Association of Writers & Writing Programs

Corraling the myriad ways Sumita Chakraborty’s poetry collection gets at the heart of grief all but flummoxed me. Its meaning is still washing over me. But I’ll say that poet Rishi Dastidar did what I couldnt do when she wrote that it’s “a book to hold close, an amulet that transmutes the intensities of grief into something uplifting, the attempt to keep hold of wonder.” We are thrilled to get to talk to her today about this luminous debut collection and many other things, if we’re lucky. We were surprised to hear that Sumita’s introduction to creative writing and literary studies was in college. In her 13 years at AGNI Magazine, she worked in many capacities, eventually serving as poetry editor. It was in these positions that became accustomed to every angle of poetry publication before venturing in as poet herself. Sumita’s time at AGNI provided her this comforting(?) insight: no matter how talented and brilliant you are, your poems might still be rejected because of reasons beyond your control. We talk about her decision to publish her collection Arrow with Alice James Books, what it means to be a “sad girl poet” trying to be a “happy girl poet,” and how to honor and dismantle grief while somehow still managing to be playful. (Spoiler alert: she does it!) Honorable Mentions: Poet, Lucy Brach Breido Rachel Mennies’s The Naomi Letters from BOA Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Doppelgangbanger from Haymarket Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance from Alice James Books Alice Oswald’s Nobody from W.W. Norton and Company Bridget Kelly’s Song from BOA Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light from Copper Canyon Press

Published Date: February 3, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare, recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare by writers.

Kate Martin Williams:

For writers.

As I was thinking about ways to talk about your book, I was quite flummoxed because it seems like it's doing so many things around grief and also violence. Also, I feel like it's meaning is still kind of washing over me. I haven't really had the chance to sit with it for a very long time, which I think that this collection needs some time for me to sit with it. But I will say that poet Rishi Dastidar did what I couldn't do when she wrote that it's a book to hold close, an amulet that transmute the intensity of grief into something uplifting, the attempt to keep hold of wonder. We are thrilled to get to talk to her today about this luminous debut collection and hopefully many other things. Sumita, thank you for being here.

Sumita:

Thank you for having me, and thank you for those very, very kind words. That means a lot to me.

Kate Martin Williams:

So this is your debut collection, but you are not a novice at all in the world of poetry. Aside from your academic pursuits, which include a B.A. from Wellesley and a Ph.D. from Emory, you worked for Agni magazine for several years. So I'm curious what the ways of working as a poetry editor for Agni, how those have influenced and helped you shape this collection in particular.

Sumita:

I love that question. Thank you. I got really lucky in that I started at Agni when I was in college.q Before that I hadn't really had much experience with, well, really anything. Before college, I grew up in a house full of domestic violence and other kinds of violence and grief, and I was really preoccupied with survival for the most part. I think that it wasn't until partway through college when I realized that I really liked all this literary jazz kind of by accident. So at the same time that I was coming to learn effing Shakespeare in class, I also began as an intern at Agni and started learning pretty much right away that there was a vibrant world of contemporary lit. I think even just that, first and foremost, that I learned of literature and writing as something that didn't only belong in any one particular time period or in the past tense was incredibly valuable for me going forward.

There's a lot more I can say about that and about the editorial side of things overall, if that would be of interest.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh yeah, for sure.

Sumita:

Do you want me to talk about that a little more?

Kate Martin Williams:

That'd be great.

Sumita:

Sure thing. I always like to make sure because I can do 40 minutes on literally any. I can just talk for 40 minutes about the way my cat is soaking up the sun right there. So I like to double check that I'm going on about something that's actually of interest. Yeah, for sure. I think that-

Phuc Luu:

Could you talk more about your cat to me? No, I'm just joking. Those are my interests.

Sumita:

We will get back to him. So I mean, I think that one way in which Agni, that experience working at a poetry ... So I started as an intern, let me back up a bit, and I did that while I was in college. Then when I graduated I became assistant poetry editor, and then after that poetry editor. So I was there for a total of 13 years or something like that. It was a long time. I think that one of the things just practically that that really helped me with was that I got to see every single angle of how the sausage was made before I even knew that I would ever myself make a sausage. You know what I mean?

Some of the first things I did involved sending rejections and reading the slush pile and stuff like that. I know that that kind of thing can sometimes seem demoralizing, but what it taught me was that no matter how talented you are, no matter how advanced you are, no matter how brilliant you are, you might still get rejected for reasons that are completely outside of your control. So I learned that first, and that was incredibly freeing to me.

Then even as an intern, we got to do a lot of hands-on editing stuff. Agni is rare in that the poetry side also involves giving substantive editorial comments. They aren't things the poets are by any means required to do if the piece has already been accepted. But we engage with the piece and we think about if there are any places where it could do what it does even better. So approaching poetry from that angle before, while I was myself learning to write it and learning to read it, I think was a valuable experience in close listening and close reading that has drastically aided my own revision process. I found myself able to have that distance from my own work in a revision process that I learned through practicing it on other people's.

There was one time, even early on when I was just an intern at Agni, and I think I suggested Charles Simmic put in a comma somewhere, and I was petrified. I was like, "How could I tell Charles Simmic what to do with anything, even a comma?" But he was like, "Yeah, no, that's great. That comma really makes the line work." I'm like, "Yes, mind blown." So that combination of humility also from people who are idols as well as the experience of thinking about how to approach a poem that way just were infinitely valuable to my later experience.

Kate Martin Williams:

Did it also help you connect a little bit? Did you know Alice James was where you were going to be sending your work? Did you get your eye on different publishers that you were interested in?

Sumita:

Those seeds did not start to sprout until way later. So I wrote Arrow at the same time that I was in grad school for a scholarly Ph.D. So I was writing it alongside my dissertation, and I was not at that time sure that I would be-

Kate Martin Williams:

Just because the dissertation wasn't enough work worth doing?

Sumita:

Well, I mean, for me, I think it's when I was in college, like I said, I fell in love with literary studies and creative writing at the same time. So although I can't say it's always good for my work-life balance, I will say it is good for my mental health and just my artistic and intellectual energy to be doing them at the same time. So weirdly, as exhausting as it was, yeah, I think writing it during the dissertation actually kept me sane and kept me feel like I was in touch with all the parts of my brain that mattered to me.

So yeah, I wrote it. I took six or so years to slowly write the thing. I wasn't aware at that time how much my very early exposure to different presses and different poets and even little poets' bios were slowly teaching me where the people that I most resonated with ended up placing their work. But that is what I did later on when I did have a viable manuscript. I remembered, "Oh, look at the bios. Think about where the people that you really admire have published their collections. Think about where the friends that you really admire have published their first collections and beyond." That is one of the things that led me to Alice James.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's great. I think it's such a good note too for other emerging writers at AWP or beyond, that there is so much to mine in this bios and those connections that lead you to the places where you want your work to be.

Sumita:

Even acknowledgements pages. If you find a poet that you really admire, you like the stuff they write about, you like the way they carry themselves in the world, it may help as a bit of a roar shock to that which we call phobias biz to be able to read it a little bit more legibly to know where the people you trust trust to place their work.

Jessica Cole:

So good.

Kate Martin Williams:

So good.

Jessica Cole:

Almost like reverse engineering, the process in a way. I know it's extremely inspirational and inspiring as well. I guess that's just really interesting. It's not mutually exclusive to reverse engineer and be inspired and put new exciting work in the world.

Sumita:

I mean, and it's become increasingly important to me to try to make incredibly sure that I work only with organizations that are interacting with social issues, with the literary community, with individual writers, with care and integrity and ethics. So I think for that, I mean, it's perhaps sad to say, but it's probably true in any profession, especially a large profession, I think that it's important to balance the creative work, which is its own thing, no one else can touch that and nothing else can touch that, with when you start thinking about the professional forward-facing dynamic, the question of who will treat me with care and who will treat others with care, and who treats these issues that you might be dealing with with care. That does unfortunately require a little bit of reverse engineering because there's a bunch of bad mojo out there.

Kate Martin Williams:

Do you mind sharing some of your poems with us?

Sumita:

Of course.

Kate Martin Williams:

That is great.

Sumita:

Do you mind if I kick that off by reading something new? I've only done it at one reading before.

Kate Martin Williams:

Sure.

Sumita:

I have not sent it anywhere yet. It's literally like the hot off the broken printer. I was going to say hot off the presses, but there are no presses yet for this so hot off the creaking printer.

So as you mentioned, Kate, my book deals a lot with violence and grief, and it kicks off from the vantage point of the aftermath. So what it's really trying to negotiate is that aftermath. Of course, there are also poems that are more directly about violence. Those are usually recalled in the form of memory because it was ... although sometimes there's a little bit of a fuzziness in how they interact with the present tense of the poem, but it was important to me to approach those subjects from a slight vantage point of distance so that I could think not only about what it feels like to have been harmed, but what on earth you do next.

So my book accordingly has a lot of super personal stuff in it, including a couple more, I don't want to say graphic or explicit, but kind of more explicit and head-on descriptions of abuse. I have found that one of the most frustrating things I get in response to those poems from some people is the question of whether or not it is true. Is it true? Did that really happen? Did that particular event really happen? Makes me so angry, so angry. So I don't usually write poems out of anger, but this time I did. The title is When they Ask, "Is It True?" I Answer. I'm going to read that title again when I start off the poem because it's the first time I've successfully pulled off a title that runs into the first line at the poem, and I'm real proud of myself.

It was also written ... a tiny bit more context. Do you remember a couple of months ago NASA tweeted, "We've got new news about the moon, hang tight." And there were a bunch of poets, I don't know if this was just a poetry Twitter thing or if it was more broad, but there were a bunch of poets, myself very much included being like, "Ooh, what is it? What is it? Waiting for new moon news? It's a delightful collective freak out. So that's also important to this poem.

When they ask, "Is it true?" I answer: What more is there to learn about the moon? Listen, you and I both know there's more I could share. I could tell you about the first time I put pennies in my mouth. I could tell you every time I grew or sheared my hair. No, I know.

What you want to know is whether I wept, whether I begged. In a few days, the astronomers will tell us what they've learned about the moon. You and I were in this together, our nude breasts pressed against our draftiest windows in the winter. Say the moon has more silt than we imagined. Say it has a mountain, say baby lions roam its crests in little feline space boots. The things we're closest to aren't easy to name, but that's no excuse. Deimos and Phobos, brothers, Io around marble in the cheek of a name. Euclid, too dim to photograph, too small, still we named her. Ours though, we named it Moon. Like Holly Golightly naming her cat, Cat. Have you put a name on my child mouth? If you were to give our moon a name right now, right this minute, what would it be? Whoever told us we have the right to learn anything about the bodies for which we never even imagined a name?

So that's brand new.

Jessica Cole:

Well, thank you so much.

Sumita:

My pleasure.

Jessica Cole:

That [inaudible 00:12:56]

Kate Martin Williams:

Why you don't piss off a poet. They will write a poem about you.

Sumita:

Usually I don't write very much out of anger. I'm very much a sad girl poet. I'm trying to also be an occasionally happy girl poet. But there are a couple of them that are really come directly from anger, and that was one of them.

Jessica Cole:

I love it. I love all the feline imagery. Now that I know you have a cat next to you, it's just a very surround sound experience having you read. Thank you.

Sumita:

Two of them actually. One's over there lounging, one's over there lounging. They live a life I deeply envy. I was also reflecting when I wrote that poem on conversations that I had with Lucie Brock-Broido, who is a teacher of mine. I don't have an MFA. She taught at the Columbia MFA. But she also taught a summer workshop at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which I somehow stumbled luckily my way into as an undergraduate.

When people ask this kind of question, it invites me to reflect on the conversations that I had with her as a writer who was wildly and beautifully elliptical and strange and committed to the real, but committed to the strange truth of the real in a way that was not often necessarily hinged to the literal or to the realist. So we used to talk a lot about that. I was reflecting on conversations I've had with her, which if you know anything about Lucie Brock-Broido, also means that that led me to think of cats. Because she was a huge fan and a perennial cohabitate with beautiful Maine Coon cats. So I probably owe those little feline space boots in sun oblique way Lucie Brock-Broido.

Jessica Cole:

It was a compliment to her.

Kate Martin Williams:

I grew up with a Maine Coon. Sorry, Jess, go ahead.

Jessica Cole:

I just meant, what a compliment to her. I want to have that line attributed to me. It's so incredible that I'm so grateful that you read that poem. It really leads into the question that I wanted to ask you about calling and naming and seeing which comes up so often in your work and so often in the poem Dear Beloved. You ... Sorry, the speaker, calls-

Sumita:

It's all good. It's me. It's fine.

Jessica Cole:

Why do you do that? The speaker names it Vizio and which I love and had to look up. I mean, I know vision, but I appreciated having that particular version of vision. We've talked to a lot of poets this week and in general about the differences between saying, telling, calling, naming. Could you talk a little bit about that, especially since the poem you so generously just read has a lot to do with naming?

Sumita:

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. I don't think I've yet quite put my finger on what naming means to me, in part because I think it shifts. I think that for me, naming speaks really directly to kind some idea of a really precise way of knowing something or knowing someone. And there's a tension there because often our name can be the only thing someone knows about me. I don't really know any of you very well, but I know your names. So it feels, in a way, it is a kind of general, easily abstracted thing from the truth of a person or the truth of their life.

But if you think about the intimacy that each one of us also has with our name, the way it was given to us, or we chose it for ourselves, the way we choose to be represented by it in the world of letters, and I mean not arts and letters, but literally the world of letters in the world. It's an assemblage of letters that kind of arbitrarily grouped together signals us in all our complexity. I think there is something about that that I really resonate with. I'm a fan of hidden meanings and etymological rearrangements, fan of the histories that words hold both in the embodied and the rhetorical world. I think a name is kind of a beautiful Venn diagram in the middle of all that it holds the human's history. It holds the history of the humans who have either inspired or given it, and it kind of aggregates all of the other things that we consider our lives and our identities and our stories.

So Dear Beloved, for example, that title is the English translation of the Sanskrit origin word that informs my sister's name. My sister died in 2014. Her name was Priya, and that word means dear beloved. I thought there's a lot to that in terms of how it interacts with her life, with the way we were raised, not as things that were dear or were beloved with the idea of trying to honor someone's memory, with the futility of ever really fully honoring someone's memory. All of that is also constitutive to the way that I understand mourning her and having known her. So it's all right there, right in the little name.

Kate Martin Williams:

I was trying to figure out how to write this question because you're engaged in this project that seems to be dismantling the complexity of grief, defining it, and poking at it. I mean, there's so much going on in that way. Also, it felt like you were preserving it. I'm thinking about that imagery of the petrified horned tree that you're working it out so much that it becomes contained or just pointed out, the palm image 004, where it's in the shape of an urn. And so, we're in the midst of all this grief, which was really moving to me as I read, but also, I hope this is right, but it felt like there was some playfulness around that your preoccupation with the etymology of words. That marigolds mean both the round-eyed flower, but worries as well. Or knifes as tongues, that there was this duality for these words; that it can be both and not either or, which I loved. I loved being able to mine that with you.

Sumita:

Thank you. There's definitely playfulness to it, and I'm glad that comes through. Because in many ways it's a very, very depressing book. But I think that, I mean, I'm not someone who has yet been capable of writing humor and playfulness in a really overt way, but I hope that the way that I return to the rearrangements of letters and to the rearrangements of meaning indicate a freedom that for me is also associated with play. I'm glad it also felt like it was dismantling and also honoring grief, because I would never want it to be taking down of grief, or it is only grief. That's another duality that was really important to me to preserve. I think that it's honestly kind of pernicious and treacherous. I was trying to combine those words into one, and I almost came out with perneacherous. It is. It is perneacherous that we think about often grief as just one static set of feelings and one static moment in time.

Kate Martin Williams:

Or that you can only feel one of those emotions at the same time.

Sumita:

Right. I love gallows humor. I love dark humor. I didn't spend two years after my sister died writing Dear Beloved never laughing once. You know what I mean? There's a lot. But human minds and lives are way more complex than that, and grief is absolutely no exceptions. So I'm glad all that came through is all I'm saying. It's really important.

Kate Martin Williams:

Absolutely. I mean, I think it was the dismantling or the poking around and it was helpful and also hopeful. I said it brought me to my knees, but it in a way that felt there's something here that means we keep going.

Sumita:

Because there's still an energy. There's still a reason to keep playing around with stuff and rethinking stuff. As long as I'm here, I hope to play around with stuff and rethink stuff. So if there's nothing else that any of us are going for, that might be the one thing that I feel myself the most consistently energized when I'm driving toward no matter what else is going on.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's fantastic. That's wonderful. Is there someone that you have your eye on or someone that you've read recently that we should be looking out for that you're excited about?

Sumita:

Oh, man, that's a great question.

Kate Martin Williams:

We're trying to accumulate a survival kit for people to survive the next three to four months before we get to leave our homes again. So if you can add anything else to our kit, that would be lovely.

Sumita:

Three to four months. You're an optimist then.

Kate Martin Williams:

Thinking of being hopeful.

Sumita:

Because I've been looking at how all the vaccine stuff is being handled and being like, "Okay, 2024, it is. That's fine. That's fair."

Kate Martin Williams:

Sumita, the sun is shining in Houston for the first time in a while, so I'm feeling a little bit, I don't know.

Phuc Luu:

Wait, we just survived another apocalypse on top of the pandemic.

Sumita:

That's right. I didn't know you were in Houston.

Phuc Luu:

So that's why anything would be optimism for us.

Sumita:

That's fair. I have friends and a student who was in Houston during all that. I'm so glad to see that you're safe and seem to be doing okay-ish. So my heart goes out to you. Absolutely. In the next couple of months, I think in a month actually, Rachel Mennies, the poet, she's amazing. Also a bit of a conflict of interest. She's one of my dearest friends. But she's also brilliant. Her second book, The Naomi Letters, is coming out from BOA.

Jessica Cole:

That's my hometown press. I'm in Rochester right now.

Sumita:

Oh, rock on. It is beautiful. It's entirely written in sort of a epistolary form, although it's way more capacious than that. It's kind of a cross between an epistolary form and a diary form, and it's all in the forms of a one speaker addressing a beloved for whom they have a great deal of desire and yearning, oftentimes unfulfilled. It's also a career love story of sorts in that sense. So it's really, really, really exciting to me. So many other great things. Oh yeah, Cortney Lamar-Charleston, also a dear friend. So again, conflict of interest, I can be compromised.

Jessica Cole:

I think we can agree on that one.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's what we're doing.

Sumita:

That's really true. I mean, my friends are geniuses, so I'm just very, very lucky. His second book, Doppelgangbanger, just came out from Haymarket. I believe it's Haymarket.

Kate Martin Williams:

I saw that.

Sumita:

It's so good. And if I can also plug a press mate, Taylor Johnson from Alice James, their book Inheritance came out in I believe December. Taylor and didn't know each other before the Pandemic, but we've become web reading buddies. We did six events together in the fall. We just did the featured event All Exchange Showcase a couple days ago at AWP. Inheritance is a beautiful, beautiful book. I think that everyone should read it. In fact, if people were like, "Should I read Arrow or should I read Inheritance? I can only read one book." I'd be like, "Inheritance." I can summarize the other one in a sentence. It's fine. Sadness, moving on.

Kate Martin Williams:

Not fair.

Jessica Cole:

Petrified and dismantled. Anyway.

Sumita:

So those are three. I will also say I've lately been reading Alice Oswald's newest book, Nobody. It's a version of a prolonged project that she's had for a while. She's also a classicist. She's a British poet. A few, I think two books ago was her book Memorial, and that was a retelling of The Iliad. It took out the narrative, really, and it made it just like Homeric similes, like haunting, doubled Homeric similes and lyric explorations into the stories of everyone who died in the Iliad. So if you take the Iliad away from that hero war macho stuff, then it's a tragedy and it's a memorial. And so, she excavated it. She calls it not really a translation, but an excavation.

She's done a similar thing. It's quite different in many ways, but she's done a similar thing in her latest in terms of how she approaches the source material with The Odyssey with her latest book, Nobody. I won't spoil anything because it's a hot off the press kind of release, but it's so, so, so good. I also reread Bridgit Pegeen Kelly's book Song, one book by Lucille Clifton, at least, every year.

Kate Martin Williams:

So good.

Sumita:

So if you want anything, The Book of Light is usually my Clifton annual go to. So for pandemic survival into question marks.

Kate Martin Williams:

Fantastic list. Thank you so much. [inaudible 00:26:01] we could talk to you all day.

Jessica Cole:

I know. Its really questions about your own relationship with the classics and everything else. So hopefully this is the new [inaudible 00:26:10].

Kate Martin Williams:

We'll just have to do a longer podcast later.

Sumita:

Be thrilled. Have me back whenever and stay safe out there.

Jessica Cole:

Thank you.

Kate Martin Williams:

Thank you. Best of luck.

Phuc Luu:

Thank you, Sumita.

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair.

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space. Hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusted and hardworking intern is Santi Tisada. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever podcasts are found.