3 Questions with Sanna Wani

Photo by Hamzah Amin

Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri poet living near the Missinnihe river. Her book, My Grief, The Sun, is out with House of Anansi Press in April 2022. She loves daisies.

HFR’s Poetry Editor Xu Li chats with Sanna about her poem “Between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, Tonight” from Issue 69. You can preorder the issue here.

Sanna—whenever I encounter your poems, I feel an immediate intimacy and warmth within the rhythms of the sentences. It made me wonder, if sound is one of the primary ways you enter writing your poems? What begins a poem for you? And on the other side of things, I’m curious how you approach revision or what your revision practice or ritual is like? How do you know when a poem is complete?

Oh, Xu, that means so much to me coming from you. I think my answer to your question is mostly yes. This morning, I was washing dishes at the sink when the first few sentences of a poem floated through my head. The rhythm—I have to catch it before it leaves me, like a tide or a current or augury. Is that sound, what we hear inside us? Whatever that music is, it’s usually where a poem begins.

I’m so bad at editing. I will write a poem and forget about it for months. I leave them strewn in the notes app, in word documents titled “okay????’” and in emails I send to myself in the middle of the night, then read immediately then forget I ever wrote until Google asks me, “would you like to reply to this?” The answer is usually no, but sometimes yes, which is also my answer about completion. A poem is never done but eventually it settles into a body that will carry it through, somewhere.

Your upcoming book, My Grief, the Sun, is arriving so soon through House of Anansi Press! I’m wondering if you could speak briefly to the vision for this book-length project? How did writing and assembling it feel different from your previous chapbook?

Yes! Already! This project blossomed pretty naturally. It began first with the terrifying and thrilling moment of realizing in late 2019 I had written enough to compile a full-length collection. I was working in 2020 on what I thought would be three separate books and I realized maybe they could all just enter the world together. I think the chapbook knew what it was earlier on: the book took a lot longer and went through a gazillion drafts and five complete overhauls. Finding the bones, the skeleton, was key. And bringing an editor on board helped a lot. I could have tinkered with that thing forever. A chapbook is like baking bread. But a book? That felt like building a house.

Is there anything you’d like to share about your poem, “Between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, Tonight” that we don’t know?

It’s part of a ritual I do to let go of poems I love. When I was in Kashmir, I would print out or write down poems that really moved me on a scrap of paper and then keep it somewhere on my desk. I would read those poems for months and then eventually I would want to change them—so to say goodbye, I would write a response. “Between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, Tonight” is one such goodbye poem. Another poem “Masha’Allah” which appears in my debut is another. They feel like twins in that way.