CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Jayant Kashyap

Rappahannock Review Poetry Editors: We absolutely adored the affection you wrote in “Come over, this night.” What was your experience in developing the feelings of connection and comfort in this poem?

Jayant Kashyap: Thank you! Initially, it was research. Following an idea of a love poem after listening to “Ishq,” this beautiful song by Faheem Abdullah and Rauhan Malik which has a couple of lines sung in the Kashmiri/Koshur language. To me, writing love poems in particular is a different kind of effort (while I do believe that all poems are love poems and ekphrastic pieces of some sort, working on a conventional love poem, keeping it from being clichéd or written in a very common format needs research). So, I worked on the tone of the poem, and talked to some of my friends who are from Kashmir. Getting their insights helped define the poem for myself, and I then took some inspiration from Agha Shahid Ali’s work to imagine longing as put in words and phrases.

RR: We also enjoyed the song lyrics used in the middle of the poem. Did the song inspire this piece? If not, when did you decide to implement them, and why?

JK: It did and it didn’t. The first draft of the poem (five lines) was written in August 2022, but listening to the song again and again last year helped me decide what the poem could look like. As it is, most of the insights I got from Faheem, Faisal, and Tabish, the Kashmiri friends, had to do with the meaning and the essence or, in this case, tone of the song (the way the song is put). Tabish talked to me about how, to her, the song implied the surrendering of the entirety of “you[rself]”to your lover; and Faheem and Faisal translated for me, in parts, the two lines (which became “Beloved, stay over this night […] let rest softly your gaze, beloved” in English) and helped shape most of the poem to result in what it looks like today. So, one could say the song didn’t inspire the beginning of the poem, but (two years later, on implementation) it did inspire just about everything else.

RR: There’s a very strong element of voice and tone in this piece—what does your process entail when developing voice in your writing?

JK: Of course! What would the poem be without it anyway? Sometimes, there are some pieces that take a lot of time to develop, and “Come over, this night—” was one of those (over two years). It required time in terms of organisation: I didn’t just wake up and decide it’d look like what it looks like now; it took moving words and lines here and there, seeing if a certain word sounds right or if a certain line/sentence sounds right without it. The line breaks tend to become important in non-prose poems, and particularly so in this one because of the presence of an element of visual poetry here. So, to put it simply, it needed some brainstorming, lots of time, and lots of revisiting old, incomplete drafts. And, as it is, I myself am very much in love with this poem, and may end up having it published as a broadside (maybe just for myself haha).

RR: The xxx at the end caught our eye—kisses, a signature, a redacted name—we’re interested in the possibilities. What was your intention for that final line?

JK: The xxx, while I was finalising a later draft, I thought was crucial in many ways—the poem is shaped like a heart (half of it), and reads like a letter to a lover, so having the “kisses” helped with both the structure of the poem (it helped insert just enough text to help make the heart shape more defined) and its tone, defining an end to its letter-like format. And I do also think the “kisses” tend to act as our signature in the texts we send the people we love, so that!

RR: We want to ask about your zine, Water, especially its format, which we think is amazing. Can you tell us more about that project?

JK: I’d love to! Water followed the first two pamphlets, and was essentially a result of Yvonne Reddick’s recommendation to the Skear Zines team. I’d been working on sets of poems about water and air already after having published a poem in Magma for the first time (and I still have quite a few water poems; one of the previous couple of poems published in Rappahannock Review was also a water poem) when I received an email from the team about publishing a really small set of poems in an un/foldable zine format. I was allowed to pick the style in which the zine would appear—it would read as an A7 (mini)book and then open up as a sheet to reveal another poem (Water was published with six of my favorite environmental poems at the time, including an erasure from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children)—and also the color of the zine, which I did. To me, the color of the zine was an important factor, considering the result itself was only to be a wee thing, and everything that Water would come with, including the color of the zine, would have some meaning. Maya Chowdhry, who worked very closely with me on the project, took me through things one by one, and the resulting six-poem zine ended up being something I very much love. At the time, I was also frantically trying to get published: having a full-length collection out was the goal, but the publication of Water helped me realise the dream was perhaps somewhat premature. The air poem set I had been working on (tentatively titled Heavy Air) had been shortlisted for the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2021, judged by Kim Moore, and I took a break from pushing full length collections forward. Now, four years after Water, my New Poets Prize-winning pamphlet, Notes on Burials, is out in May, which is exciting!