A Different Distance: A Renga

By Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781571317780

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

Book preview

A DIFFERENT DISTANCE

Also by MARILYN HACKER

Presentation Piece

Separations

Taking Notice

Assumptions

Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

Going Back to the River

The Hang-glider’s Daughter: New and Selected Poems

Selected Poems: 1965–1990

Winter Numbers

Squares and Courtyards

Desesperanto

First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960–1979

Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems

Names

A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014

Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2018

Also by KARTHIKA NAÏR

Zon-Mai: Parcours nomads (co-author)

Bearings

DESH: Memories inherited, borrowed, invented

The Honey Hunter

Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata

Over and Under Ground in Mumbai & Paris (co-author)

Amirah ou la Princesse intrépide (adaptation of the opera La Princesse arabe)

A DIFFERENT DISTANCE

a renga

MARILYN HACKER and KARTHIKA NAЇR

MILKWEED   EDITIONS

© 2021, Text by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. [phone]

milkweed.org

Published 2021 by Milkweed Editions

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover art by Abi Daker

22 23 24 25 26   5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hacker, Marilyn, 1942- author. | Karthika Nair, author.

Title: A different distance : a renga / Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr.

Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2021. | Summary: Celebrated poets Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr compose a collaborative poem marking a year of friendship through stillness and grief-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021029434 (print) | LCCN 2021029435 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315519 (paperback) | ISBN 9781571317780 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Renga.

Classification: LCC PS3558.A28 D54 2021 (print) | LCC PS3558. A28 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029434

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029435

Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. A Different Distance was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by McNaughton & Gunn.

For Julie Fay, Mimi Khalvati, Karyn London, Deema Shehabi, and Kim Vaeth, who all kept the lights on at a different distance. For Golan Haji, Norbert Hirschhorn, and Fady Joudah, physicians of the heart.

—MH

To the kith—near and far, white-coated and not—who kept me safe and (somewhat) sane through this last year.

—KN

Contents

A Different Distance

Acknowledgments

A DIFFERENT DISTANCE