The Shape of Things

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Sumita Chakraborty’s poem “Image 004” appears in the April 2020 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

I have an archival spirit. I take pictures of food not (most of the time) to post, or even to look back at later, but just to have taken; instead of deleting emails, I sort them into folders and download them at irregular intervals, compressing them into zipped files; my drives contain files and folders through which I can trace my life back at least ten years. (Before then I didn’t much bother, since I neither thought I’d live long enough to care nor thought I cared enough to live. Besides, having moved a lot from a young age, often under duress, for quite a few years I seldom had the resources to bring very much with me whenever I had to move.) I take pictures of stickers and graffiti, of tomatoes and onions, of pebbles and of dirt. I take screen captures constantly. Of my life, I have all of the receipts.

Digital tools have been a godsend to what would otherwise be a home in desperate need of Marie Kondo’s interventions. I used to keep piles and piles of notes, for example, but now I get to scan and recycle. Nevertheless, I do sometimes find a paper something-or-other I’ve hung onto for a strange amount of time for no discernible reason, like when, while packing to move from Atlanta to Ann Arbor, I realized that I still had a fully completed French-language workbook from a course I’d taken when I lived in Boston a full eight years prior—along with a three-inch pink wool square that was supposed to turn into “a scarf” from a brief period of time in which I tried to make myself into a knitter. (I recycled the workbook, but not before seriously considering scanning every page. It took me an hour to talk myself out of that.) Given when I took French classes, I’m guessing that not only did I drag that thing across state lines, but I also must have moved it to and from four different apartments.

Now that you know these things about me, you likely won’t be surprised to learn that when I had a hysterectomy in 2018, I asked my surgeon to send me photographs of the operation as seen through his endoscope. It’s not that I ever have a sense that any of these materials will be “useful”—although I’m told that while going under, I fervently insisted that I’d need this particular archive for my next poetry project—but more that I need to know they existed, and there’s something about the act of gathering that translates in my mind as proof of that knowledge. It’s as though in order to know the thing happened, I have to have put it into some kind of tangible shape, or at least have taken a moment to survey the shapes it makes.
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I imagine this impulse as somewhat akin to what Emily Dickinson describes as “a formal feeling.” When I talk to my students about form, I tend to call it shape. Shape—which is part of form’s etymology—better accommodates what I’m interested in when it comes to form, which is that it offers a non-syntactical way to make and convey meaning. What are the shapes of the things you’re trying to share? What is the shape of the story this poem is telling?

There’s no precise one-to-one correlation in my mind between a shape and any particular form or formal device; for example, there’s no specific geometry that necessarily screams sonnet, or yelps villanelle, or whispers caesura. Perhaps a better way to explain it is that shape is a word that helps me understand some intersection of form and content that matters to my understanding of a poem’s reason for existing, and that the process of shaping a poem, or reading the shape of a poem, involves parsing the many subtle ways in which that reason for existing plays out on the page.

In writing about my hysterectomy, my anesthetized flights of fancy ended up correct: I followed the shape of my surgeon’s photographs. The shapes of my “Image” poems don’t directly replicate those in his photos—as I write in one poem in this series, “Image 000,” the surgeon’s photos were “rendered in a picture-in-picture format which is not unlike, yet not precisely alike, the shape of these poems.” Not all of the poems directly address hysterectomies, but there are a few constants. In the smaller circle, I’m imagining a chorus. As I also write in “Image 000,” “The voices that gave rise to the invention of the Chorus came from my recovery room. The recovery room is a room into which patients are brought following their operations to emerge out of anesthesia.” In the larger circle is something that either pertains to the hysterectomy or some other lines of my life that intersect with the hysterectomy in some way, or even, as is the case in “Image 004,” an ekphrasis of the surgeon’s photo itself. From “Image 000”: “In this circle lives the I, and history.”

In the actual “Image 004,” by which I mean my surgeon’s fourth photo, on the right side, a silvery instrument plunges into something fleshy and pink. On the left side of the photo is what I believe is (was?) one of my many endometriomas—swollen, engorged, veined. Here’s a black-and-white version of this photo, which is actually in color, but for now I’m saving the color for myself:

I don’t have the knowledge to read medical images, so I might be wrong about what is shown; I may well be simply taking what I know of my diagnosis (stage four endometriosis, with multiple implants, adhesions, and endometriomas, including on both ovaries) and imaginatively reading it into the picture. And I don’t exactly know what the silvery instrument is either, although I’ve read countless descriptions, textbooks, articles, and histories of hysterectomies, and watched a number of videos of them. I’m unsure of exactly what step I’m looking at based on only the vantage point of this image.

But the facts of the matter aren’t the point. The point is the shape of what matters. And the shape is about what I feel when I look at this image and wonder what vulnerabilities, angers, tendernesses, and incursions it has archived.

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I can trace my archival instincts back to when my father was arrested for the attempted murder of my mother. Until then, I hadn’t put much thought into “evidence”; it didn’t matter to me whether anyone knew when I was concussed, bruised, terrified, numb, ill, bleeding, or burned. Until, suddenly, it came to matter very much, because finding whatever records I could find and keeping records of everything that transpired from that moment onward meant the difference between whether or not my mother and I were considered credible, between having enough evidence to make a case for the long-term domestic violence we experienced or not, between being cast as a hysteric (hystero-: combining form of Greek ὑστέρα, or womb) or being someone whose history could be read and acknowledged.

I mention this because, like many of us, I often worry about the usefulness of what I do. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned a number of things that I catalog or save that aren’t exactly “useful.” I don’t reread my old archived emails; I’ve seldom even had cause to do so. When my sister died under murky circumstances six years ago, I had the occasion to revisit my inbox from the time around my father’s arrest, but that’s the only time I can recall having actually dug into my inbox archives. I don’t look back at the food pictures. I had no use for a French workbook full of conjugations I already knew. The funny thing is that despite the uselessness of my current archives, the origin of these habits came precisely from a fervent desire to be useful.

Even so, even in the context of the events that led to their conception, my archives weren’t useful in the end. In fact, they didn’t matter at all: my mother stopped cooperating with the police after my father intimidated and harassed her. They’re divorced now, but at the time she even went back to him; the entire event made nothing happen, not really, not exactly. My mother told me my father spoke at the time about hiring people to scrub the police blotter entry from search results; my recent Googling while writing this post tells me that whether or not he actually went through with hiring a firm, the page no longer comes up when I search for his name. (Yes: I have a cached version saved in my files.) And I never used my archives to press charges on my own behalf, either. I watch statutes of limitations approach and depart. Carceral punishment isn’t where my interest lies. Usefulness is no longer where my interest lies. The archival impulse remains anyway. The points, again, are the shapes of what I have seen and felt, the shapes into which I’ve been placed, the shapes of what I have been.

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On the hunt for the history of the noun phrase “the shape of things,” I found an H.G. Wells book called The Shape of Things to Come. I haven’t read this book, so I can’t speak to the tones and valences of Wells’s speculations in it. I can say that based on what little I’ve scoped out about the plot and the philosophies of the book, I’m not thrilled about some of the fantasies and politics it seems to cherish; it’s not likely to be on my reading lists. But I did skim parts of it on Project Gutenberg, specifically the chapter “The Raid of the Germs,” which begins:

That same dearth of detailed description which takes the colour out of the history of the last wars becomes even more apparent in the records of the epidemics that made any resumption of that warfare impossible. Diaries, letters and descriptive writing were out of fashion; there were other things to do and no surplus energy in the brain. It is as if the micro-organisms had taken a leaf out of the book of the Foreign Offices and found in mankind’s confusion an opportunity for restoring the long-lost empire of the germs.

Explorations of diseases, real and imagined, follow, including “maculated fever,” which “discoloured the face and skin, produced a violent fever, cutaneous irritation and extreme mental distress, causing an uncontrollable desire to wander. Then the bodily energy vanished in collapse and the victim lay down and died.”

I hadn’t intended to talk about the Wells book in this post, but I’m sure you all know why I now am. I was asked to write this post on March 2; I’m writing it on March 28. Between then and now, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered many shapes of many things, or traced in glaring colors the shapes of things we already knew, like the cruelty of various governments and world leaders, late capitalism’s disregard for certain kinds of bodies and persons, inequalities of race and class, flaws in health care systems, the travesties of incarceration, and more.

And I’m archiving it. Many people are, often on those same forms of digital media that make my collecting habits so much easier on my physical surroundings. And I’m sure many people are archiving in analog media, too; I started a notebook, and am injecting some snail mail into my now largely digital correspondences with my students.

I don’t share Wells’s fantasy that epidemics make warfare impossible—certain humans and nations are weaponizing this pandemic as we speak, or else retaining and accelerating pre-existing wars within this new context—nor do I imagine that germs themselves are hell-bent on creating empires, but there’s something to be said about his sense that diseases and crises of this nature make for a whole lot of “other things to do” than activities like “descriptive writing,” to say nothing of a profound lack of “surplus energy in the brain.”

Why are people archiving this? What use will it have? Over the last few weeks, some of us have turned to poetry; others have said that poetry is essentially useless at this time. Both of those arguments, I’m guessing (and speaking from experience as someone who has felt both of those things, often simultaneously), are much too simplistic to do justice to the shapes of the feelings on either side. Regardless, at times vicious fights have emerged online between those two camps.

In mid-March, after the university where I teach went virtual and the exponential dangers of this pandemic became incredibly clear according to all reputable sources, a student from a course I taught last semester reached out to me. The course this student was in was titled “Writing in a Time of Extinction,” and it focused on how contemporary writers are imagining the world and the place of literature in the context of the ongoing sixth mass extinction event. In addition to thinking about extinction in environmental terms, we also thought about how writers from subject positions that have long had their survival threatened—by colonization, state-sanctioned violence, discrimination, genocide, and more—parse the various valences of what “a time of extinction” has meant to and for them and their communities.

My student wrote that the readings from the course were on their mind as they made decisions and plans for themselves and others in this pandemic. They wrote that the stories and poems that we read had been giving them strength and advice, even though they admitted they had been skeptical at times about whether writing could be useful in relation to urgent needs in the material world.

In my response, I said that in their skepticism the student was in excellent company, including the company of W.H. Auden, who writes in his elegy for W.B. Yeats:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

I too share this skepticism from time to time, because when I say that usefulness is no longer where my interest lies, I am, of course, not telling the whole story. A better way to put it would be that in some cases, what I used to consider “useful” is no longer something I’m invested in, and in some other cases, I try to resist the message that everything I do needs to be operationalized. But of course I care about being useful. I care about whether I’ll ever be able to help anyone with anything, or make anything that matters in the scheme of anything, and I’m worried I won’t and I can’t. I told my student that this worry keeps me honest. That’s an overly redemptive way to describe what’s actually much more fraught—sometimes, it doesn’t keep me honest so much as makes me feel daunted and stymied—but what I mean is that it helps me remember that I make what little I can make, and it does what little it can.

In Auden’s poem it’s easy to stop at “For poetry makes nothing happen,” and sometimes, that’s where we need to stop—to feel that indictment, that fear, that anxiety of uselessness. On the days when we can continue reading the rest of the stanza, though, what we might take away is that however much or little we believe poetry can do, what Auden is clear about is that it flies in the face of how late capitalism disciplines us into understanding the word “happen.” Poetry acknowledges the things into which “executives/Would never want to tamper,” like “isolation,” “griefs,” the “Raw towns” of our hearts and minds. Maybe even when a poem can’t make anything happen, it can still be a way of happening. Maybe it is an archive of forms and contents, or a contribution to a larger archive thereof; maybe it’s a collection of the shapes of things past, things present, and things to come; maybe it’s a way of making, of all of those things, something fleshy, open, round, and real.