Jai Hamid Bashir, Joshua Burton, and Nanya Jhingran are three writers who share a contemplative engagement with history, intergenerational wounding, and lyric. I admire the ways they honor the reflection and relationship-building aspects of the writing process, and practice a rigorous love of poetry.
Below, I talk with these brilliant poets about their distinct writing rituals, creative dreams, and fears, as well as their respective first book projects. In a rare pre-first-book glimpse, Jai, Joshua, and Nanya share their thinking and creative processes.
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Do you have any writing rituals? What helps you sustain/nourish your writing?
Jai Hamid Bashir: I write for the people I have and desire.
After a dinner party, after all the other guests had exited, a beautiful journalist asked to see where I write. The tone of his inquiry made it seem like I would open a hatch door, lead him through a small passage, and to an everlasting, candlelit altar. Instead, I took him to my bedroom. I handed him my dog-eared books leaning against my window, my notebooks covered by turmeric-fingerprints and kimchi-stained chopsticks. Perhaps the magic/ritual is in how Lucie Brock-Broido identifies it: domestic mysticism. I write mostly at home. In bed. I believe equally in the fleeting, electric muse and of editing as a daily practice and dedicated labor. I am sieving the wind endlessly to touch the muse by the ankle; those visits are never declared beforehand. What is in my direct power is editing daily. I have yet to write a poem and believe it is finished in its first draft/incarnation.
Joshua Burton: I feel like my process/rituals are a bit archaic. I think I just need space to breathe and to live life between projects. But the thing is that the space and life-living usually isn’t fueling my current projects but are fueling the proceeding ones. If something big or catastrophic happens in my life, I’ll need a few years before I can write about it in a poem in any meaningful way. So the space I need is more of a long-term investment for future projects. There are things that happened to me last year that I know I’ll need years to digest and understand outside of myself and in a greater context. I’ll need about half a decade to sit with these things and process them before I can write about them in a way that feels gratifying for me.
Nanya Jhingran: I am learning to allow myself time with things that are not ostensibly writing. I try to remind myself that poetry is a way of meeting the world and so it demands from me the sharpening of a form of attention to experience and asks that I create space continually, as you say ritually, to spend time with the insights/textures/contradiction/unwieldiness that emerge from everyday life. I’m trying to understand my work as a poet to be that of finding through language a way to inhabit experience with a perceptive presence and flexibility. To carry the poetic both into the page and off from it.
For my current project, which at its core is concerned with the question of the city and what it means to be present to its ever-changing complications and entanglements, an indispensable anchoring ritual has been regular walks in which I try to trail on foot the various ways that move me from one end of the neighborhood to another. Walking helps me generate the rhythms and maneuvers I’d like to write into for this project. How can I write into the whimsical or hyper-curated or jarringly changing route of a pedestrian’s walk through large swaths of city spaces? Too, I like to bring my drafts on these walks, speak what I write of the city back into the city. It’s my version of throw-the-spaghetti-on-the-roof-if-it-sticks-its-ready! Sometimes I can tell instantly what new questions or closer observations can emerge from this process of returning the language to (in some ways) its source.
Tell me more about your current project. How/when did this project begin?
Bashir: My current project is tentatively called, Saturn in the Citrus. I am in concert with etymology/ linguistics, pleasure, space travel, The American West, interfaith/interracial and queer relationships, immigration, and an ongoing interest in loss and belonging. Many of the poems also are in conversation with photography and jazz. I strongly believe poetry is the medium most intimate with the metaphysical. The poems first came out of writing my own family history with migration and borders, and then my own anxieties and frustrations with our nation’s relationship to these issues.
I began this project during my second year of my MFA at Columbia University. In New York City, I became wildly homesick for campfires, the canyons, the weird hymns of coyotes while you are trying to sleep in a tent, etc. The origin of this collection started with a poem called, “In Dead Horse Point We Are Alone,” (published by The American Poetry Review, later The Adroit Journal). After I slid it across the table to my professor, Major Jackson, some tectonic shift occurred: It was all happening.
I am also working on a collection of essays with the central theme being time and unrequited love and the first draft of a screenplay. Yet, poetry is the medium in which I dance most naturally. So, I keep dancing.
Burton: I entered my MFA at Syracuse University with an almost complete manuscript, so I was able to finish it after my first year there. The manuscript was about the life of my mother. It became apparent to me later on in the process that being able to write about my mother was a way I could talk about myself without talking about myself. She was a bit of a scapegoat for me in some ways. In other ways, writing about her helped me learn more about myself and my own temperament. After writing that manuscript, I spent the summer before my second year at Syracuse trying to find my next project. Also, at this time, I was on the verge of a breakdown. So, I was trying to understand myself and my depression and how and why I kept ending up in the same place mentally. This was in a time in my life where I finally felt comfortable addressing my blackness in subtle ways. So I spent the summer researching, reading and watching Baldwin, The Panthers, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Joy Degruy. I also read a lot of Terrance Hayes and admired how he centered a Black audience in most of his poetry. And I found so much pride in blackness as a concept and had to slowly reconcile why I’ve never felt pride in my own blackness up until this point in my life. Once the semester started, I had a full-blown breakdown, and made it out of it. I researched the history of lynching’s and found a few Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews captivating. The combinations of these artists and activists I read, along with my breakdown and the research I did of American history, helped me understand what his new manuscript had to be about. (Or at least what it was meant to be about at the start). I wanted to explore the effects of generational trauma and its connection to mental illness amongst Black people, while also analyzing my shameful history with internalized anti-blackness. This was the birth of “Grace Engine.”
Jhingran: My current project is (provisionally) titled “Streets I Have So Often Seen” which is an excerpt from Walter Benjamin’s “Hashish in Marseille” and is so far a series of questions about city living, existential numbness, and an effort through language to come out of that numbness into a different knowledge of the city. Too, it began as a curiosity about that typical or canonical story I’ve been told about the lyric utterance: that it is spoken, overheard, and how much that sounded like being on the bus, on the pedestrian trail, the grocery store. It is also curious then about entanglement, transgressive witness, the city’s unwieldy proximities. Also, though, as in Joy James’s “Notes Towards an Unoppressive City”, a dream of being with others who come together tendentiously in relations of shared space as strangers who must accept the irreducible differences between us. I think it started somewhere in my first few years of living in Seattle, in the heart of gentrified Capitol Hill in a rent-controlled apartment and being absolutely thrown off by the dissonance of being across from community spaces being torn down to be replaced by empty apartment buildings and lease to rent retail spaces no one in the community could afford. In an inarticulate way, then, it started as a question for me, personally, about what it meant as a 20-something, in the United States, as someone not-from-here, to develop a relationship with the land which keeps me in the Pacific Northwest and still, still be very, very present to the same contradictions of settler colonialism and globalization that brought and have kept me here.
What books/records/film/visual art is this project in conversation with?
Bashir: Seeing as a tool, as the mode by which we most often consider and construct reality is a concept I’ve been writing towards since 2015. W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger are always with me. South Asian epics, such as The Ramayana, Sufi mystics, and Pakistani folk music are cellular elements of my body. There are certain poets —their melancholy, eroticism, and tragedy, that are so seductive. I love the Cranes: Stephen and Hart. Some of these other poets are Paul Celan, Thom Gunn, Marina Tsvetaeva, Lucie Brock-Broido, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño, Linda Gregg, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. In an economy of light, I’d give my one, feral star to Frank Stanford. Praying an extra prayer tonight for Mei Mei Berssennbrugge, Robert Hass, Anne Carson, and Jorie Graham.
Poems are also ways in which to extend and interrogate what is said and felt amongst people we love. My poetry is also in constant dialogue with my friends who are also artists: West-Virginian figurative painter Patrick Bayly; Brooklyn-based sculptor, painter, and poet, Basie Allen; Hudson-Valley filmmaker, Sergio Rico, etc. are people who inspire me deeply. My friend, climate-activist and long-distance hiker, Daniel Leipow is someone I write to almost daily. Most of my poems are dedicated to Paris-based photographer and critical essayist, Natalia Abril. Lately, while editing, I’ve been listening to an album called, How Do I Love Thee as I Should, made in part by my beloved friend, Maxwell Ijams, who I began sharing writing with under meteoric circumstances during his international move.
The art of the people I care about feels less like a haunting and more like a pulse.
Burton:. Like I mentioned, discovering the work of Terrance Hayes was a pivotal point in my life as a poet. I actually couldn’t connect with his work for many years, but in the summer of 2017 it all just clicked. I was able to hear who he was speaking to, which was Black people. So I feel that I was chasing that feeling early on when writing “Grace Engine”. I wanted to center Black people in every way the way he did. In 2019, I had the opportunity to work briefly with poet Solmaz Sharif at the Tin House Winter Workshop, and the feedback and constructive criticism she gave me based off of my work heavily influenced the trajectory of my entire manuscript to its completion. She forced me to ask questions about the work that I wasn’t able to see on my own. As an extension to her feedback, I began to see that she was asking me questions that she also asked herself in her work. I was able to also learn a lot from her collection Look.
Jhingran: This project is presently amorphous, still struggling with its “about-ness,” still articulating its curiosities. It is a string of poems, sharing a google doc, trying to make their way to each other. I can’t quite track where my attachment to and curiosity towards city living stems from but some co-ordinates of what has keep these questions nourished, churning – Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project seeded this project, gave it an anchor in form and method. How to really look at and read the grotesque extravagance of the marketplace? Also, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency and Lunch Poems which remind me to keep surprise and indecision on the page. Recently, I read somewhere that Frank O’Hara said that a poem is something you write instead of calling a friend and that has stuck with me, what kind of intimacy with experience do I allow myself if a poem is as earnest, as grounding as calling a friend? Too, June Jordan’s Civil Wars, and her collaborations with Buckminster Fuller on the Harlem re-design, Li Young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You, Aria Aber’s Hard Damage, Julio Cortazar’s Save The Twilight are all books I return to when feeling unmoored or astray.
Music is also big in my process and probably an equal partner in this conversation. Some albums that I return to lately when I feel blocked or in need of sound-inspiration are Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, Kishi Bashi’s Sonderlust, Joni Mitchell’s Miles of Aisles, and Beirut’s The Rip Tide. Of course this list is much longer and ever-morphing but these are some comforting constants in my process.
What is a creative dream that scares you?
Bashir: All of them. I just keep traversing through tender openings.
Burton: Every time after I finish a manuscript, I feel like this is the last time I will write poetry. I think I have just said everything I have ever wanted to say, so I have no more poems or poetry projects in me. To complete poems is the joy and gratification I get out of being a poet, but to complete a collection and get it published is the dream, that will, unfortunately, like Ocean Vuong said, “(will) leave me empty handed”. I also always want my new work to feel as important to me as the last, so if I feel like my heart isn’t in the new work as much as the older one, it will feel a bit inconsequential in my life.
Jhingran: A creative dream that scares me, which I will now speak into this lovely space as an act of accountability and manifestation, is that I’d love someday to create a retreat space for artists to engage in true, slow, iterative collaborations that center the work of artmaking and the important of co-sustenance and care to this process. I also am a huge fan of retreats and the magic that happens when we are plucked out of everyday stresses. However, as someone who does not come from wealth and as a first generation immigrant, anything about running a business and owning property scares me so this is like a dream for the future more than something I’m working on right now.
Is there an idea about being a writer/artist that you’ve let go of, that you used to believe? Or, an idea about being a writer/artist you’ve come to believe more strongly?
Bashir: I believe more in writing, especially poetry, as a necessary method of asking questions and practicing the potential and eros of language with others. My poems are extensions of my own viscous ecology and energy with those I love and who love me forward. I have forfeited the desire for my poems to say anything larger than “I love you.”
Burton: This may sound grandiose and dramatic, but I feel poetry has the power to change the world. I’ve come to feel this very strongly during the process of writing “Grace Engine,” seeing the transformative effects it has had on my life just being able to write these poems and address parts of myself that I have kept hidden. After I thought about how I would answer this question, there was a huge controversy on twitter over a white poet belittling the effects and impact of poetry. The tweet sort of went viral for the wrong reasons. Even before this discourse, I recall other similar tweets that have always rubbed me the wrong way. It’s fine if some people believe that poetry can’t change their world, but the truth is it has changed many other worlds: it has created new ways of thinking that has stopped people from committing suicide, it has helped people process their traumas that no other outlet could reach, has helped people forgive, and maybe even just taught people to learn to sit with themselves. Poetry won’t end wars or fix America, but the way poetry can enter the individual’s life and cause them to change even just a little is changing the world, even if you don’t see it.
Jhingran: I’ve had to let go of so many strange ideas about “the writer’s life.” One that my suffering is a more potent muse than the rest of the continuum of experiential affects. Another that unless I’m producing, I’m not a writer. I am very much trying to move into other sorts of relationships with my writing process – as a posture of relational presence, a wakefulness in experience, a space for me to talk to “myself,” shape her. Also, I am learning to pay attention to pace, slowing further every day to match the metronome of my body-mind, its oscillations, its waxing and waning.
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Born to Pakistan-American artists, Jai Hamid Bashir is a poet and essayist based in Salt Lake City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Guernica Magazine, Crazyhorse, The Margins, and others. She is a recent graduate of Columbia University.
Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and was a 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, and is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Grist, TriQuarterly, and Indiana Review. He has a chapbook forthcoming in the fall of 2022 with Ethel.
Nanya Jhingran is a poet, scholar & teacher from Lucknow, India currently living by the coastal margin of the Salish Sea, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish People (upon which the city of Seattle was built). She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Culture, an MFA Candidate in Poetry and an instructor of writing at the University of Washington, Seattle. She serves as Book Reviews editor and submissions reader at Poetry Northwest.
