Interview with Poet Seth Jani
11/01/16
11/01/16
1. What is the most important advice you have been given as a poet?
When I was in middle school and was just beginning to seriously engage with poetry, I had the amazing opportunity to trade a few letters with the late Henry Braun, a staple of regional New England literature. He was a great and generous poet, and his advice to me was to make it as whacky as I wanted. Don’t curb your ideas or language for anyone. He said that only I could figure out what a “Jani” poem was. This was excellent advice.
2. How do you nourish your own creativity?
For me it’s about creating space. I maneuver my life in ways that allow me to write. I am blessed with wonderful friends and family but I require a lot of solitude, a lot of peace and quiet. I jigsaw my social and work obligations around this quiet center. I make sure I have days of complete freedom from everything and everyone so that I may open myself to the necessary process.
3. What is one of your favorite lines of poetry? Why?
“The whole, collage and stone, cleansed
to its proper pastoral…
I sit
And smoke, and linger out desire."
This is from Alvin Feinman’s “November Sunday Morning,” it sums up the whole of the poem. It captures something very critical about human need as well as gives us one of the most beautiful descriptions of natural light I have ever found.
When I was in middle school and was just beginning to seriously engage with poetry, I had the amazing opportunity to trade a few letters with the late Henry Braun, a staple of regional New England literature. He was a great and generous poet, and his advice to me was to make it as whacky as I wanted. Don’t curb your ideas or language for anyone. He said that only I could figure out what a “Jani” poem was. This was excellent advice.
2. How do you nourish your own creativity?
For me it’s about creating space. I maneuver my life in ways that allow me to write. I am blessed with wonderful friends and family but I require a lot of solitude, a lot of peace and quiet. I jigsaw my social and work obligations around this quiet center. I make sure I have days of complete freedom from everything and everyone so that I may open myself to the necessary process.
3. What is one of your favorite lines of poetry? Why?
“The whole, collage and stone, cleansed
to its proper pastoral…
I sit
And smoke, and linger out desire."
This is from Alvin Feinman’s “November Sunday Morning,” it sums up the whole of the poem. It captures something very critical about human need as well as gives us one of the most beautiful descriptions of natural light I have ever found.