Haiku for Healing Interview – Shobhana Kumar

We continue the H4H interview feature with the well-known poet and editor, Shobhana Kumar. Shobhana shares with us how she found a sanctuary in haiku and haibun in the midst of dealing with a debilitating auto-immune condition and also in her voluntary work with the elderly homeless and the transgender people.

First of all, thank you very much, Shobhana, for agreeing to be interviewed for the H4H project. As a widely published poet and editor, what is it about haiku and its related forms that appeals to you?

I am deeply grateful to you, Sonam and to Haiku for Healing for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts.

I fell in love with haiku long before I knew anything about it. It must have been in the early 2000s that I first encountered the form. However, the few haiku that I wrote during that first decade cannot be called haiku at all, not even micro-poetry.

It was only when I signed up for a workshop by Gabriel Rosenstock in 2012 that I realised what a profound form it was. I was drawn to the brevity of the verse, the possibility that one could say a lot in just a few words. I knew very quickly that it needed deep work to be able to do that. The more I learnt about the form, the more I discovered that I knew nothing at all. Natural imagery abounds in haiku. But I did not know much about the flora and  fauna in my immediate world. And here I was, dreaming of being a writer! I think the audacity of that presumption met headlong with the sublime, austere wisdom of haiku. I don’t think that I was the same ever again. It was a waking call of sorts—wake up and look around you and finally it will lead you to look within.

I like to think of the haikai world as a snooze button periodically awakening me and making me to never stop looking. For this I will be eternally grateful.

Would you say that this appeal includes the potential of haiku as a healing tool? Please expand a little on this.

Indeed. Thank you for this deeply reflective question. Sometime in 2014, the journey of haikai writing turned into a collaborative experiment with two wonderful poets, you, Sonam, and Geethanjali Rajan from India. It was with both of you that I learnt the nuances of the forms and together, we wrote for around eight years, writing back and forth, sharing the ups and downs of life and learning to navigate the complexities of parenthood, working motherhood and according writing the sacred space it deserved. We wrote through illnesses and setbacks and during these times, it became a healing experience, I think, for all three of us.

Writing haikai forms also meant reading. When I read Basho’s story, it had a profound influence on me. The austerity, the relentless searching, the difficulties that must have come with his artistic pursuit, the depth of the spiritual fount that he endlessly drew from. It all resonated with me in a manner that I had not experienced before. Looking back, I realise it was the spirit embodied in the haikai world that eventually led me to my spiritual path. That of course, is not apparent, but hindsight reveals a lot about life that you don’t realise at the moment.

The calm of a haiku and the calm of meditation became tools to help me cope with pain that arrived around the same time through an auto-immune condition.

How to make sense of the world and identity issues are recurring themes in your writing. How does your charity work for the homeless elderly in Coimbatore, where you are, impact on your writing? How does haiku and its related forms help in articulating these ideas? Could you please share a few examples?

My husband, a few friends and I had just started a non-profit organisation and we were working with very vulnerable groups. In 2014, we began working with the transgender community and the elderly and abandoned people. The everyday trauma of witnessing the horrors that humankind can inflict on itself was enormously difficult.  I suppose I began to internalise a lot of what went on and could not come to terms with the horrors I witnessed daily.

When I came back home, writing was the only solace. And it was the haibun, my most favourite form of the short forms that I turned to. It allowed me to stay on the periphery of lives that I was bearing witness to and guarded me against invading their stories. It enabled the ‘witness’ stand that we often struggle to maintain. So, ‘how can I tell a story and recede as the storyteller?’ became a very conscious effort. Haikai writing naturally makes this possible. It also helped me come to terms with what I could not do. It taught me in gentle, illumining ways my limitations.

It also has had a profound influence on writing poetry. I could unconsciously weed out the redundancies, there was an automatic tightening of the lines, the poems became shorter, and I began to discover a new way to write. Poetry became more and more about my immediate world, its inhabitants, its beauty and quirks. There is so much to write about the street where I live, an ordinary street in an Indian town. Were it not for haiku I probably would not have realised this.

Coming to think of it, the journey of haikai writing also gave me an opportunity to look more closely at my mother tongue, Tamil, and I discovered the joy of translations.

You have had prolonged periods of treatment for your own health issues. Has writing been a healing process through these debilitating and difficult times? What particular forms have you chosen to use? Please share a few poems. 

The mid-2010s was the time when I had major health setbacks, complicated surgeries and then, a short period of time (around six months) when I steadily began losing sensations in one side of my body. Nothing really made sense at the time but I knew I was steadily declining and believed that perhaps I would not live long. Again, it was writing I turned to. Reading the jisei (death) poems of the masters l felt a spiritual yearning. They taught me about an idea that I have been fascinated by from when I was a child—that there are many ways to die. And as long as one can find a way to nurture the spirit, dying can open doors.

And the gods were kind. I lived. Continue to, and hopefully, will be around for some time.

Writing is what I turn to process any emotion, the moments of calm, the storm, the anger, the hurt, hope and hopelessness. Haibun became a way of expressing those moments from a quieter frame of mind. With poetry, the work became about the moment.

I would like to share two pieces, the first a haibun from A Sky Full of Bucket Lists, and the second, a short free verse poem. I share it because I hope it reveals how big an influence haiku has had on me.

Segue*

On a rare day, she wakes up smiling. Limbs sing and meld into synchrony. She is like
the little girl in
Dostoevsky’s dream: tugging all of life’s closely held secrets to come asunder.

darkened path
a tree erupts
with fireflies

She leans in and listens to the koel sing. Gulmohar petals fall in silence. She lends her
cheeks to the
stroke of the morning wind and lets the sun wash over her. Sometimes, she sees a star
refusing to fade
into the light.

panic attack even the clock a time bomb

Serendipity**

acorn / wild corn / pumpkin / jasmine / plum /
milk / sap / toddy / honey /
fire / wheel / crop / pasture /
poem / epic / prayer / dream /

beyond the bend
revelations
gifts that turn tides
the higher voice of possibility

light

To a poet looking to haiku for healing, what would you like to say? 

Embrace it with open arms for the masters (contemporary included) constantly show us how life reveals itself in just three lines. If you open yourself to haiku, it will show you a path that is endless in its giving. The path is inward.

Notes

* ”Segue,” A Sky Full of Bucket Lists, Red River India, 2021.

** “Serendipity”: unpublished.

If you have any questions about Haiku for Healing, please use the Haiku for Healing contact form on our Contact page.

Coming up on Monday 1st June:

H4H interview with the award-winning poet, Rebecca Drouilhet. We learn how haiku has been a part of her life and writing from an early age and how it has helped her to cope as a registered nurse and also with her own breast cancer and the deaths of her mother, daughter-in-law and her husband, Michael Drouilhet last September.

Bios

Shobhana Kumar is a poet, translator and chronicler. Forthcoming over the next two years, are two collaborative translation projects from Tamil to English on a ninth century mystic and Tamil’s most loved poet, Subramania Bharathi. She runs a non-profit organisation that works with different vulnerable communities. Writing and reading haikai forms is her place of solace.

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short-form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails.

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geethanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021. She organised a year-long email course in 2024 for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku for Parkinson’s project.

Read past Haiku for Healing posts here.

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