The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Lisa Rosenberg are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.
Note: Lisa Rosenberg wrote Process Note #1 published on October 1, 2022.
EQUINOX
Six years ago in a weedy backyard, a poem took shape, coaxed by a well-known work from a pandemic of another era. William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All”—season, contagion, weeds, and wiry roots—held my fears and curiosities and whatever whirled between them, giving support to attentiveness. We were in a newfound, if imposed, stretch of near silence. I could listen in new ways, discover inroads and rhythms of composing within and across poems.
“Equinox and All,” a blank-verse poem roughly symmetric for its occasion, signaled the beginning of a new collection. For awhile, I assumed it would be the title poem. It surprised me by completing more rapidly than I was used to. So did subsequent poems. I questioned my internal editor, felt the skills intact, and kept going. Speed didn’t signal sloppiness, and slowness did not equal virtue.
Equinox and All
Spring, 2020
It was Thursday. It was warm. Equal hours
of rain and sun to match the parity
of night and day, to catch me—half wonder,
half anxiety—taking comfort in names
as crows gathered in the neighbor’s cedar,
and juncos filled a canopy of oak, here:
a small backyard in the suburbs. A small
parcel, equal to any before the stars.
A season arrives, defies confinement.
We dress for contagion, we quantify
calm, but dance in separate rooms. We might
re-chart the skies. Scour the old maps as if
their errors were not ours, and scrapping them
could right the world. Such vacant streets. Only
birdsong, and cautious distances, and faces
of oxalis, rooted beside the fence.
As a collection, Weeds and Stars itself assembled more quickly than my first book (A Different Physics, 2018). Both books endured and prospered through many changes, including titles, yet the new one reached book length in what felt like lightning speed—five years. It coalesced through other dynamics and organizing principles, and a different edition of me: shaped by parenthood’s ongoing lessons in imperfection and unexpected circumstances; more firmly rooted in long arcs of learning and making, and a readiness to put more trust in them.
This book would hold nested levels of structure, attracting new kinds of poems as it became a field in which abandoned threads could grow into poems. A working nexus, it brought teachers and models from poetry and elsewhere. I was entering into more awareness of process, and of ways to gain process fluency, recognizing poetic composition as my sustaining practice and laboratory.
For three decades, the first two of which were dominated by engineering and consulting, I had been a poet of short, carefully-honed, imagistic free verse, a few fixed forms, and specimens from an uneven apprenticeship in blank verse. On the surface, this could look exclusively like micromanagement. It was also practical. I rarely had writing time before my 50s, and worked mainly on what I was able to carry around in my head. Things had to be musical, memorable, and not too long.
Toward the end of composing A Different Physics, and especially with the start of quarantine in early 2020, more forms became accessible to me through routes I could not have guessed. I’m probably conflating artistic growth with the circumstances of global crisis. Both were happening at once, creating a tipping point: the crisis caused a sudden change in daily environment, one in which old habits and their limitations could become visible and make room for alternative ways of working. Ongoing political strife added a layer of urgency to everything, including artistic thought and craft.
If this were a slide presentation, the bulleted list of shifts leading to and through Weeds and Stars would look something like:
- More comfort proceeding in (not just acknowledging) uncertainty
- Greater adaptability and willingness to work with what’s there (“available resources”), especially: allusion, immediate surroundings, internal guides and guideposts
- Trusting the wisdom of forms (poetic, somatic, physical—both biological and nonbiological)
- More play with iteration
- Greater collaboration with unknowns
- More awareness of what can be generative
- Constraints shifting from being structural supports and pattern interrupts, to acting as conduits.
All of these are interrelated. The last two are tightly coupled.
TIME AND SPACE
Quarantine slashed my driving duties, bringing more intact stretches of writing time for exploring longer compositional elements and forms. I took essay-writing classes, online (that was relatively new, remember?), through which a cache of nascent essays could finally develop. I found my poet’s sensibilities and stubbornness to be astute guides. Experiencing longer compositional elements (phrasing, sentences, paragraphs), and more spacious forms (short and medium essays) impacted my skills and strategies across genres. And longer phrasing meant I had more things to work with when the starting point of a poem emerged.
I continued my apprenticeship in pentameter (not my default meter). Greater ease here allowed me to resume working toward the sonnet, with the help of Sir Patrick Stewart’s generously annotated online Shakespeare recitations. I had a sonnet prompt stashed in a drawer of my mental desk for over thirty years. With stronger skills and unofficial virtual coaching, I was ready to learn how, in poetic composition, meeting a set of constraints was not the same as crafting a functioning whole (“necessary but not sufficient!,” cue my 8th-grade math teacher). That was such familiar wisdom in engineering, why had I applied it so unevenly in writing poetry?
COSMIC IRONY
Then a funny thing happened on the way through the sonnet. Prose poems arrived. Like a new language for which I had lacked the ear and structural knowledge to grasp, the prose poem opened to me as both reader and writer.
The first to take shape was a series on plants of Western Greece, my husband’s homeland, where we spend part of almost every year with family. These were short poems (~ 30-110 words) that I wrote in fairly rapid succession. After the fourth or fifth, I recognized the undercurrent: it was, in part, a grief journal, coming amid several years of losses in both Greece and California.
“Ionian Rural,” an eight-poem sequence, landed in the literary magazine Quarter After Eight and brought my first Pushcart nomination. It spurred my momentum in prose poetry and let a longtime engagement with plants move deeper into my writing, attracting more botanical prose-poems later on. They invited playfulness and a broader range of voice and tone than I was used to inhabiting, or allowing myself to inhabit.
Herbarium: Giant Reeds
Guardians, whisperers. Mythology let you off easy. If I had a secret, you’re the last place I’d bury it. Lined up creekside, roadside, edge of the farm: pointing the way to watery greed. Abundance loves you—wild, bundled, woven as fencing, what and whenever. The lush wind-fluttered lot of you pleading nothing to see here, no one to shield, somewhere to get to, somehow to be.
GUIDE STARS
Finding ways to proceed past the initial kernel of a poem isn’t a new challenge, but it eluded me more often during the extended crisis of the pandemic: questions of framework, ways to form a line, and to move from line to line without my energy (and the poem’s) vanishing. I had rhythmic, sensory-imagistic, and tonal sense as ongoing guides. I knew from experience that line and stanza structure could also support me, but could they sustain me?
Allusion kept showing up for me from “Equinox and All” onward. So did ekphrasis. Both modes offer something focused to start from, react to, or enter into conversation with.
Late in quarantine, standing at the kitchen sink on a winter weekend, my morning brain met a swath of coffee grounds and orange peels and could not not hear Wallace Stevens. A series of blank verse poems modeled on, and borrowing from, “Sunday Morning” took hold of me for several months.
Beyond the easy allusive start, “Complacencies of the kitchen, and late / coffee grounds and orange peels in the sink, / and the gray freedom of sunlight through clouds…,” I wasn’t clear on how to proceed until I chose minimal rules for each constituent poem: twelve-lines of pentameter, incorporating words, phrases, and other elements (tonal cues, narrative shifts) from across Stevens’s sequence. There was no other way I was up to an arduous poem-project at that time. It felt exhilarating—such welcoming support. It felt like theft. It felt like the slow, jagged progress of assembling a jigsaw puzzle that quietly accepts your tinkering in the corner of a common room.
“Quarantine Morning” built over four months. It was sturdy and roomy enough to reflect on fear, quandaries, injustice, and corrosive undercurrents that continue to this day. It gave me momentum. When a poet-friend forwarded a submission call for micro-chapbooks, this sequence offered a solid center. I had a poem to precede it (“Equinox and All”). I wrote one to succeed it (“Inventory for the Ecliptic,” which underwent extensive rewriting the following year). Each held a complement of plants and stars. Now I had a micro-chapbook, according to one publisher’s guidelines, anyway. It was a larger center to build on.
SYMMETRIES AND SYNERGIES
The next prose poem to arrive shifted everything: process, thematic linkages, trajectories, integration, and an abrupt expansion of process awareness.
“Sun, Flower” was prompted by a looming deadline for a community ekphrastic project. After multiple extension requests, I had an exquisite piece of visual art to write to, but still nothing to write. The first phrase arrived in a moment of insomniac musing as the third deadline approached. I scrawled it on a scrap of paper on my nightstand. In the following days, surprisingly simple things swirled into this poem, regardless of the relative grandeur (hello, Sagittarius A*) of any single image. The title’s format— a compound word with a comma inserted for thought—is a device I use elsewhere in Weeds and Stars.
Sun, Flower
The center of anything has work to do. Bearing, spinning, taking things in, sending them out again. Pupil and iris. Axle and hub. The dense, dark center of our gathered stars, swathed in what light it hasn’t swallowed, dragging bright dust in arced scarves. Aster to aster, disk to disk. The way a word begets a world. Say inflorescence. Say one bent petal rests on the rim. A tear. An inflection. Say the mind travels there, a foot explores the unexpected curve.
“Sun, Flower” brought new awareness of the resources of pattern. I felt it come together as I followed the movement and shape suggested by the artwork. Botanical asters (daisies, heath, sunflowers, etc.) are radially symmetric; celestial asters are spherically so. Spirals are likewise concentric, but dynamic. That we feel and understand them so universally and instinctively illustrates embodied, nonlinear wisdom—one of our oldest inheritances.
In focusing my attention on a pattern of movement, other things (especially things made for differentiation or division, like taxonomy and scale) fell outside the scope of compositional concerns. There was less to think about and manage. The sunflower itself, suns/stars, flowers/inflorescences, eye, and wheel—they all unreel from somatic sensibilities, shared forms, or shared movement patterns indifferent to scale and subject. That choice of functional lens underlies the way a poem might appear to leap and travel associatively. (A few years later, this approach strikes me as resembling Lagrangian Mechanics in physics, but that’s a longer conversation for another day.)
I didn’t see this poem as suited to the pandemic-centered micro-chapbook at first. But to progress beyond ‘micro’ I had to consider including it, along with a handful of other poems completed since my first book. Things stellar and planetary wove through them. Maybe more plant-based work could come in. Several species in the Greek sequence were equally at home in California. I just had to open the gate, and pieces like those in “Ionian Rural” arrived, moving beyond connection to Greece and into other tonal shadings and speech registers as well. They soon overtook the quarantine sequence as a source of cohesion, being more agile in finding connection. They became structural elements, like little vertebrae strung throughout the growing collection, creating a trace narrative, holding space for other poems to enter, and indicating possible gaps (if I could listen for them) in the developing whole.
More than anything, I loved playing in opportunities of voice that each plant offered, whether scruffy weed or fancy cultivar. The new prose-poem series includes the original Ionian pieces. Each one bears the title “Herbarium” plus a common or Latin plant name. Most have a third-person speaker, some are in first person or direct address. Here’s one of the last to be composed.
Herbarium: Arum italicum
Sometimes a spadix is just a spadix. Sometimes a spathe is frank as all get-out—not calling it a spade, not pretending toward the flare of famous callas. Sometimes it’s futile: best you can do is honor the form, the hue, the mettle of nonlethal toxins, the showiness of potted cousins placed just so inside a cottage window. Make of yourself a gazer, dazed. Exonerate a rough, unhindered bunch in humid shade, vermillion fists of seed intent on being seen, much to the rare embarrassment of docile mulch and possibly the most plaintive of inviolate impatiens.
ITERATION, RECURSION, PROGRESSION
Around this time, the list poem also entered my reach. “Citrus” had a sensory start (walking by neighborhood lemon trees), and the opening line rode in on echoes of Robert Frost’s ruminative pentameter. I proceeded with a newbie’s strict adherence to identical format of the repeated phrase, adding a commitment to maintain every line as a sentence fragment. Later, reluctantly, I agreed to experiment with changing the initial word/phrase in some lines. This allowed the poem to progress in the way thinking and memory might progress: incrementally informed, unresolved and unfinished despite insightful gains; each line acting like a refinement or addition to the thinking of the preceding line. The end lacks closure despite its closure-signaling intonation and pacing.
Citrus
By which I mean the blossom, not the fruit.
By which I mean the scent and not the sight.
By which I mean nostalgia, its sudden bite.
As if a tree, a patio, a street.
The way the concrete had a fragrance.
The concrete and the asphalt and the quiet, tiny yards.
Because the windows and the curtains.
Because the timbre of a passing car.
And how the dampness of the grass
in which I meant to pause.
Or when the stippled light on stucco walls.
Because a slow forgetting.
By which I mean the acrid with the sweet.
Working in uncertainty is a standard feature of physics. Now it was integrating further into my life and writing, expanding pathways and landing places.
The cento, pantoum, and villanelle proved up to ventures in uncertainty, too, and all appear in this collection. The villanelle has been my go-to support form for political crisis. The cento is the least familiar to me of these forms. The 24-line cento “Home, Planet” knits the work of poets from disparate eras and formal styles: Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, John Donne, Li-Young Lee, and others. It became the title poem of the book’s last section.
The pantoum, by definition recursive, is especially suited to carrying quirky paths of lyric inquiry, as each line transforms through new placement and constellations of meaning. The title poem of Weeds and Stars (written well after the book title decision), is a pantoum that moves between the sea floor, minor moons, music, and motley stars. It’s one of three pantoums in the book, none of which began with the form as prior intention, but rather as exploration early or midway in composing. (Speaking of seas, the aquatic creatures in Weeds and Stars arrived in the last months of writing, usually via star-like geometry.)
Form and pattern can become increasingly fruitful resources as we attune to them. I mean this not only in the literal sense—that patterns arise and can act as motifs—but also in terms of compositional logistics. Constraints, whether in fixed forms or invented rule sets, can be conduits for unexpected elements, and can also provide ways for us to enter and navigate daunting terrain, overly familiar terrain, doldrums, or confusion. I’ve found this learning to be cyclical, often hard to assess from the inside.
To complement the lonely bullet list up top, here’s a quasi-map of learning, discoveries, and process evolution from book one to book two.
EMERGENCE
Some of the structure and dynamics of Weeds and Stars seemed clear as they unfolded, but it was a patchy clarity. The most striking aspect to me in retrospect is that, similarly to putting my trust in other poets’ work as starting places and anchor points, I was putting my trust in self-organizing principles to a greater degree, and more deliberately, than previously. Not that I stopped trying to micromanage; rather (and thankfully), I was finding approaches where that type of headwork and handiwork wasn’t perpetually active or on call.
“Sun, Flower” has a center. It came into being as I centered patterns of movement, spiraling more imagery into the poem. The poem and its properties drew more poems into its field. It felt like a quiet, recursive dance unfolding over years. Now the whole collection appears to enact that dynamic, within poems and within sections, pattern as generative and attractive. Each of the finished three sections (“Sun, Flower,” “Still, Life,” and “Home, Planet”) holds weeds and stars and a different locus of concerns. The foundation is the original micro-chapbook. The book is a nested whole.
I sent a (non-micro) chapbook manuscript out a few times in 2023-24, first as Equinox and All, and later as Weeds and Stars. From late summer through the end of 2024, it almost doubled in length, surpassing both the threshold for full-length collections, and my notions of how my writing could progress. Arrival of new poems overlapped with revision as I began submitting Weeds and Stars as a full book manuscript shortly before a midnight deadline on December 31, 2024. It went to many prospective publishers (competitions, open reading periods, and cold queries) as it grew and sharpened. A thrilling acceptance call came eight months later from The Word Works. For sobering comparison, my first book traveled over two decades to find a publisher; a frustrating span that allowed abundant rounds of rehearing, revising, and reconfiguring.
Weeds and Stars subtly reorganized as it progressed. It holds ongoing experiments alongside image-based poems in free verse, my earliest sustained mode of poetic composition. The blend of lyric impulses in the free verse poems is very close to my earlier work, but the sensibilities are broader, more at home in this gathering of questions and allusive song. Again and again, everyday encounters set the mind, the senses, and the mind’s eye in motion.
Of Mere Seeing
after Stevens
A quill at the edge of the street—
crow, most likely,
the bird gone barking
up the wrong tree
somewhere. The right tree
rising like the tree
at the end of the mind.
The mind at the end
of one tether or another,
as frayed or smooth
as a quill, sings
beyond thought.
One shiny, dark quill
trims the unswept gutter.
Then, another.
Lisa Rosenberg is a poet and essayist formed by physics, engineering, somatic practices, and fine and performing arts. Her work has been recognized by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, MOSAIC America Fellowship, and Leonardo@Djerassi Residency. She served as the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and worked as an engineer in the US space program on satellites including the International Space Station. Her prose spans poetics, satire, science, and memoir. Her poetry centers interconnectedness across nature, culture, and perceived extremes: from the fantastic to the mundane, the subatomic to the cosmic, the global to the hyperlocal. Through workshops, talks, and essays, she addresses process and systems skills essential to integrative thinking. Her collections Weeds and Stars (April, 2026, The Word Works/Hilary Tham Capital Collection) and A Different Physics (2018, Red Mountain Press) reflect decades of polydisciplinary inquiry. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives part-time in Ilia, Greece.
Website: www.LisaRosenberg.com
Instagram: @lisarosenbergwrites
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lisa.Rosenberg.poetry/
Medium: @lisarosenberg9
Bluesky:
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NOTES
• “Sun, Flower” responds
to the cyanotype “Sunflower in Blue” by Buffy Davis.
• Cover art, “Golden Cosmic Whirl,” (2025)
by Karen Cox. Talk about synchronicity!
• Author photo by Thinh Le
Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com
