There's lots of different ways to start writing a poem. For me, the idea comes in a line or two. A couplet is good. When I was younger I used to keep a book where I physically wrote everything down, but right now I can't imagine being productive in my thought without a computer. I use Notepad, and not Word, because it's primitive, uncluttered, and doesn't Auto Correct capitalization or whatever grammar rules I want to ignore in poetry. I tend to use all lowercase more often than not.
I keep a file in which I save these "ideas," in the forms of lines or words. Over the past year, I've had about four "poem" ideas and one "story" idea saved in my file, one word each. It helps to keep tabs on them rather than lose the ideas altogether just because I don't have the time to write.
On the night of Monday, April 27th, as I scrambled to put the finishing touches on my senior culminating project, I realized that I needed a few more pieces to complete the chapbook I had created. I decided to pull from the file. For poems, I had noted the following: "brother, grandfather, heartbreak, the Bronx." For stories, I had written "Athens." I wouldn't have enough time to create quality writing that I would be proud of in one night for all of these ideas, but I knew that they were so important to me that they had to be included in my thesis.
So I got to work and wrote for 12 hours straight without any breaks (or caffeine) until 7AM. I wrote an ode to my brother, I wrote an ode to the Bronx, I wrote about unrequited love, and I wrote a (short) short story about
The Faridpur Man in Athens. I revised a few of my older poems, too, such as Daffodils in Acrylic (
edited poem here) and the water-bearers (
edited poem here). I weeded out my worst work and fixed whatever was worth fixing. When it was Tuesday morning, I wasn't even that tired, because it was past the worst part (when you get queasy around 5AM). But I couldn't bring myself to write about my grandfather. And it was really for the most absurd of all reasons- I couldn't write about my grandfather on that Tuesday because he was still alive.
There is a sentence in Jhumpa Lahiri's short story,
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine:
"Now I knew what it was like to miss someone, very far away."
There's really no other way to describe my relationship with my grandfather, and I'm grateful to Lahiri for that simple line. When someone you love is continents away, they exist to you as ghosts. You know they are there, at peace and alive, but it's like they're in liminal space. They're neither present nor unpresent. Communication is hard with the strong dialects they speak. So you hardly talk to them. You just know that that they love you (the best, as it often is with grandchildren that are the farthest away), and that you love them back because they raised and cared for your parents.
For this reason, I could not write about my feelings for my grandfather. As I mentioned before, most of my writing is struck by imbalance and pain. And that is something I didn't want to bring into the existence I had created for him. I wanted to keep my grandfather as that ghost, very far away, survivor of a stroke but still healthy and holding on to see us one last time. Writing about him now meant that I would have to think of him leaving me; that I would have to cry about him.
I handed in my thesis on Tuesday. The following evening as I slept, my grandfather died at 10AM in the morning, in Bangladesh. It's like he moved from one ghostlike existence in my life to the next. Perhaps there was some sort of connection between us, that had made me feel so strongly for him before he passed. Maybe over time I can write about more of the things that he told me- like how he acted in village plays, how Pakistani traders that came into Bengal fell in love with the women there and abandoned their families in Pakistan, how British men were very handsome, and my favorite, the tales of Rustam the Persian warrior prince. For now all I can say about him is that he was the only grandfather I knew, my anchor in the ancestral world that I am so fascinated by, the muse of all the imagery I could ever write about Bangladesh, one-fourth of my DNA, and someone who gave a beautiful adhaan for our village every day for as long as I've been alive, and tried with all of his heart to obey Allah.
Over 3,500 villagers, fakirs, and politicians came to pay their respects to him, a man who had been a poor farmer all of his life. When he died, he owned only his potato fields, tin house, plain white garments, and a watch my father had gifted him. He had refused everything else. His name was Aynjat Ali, and he named me. According to my mother, when I was born he said "Jasmin, eta tho behesther phul." ("Jasmin, this is heaven's flower.")
Before he died, about a year had passed since I had talked to him over the phone. The last thing he said to me was: "Togore sara mann laage naa." I didn't understand the Comilla dialect, so my mother translated: "I can't feel my heart without all of you."
The believers are only those who have believed in Allah and His Messenger and then, have never doubted and strive with their wealth and their lives for the Cause of Allah. Those! They are the truthful.
-49:15 Surah Al-Hujurat
I've had the pleasure of being taught (twice) by poet Emily Moore at Stuyvesant. A graduate of both Phillips Academy and Princeton who is now teaching high school English, she's definitely helped me to discover my own style of poetry. "Perhaps you should stick to all lowercase, like Frances Chung?" she suggested one afternoon. You will notice that most of my work is now in lowercase, and many are dated from when I first started writing poems in her class in 2003.