K. Ramesh: Haiku Master of South India

By Robert Hirschfield

Around the time of the millennium, a young physics teacher, K. Ramesh, could be found walking in the heat of Tamil Nadu with The Haiku Handbook authored by New Jersey poet William Higginson. The Haiku Handbook is one of the essential guide books to English-language haiku. Higginson refers to haiku as a “shared language” of experience and perception expressed in the fewest possible words. The Handbook was a gift for Ramesh from a visiting American. But, more importantly, his entry, through a side-door of Western literature, into his future.

Ramesh, who only began writing English-language haiku in his twenties, has quietly emerged as one of its major poets. His work appears in journals in the US, Europe, and Japan, and is read in translation in his native Tamil. He’s had three published volumes, the first, Soap Bubbles (2007), by the prestigious Red Moon Press in Winchester, Virginia.  

soap bubbles
from a children’s park
break a traffic rule

Brazenly flouting a red light as Ramesh and other drivers were stuck in traffic.

His second volume, From Pebble to Pebble, has an unusual publishing history. It was first published in Ireland in 2013 by Gabriel Rosenstock, Ramesh’s Irish translator. An expanded version, by Authors Press in India, came out the following year.  The book launch was in Chennai. The Indian Express graced the volume with an article, but like most books of haiku, sales were poor.

paddy field by the river
voice of the farmer
speaking to the bulls

In her introduction to Ramesh’s third volume, A Small Tree of Tender Leaves (2020), Japanese American poet Fay Aoyagi writes, “I walked the sugarcane field with village boys. I heard the thud of a mango.”

“I write only about what I directly experience,” Ramesh wrote in an email to me. The poet teaches at a Krishnamurti residential school in a village southeast of Chennai, built amidst paddy fields over which kingfishers, cuckoos, and golden orioles fly. It is also home to antelopes, mongoose, and hares. In the tradition of Basho, and the latter-day Japanese master, Santoka, Ramesh roams the Tamil countryside, often with his camera, much like Henri Cartier Bresson, the photo-journalist who covered the world for Magnum, waiting famously for “the decisive moment” to arise. For Ramesh, “I just walk without attempting to look for something.”

Born in the temple town of Madurai, he stands philosophically aloof from the frantic pace of big city life. He adjusts his art to the slow, heat-baked rhythms of rural India with the patience of a literary farmer.

afternoon breeze
sound of the loom
from the weaver’s house

In another email, Ramesh wrote, “Haiku is a form that works by juxtaposing images. In a good haiku no word is redundant.”

Like haiku poets, East and West, he learned about the quartet of great Japanese masters (Basho, Buson, Issa, and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century master, Shiki) from the British scholar R.H. Blyth’s classic, four-volume set titled Haiku. “Learning about the aesthetics of the masters, I found one particular element, yugen, especially important,” reflected Ramesh. “The sense of mystery in what is all around us, its timeless quality. When a haiku is filled with wonder, yugen is present.”

His inspiration came not just from Japan. He read Gary Snyder’s poetry and Jack Kerouac’s novels. He listened to the Beats’ haiku on audio files. “I learned a lot about how haiku is composed from Kerouac.” In On The Road, he found a kindred spirit. “I admired his love for exploring, the way he went from place to place and met with other poets to talk to.”

Not unlike the wanderer and Japanese writer Santoka who, like Kerouac, had a passion for alcohol, about which Ramesh, typically, is non-judgmental. “Like Hemingway, Santoka was a great stylist.” Ramesh’s emphasis on writing haiku from what he himself experiences comes directly from Santoka’s great road poems: “No money,/ no possessions, no teeth/ alone.” Ramesh wrote, “Some haiku poets say that what is experienced in a haiku does not have to be real. I cannot subscribe to this approach.”

He came across Santoka’s work in the home of the late Angelee Deodhar, one of the first poets to write English-language haiku in India. Haiku has experienced an upsurge in India in recent years. The catalyst has been another Tamil native, Kala Ramesh. After stumbling upon haiku in the online site, boloji.com, in 2005, she began writing, publishing, and leading workshops on the form. In 2016, she established Triveni Haiku, India’s first national haiku organization. Her students include Shloka Shankar, Vandana Parashar and Teji Sethi, who, along with K. Ramesh (not her student), and others, have thrown a South Asian cast over the predominantly white face of English-language haiku.

In K. Ramesh’s poetry, there is a confluence of the contemporary and the ancient. The result, perhaps, of being raised in a temple town over two thousand years old (“rocks…my hands grip/ time”). Growing up, he’d visit the birth place of Madurai’s great sage, Ramana Maharshi. “You go to his house and feel a deep silence,” he recalled.

everyone asleep…
sun rays on the violin
hanging on a wall

“I am touched by the joy of small things. I love sharing life’s small things with my readers.”

There is a timeless quality to the poet’s best haiku. He is able to take readers beyond the normal realms of duality and measure, and draw them into a vision field of empathy, a deep space that is very down-to-earth.

phone call…
the chirp
of a hometown bird

The poet’s hometown is whatever his eyes see.

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Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based freelance writer and haiku poet. His work has appeared in Hanging Loose, Modern Haiku, Tricycle, The Banyan Review, Salamander, Acorn, Jewish Review of Books, and numerous other publications. His chapbook The Road to Canaan was published by Presa Press in 2019.

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