Interview with Sumita Chakaborty
By Jay Ward
Each year since 2019, I’ve coordinated the annual winter retreat for The Watering Hole, an organization determined to cultivate poets of color in the Southern tradition. One of the facilitators for the 2023 retreat was Sumita Chakraborty, currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at North Carolina State University.
In addition to being an attentive and adept teacher, Sumita showed by example how the acknowledgment of failure makes us all better students. Her style of instruction seemed to beckon, to say walk with me through these mistakes, these beautiful miscalculations that bloom, unfettered, into new and myriad worlds.
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, essayist, and scholar, and the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books [U.S.]/Carcanet Press [U.K.], 2020). Her first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, is in progress. Her poems have been published in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, The Offing, and elsewhere.
I caught up with Sumita recently via email to talk about revision, favorite poems, the boredom of spinning plates, and more.
JW I had the privilege of taking a revision workshop with you over winter break, which made me examine my own revision practice (already my favorite part of the writing process) in fresh and invigorating ways. Can you speak briefly to how important revision is, particularly for an emerging poet looking to grow as a writer?
SC First of all, the privilege was all mine. Thank you so much for inviting me to The Watering Hole and for coming to the workshop. It was truly one of the most meaningful teaching experiences of my life, and I feel terribly lucky.
One of the things I spoke about during that workshop was that, although we often use the words revising and editing interchangeably, they come from different etymological roots: revision comes to us by way of to re-envision, and edit comes by way of producing, publishing, and the like. The implication of this distinction is that revision can be a space of play and experimentation that is free from the kinds of perfection-related quests with which we sometimes associate it (finding errors, fixing problems, and so on). That’s not to say that those editorial steps are not important—although, in general, I despise the concept of perfection, likely because I am a perfectionist and I tend to have to fight that instinct in order to make work that excites me (especially when drafting), so I’m intimately acquainted with the limitations that the idea of perfection can place on our creativity. Rather, it’s just to say that editorial tasks differ from revisionary ones. Revision can be a stage of the writing process wherein, instead of trying to “improve” the poem, we’re trying to get to know it better and explore the world of possibilities that it holds.
That’s why when I teach revision, I do so with prompts that are essentially games. They invite you to—pardon my French—fuck things up, not fix them up. One game asks you to rearrange the lines of the poem in a completely different (even random) order; another asks you to change the setting of the poem; another asks you to turn your poem into a MadLibs; another invites you to think about a language that is not the one you primarily write in but is very important to you nonetheless, like a heritage language or a second language, and inject some element of its syntax or grammar into your poem. While some of these experiments may yield results that you want to retain in the final poem, many of them likely will not. (For example, I have messed up my own poems badly before by doing my own relineation exercise!) What they will invariably do, though, is get you to interact with your text in a new and surprising way, which will either show you something else you do want to do or will help you clarify what your intentions were in the first place. (To stick with my example: when I’ve ruined a poem by relineating it, it helps me see what I was aiming to accomplish with my original lineation. And thanks to the magic of word processing, particularly the beautiful Control-Z and equally beautiful “Save As,” any damage I’ve done can be easily undone, which I think is an important lesson for emerging writers to learn: nothing bad will happen if something bad happens on the page.)
On that note, for emerging writers looking to grow, this approach to revision can be especially helpful because it can give you a sense of freedom and agency. Our standards for a “good poem” can sometimes come from elsewhere or be the product of things you have quietly, even unintentionally, internalized. My emphasis on peeling “revision” away from “good” and “bad” is all about helping each person understand what their own goals are for every piece. And it can also help give folks a sense of concreteness and materiality instead of grasping for some abstract “improvement.” Most importantly, though, I hope the games help create and sustain joy. I’m always really saddened when I hear, from emerging writers, that they used to have fun on the page until they began to write in classrooms or in other such settings. Anything you can do to sustain joy and fight against the things that take it from you should be a high priority. (I say “emerging writers” here because that was a part of your excellent question, but truth be told, I’ve spoken to writers of all stages for whom these things are true. They certainly are for me.)
JW I intentionally used the word “briefly” in the question above, partly because I know there’s no way to be truly brief with a subject like that (except for the use of revision strategies . . . making the answer an example of itself), and partly because your dedication to revision makes me think of how your poems begin. I know poets who listen to very particular songs before engaging with a new poem, others who read from books of poems, still others who need to wake at an ungodly hour to engage their creative mind. Do you have a pre-writing ritual that you feel situates you in the best space to generate new work? If so, does that ritual change based on whether you’re writing poems, nonfiction, or scholarly work?
SC I totally wasn’t brief above, was I. SORRY! I really like talking about revision. I will, however, be able to be brief about this one, because no, unfortunately, I entirely lack writing rituals, and instead am like a raccoon or a crab or some other kind of undignified scavenging creature. When I was in college, I was also working three jobs. I got into the habit of writing when I could, and of not expecting large expanses of time. I am deeply fortunate these days to have some more extended days that are “writing days,” and they are precious to me; it turns out that I love and thrive on unstructured time. But my general disposition remains the same: I don’t have any rituals except for the general rule that I will write as much as I can, whenever I can, in scavenged snippets of time if need be. And that doesn’t change by genre, either. Every single text is just a bunch of words piled on each other. If I can put down five words in a document whenever I have time for five words, that’s five more words than the piece had before, and I call it a win until I can scrabble up the next chunk.
JW You have a forthcoming scholarly book project with the University of Minnesota Press titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene. Obviously, a lot of research goes into a project like this. Twentieth and twenty-first century American poetics are also brought under the microscope in this work. What was it like to work on this project? How has it affected your own poetics?
SC Thank you for this question! This manuscript is actually still in progress; it’s an advance contract and I’m hoping to turn it in this year. My poetic practice and scholarly practice have been intertwined for a long time—since my undergraduate [days], actually, when I was lucky to be taught by poet-scholars. It wasn’t until later that I realized there even were so many distinctions between these categories, professionally speaking. I don’t have an MFA; I wrote Arrow, my debut poetry collection, while writing my scholarly dissertation during my literature PhD.
In some cases, the relationship between my poetry and my scholarship is fairly direct. The first poem in Arrow begins by meditating on Robert Lowell, for example, who’s someone I was writing about in my dissertation (and am now writing about in Grave Dangers, too). That poem turned out to be a long poem which isn’t primarily about Lowell, but its origin story was that while I was writing about Lowell academically, I wanted to have an outlet for some personal feelings I was having while reapproaching his work. He’s been a “problematic fave” of mine for a very long time and the kinships I’ve felt with him—as well as the ways I’ve struggled with him—map fairly directly onto different stages of my own development. In cases like that, the spark is the same, and each genre takes that spark in a different direction.
In others, it’s a little more oblique. Grave Dangers asks what is missing from our current conversations about grief and mourning in what we’ve come to call the Anthropocene, and how we might better care for or attend to the grief especially of persons of color in this time of death and violence, especially since, for many persons of color, death and violence are hardly products of the Anthropocene alone. My collection Arrow is in large part about my experience mourning my sister’s death, as well as how I, in the aftermath of the domestic violence I experienced in my youth, came to learn what things like love, kinship, and care could mean to me. So Grave Dangers isn’t, say, a prose version of Arrow, but without the inner searching that it took to write Arrow, I’m not sure I could have come up with the argument of Grave Dangers. And similarly, while working on Grave Dangers, I’m in the weeds of a second poetry manuscript titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record, which I read a little from at the retreat. That project riffs on NASA’s 1977 Golden Record and interrogates the things about human experience that the original record left out (the original record tried to give an unequivocally positive glimpse into life on Earth). The B-Sides owes a great deal to the historical and philosophical research that informs Grave Dangers, even though I don’t directly reference a lot of that research in those poems. I like to feel like I’m just a little satellite orbiting around these questions that have huge centers of gravity, and to let those gravitational pulls inform where I swerve next.
JW What drives you as a writer? I am wondering what really pushes the words out, what unsaid thing drives you relentlessly toward resolution. A better way to ask this might be, what are your current obsessions and how do you engage them?
SC I love this question and I’m afraid that my answer will be disappointing. I really just like asking questions and seeing where the attempt to answer those questions might lead. The poet Joan Retallack once said that poets are radical epistemologists: they create new ways of knowing that are outside of the accepted grooves in which we already operate. That inspires me greatly.
JW At the risk of exposing my own naiveté, I generally assume that anyone who is teaching has a passion to do so, and anyone who writes has swelling questions (or answers) within them that cannot be suppressed. Where does your passion to write come from? Your desire to teach? Are those two pursuits ever at odds or is it more of a symbiotic relationship?
SC I don’t think that’s naïve at all. On a literal level, they can be at odds just because there is unfortunately only so much time, and I’m someone who gives as much time as possible to students. I’ve had to work really hard on trying to sustain my commitment to that work—which I do see as an act of care, and one that’s very important to me—while also carving out space for myself. I do a lot of emotional labor with students as well, and sometimes I use up all my reserves there and don’t end up having much left over for the page. It’s a tough balance to strike, and I admit that it’s not at all easy to negotiate and that I’m not sure I succeed as often as I perhaps should.
But on the other hand, they’re not at odds at all, because philosophically and emotionally, they are symbiotic for me (and also because I’m a scavenging trash creature who is accustomed to making a great deal out of not very much time). I am not exaggerating when I say that I would not be who I am—not to mention, you know, probably not alive—if it weren’t for the teachers I met in college or the poems I read there. It means a great deal to me to have a life in which I am, as both a teacher and as a writer, in a position to perhaps pay it forward for someone else.
JW We had an interesting conversation at the retreat. I believe Q (Quraysh Ali Lansana) asked each of us for examples of poems that stay with us or influence us. I know that answer can be fluid from one day to the next. I’m curious how you’d answer that in this particular moment both as a teacher (poem[s] that you think about for your students) and as a poet (poem[s] that you think about for your own life and practice).
SC I love this opportunity to revisit this question!
The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton, which is one of the books I mentioned in response to Q’s question at the retreat, remains my most steadfast answer for my own practice: I have reread it annually for many years. I’m also currently obsessed with poets who push the limits of what “the book” can be (especially as inspiration for my B-Sides of the Golden Record poetry manuscript), like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bhanu Kapil, Tyehimba Jess, Alice Oswald, Don Mee Choi, and Anne Carson.
For students, I always find myself coming back to Chen Chen for a dizzying balance of whimsy and insight; to Brigit Pegeen Kelly, to emphasize the power of myth and fable; to Natalie Diaz and Patricia Smith for innovative formal brilliance (among, you know, literally every other thing about their work); to Monica Ong and Diana Khoi Nguyen for inviting us to reimagine what a poem can be; to Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith, and Carl Phillips for the power of image and syntax; to Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, Ilya Kaminsky, torrin a. greathouse, Franny Choi, and Ross Gay, for reminding us that poetry, as Audre Lorde wrote, is not a luxury.
JW I read an interview where you stated, “I feel happiest when I have many things going at once,” which resonates with me in a profound way. I do find myself somewhat stressed by all the spinning plates, but what am I gonna do . . . just watch a single plate spin and pretend to panic when it wobbles? This is a lead-in to asking not only about projects that you’re working on now, but also about projects you dream of; assume that time, responsibility, the intersection of life, career, and all the myriad things that pull at your attention, weren’t a factor—what projects spring to life?
SC RIGHT? One plate is so boring. Family style is the only way to dine. Even when things spill around chaotically.
This question is both delightful and mind-boggling. I don’t know if I even know how to imagine such unfettered freedom. (Is that sad? Probably. I should work on that. Writing that one down for the next therapy session.)
Truth be told, when I think about this, I don’t think about projects. I do, though, think about volunteer teaching, which I’ve done before in prisons and with domestic violence shelters. I haven’t had the time to do as much of this kind of work as I always imagined I would, and I sincerely want to find a way to arrange my life to have the space in my schedule for it again.
I also want to learn violin. I played piano as a child, but I left it behind with my entire childhood when I escaped domestic violence. I don’t know that I want to go back to piano—it feels like a part of a distinct chapter—but I’d love to learn something else.
JW Any closing advice on poems, or maybe a poetry prompt, for our readers?
SC I’ll share a brand-new revision game that I’ve recently written up and added to the handout I used at the retreat! This one is inspired by Q, actually: in his craft talk at The Watering Hole, he spoke about how he is not usually a poet of the “I.” I am often a poet of the “I,” but I loved thinking, as he spoke, about the different perspectival work required for both approaches. After I got home, I wrote up a new game that’s now in my handout, and it is entirely thanks to The Watering Hole and to Q that it exists:
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: If your piece uses the “I” a lot: take every instance out (or at least the 1–3 that you think of as most crucial). How can you fill those moments in the piece either without a subject or with a different subject? Make any changes that follow. If your piece never uses the “I”: Put the “I” in throughout (or at least once at the beginning and then 1–3 more subsequent types). How does that change what you yearn for from the piece? Make any changes that follow.
As I said in response to the first question, this game isn’t about making a “bad” poem “good,” and it’s also not about being prescriptive in any way: I don’t mean that a poem “should” or “should not” have the “I.” It’s about shaking up the perspective of your poem and seeing whatever that helps you see, or wish you saw. Readers: I hope you play this with a draft of yours, and email me to tell me what happened!
JW Thanks so much, Sumita, for being part of TWR’s very first all-poetry issue! We are wishing you much continued success and look forward to celebrating the forthcoming Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene and B-Sides of the Golden Record!
SC Thank you so much, Jay. It’s a gift to know you and be in community with you.
Junious “Jay” Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), and the author of Sing Me a Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, and the Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.