Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she teaches in literary studies and creative writing. She is the recipient of fellowships and honors from the Poetry Foundation, the Forward Arts Foundation, and Kundiman. Her debut collection of poetry, Arrow, is out now from Alice James Books in the U.S. and Carcanet Press in the U.K., and has received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian. For more—including more details about her poems, articles, and essays, as well as links to those that are accessible for free online—find her on her website at www.sumitachakraborty.com or on Twitter at @notsumatra.
I’m interested in learning how you started as a writer. What pulled you into the realm of the written word?
I didn’t really know I was interested in poetry and in literature until part way through college. I arrived without any sense that I had any passions or interests at all; I’m a domestic violence survivor who’d largely been focused on the sheer reality of the word survival. Those concerns didn’t disappear at all in college, but something else did happen that let me imagine something else, even if I remained unconvinced at the time that I’d ever get to actually pursue it. In my first year and my sophomore fall, I took a broad smattering of courses, including (with wild, and probably inappropriate, disregard for prerequisites in both cases) an advanced Shakespeare literary studies course and an advanced poetry creative writing course. I shouldn’t have ignored the prerequisites: I was very much not good enough for both of those courses! But I fell into what I call “love at first confusion,” and I’ll forever be grateful to those professors for not chucking me out. Even when I was flailing around in both courses and even when I knew that I wasn’t making anything that worked, I loved wading through the muck. I loved what literature and poetry made me think of, the questions they made me ask, the uncertainties they animated.
Since you write both poetry and essays, how does working with both mediums influence the way you approach each of them?
Well, for me they both came hand-in-hand and were both a part of that “love at first confusion”! Typically I find that I’m asking similar questions and teasing out similar problems regardless of genre. In terms of deciding which thought belongs to which genre, or which project a particular moment is better suited to, that’s often a matter of thinking carefully of what shapes that I want the questions to take, and what kinds of “answers”—in quotation marks because I don’t strive at certainty or mastery in either genre, or in anything for that matter—for which I imagine reaching or searching.
Not too long ago, you published Arrow, your debut poetry collection which explores grief, magic, and the universe. Tell us more about how this collection came to be and how we, as readers, should approach this collection.
The most fundamental story I wanted to tell in Arrow was that of the experience of living in the aftermath of severe domestic violence, other entangled forms of assault, and grief (in my case, particularly for my sister, who died in 2014 at the age of 24). This idea of an “aftermath” is complicated by the fact that there is no “after” violence or grief, especially when one thinks about how those things reverberate through the entirety of a life. I’m going through some challenging dynamics right now with my mother, who is also a survivor of the same household. It’s unequivocally true that my own parentification in relation to her coupled with her varying resistances are both direct products of that “aftermath” that is nevertheless very much taking place in the present tense.
The fallacy of “after” becomes even more true when one considers the various scales on which devastation and mourning take place—not only for one singular person, but for entire communities, for other people, for other communities, for other species, for planets, for ecosystems, across history, and so on. That being said, I did also want to take the idea of “after” seriously, because the main autobiographical story that this collection tells is of my experience becoming able to embrace love, and joy, and care, and kinship.ven when all of those things were weaponized against me or foreclosed for most of my formative years. This tension forms the tightrope that is Arrow’s throughline, and all of the other obsessions and preoccupations in the collection are lassoed to it, collide with it, or orbit around it.
One thing that immediately caught my attention was the sheer length of your poems such as“Marigolds” or the dazzling “Dear, Beloved.” Nowadays, many poems don’t tend to go beyond 1-2 pages. Yet, you craft ten-page poems that can carry on a poignant and cohesive narrative without ever losing the readers. How do you do it?
Thanks so much for your very kind words, truly; it always warms me to hear that one of these sprawling beasts of poems connected with someone! But if you’ll let me, I’d like to gently push back on two things. First, the short lyric poem isn’t a new invention! That goes all the way back to Sappho, so in a way, the fact that it’s really prominent now isn’t a product of some kind of contemporary resistance to reading or to attention, but rather because it’s always been baked into lyric and poetic history. And second, there are brilliant long poems in the contemporary moment that astound me and move me. I’m thinking especially here of Alice Oswald’s work, of Shane McCrae’s work, of Danez Smith’s work, of Claudia Rankine’s work, of Carolyn Forché’s work, of Ross Gay’s work, and of many, many more—including some brand-new work that isn’t yet out but I know will delight readers as much as they delight me when they are.
I do have a real fondness for long poems, and I’m so glad they pulled you all the way through—that’s the dream! But in a way, writing a long poem for me has a lot to do with being willing to tap into the very deep vulnerability that it requires to risk someone’s loss of attention or someone’s confusion and irritation. “Marigolds” is at times brutal in ways that not only risk losing a reader but also appear at times actively to push the reader away. The length as well as the lack of white space and break of any kind in “Dear, beloved” was meant to speak to some aspects of the experience of mourning, which I certainly intended to open a doorway into for readers, although I didn’t necessarily assume that the room that door opened onto would be necessarily easy for readers. “Windows” strips away narrative structure. “Arrow” is a triple sestina with multiple yous. (“Dear, beloved” also has multiple yous, and often they’re not “the reader”!)
All of which is to say: I’m so incredibly happy when a long poem works for a reader. I feel seen! But I think that contrary to the myth of the long poem as some kind of huge masculinist assertion of ego, for me, while there’s certainly something to that taking-up-of-space and self-permission-of-having-a-body that chimes with that traditional party line, as far as the reader is concerned, the long poem is actually an extended release of control, a delving into vulnerability to an extent of being willing to lay it all out and risk that everyone will respond by walking away.
In an interview with The Rumpus, you talk about utilizing the sestina and even transcending beyond that by writing a multi-sestina. Do you think form, sestina or otherwise, molds your poems in a way that language itself cannot?
Well, I think that triple sestina poem would be nothing without the sestina itself, so for me I didn’t transcend nothing! But yes, form—which I’ve written about elsewhere along the lines of shape—for me is a non-syntactic signifier, which means that it is a meaning-making aspect of a poem, as important as language, as full of communicative potential as anything else on the page.
In Arrow, you make several allusions to the etymology and duality of words, starting with the title itself. In what ways do these references add meaning to your poems, and where do you get the inspiration to include a specific word or phrase?
I love working with definitions that already exist and making my own. In “Dear, beloved,” for example, there are tons of invented etymologies.
Side note: I was once in a summer writing thing and someone in a workshop I was in attempted to mansplain the etymology of “ash,” because I’d written that “ash is a word with neither origin nor afterlife.” Well, actually… I had to laugh! See what I mean about tapping into the vulnerability involved in potentially losing folks?
Words are living, breathing, sparking, dangerous, shifting things. Ambiguity and multiplicity are my jam, including—and maybe especially—when those ambiguities and multiplicities lead to conflicts in the word that mirror conflicts in my own life, or in the philosophical questions that intrigue me, or in the world more broadly. In terms of how I think of specific words or phrases—it’s not unlike that feeling when a song lyric turns into an earworm!
On that note, who are some writers you admire?
I’m going to zig gently where this question zags, if that’s okay with you! I admire so many writers that I always have to make up different versions of this question for myself so I don’t risk going on forever or telling each person the same thing that I’ve been telling everyone else. For this conversation I’ll turn this question into which writers I chose to welcome the new year. I’m reading three books right now and I love all of them, and all of them are by writers who have meant a great deal to me for a long time: Aracelis Girmay’s new and selected edition of Lucille Clifton, Alice Oswald’s Nobody, and Claudia Rankine’s Just Us.
While I’m absolutely certain that writing has been an inseparable part of your life, what do you do outside of writing? Do you ever see yourself pursuing another career path completely separate from creative writing, maybe in another lifetime?
A lot of what I do is outside of writing! I love sports. I’m a bit of a secret jock, actually, since most of what I do for fun involves lifting weights or watching a game. Or both at the same time. I don’t have much of an established record with video games, but I fell headlong into the Animal Crossing craze this past year and don’t anticipate coming out of it anytime soon. I love TV and I’ve missed nothing more during the pandemic than I have missed being in a movie theater.
Since I write academic scholarship as well, I already have a professional life that’s separate from creative writing (although they’re pretty intertwined as I’ve mentioned). Other versions of me might have majored in art history—I’m a huge visual art nerd—or in Peace and Justice studies, a concentration at my alma mater that always seemed incredibly intriguing to me. And before I moved out of my childhood home as a teenager, I was deadly serious about the piano. I wanted very much to play professionally. In a different life in which I didn’t have to work multiple jobs as a kid and hadn’t rapidly lost access to my instrument, I may have been able to go that route.
But honestly? I’m pretty sure I do exactly and only what I am capable of doing.
I usually ask writers for any advice for new and emerging writers, but in addition to that, could you share a poetry prompt (either your own or from another source) for our audience?
Advice? Be willing to risk failure. Write things that you think you have no idea how to write. The hyper pre-professionalization of writing has the unfortunate side effect, I think, of making writers think—at a younger and younger age every year—that they have to come correct all the time, write great things all the time, win everything they can, publish immediately. But the space of creation is the space of mess. Everything I’ve ever written that I’m proud of has come from a profound mess, no matter how “polished” it might look in the final product.
On that note: I assigned this prompt to my graduate class this past fall, and I LOVED reading them and loved the conversations they engendered. Please draft what you consider to be the worst possible poem. You’re responsible for defining “worst,” and please, run with it and have tons of fun. This is in keeping with our desire to turn “failure” into a space for play and discovery. (We also had a running thread on a Slack channel where we talked about stuff we tried that really did not work in our drafts – highly recommended. The Slack channel was called “banana peel.”)
Follow-up: later in the term, I offered this as a discussion prompt:
In the final poem in The Galleons, Rick Barot writes:
I used to think that to write poems, to make art,
meant trying to transcend the prosaic elements
of the self, to arrive at some essential plane, where poems
were supposed to succeed. I was wrong.
Reflect back on your banana peels, your worst poems ever, things people told you about poetry, etc. What would your version of an “I used to think” be? To what would you now append the words “I was wrong”?
Highly recommend that thought experiment, too. Can easily be converted into a writing assignment—I assigned that to myself after that class session and scared myself a little, which is my favorite thing!
To close off, you mention that you are “an Aries sun, a Virgo moon, and a Cancer rising.” Are the stereotypes associated with this combination representative of you? Why or why not?
Ha! Yes, probably, and also probably not—humans are delightfully complicated. As for why or why not, I’ll leave that up to you. Which is probably a pretty Aries sun, Virgo moon, and Cancer rising answer.
Interviewed by Jessica Kim, edited by Lou Willmott.