Jayant Kashyap has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has published two pamphlets and a zine, Water (Skear Zines, 2021). His work appears in POETRY, Magma and elsewhere.
You can read his poem Rehoming in the October 2023 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
The way I look at Rehoming, it is a rather indirect apology letter to nature, that in doing whatever we’ve thought to be right for ages (or in being unbothered about the impact our activities have on our surroundings and on the earth on a whole) we’ve made criminal choices and that, perhaps, there is no redemption – although I very much hope there is!
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
There can never be one is what I believe, so, I’ve got several favourites that are always at the back of my mind and serve as touchstones based on slight differences in genre: The Veiled Suite (or, particularly, The Country Without a Post Office) by Agha Shahid Ali, Two-Headed Nightingale by Shara Lessley, The House with Only an Attic and a Basement by Kathryn Maris, Magdalene by Marie Howe, The Uses of the Body by Deborah Landau, Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and more.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
I believe that there is a great chance I’m quite fortunate to not know the answer to this question.
What are you working on now?
For quite some time now, I’ve been working on three poetry collections – one is a set of love poems, another of ecopoetry (a smaller draft of which was shortlisted for the 2022 New Poets Prize at The Poetry Business) and one about people/place/history.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Ideas; random/disorganized words; inspirations. I believe workshops, with all the prompts, advice, recommendations, etc. are quite helpful in the process of writing, and I try to participate in one every once in a while.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Paintings/photographs/music; I’m quite big on ekphrastic poems.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I don’t really; there are often days when I write nothing, and then there are times that I can look at as durations of “poetic boom” for me. Of course, this irregularity of manners is distracting at times, considering the fact that, for a student, it can be disturbing in the midst of a course (which is just about always) but the results sure make me ecstatic.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
Chinua Achebe’s Collected Poems; Leontia Flynn’s Drives; Yvonne Reddick’s Burning Season; Clare Shaw’s Towards a General Theory of Love; Ranjit Hoskote’s Vanishing Acts; Rebecca Netley’s The Whistling (novella); Seamus Heaney’s Field Work; Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (ed. Douglas Dunn) and Kathryn Maris’s The House with Only an Attic and a Basement (rereading). Otherwise, I’ve just finished watching Foundation, Midnight Mass, Lawless (2012, dir. David Lynch) and, for some unexplainable reason, have begun Pokémon.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
Yes, the first and most important one so far has been “write”, and then I listened to a podcast interview of Marie Howe (I think!) where she said that she advises her students to maintain a journal – to write 10 normal events of a day everyday – and work around some of the events from several days after some time (whenever the writer feels ready, that is).
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
Not really, no! I believe that style matters quite a lot but, then, I’m also a very disorganized person and I more often than not let a poem run me rather than doing it the other way round.