On Chaturdashpodi Kobita
By Tarfia Faizullah
Hi, I’m Tarfia Faizullah, here for Poets on the Plains. Today, I feel a bit sheepish sharing one of my own poems, but it’s a poem that serves as a snapshot of my own life, so I’m excited to share it, and share about it.
I am the author of two full length poetry collections with a third on the way, and I teach creative writing at UNT. I have been writing sonnets for a very long time, so long and so often that sometimes when I sit down to write a poem, it emerges as a sonnet. For those who may not know, and who may also want to begin writing sonnets, a sonnet is a 14-line poem, traditionally with a couple of options for rhyme scheme and meter.
In addition to writing poetry and having been raised in Texas, I am also a Bangladeshi born in New York, and am always looking for ways to incorporate those elements into my poetry, while also honoring received forms.
In the 1860s, Bengali poet Michael Dutta pioneered what is called the chaturdashpodi kobita, which is a 14-line poem that is the Bengali equivalent of a Western sonnet. My poem, Chaturdashpodi Kobita, is my attempt at bringing that tradition into an English language poem. This poem was written a couple of years ago on the notes app on a train in New York, during a visit there with my mother, who gave birth to me there.
CHATURDASHPODI KOBITA
My life began here, Maa begins,
meaning, she wasn’t born
here—she was that young
when first married to Baba. When
dreaming of their hours in a small one-
room space in Sunset Park, I want . . .
what? The train stalls now close to Penn
Station; I’m cold and the placid pond
outside the broad window is no scene
I care to name . . . still, I squint
at these tenements which once
served as sanctuary to Maa & Baba in
those first days. Where now are the secrets
between two strangers who made my eyes?
I am fascinated by private worlds, especially the ones I wasn’t around for. To that end, my first two books seek to capture the inner lives of women affected by the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, as well as the interiority of those discovering and documenting those lives. There are sonnets in both of those books, too! In my third book, Alien of Extraordinary Ability (the title of which is an actual visa classification), I’ve been exploring the interiority immigrant parents’ love story, which converges/creates my own origin story and searches for love. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be the first person in my extended family to be born in America: both the pressures of living up to the opportunities and expectations of that, as well as my attempts to be an artist who holds myself to high standards.
One aspect of poetry that I love is its ability to traverse not just statelines but timelines. A poem allows the imagination to zoom halfway around the world and back again. A poem can drift back in time to the past as easily as it can rest in the present, and then fly into the future, all through tense, for example, and of course through thought. I grew up in Texas and then left for many years to be a nomadic writer, and have settled back there for the last several years, near my parents, who have been rooting there since the early 1980s. Being near them again, and in Texas, has opened up portals to write poems that seek to capture multiple geographies in one space. Texas was my home base when I drafted this poem, and still is, and though I don’t mention Texas explicitly, Texas is an invisible but essential figure here: it creates a vantage point, for one, as do the distinct temporalities that are encompassed here.
This particular sonnet, for me, is also a simultaneous snapshot of my birth city, my parents’ home country, my ambivalence about being stuck on a train, and my curiosity about my young parents’ private world in the time before my birth. I’d like to take a moment here to shout out a specific aspect of the sonnet which is most intriguing to me personally: the volta. Around the ninth or 13th line of the sonnet (depending on if Petrarchan or Shakespearean), after the middle, and before the ending, a sudden shift in logic, mood, or argument occurs, called the volta. That turn, you might call it a “detour,” even, allows for the sonnet to divert from the direction it was heading: creating a portal for an exciting eleventh-hour side quest.
In this sonnet, I’ve snuck in two voltas: one signalled by the ellipses in the penultimate stanza, and the second, in the thirteenth line, which is the beginning of a question that startled me as I wrote it. Somewhere along the way, I developed a keen curiosity about the sonnet’s origin story too–I learned that this efficient and expansive little form was first developed by a bureaucrat, of all things. Giacomo da Lentini, a Sicilian notary, invented the sonnet in the 13th century, and it eventually evolved into the Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms we teach most often and widely today. There is something miraculous about a form that has stayed with us this long, but continues to evolve and adapt, all while maintaining its essence, all while inviting both distillation and deviation.
With that in mind, perhaps it’s not so odd after all that a Bangladeshi Texan poet born in New York might be drawn to such a form. I’m looking forward to sharing with you this season a range of terrific poets and the way each of them are grappling with how to pour the wild unwieldiness of our human lives, with all their structures and deviations, into poems.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Tarfia Faizullah, coming to you from Dallas, TX.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). Her writing appears widely both in the United States and abroad and has been translated into several languages. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Arts & Letters, a US Artists Fellowship, and other honors. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.https://www.tfaizullah.com/tarfia/
