This week in the New Poetries VII blog series we hear from Sumita Chakrobarty. Continuing the run up to publication of the anthology in April 2018, Sumita introduces her long poem, 'Dear, Beloved', and shares the opening excerpt below.
Sumita Chakraborty hails from Boston, Massachusetts and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Emory University, where she is currently a fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Poetry editor of AGNI and art editor of At Length, her articles, essays, and poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, the Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, and elsewhere.
In the summer of 2014, my younger sister suddenly died at the age of twenty-four. The cause of her death remains undetermined. Her death became the main interest of this poem, which takes its title from the English-language translation of Priya, her Sanskrit-origin name, and on which I worked for the subsequent two years.
While the poem is therefore an elegy of a kind, it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper, or to write a way of inhabiting grief rather than exactly writing about grief. As a result, neither its subject nor its addressees are my sister alone, and its references range widely, including Louise Bourgeois, Nina Simone, Calvino, Beowulf, the names of horses I once saw at the only horse-riding competition I’ve ever witnessed, and more. As that list as well as the length of time I spent writing this poem might indicate, several different texts and interlocutors were on my mind as I wrote it. Four repeated touchstones were: Paradise Lost, to which I listened on audiobook often during those two years; Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song; Alice Oswald’s Memorial; and Marie Howe’s The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. Howe’s title is the phrase that often comes to mind for me when asked to describe this poem. The mood of elegy, I found, is diverse and capacious, containing bliss and misery alike; inhabiting grief happens in the day-to-day procession of the most ordinary time, which can also feel like a kingdom—and one that is both evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between. These decisions motivated each aspect of the poem, including its syntax, form, and diction. The desire to write the mood of elegy or to write the experience of inhabiting grief became, as such, not dissimilar from what I tend to hope of any poem or tend to admire in poetry: that it will write into being a world that already in some way exists.
***
from Dear, Beloved
Child. We are done for
in the most remarkable ways.
—“Dead Doe,” Brigit Pegeen Kelly
It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam
would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass
of ice would come upon me like a crown of master diamonds
in shades of gold and pink. The base of the mountains
would be still in darkness. The snow would melt,
making the mountain uglier. The ice would undertake
a journey toward dying. My iliacus, from which orchids bloom,
would learn to take an infant’s shape, some premature creature
weaned too soon. My femoral nerve, from which lichen grows
in many shades, would learn to take breaths of its own
and would issue a moan so labored it could have issued
from two women carrying a full-length wooden casket, with dirt
made from a girl inside. The dirt would have been buried
with all of the girl’s celestial possessions. Bearing the casket
would demand more muscles than earthbound horses have.
The girl would have been twenty-four. This was my visio.
Sometimes I think of it as prophecy. Other times, history.
For years it was akin to some specific land, with a vessel
that would come for me, able to cross land, sea, the spaces
of the universe, able to burrow deep into the ground.
Anything could summon it — a breaking in cloud cover,
wind chimes catching salt outside my mother’s window,
a corner of a painting. And I learned how to call it, too.
This is the only skill of which I have ever been proud.
When my sister died, from the head of my visio came offspring
in the thousands, armed to the teeth, each its own vessel.
My first, their mother, lived on. For itself and its hoard
it found a permanent home in a cave at the bottom of a lake.
And it waited until I was standing on a mountain to sing to me:
You will call this mountain home until I tell you to move again.
***
