Interview with Sumita Chakraborty on Arrow
In this edition of Sticky Fingers, Interviews Editor Zakiya Cowan speaks with Sumita Chakraborty about her debut poetry collection, Arrow.
Zakiya Cowan: The first time I heard “Marigolds,” it took my breath away, and each time I come back to this piece, I am just as captivated and intrigued at how you’ve created such a beautifully labyrinthine and image-rich piece. To begin, I would love to know: what was your process of building this elaborate and complex poem?
Sumita Chakraborty: Thank you so much—that’s incredibly kind of you to say and it means a lot to me. “Marigolds” was the first long poem I ever wrote, and I started it quite by accident! I was writing an essay about Robert Lowell and found myself having some thoughts that had nothing to do with the essay (and more to do with me than with Lowell). So I wrote what I thought was going to be a one-off sonnet addressed to Lowell which I would stick in a drawer and which would never see the light of day. Instead, I kept going, and I realized that I was trying to tell my own coming-of-age story, by which I really mean my own story of escaping domestic violence and beginning to want to claim space in the world. It took about a year and a half or so to get it right, and much of that process involved me generating a lot of draft verbiage, going back and kind of reverse-outlining it to see what said verbiage was about and to trace the development of various tropes, rearranging accordingly, and then drafting some more and starting the entire cycle again. That’s the macro view of what it looked like to write it; there were more micro-level processes that I’m happy to speak to as well if you’re interested (for example, there’s about a 5-line chunk of the poem toward the end that was so hard to get right I thought it’d be the last thing I ever did), but that’s the broad-strokes gist.
ZC: And to follow up: Towards the conclusion of “Marigolds” readers are made aware of your sister’s death with the line, “My sister has joined the list of those I mourn.” I read your piece for The Carcanet Blog, “What to do With the Body,” where you discuss your thought process on the placement of this moment in the collection and you state, “The incontrovertible and uncomfortable fact is that without her death I would not have become the person who could write the book I wanted to write; nor would this book exist in its form without her death beginning it.” Why was it important to you that the end of your sister’s life be the moment that ushers readers into the rest of the book? What was the significance of commencing the start of something with the conclusion of another?
SC: For me, this came down to figuring out what the book as a whole was about. “Marigolds” is a “coming-of-age” story, as I just said—but the book as a whole isn't. My own interest didn’t lie precisely in exploring domestic violence (although I do), or talking about specific elements of the abuse I endured (although I do), or talking about what exactly it felt like to leave such an environment (although I do!). I was interested in thinking through what happened next. I wasn’t raised to love or be loved, or to trust or be trusted; I wasn’t raised to take up space, and I wasn’t raised to cede space when necessary, either. A lot of who I strive to be now flies entirely counter not only to the mindsets and behaviors to which I was exposed or by which I was violated as a child but to how I learned to endure my childhood and adolescence. That’s why the poems in that first section are more brutal, more callous, more harsh, and more hard-hearted than later sections in the book; it took me a long time to learn softness, or tenderness. That’s the main story I wanted to tell. To do so, I needed the “past” of Arrow to be present, but also not the dominant thread; that’s why I start with the book with “Marigolds” (even though very little conventional wisdom about publishing would recommend beginning a collection—a debut, no less—with a long poem!). While my sister’s death happened well after I moved out, her death—and mine, and my mother’s—was a constant possibility that I feared and fought against as a child and an adolescent, so that while it was temporally part of my “after,” experientially it was also very much part of my “before.”
ZC: I'm really intrigued when you say that "Marigolds" is your coming-of-age story. There's this general "understanding" so to speak that readers should not assume that the "I" in a poem is the writer, and I think that this understanding allows us as writers to have a sense of freedom on the page while also creating some sort of distance/protection. I would love to know: How often are you inhabiting the "I" in your poems? And just out of my own curiosity: Why poetry? What is it about this art form that makes it an ideal vehicle as a means of introspection as opposed to the essay, short story, etc.?
SC: Yeah, that’s a tricky bit, isn’t it? I mean, I too recommend that students, for example, respect the distinction between the speaker and the poet, not out of some arbitrary sense that the writer’s life is somehow separate from their poetry but precisely, as you say, to respect that distance that’s necessary both for the writer’s ability to create and for the reader's ability to approach a text with attentiveness to the fact that a poem is a made thing. I think for me, the extent to which I inhabit a poem’s “I” really varies based on occasion. Arrow is a deeply personal book, so the poems I wrote during the years that I worked on Arrow that don’t fit into its autobiographical narrative didn’t make the cut for inclusion. I think the manuscript that’s starting to come into view as my second collection has more room for poems that stray a little farther from how I understand my “I.” But even as I say that, I’m reminded of the fact that one of the things I like most about the lyric “I” is that it demonstrates how inchoate, mutable, and co-created any “I” is, including in “real life.” The mystery of “the speaker” really is the mystery of identity, personality, and subjectivity of any human being; the self isn’t stable or really all that knowable, and it’s certainly not static. Similarly, even though a lot of the “I”s in Arrow are autobiographical, they’re also versions of me rather than the whole shebang: they’re amalgamations of different aspects of my personality that are concentrated and highlighted, for example, or a “me” that is only really specifically true to “me” in the specific context of the poem’s dramatic scenario, or a “me” I long since grew away from, and so on. The “me” of “Marigolds” isn’t the “me” of “Dear, beloved” isn’t the “me” of “O” isn’t the me who’s obsessed with the Animal Crossing DLC and really craving steak. You know?
As for why poetry: I’m not one to really glorify any particular art form because I feel like that runs dangerously close to a hierarchy of the arts, which has really only done bad things to arts and to people. And I do also write essays and literary scholarship, and I love them all. I think every mode is a method of thinking, and the ones I write in line up with the ways my brain works and the ones I don’t write in (like fiction, for example) are things that haven’t (yet, at least!) been simpatico with my patterns of thought and the way I like to pose questions.
ZC: Throughout the text, there's the reoccurring image of the moon, as well as space and the stars. What draws you to the moon and the other inhabitants of the universe's expanse?
SC: Part of this is simply because I’m a massive space nerd. I mean, I’m writing this response with a plush moon right next to me! But in terms of figures of the universe making it into my work, I think that often for me that’s deeply tied with the other definition of “space” I’ve mentioned: taking up space and ceding space. It’s about scale; for me, outer space dramatizes the negotiation between the particular (or the proximal) and the vast (or the distant) in a way that invites me to interrogate my own relationship to both of those things. And the language we use to talk about outer space mimics—not coincidentally—the language we use to talk about those things in sociopolitical contexts here on Earth, too. I think often of the word “alien” as an example of that, as well as the ways in which “space exploration” is historically intertwined with capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, all of which are (among other things) racist, misogynist, and violent structures. So as a field of metaphors, even when I’m not directly writing about capitalism, nationalism, or colonialism, outer space leads me directly to the heart of a kind of self-interrogation that is very important to me (particularly in the context of the story I’m telling in Arrow): how to “take up space” without rehearsing the destructive paradigms that structured much of my life.
On a craft level, I find outer space fascinating simply as a challenge of perspective and specificity. In this, it’s something of an exaggerated extension of my interest for ecological and natural metaphors and figures. I like pushing myself to ask how deeply I’m considering every little detail about the things I’m writing about, and thinking about planets or moons I could never inhabit—and planets and moons that no human being could ever inhabit—feels rigorous in a really exciting way to me, because I simply can’t assume anything about the environment so I have to keep re-imagining my own world-building.
ZC: I'd love to know more about your revision process. You mentioned that "Marigolds" took over a year to reach its final form, and I was wondering what your revision process looks like? How do you know when a piece has done the work you've aimed for it to do? And to follow up: are there any pieces in Arrow that you would go back and revise if you could?
SC: I love this question because I love talking about revision. For me this differs from poem to poem—I was once on a panel about long poems on which Marianne Boruch gave this beautiful metaphor for revision, that it’s like a doctor going on medical rounds, checking in on each poem to see what it needs until it’s well enough to leave the hospital. That’s pretty similar to what I do. (Doctors, however, make their rounds in the mornings. I am allergic to mornings, so my rounds take place at questionable hours of the night that would be untenable for any human patient but which, thankfully, the poems do not mind.) For “Marigolds” and “Dear, beloved,” I drafted them more or less linearly and then went back, reverse-outlined the draft, used the reverse outline to see what I’d said and what order I’d said it in, and kept rearranging things, cutting things, or writing into things until I felt like those poems told the stories that I wanted them to. For a poem like “Night Questions,” the hardest thing to figure out was whether the final question should be answered—when I was revising that poem, I spent a lot of time imagining the world of that poem beyond its stark few lines to really interrogate what the speaker would say, if possible. And for other poems, like some of the “O Spirit” poems, revision was much more surgical (I guess I’m sticking with the medical metaphors in this answer!).
As for when I know something’s done: I’m afraid this will be wildly unhelpful, but I have this feeling of an embodied thunk in my gut when I feel like something’s got all its parts in place. I trust the thunk and I make sure the thunk has thunked for a long time before sending anything out. On a more practical sense, I think I call upon my literary analytical training and work for this—I’ll tend to subject my drafts to fairly intense and nitpicky close readings and annotations, and when I do that I make absolutely sure to look at my poem as if I did not write it (in other words, to not assume a single thing that the text does not provide). That really helps me see what I have left out or what’s not serving the poem.
There aren’t pieces in Arrow I’d revise, no. There are certainly poems I would write differently now if I was writing them now, but those wouldn’t be the poems for Arrow. These ones left the hospital with their doctor’s blessing; I wrote and rewrote this manuscript for about seven years, and some of the phrases and lines in there are even older than that, so I really took my time with them and made sure to live with them for as long as I needed to be sure of the manuscript's thunkiness. And also, I really mean what I write in the last poem in the book, “O,” and it’s turned out to be true: when I next speak, it will be with changed lips. I wonder what their color will be. I’m very content to let Arrow rest now and discover new ways to speak.
ZC: The cover for Arrow is absolutely beautiful. What was the process like in deciding on a cover for the collection? And why did you ultimately decide on this particular image?
SC: Thank you so much! Alice James deserves all the credit here. I think their system is magnificent: they asked me for 10 to 20 pieces of art that I’d be happy with and then went through them to see what the permissions process would be like for each of them and what their design team felt was best, and then they asked for the go-ahead when they settled on it. I found that thinking entirely representationally (e.g. a literal arrow) wasn’t quite right, so I thought instead of the question of what that arrow might hit or puncture, and for a few other pieces I also thought about what the arrow might leave in its wake, given my interest in aftermaths. I’m also a visual art nerd so I had a lot of fun with this. E. V. Day’s “Satellite of Modern Love” resonates with a lot of the things I write about, like sensuality and violence, and it even looks planetary or moonlike; because it’s a sculpture, the rod on which it is mounted looks like an arrow shaft to me in the context of my title. I am ecstatic that the team got the rights to use the piece. But, per Alice James’s instructions, I made sure I’d be very happy with each of the pieces I suggested and forced myself not to fixate, since so much about cover art comes down to budgeting and logistics. I never felt like I would be manhandled into picking something I hated, but I was very grateful that their process helped me manage my emotions!
ZC: I'm always curious about writers' inspirations and who they feel their work is in conversation with. Who are some writers you feel influence your work?
SC: I’m such a sponge! I am trained in the history of Western lyric poetics with a focus on twentieth and twenty-first century poetics, and I think most of what I’ve read is smushed up in my mind to the point where, for example, one of my most personal poems can get its start via Robert Lowell. I fear I end up sounding like a syllabus when I answer questions about influences, so instead of going that route, can I share with you instead some of my favorite recent (and recent-ish) books that I hope that Arrow would be allowed to hang out with in an imagined literary playground? A few of those would be Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling, Philip B. Williams’s Mutiny, Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, Eduardo Corral’s Guillotine, and Anne Carson’s Nox. I would want Arrow to be these books’ friend and share its lunch with them.
ZC: I feel like this is a question that some writers may dread, but I'm hungering for more of your work so I have to ask: Are there any new projects that you're currently working on?
SC: Yeah, speaking of outer space, I have this series of poems I’ve been writing called “The B-Sides of the Golden Records” that imagines into the elisions of NASA’s 1977 Golden Records. These poems are a great elaboration of my earlier response to your question about space: in "The B-Sides,” I’m having to use a first person plural a lot, which has been interesting and instructive (what kinds of “we" I do and don’t feel comfortable inhabiting, that kind of thing), and they’ve also invited a lot of specificity because you can’t really just say “like a bird” to an imagined extraterrestrial because you have no idea if they even have birds on their planet. While I thought for a long time that these would likely be in my second full-length book, I’m now thinking of them as a standalone project. I’ve been inspired by Monica Ong’s work, and especially the way that she will sometimes publish pieces as material objects outside the “traditional” forms of literary publishing; I bought and spend a lot of time staring at and into the version of her poem "Her Gaze" that she released as a ViewFinder reel. On that note, can I share something with you? I’ve been thinking lately of trying to make my “B-Sides” into an actual vinyl! (I have no idea how to do this yet, which is also a really exciting headspace for me.)
I’ve also been creating a lot of visual poetry, especially but not exclusively about the hysterectomy I had due to stage four endometriosis some years back, and I’ve been playing with some mixed-genre work that I think likely will be in a second full-length manuscript. I feel happiest when I have many things going at once, so I’m working on those while working on some poems that will be more familiar, formally, to readers of Arrow (I have a sonnet cycle in progress that’s looking like it’s going to go long). And I’m working on a scholarly book called Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene; the full manuscript for that puppy should be done late next year. As far as poems are concerned: some of the “B-SIdes” and the visual poems have been published here and there, but for the most part I’ve been enjoying drafting in private post-Arrow. I’m starting to feel like a few things are ready to send out, so I might soon start sending work out again in substantial quantities, but I’m really just taking my cue from what the pieces tell me when I do my rounds.
About Sumita Chakraborty
Sumita Chakraborty is the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020), which received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, and the Guardian. Her work in progress includes a scholarly monograph, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. Her poems have been published in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere; her essays and articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Modernism/modernity, and College Literature, among others. She has received honors from the Poetry Foundation, the Forward Arts Foundation (U.K.), and Kundiman. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Find her on Twitter @notsumatra or on her website at https://www.sumitachakraborty.com/.
About Zakiya Cowan
Zakiya Cowan is a creative from Chicago who holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish from Lewis University. She serves as the interviews editor for Honey Literary, a poetry reader for Memorious, and was a former editor for Jet Fuel Review. Her work has been previously published in Split Lip Magazine, Hobart, Green Mountains Review, Window Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Wolny Residency Fellow, a 2020 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship recipient, a Best Small Fictions nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee.