding on first light
the universe fills my stage
The first thing to note once again is the shift between the first tanka in this pair and the second.
We are now on a shoreline with an image neither frenetic nor scent-filled, but more gently multisensorially and emotionally compelling.
The fusion of motion, sound, and residue in the first three lines is remarkable. We are not considering simply a memory of sound, but the rippled remnants, left in the sand, of the waves that carried those ‘songs’.
Auditorily this is a quiet triumph – ‘waves’ echoing ‘woven’ and the suggestion of an unspoken ‘weave’ in ‘leave’.
The first three lines are not so much about loss as a transformed continuance.
Ultimately, this is a tanka of abundance rather than either loss or transformation. As it shifts into its last two lines, it connects with the final line of the first tanka in this pair:
riding on first light
the universe fills my stage
‘First light’ brings with it the suggestion of birth and the final line, ‘the universe fills my stage’, creates both a sense of sensorial profusion and a welcome into life.
This tanka expands rather than reverses the sense of ‘birth day’ abundance found in the final line of the first tanka in this pair.
Each tanka in this final tanka-doha is a joyful embrace of life, with the second extending the scope of the first. The first shows the life-promoting effect of wind currying human celebration. The second initially appears confined to the natural world, but its concluding lines welcome that world, indeed ‘the universe’, into the speaker’s consciousness as the medium within which a life can be lived. It confirms the sense of swelling personal boundaries carried in the last line of the Kabir couplet.
Kala Ramesh’s work shows the scope of the form she has done so much to define. Her aim with tanka-doha is to create an interaction between pieces in which a form of magical cross-pollination can occur, where each tanka retains its own integrity while altering the terms on which the other is read. She seeks to spread the colours from one to the other.
I believe her work succeeds in this. In the process it offers additional variants of the tension seen in Kabir’s Doha. She moves Kabir’s model of reversed elements into expansion and revelation.
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I would like to thank Kala for her generosity in giving me a range of examples of her work in this form. I would also like to thank her for her permission to use the two pairs I selected.
Below are the two tanka-doha in the form in which they were first published.
on rangpanchami
fisherfolks throw colours
on one another …
the moon emerges
with indigo stains
undulating desert sands
touch the open sky…
memories of you
blossom from somewhere
deep within
Presence Journal: # 59 Fall 2019
festivals
curried by strong winds
quite sufficient
to make September special . . .
I was born this month
waves
leave their songs
woven in sand
riding on first light
the universe fills my stage
Heliosparrow Poetry Journal:June 16, 2021
References
Kala’s comments on tanka-doha: MacQueen’s Quinterly, issue 24, August 30, 2024.
Accessible at http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ24/Ramesh-Two-Tanka-Doha.aspx
Sanford Goldstein’s explanation: Tanka Society of America, ‘Spilling Tanka: Interview with Sanford Goldstein by Patricia Prime’.
Accessible at https://www.tankasocietyofamerica.org/essays/spilling-tanka-an-interview-with-sanford-goldstein
Kabir: The Bijak of Kabir. Translated by Linda Hess and Sukhdev Singh. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2001. Sakhi 69.
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Jo McInerney
Tanka co-editor
Catchment – Poetry of Place