7 Questions with Canadian poet Jaspreet Singh

Alberta author Jaspreet Singh, who grew up partly in Kashmir, says he feels most at home in the mountains

Jaspreet Singh is a Canadian poet and novelist who has lived in Alberta for over 18 years. He grew up in India and Kashmir before moving to Canada in 1990. Singh won the 2022 W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary best book prize for his memoir My Mother, My Translator. His poetry collection How to Hold a Pebble (2022) was named one of the best poetry books of the year by the CBC. His newest book of poems, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock was published by NeWest Press in November 2024. He’s reading Thursday night at 7 p.m. as part of Single Onion at Shelf Life Books, along with Kevin Stebner, Nikki Sheppy and Sarain Frank Soonias.

Are the events in Kashmir surprising, or have you been anticipating something like this for a long time now?

Seventeen years ago I published a novel (Chef) set in Kashmir. It is still read. The army camp in the novel is on top of the Siachen Glacier, claimed by both India and Pakistan. Toward the end of the book the narrator—an army chef—simultaneously reflects about war and the creative arts like painting and poetry.

Regarding the recent escalation, the fragile ceasefire, and the dangerous new normal: I don’t have any illusions. And yet I continue to believe that the protracted conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbours might end at some point. Like so many, I am unable to give up hope.

Someday good sense might prevail and a proper dialogue might begin, the dialogue that would also involve the Kashmiris.

Would you call yourself an eco-poet? What does that mean?

Like you, I, too, am trying to ask questions, and gathering the ones that have already been asked. For instance, the poet Forrest Gander has some remarkable questions about eco-poetry: Can poetry itself be ecological? Can it display or be invested in values that acknowledge the inter-relationship between human and more-than-human? Aside from theme and reference, how might syntax, line breaks and the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethic?

Why poetry? Is it the most effective way to talk about the environment?

These days every discipline, every field (so to speak), is going through the “planetary-turn.” I consider myself part of this larger shift.

The geobiochemicalness of humans is not new. What is new is that collectively humans have become a geologic force. What the scientists have told us right away questions all our major assumptions about place, time, nature, culture, subject, object… Suddenly the forgotten planet starts returning to all our narratives, scholarship, utterances, and conversations.

Loudly and silently Earth is returning to the literary novel, also poetry. “Nature” is not out there. I know of at least one theatre director in a far away city who has plans to adapt Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard from the point-of-view of trees. These days it’s not uncommon for law scholars to have conversations about “eco-centric constitutional law.”

Is a lake a person? Do rivers have rights? Even historians think and write differently in this new epoch. Like this passage by the historian David Van Reybrouck: “There is more to colonialism than historical colonialism… Today’s climate change is deeply colonial: it has largely been caused by temperate zones from the northern hemisphere and it is most deeply felt in the tropics and the Arctic. You can’t decolonize without decarbonizing and vice versa.”

How has your poetry evolved since your previous book?

For instance, more and more I complicate “we-ness”. Who is this “we” in the poem?

For instance, prepositions make me stumble. “Thinking about water? Or, thinking with water?"

For instance, I still don’t know a good way to write “deep time” (the planetary time) on the page!

Who are your favourite poets to read?

Layli Long Soldier. Rita Wong. Alice Oswald. Donna Kane.

What are you writing now?

Currently, I am writing Book-III of the poetry trilogy I started a while ago.

Book-I—How to Hold a Pebble—was published in 2022.

Book-II—Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock—was published in 2024.

Book-III will be published in 2026. Also by NeWest Press. And later this year, among other things, I plan to start a book-length long poem.

What’s the rock in Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock?

Perhaps the rock has no one single meaning. Perhaps the rock in the title is a stand in for the planet (and planetary-time) de-centring the human (and human-time). Perhaps the rock is a rock in a dream questioning its own immortality! The epigraph of the book is from Li Bai, the Eighth century Tang dynasty poet. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.

For more about Jaspreet Singh, go here.

For more about Single Onion, go here. Thursday’s reading is being livestreamed on Single Onion’s YouTube page.