PRAGEETA SHARMA
in conversation with MICHAEL DUMANIS
On April 20, 2023, at Bennington College, Bennington Review editor Michael Dumanis engaged the poet Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English at Pomona College and author of Grief Sequence (Wave, 2019) and Undergloom (Fence, 2013), in an hourlong conversation about her work. The following is an edited excerpt.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
I would like to begin by asking you about your trajectory, biographically, in terms of writing and poetry. How did you go from first being interested in poetry to writing some poems to making the writing of poetry a central aspect of your life to publishing books of poetry?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
The first important formative experience I’ve had that led to poetry occurred because I switched out of public high school. I went to a racist public high school and was bullied. I talked my parents into helping me find a private high school, Cambridge School of Weston, an arts-oriented, alternative high school that had a progressive “block” system, and a more diverse community of day students and boarding students. There, my junior year, I took a poetry workshop with a wonderful teacher, Warren Carberg, who on the first day of class actually screened the film Blow-Up by Antonioni. He said with enthusiasm, “This is a poem.” That just blew my mind. I knew I was in the right place. Then I read the poet Ai in the Norton Anthology and loved those poems, those persona poems written only the way Ai could.
After I did a Writing and Thinking summer program at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, I left the school I loved, skipping my senior year, and started college at Simon's Rock. I found myself in poetry there too. Also, thirty years ago, I took a month-long summer intensive at Bennington and studied with Lucie Brock-Broido and Kate Daniels, and found that I was attached to the lyric poem. I started to understand my voice there.
I stayed at Simon’s Rock for four years and completed a thesis in poetry—and also put together an exhibition of paintings, and wrote prose in the form of nonfiction and fiction. What I realized was, wow, I was in a space where my professors would let me do everything I wanted to do. That exploration really changed me. I applied to graduate school and got into Brown, and I came to realize that the poem was a space where all the thinking I was doing, or all the experimenting I was doing with these different disciplines, was really organized well for me.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Can I ask you about the word “experimenting”? The label experimental is often associated with your work. What does it mean to experiment as a writer, to see yourself as a writer who is experimental? How do you understand this term?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I loved my undergraduate experience. I studied with Peter Filkins, who’s a wonderful poet and translator. He taught me so much about contemporary poetry and traditions, and I think it was a vital tutelage he gave me; I think the only challenges we had were when my poetry seemed illegible and experimental, because he saw poetry as really a received art and craft and this was expressed through ideas of talent and form. As an undergraduate, I was taught how to write a poem in a particular way, with an eye toward narrative. Maybe some lyric poetry too, but it was very narrative. I thought a poem had to be a certain way in order to be “good,” and it stressed me out. But I’m deeply grateful for the mentoring I received from Peter. If I didn’t have it I wouldn’t have a sense of what experimentation and craft could be. His mentorship was crucial in giving me permission to be a poet.
Then when I went to grad school, my mentors, C.D. Wright and Michael S. Harper, wrote in these really different ways, and they seemed experimental to me. The program that I went to was more invested in works that positioned themselves against what might be mainstream taste. I always thought of the experimental as a shifting opportunity where you might look at what was happening in the mainstream. I think about popular music and then about what’s new and strange or innovative. I always hoped that through experimenting, one might step out of received ideas and want to try on something new, so that the new always changes.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Do you think that every time you write is a kind of experiment? Or do you think of each individual book as an experiment?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I don’t even know if I’m experimenting. At this point in my life, I have really thought about who are my communities and what are the things I need to say. I’ve been trying intentionally to think about an Asian American, and specifically, a South Asian American community. I may put some pressure on myself to explore what might not be explored around me, or to give voice to myself. That seems the riskiest, because I think about ideas of not wanting to assimilate, not wanting to be part of a status quo, that are embedded in my relationship to my culture.
But when I think about experimentation in a broader way, I think about different ideas and traditions. I have found that the more bohemian the environment is, the more comfortable I feel. So I always associate bohemian culture with experimentation, and also thinking about gender, and thinking about theory. I am interested in bringing some unexpected things together.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
So it’s not just about how one writes, it’s how one thinks, or how one positions themselves in the world in relation to…
PRAGEETA SHARMA
Yes, that’s how I feel. I don't want to conform unnecessarily, but I might just be knee-jerk that way.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Have your values as a writer have changed significantly over time? You probably don’t remember this, but twenty-five years ago you and I read together with a bunch of other people, like in 1998 or something, in a different century. It was in an apartment, organized by Katy Lederer, and Charles Bernstein was reading, Jackson Mac Low was reading. It was the first time I heard your work. I remember it vividly, because it was comic, right? It was disjunctive. It was very punchy and unpretentious and resistant to any traditional sense of lyric. I was really engaged by it. I immediately wanted to read more. I do see a throughline between what you were writing twenty-five years ago and a book like Grief Sequence, but it’s a remarkably different book.
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I stopped being funny. You know, what happened is I moved to Montana, and I started to experience a different racism. What I thought I could do in my twenties and my thirties was just insist on a voice that I wanted to be, an authorial presence for myself. I could be punchy, could be funny, could be weird. Then I think I started to theorize more around the object, and I started to think about fixed spaces that I ended up being in that surprised me, that gave me no agency, and I couldn’t escape them.
I was joking the other day that I’m not funny anymore. I mean, I try maybe a sentence or two. I hope I’m still funny in my daily life, and I would like to figure out how to be funny again. I do think I lost, and now I’m in the abject. I think that your poem should really track what your questions are, what you’re going through, and it can change. It is very interesting to think about light and dark as themes. My previous book Undergloom is obviously really explicit and abject. I moved from thinking about a romantic lyric to something that I guess I needed to wrestle with.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Can you talk a bit about your interdisciplinary conference on race, writing, and aesthetic practice, Thinking Its Presence, that you founded at the University of Montana and last held at Pomona College, how it formed, what its purposes are, and what it is.
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I moved from Brooklyn to Montana, and the thing that was unique and difficult about that move was that I took a job in more of a leadership role as a director of the writing program before I got tenured. What doesn’t get explained in those situations is that you’re being evaluated by your colleagues before you can actually have some security. I had to make lots of silly administrative decisions, but one thing I would do is I would just try to actively think about absence and presence. A principle that I learned when I was teaching at Goddard College was this question faculty would pose before our students got there. The faculty would ask, Who’s not in the room right now?
Who do we need to think about who is not visible here? I would talk about gender and race and who was in the room. Who was not in the room? The program at Montana was a conservative community, and they thought I complained a little too much. I would hear things said like, well, we could invite more BIPOC—they didn’t even say BIPOC at that time—writers, but they’re really expensive.
These things ended up starting to sound a little racist to me. I complained, and I said, “Well, I’d like to bring more people here.” So I created a conference with the idea that lots of BIPOC artists and scholars and thinkers are not necessarily being celebrated for their innovation.
The conference was named after the scholar Dorothy Wang’s book Thinking Its Presence, which has such a riveting and innovative theme: the idea that minorities are read for their grievances but not for their innovation. Innovation is what I wanted to celebrate.
We held our fourth conference at Pomona this year. The goal continues to be to bring lots of people together who aren’t necessarily visible or recognized for their contributions.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Is it scholarly panels, or is it also readings?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
It’s all sorts of things. Sometimes, I will just call someone up or text them. And say, “Well, I know you’re a scholar, but you’re doing this other thing, you’re working on a play. What if we stage a reading of the play?” It wanted to get to questions and creative brainstorming with them and ask them about the projects that were hard to get people to see in other spaces. I wanted it to be a place where we came together to take care of each other and to honor each other.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Do you think that hosting the conference like that, be it in Montana or at Pomona—you said you’ve done this at University of Arizona as well, right, in Tucson?—do you feel like it changes the space around it? Do you feel like having a conference like that has a longer-term impact on the program that funds it? Does it affect the conversation around race outside of the days of the conference itself?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
The students certainly felt significance—they felt like they were getting access to things that they didn’t have access to, that they didn’t see at AWP, the annual national writers’ conference. But also they were having conversations around pedagogy that were relevant. I felt that bringing in a lot of people who I connected with made me feel safer in my space. That was meaningful too. We have hosted four conferences total in these ten years.
In Tucson, I kept reminding people there of the mission, which was, what work can we do to help with any conflicts or challenges or erasures in that space. I can’t be sure if we addressed this and I don’t know what we accomplished beyond positive feedback and relishing in more astonishing work by people I admire. I do know that we had a good gathering.
For Pomona, I wanted to celebrate my colleague in the English department, who had been there for twenty-five years, was the first Black hire in English in 1999, who got tenured, and was still feeling invisible. She’s close to retirement now, and so I just wanted to celebrate all the work she has done on ideas related to her subject of her rich scholarship and pedagogy on racial diasporic vertigo and the important intellectual, community, and curricular-centered innovations she has brought to our community.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Earlier, you said you started to experience a different racism when you came to teach at Montana. Could you elaborate on that a bit?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
Yes, I think I lived—I mean, I grew up with a lot of racism in my hometown in Massachusetts, our family did, and that was very explicit. Then I think in school, I was part of communities where I don’t think I had that many South Asians around me, but I had people of color around me, and I felt very active politically. Later I moved to New York and felt very much part of a cosmopolitan community. I loved the poetry scene. I could critique the poetry scene as sometimes being a little too white for me, but I could also align comfortably with other people.
Montana had a more conservative white poetry and poetics about the natural world—I think also very defensive about people viewed as outsiders. There was also so much tokenization around BIPOC communities who could participate in the MFA institution there. Even when these communities accepted a few indigenous writers into their community, it still seemed like a gated community. There was gatekeeping around it: who could be a poet and who couldn’t. I found that out by directing a historic creative writing program. Richard Hugo had directed it from, like, 1964 to 1982. Then they had a series of rotational or adjunct directors. They hired a tenure-track person for the first time in years. They kept telling me I wasn’t the right fit, I wasn’t Richard Hugo.
We all know I’m short. One of the things they said to my face was, well, Richard Hugo ran this program, but now a twelve-year-old runs it. I was told things like that. That’s a painful example, but it’s just a way to call it out.
I was seeing explicit racism and misogyny in a way that had been hidden to me and would become clear structurally. I would try to address it. That also made me look really ungrateful. I wrote a poem called “Grateful” about that, thinking about how Asians are often seen in a particular light. Like, if we’re grateful, if we have gratitude, we get to assimilate—which we don’t. My poems changed, and I started to address these kinds of topics.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Grief Sequence is focused on the grief that surrounded the death of your husband. How does one go about approaching such an emotional, sensitive topic in a sequence of poems?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I guess I have to accept that I’m an emotional person. I was just thinking about that the other day: “Oh, I guess I really am. I’m an emotional person.” My poems are reflecting for myself that truth about being. I think you need to ask yourself, what’s your inclination to think about truth, and what does the poem need to do for you. A shift from being kind of funny to abject, to writing about grief, came from wanting to document my current moment, the feelings and the truth of the current moment.
I’m actually truly grateful now that I thought about Grief Sequence as a document of tracking sequences, of dealing with or grappling with emotions that felt incomprehensible to me. I needed to figure out if the poem could teach me something about the emotions. I saw it as a learning tool. How much could I put on a page without it being too hard?
MICHAEL DUMANIS
How much time elapsed between the experiences in the poems and the poems themselves?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
There’s one poem which has the date of November 14, and he’s alive, and that is just something I put in a notebook that I found later. I think it took me three months to start writing. I think I was in shock, a lot of shock because he died so quickly, and I couldn’t remember anything. That was the other thing that happened: I lost my whole memory of the marriage and could only process this really excruciating death that took about eight days. That was traumatizing.
I had to figure out if I could write again, and I lost my imagination. I just was like, oh, an imagination seems like a really extravagant thing. That’s for people who aren’t grieving. I was trying to figure out how I could write in a space where I wasn’t necessarily imagining very much, but processing gaps in my memory, and processing a lot of trauma around the shock. I was just trying to figure out if there was a poem I could still write. The prose poem became a new form for me.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
How does one go from the felt emotion to the controlled poem?
PRAGEETA SHARMA
I think I put the raw emotion first, and then I get tired, and the fatigue of my own feelings bothers me, so I just chisel away, engage in some analytical thinking, think about language. I move from raw to formal. It feels like it’s my natural voice when I do that. I isolate the emotion, and then I try to build either an argument or scene, or I think about the images that it needs, and I start to think about the texture of words, some language that feels connected to the scene. I don’t stay in the walls, though in that November 14 diary entry, I kept it the way it was. That was a moment where I just wanted to capture him speaking to me because I was going to lose that. I was going to lose the idea that we actually were in a marriage and spoke to each other daily. I didn’t know if I could write a poem that would actually capture that. I think, in some ways, that’s raw but more sentimental than other things I might put in a poem. A book doesn’t all have to be the same. It can have different registers.
MICHAEL DUMANIS
Grief Sequence is a book that is often really intimate and about a specific, recognizable person who is not portrayed in an especially flattering manner. The book depicts a complicated marriage, a relationship that had explicit struggles in it. This is a book where the telling of the narrative strikes me as a discrete form of courage. It is a memory of someone and a book full of love. But it’s also a book that acknowledges things that the person being elegized might have wanted to keep secret about the relationship.
PRAGEETA SHARMA
Yes. When Dale got his diagnosis of esophageal cancer, he said to me, “The doctor gave us the diagnosis.” He looked at me, and he said, “I just want to say I made a lot of mistakes.” I wasn’t clear on all his mistakes until after he passed. I processed a lot of secrets. I processed his alcoholism and his addiction. I couldn’t write an elegy for him that was dishonest. In truth, I felt that it was my right to take this space now and that it was my poem. He had to live with himself, but I had to live with his memory, and this would be the most honest way for me to grieve who he was and who I thought he was.
I felt that we all probably have difficult people in our lives where they present their best self to you, but then you’re stuck having to put their troubling selves together: who they are to you, and who they are to themselves. I realized I was dealing with several different kinds of personalities that he had and how he wanted me to see him. I fell in love with him in a way that saw his best self, and I’m very proud of that.
I also had a lot of pain over how I was treated. That’s why the poems are so conflicted. I think poetry allows you a place to feel a deep, conflicted space and learn from it, or to teach you what you need to learn. I don’t know if I have other spaces where I get to do that.
PRAGEETA SHARMA is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Grief Sequence (Wave, 2019), a narrative reflection on grief over the loss of a loved one; Undergloom (Fence, 2013); and Infamous Landscapes (Fence, 2007). She is the founder of the interdisciplinary conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Art. She is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.
MICHAEL DUMANIS is the editor of Bennington Review, the director of Poetry at Bennington, and a member of the Literature faculty at Bennington College. His most recent book is Creature (Four Way Books, 2023).
