We met our current guest in 2015, while hosting Haiku North America at Union College. Kala Ramesh is a poet, editor and educator. She writes and teaches haiku, tanka, haibun and renku to children, undergrads and senior citizens. An external faculty member of the Symbiosis International University of Pune in India since 2012, she teaches Japanese short forms of poetry to undergrads—a first in her country.
Passionate about taking haiku to everyday spaces, Kala initiated the ‘HaikuWALL India,’ where she gets graffiti artists to paint haiku on city walls. Starting in 2006, she has organized five haiku festivals in India and her love for haiku culminated in the formation of ‘IN Haiku’ in 2013—to get Indian haiku poets under one umbrella and to promote and more deeply appreciate the beauty and intricacies of haiku and allied Japanese short forms of poetry. She has collaborated with artists, musicians, and dancers in several public readings. And recently she has served as the editor-in-chief of Naad Anunaad: An Anthology of Contemporary World Haiku. We hope you will enjoy this small sample of her haiku.
This year has been and looks to continue being very busy for all of us. We are hoping to attend this year’s Haiku Circle in Massachusetts as a group, which we did for the for first time last year. An added attraction this year will be a workshop to be led by Yu. Some of us will be attending Haiku North America in Santa Fe this September, the Seabeck Haiku Getaway (near Seattle) in October, and the Asilomar Haiku Gathering in Monterey, California in November. And we dearly hope to enjoy another renku session in Onawa, Maine sometime in August or early September. Most of these activities will take place before our next issue and are likely to be reflected somehow in that next set of poems.
js
Sample Poems
who am I
night and day merge
in twilight
Kala Ramesh
the way we left our dining room chairs
js
January thaw
last year’s snow
in icicles
ht
space station
can you see me
on the floating dock
yc
full moon—
i’ll get back to myself
someday
tc
Upstate Dim Sum 