ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet, public critic, and scholar who is Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Emory University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, the American Poetry Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, and elsewhere; she is poetry editor of AGNI and art editor of At Length. In 2017, she received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and in 2018, she was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. Her first book of poems, Arrow, is forthcoming in September 2020 from Alice James Books in the U.S. and Carcanet Press in the U.K.
Basic Questions
What was the experience of death like for you?
The fluids within my body failed to be held within my body, which, as far as I can tell, does not entirely differ from some experiences of life,
At what moment did you know there was an existence
beyond earth?
as when for example I lay beneath another’s beautiful body of my own free will for the first time, and learned in one moment that I had hairs within my nostrils,
How did you feel?
because they stood on end, as if confused by which hole was meant to receive that body—
Were you met by anyone?
rapt into confusion. I once got to see inside of my own lower abdomen. Did you know there is a galaxy there?
What things in our world still attract you most?
My veins made azalea roots that throbbed with messages. There were lights whose names I didn't know. Malignancies were moons. Gold on the ocean shores. Planets made of other planets, growing into one another to rewrite physics and reinvent geometry. I saw it all, through the eye within the eye.
What would you like to clarify for our world about your life?
Daily existence, mine included, was nothing short of improbable.
Do you wish to return again?
Foucault once wrote, “The venomous heart of things and men is, at bottom, what I’ve always tried to expose.”
Is there a message you would like to give to our world?
Rilke once wrote, “You must change your life.”
Is there anything that you wouldn’t mind saying that would
help assure your friends that you are you?
Whatever I have loved, I have taken its name in vain.
The questions in this poem are taken from archives of Lucille Clifton’s spirit-writing.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
