The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This poem and process note by rob mclennan was part of her curriculum for her Poetry Workshop at University of San Francisco in their MFA Program for Fall semester of 2022.
The book-length assemblage of one hundred and five prose poems of the book of smaller originally developed out of a series of loose threads that came together at a particular moment. On a basic level, the poems were composed across the space of ten months of children, cloth diapers and chaos, starting three months prior to the end of my wife Christine’s second year-long maternity leave. Upon her return to in-person work in early 2017, I remained home with our wee Aoife, who was about to turn one, and Rose, who is nearly two-and-a-half years her elder. It was a conversation Christine and I had well before our firstborn emerged: the idea of who might remain home with potential children, if anyone. She has a good job that she likes, after all, and I’d arguably already been home for some two decades, working on poems, fiction, reviews and all of my other projects. And this would not be my first experience home with children: twenty years prior, I ran a home daycare with my first-born, Kate, until she was four years old. I was entirely comfortable with being the home-parent, in the role of attending children’s meals, entertainments, household tasks. Laundry.
Being home with the children was one particular kind of thread: after twenty-odd years of writing full-time, I had already made significant shifts to my days and expectations upon the arrival of Rose. If she napped two hours during an afternoon, that was my writing day. On mornings she eventually attended preschool (three mornings a week), my writing day sat from 9:07am until 11:17am, when I had to be out the door to walk north the two blocks to collect her for 11:30am. I’d been writing, reviewing, editing, curating and publishing all day every day for so long, there was something nice about being able to take a particular kind of breath, mindful of further considerations beyond exclusively at my desk. We baked, went for walks, engaged with museums and play-dates, wandered over to the neighbourhood park. With that second maternity year, our household enjoyed a second stretch of everyone home, but once I was days solo with two, there would be further shifts. My attentions would be smaller, shorter; so why not shift the writing in response? Poems began quickly, including some first composed at a variety of neighbourhood parks as the young ladies played, during nap-times or even one during a Christmas hotel stay with father-in-law: Christine and Rose were outside in the snow, as I remained in a darkened hotel room with Aoife as she napped. I began to sketch out lines on hotel stationery. Not terribly different, one might say, from Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching first drafts on prescription pads in between patient visits. Poems began quickly enough, although some took days or even weeks to complete; some even took months. I daily attended the carve and craft of moving a word or a phrase, or flipping a poem entirely inside out.
For a decade or so I’d been more attentive to the prose poem and the lyric sentence, prompted in no small part by the anthology Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2000), edited and translated by Norma Cole. It was a book gifted to be in Toronto in 2010 by poets Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris, around the time I helped with their move. I found the collection revelatory for its examples of lyric prose, each contributor offering wave upon wave of music across the sentence I hadn’t quite experienced prior. Simultaneously, I discovered the work of German-born American poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, a writer whose work went hand-in-hand with the works in Crosscut Universe for twists, turns, nuances in how language could both propel, swell, sweep and shift. From that point further, I began more overtly seeking examples of the contemporary prose poem, and began considering the possibility of composing a book’s worth.
Each poem in the book of smaller is made up of a single stanza, layering individual segments of sound and/or meaning the size of a word or a phrase into prose-blocks; each fragment, each poem, set against or aside another. The poems were each constructed as lyric bursts, or moments, carved and carved to each exist as a small, fixed point of liquid prose, utilizing sound, meaning, rhythm and scope. At times, titles repeat, even echo. Eventually, threads of domestic patter, reading patterns and other movements begin to emerge. There is something of the repetition I’m rather fond of, something I saw beautifully done in the work of Noah Eli Gordon, for example, and Sawako Nakayasu. It is a way to hold the individual blocks together as a kind of mortar. Also: to capture an idea once might move through obvious places; but to compose a second, a third, or even a fifth or a tenth: what else is possible when the obvious has been set aside? As well, annual birthday poems are a thread through my work going back nearly three decades. For both, the repetition allows for what else might come, beyond those initial, first thoughts. I could write around this. I could write around this again. I could keep going.
For years, I’d focused my structural attentions on the line break and breath, opening my early twenties with a focus on Canadian postmodernism, starting with the 1960s small press explosion of venues such as Talonbooks, Coach House, IMAGO, TISH. The Capilano Review. I moved through dozens of writers who influenced the ways in which I began to think upon the book-length unit of poetic composition, specifically the Canadian long poem, influenced most by George Bowering, bpNichol, Barry McKinnon, Robert Kroetsch, Jack Spicer, Dennis Cooley, Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser and multiple others. Cooley’s infamous essay on line-breaks, included in his collection of essays, The Vernacular Muse (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1987), is essential reading. After numerous poetry collection, I had begun to worry that I was leaning too heavily, perhaps, on the line-break. What might my poems look like if I were to remove them entirely? While returning regularly to Waldrop, I continued my reading and research through poets such as Pattie McCarthy, Julie Carr, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Eric Baus and Rachel Zucker, feeling through the possibilities of the lyric sentence. I worked back through my own prior reading seeking out similar possibilities, reexamining and revisiting the work of Anne Carson, Robert Kroetsch, Lisa Robertson, Margaret Christakos and Monty Reid. How long a line might stretch, and the way it might move.
To my thinking, the book of smaller is the opening of a more overt suite of my collections attentive to and attending the lyric sentence across reading, thinking and the domestic. While the idea might not exclusively begin there through my published work, it certainly pools in a more direct way, and from there, furthers into the unpublished poetry manuscript “Book of Magazine Verse,” and the subsequent “the book of sentences,” with a slight, simultaneous sidebar into “snow day,” and further, into the current work-in-progress, “Autobiography.” In the end, perhaps, it is less than a suite of collections than simply “a poem as long as a life,” as bpNichol once coined it. The writing connects, as he suggested elsewhere, even if only composed by that same hand.
A variety of loose threads, coming together in a particular way during a particular period of time. I was already thinking about the prose poem, and then I caught Kentucky poet Amelia Marten’s debut full-length poetry collection, The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat (Louisville KY/Brooklyn NY: Sarabande Books, 2016) while simultaneously rereading a couple of poetry books by Sawako Nakayasu, both of whom are included in my dedication. Their work is just so damned good. I suppose they were the straw that broke, one might say, the camel’s back. I had no choice but to begin.
September 6-7, 2022 / Ottawa ON
from the book of smaller
The President’s House is empty
Corollary. Endured, a whitewash. Literally. A golem’s chance. Not just him, though you have marked. Resist! Is neither obsolete. We will not fall. An empty chamber, fueled. All strapped. Collective impulse, impulse, falsehood. Airbrushed, pitch. Convulsed. An east wind, furthers. Contradicts. This area, distorts. An oval rounds out, shimmers; misshapes. Bends. Such will. A hundred thousand hopes subject to fail.
The Prime Minister’s House is empty
The closest renovation. Upgrade. The great white hope. Façade. Gorffwysfa. Do designations matter? Set foot, first. Of rest, and residence. A clear day. Fluid dynamics; a basic foundation. The art of weaving. Hallowe’en. Will never accede to the body. Scaffolding. A bureaucratic, function. Cottage. Reconcile, please. For real. Be truth. They drain the pool.
Forty-seventh birthday
My annual nod, to origins. Pixilate. Birth mother: does she think of me? Ancillary. The compass hand. Water, such a fine conductor. Diction, sketchbook, herringbone. How we have each contributed to the meanings of words. If age a power source, of wisdom. Hardly. What’s that? Speak up, the cover band a set list. Don’t worry about all the problems in the world right now. Overheard: I love Tom Petty. A note that ends in tragedy. I think I finally understand. We have chicken wings, at least.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
Maw
Shein Win's most
recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn)
nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the
PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award
for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic
D Press) and chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score
and Bone (Nomadic Press). She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito
and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers.
mawsheinwin.com
