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 Maria Nazos 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.
In 2017, in Fred Marchant’s workshop at the Colrain Manuscript Conference,
we were asked to illustrate our manuscripts without using words.
At the time, my manuscript was titled “Change in
Altitude.” I drew a plane in the air—something hovering between sky and sea. I
drew a heart.
Then, I drew a whale watch boat off Ptown, where
I once worked, and the long Atlantic horizon behind it.
And, without consciously deciding to, I drew the
Pulse Nightclub, fanned by palm trees, to represent a cornerstone collage poem
in the collection, which includes a love letter between one of the shooting
survivors and his on-and-off-again lover, who was among those killed.
The point behind the poem was to demonstrate
that, in the face of undeniable devastation, there was also love. Hence, the
concept examines the life force behind what keeps us going, even in the face of
the violence and madness that have become our daily lives.
When it came my turn to show my drawing, Fred
smiled and said, (I’m paraphrasing) playfully, “Isn’t it interesting that
you’ve already broken the one rule you have to follow?”
I looked down, mortified. He was right. Although
we’d been specifically instructed not to use words, only images, I had included
one.
Ever the diligent student, I began apologizing.
He stopped me, laughing. No, he explained. This was the interesting part. Why
had I written that word? Why had I disobeyed the constraint?
The only word in the whole drawing was “PULSE.”
He told me to look closer.
The manuscript that would become “PULSE” was born
in that moment of “error.” Or maybe it had been trying to be born all along.
What follows is the longer pulse line—the
arrhythmic, stubborn, fourteen-year throb behind the book.
2002–2007
I finished my MFA in New York City,
certain I would conquer the world. Instead, I collected rejections. I worked
every job imaginable and survived on food stamps. I moved to Provincetown and
spent eight years cleaning hotel rooms, working as a whale watch attendant,
selling sunglasses, and teaching at a community college. I learned the tide
charts of survival.
2007–2012
A stalking ex. A year and a half of fear.
A year and a half of homelessness, couch-surfing. PTSD. Odd jobs. I applied to
PhD programs and was told I wasn’t cut out for academia—dyslexia, poor test
scores, the wrong temperament.
I found a program at the University of
Nebraska–Lincoln that didn’t require the GRE. They offered me a full
fellowship. I melted down my gold jewelry to afford the move and drove west.
2012–2017
In Lincoln, something shifted. During my
PhD, I published in The New Yorker—a moment that, from the
outside, looked like an arrival. I met my husband. I fell in love. I stayed.
Ten years after my first book, I gathered
the poems that would become my dissertation, tentatively entitled “Change in
Altitude.” People said my career would explode. It didn’t. The manuscript
became a perennial finalist in almost every contest. Always close. Never
chosen.
In 2017, I attended Colrain and drew the
cover in my mind. The heart. The nightclub. The whale watch boat. The air
between altitudes. The word I wasn’t supposed to write.
I began to understand that the book’s
architecture was never about ascent; it was about listening to what keeps
beating despite rupture. About queer grief and survival. About breath. About
salt water and inland plains. About how a body carries both violence and love.
“Change in Altitude” was too gentle a
title.
The book had always been called PULSE.
2017–2023
I finished my PhD and left academia. I
built a career in digital marketing. Agents were interested in PULSE—then they weren’t. Publishers were
interested—then they weren’t.
The manuscript kept making finalist pools.
I put poetry away for a year. I told myself maybe
that chapter was done.
But a pulse doesn’t ask permission.
I returned to the poems with less desperation and
more ferocity. I cut them deeper. I let them breathe. I stopped trying to make
the book legible to gatekeepers and instead made it make sense to my own
nervous system.
Then, the unthinkable happens. A madman is
elected president. We hope it is a fluke.
A temporary rupture in our nation’s moral
consciousness. Maybe we can sew it up again. We tell ourselves that the change
in altitude, the rarified air, the crash-and-burn of our collective
consciousness are necessary, that we need to hit rock bottom before we ascend
again.
For a minute, it seemed true.
2023–2024
After a brief respite, the madman and his painted
clown car flood the bloody circus that has become our nation.
They are no longer funny. They are Stanley
Kubrick-meets-Stephen King hauntings that rise up again from unhealed wounds in
our nation’s cracked consciousness. And they keep emerging, one after another.
I sent the manuscript to Rusty
Morrison at Omnidawn Publishing.
2026
Now, this spring of 2026, they will publish “PULSE.” Rusty—poet, editor, teacher—has met
the book with rigor and care.
Together, we listened for its strongest rhythm.
If this sounds like an “overnight success,” I
assure you: it is not. It is sixteen years after my first book. It is
homelessness and fellowship. It is whale watch boats and Midwestern winters. It
is rejection layered upon rejection until the only thing left is the beat
itself.
I used to be embarrassed by the mess of my
biography. Now I understand that the mess is the method. The poems came from
living long enough in chaos to hear what remains constant.
At Colrain, I thought I’d broken the rules.
What
I had done was tell the truth before I was ready to admit it.
Keep
listening to your PULSE.
Cape Cod Pantoum
Tonight,
you’re loaning Billy your car, a brand-new
seal-gray
Volkswagen Passat with four doors,
though
last week at three a.m., he stole your canoe
and
sank it in the autumn sea, then swam ashore.
Tonight, you’re lending Billy your car—it’s brand new—
and he’s a well-meaning, blue-eyed Byronic drinking man,
who last week,
at three a.m.,
stole your beached
canoe,
and when it sank, he blamed it on a dolphin.
A well-meaning, blue-eyed, Byronic, hard-drinking man
whose phone calls you take, no matter the hour,
who sank your canoe and blamed it on a dolphin,
and the young man with him, whom the sea sadly devoured,
so you’ll always take Billy’s call, no matter the hour.
Because,
you sigh, his mother’s dying too, and he’s drinking again.
He’s no longer
a young man (he’s sad, and he’s drowning),
and neither are you, and all friends sometimes
sin.
Besides, you sigh, his mother’s dying too; that’s why he’s drinking.
She wasn’t a beauty—she came on to you long ago.
And he’s not a young man;
he’s drunk, and he’s drowning.
So, you press the phone to your cheek, stare out the dark window.
Who hasn’t come on to you? (Who wasn’t lovely long ago?)
(Even Billy did; his tragic need, his blank blue eyes.)
You press the phone to cheek, stare out the dark window,
and listen to him make a mess of our peaceful lives
Now, back in
bed, we return to our disrupted romance. Although last week, at three a.m., he
stole your canoe,
you
set a sinking man adrift in the sea of second chance:
tonight,
you’ve loaned Billy your car again, brand-new.
Cash Register Sings the Blues
This isn’t my dream job. As a young sheet
of steel and plastic,
I dreamt of being melted
down
into a dancer’s pole in Vegas. I wanted a woman
in a headdress glossy as a gossamer
to wrap her lithe limbs around
me. I wanted
to be strewn in lights, smell her powdery
perfume.
But I’m a squat box crouched behind the counter,
noticed only if someone robs me. I’m touched all day,
but
never caressed. Listen: somewhere, gold tokens spew
from
slots. I want to drink neon martinis on black-
leather sectional
couches. Watch tipsy women with
acid-
washed jeans and teased hair, dreamily
press their faces
against slot machines, while people treat currency
carelessly as spit in the wind.
I’m everywhere you look, ubiquitous and ignored.
I’m the container of your dreams that tossed away my own.
I’ve
kept my clean, sleek lines, but you never say a thing.
Feed
me, feed me with the only love we know.
Bungee Jumping
Before the woman leaps off the 160-foot platform, she sees
the tear-colored ghost of her body.
Far below her, a man watches from the ground. He has
gracefully
hauled
her sweaty backpack, weighed down
by novels and heavy crocheted
dresses bought for her by the man
before him. He has
come this far
but will not ascend the platform to jump with her despite
her brief begging. He puts a bandana
over his eyes, either to shield the heat or hide from his fear
of what happens next.
She calls down again for him to come up. But he won’t.
Whether he’s too wise or weak remains to be seen.
Whether she’s careless or fearless is beside the point. The
point is this: from that height, it’s so
bright
she can see the city below her toes. Suddenly, she’s jarred
back into her body, that is my body.
Mine and mine alone. Now I am back, looking
down at you, back to that time of perfect
paralysis.
It doesn’t
matter what sadness happened from there.
How your pull exerted
too much gravity.
How
I wanted you to ascend to greater heights. When it came time
to jump alone, the distance between us
had
become natural as air but sad as a last breath. So I took that breath and begged the assistant
behind me,
Just push me, push me, push.
Maria Nazos is a
Greek American poet raised in Athens. Kaveh Akbar chose her work as a Palette
Poetry Contest winner. Her poetry, translations, and essays are published or
forthcoming in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, and
elsewhere. She’s the author of PULSE (Omnidawn,
2026) and The Slow
Horizon that Breathes(World Poetry
Books, 2023), a translation of poems by Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula. She has
worked every job imaginable, including a disastrous, three-day stint as a table
dancer in Mykonos. She quit after she realized she’d lost too many friends.
Find her at www.marianazos.com.
Bluesky: @marianazos.bsky.social
Instagram: @nazosmaria
LinkedIn: Maria Nazos
Medium: @MariaNazos
Substack: @marianazos
Maw Shein Win's latest full-length
poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her
previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House
(Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry
and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently
been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The
Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet
laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime
Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts
and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches
poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low
Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca
Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a
literary community. mawsheinwin.com
