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. These poems and process note by Colin Partch is
part of her curriculum for her Poetry Workshop at University of San Francisco
in their MFA Program for Spring semester of 2023. https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sciences/programs/graduate/writing-mfa
I’ll do my best to describe the process for writing Sharp
Said, the manuscript I’m drawing from here. Truthfully, think I went
half-mad writing these poems. There was something I wanted so desperately to
say, but couldn’t; something that, whenever said straight, would dissolve like
tissue paper. I started looking for forms that might support what I felt. Maybe
I was casting a spell. And it cost something, not time or money but energy. I
had to learn how to get out of my own way. Writing meant abandoning memory,
politics, identity, sentiment—giving way to every word from my mouth silently.
Ash
our
father is a bronze casting, an eagle
a
lovely canvas
I
am held together by wire,
I
imagine my son watching
Cypress
I look into a mirror and see the shadow of an animal
Sometimes I do not speak for weeks
I rove the country
They will not find me here
Noon
A torch is waiting
in our breach of history
Don’t shut the door on my skin
I keep a movie version of myself
drunk in the backseat
Brother our presence is
irreconcilable—
We etch each other on
streets
As a window betrays the
steam of horses
An arm
of seawater runs
through my mouth
I listened to my stutter, something I usually tried to hide.
The stutter—an embarrassment, a curiosity, a ghost. I always felt mastered by
it. How do you defeat a reflex, a shadow, an echo? Some people laugh at it,
others are fascinated by it, most don’t care or don’t notice. There’s an edge
to the stutter. We still have shibboleths: words that distinguish insiders from
outsiders. That hesitation before giving my name, age, or origin is enough to
give the game away. Ironically, even when I pass the shibboleth by pronouncing
the word “correctly”, I don’t do it the way I’m supposed to. The stutter opens
up a gap between voice and the word, and calls into question the seamlessness
of speech. Easier to write it off as an aberration, or even a deception than to
ruminate on the disconnect between body and voice. I leaned into this, tearing
back the curtains of what I should say onto what I can’t say. I remembered a
trick speech pathologists taught me: think of one word while saying another. I
discovered a way to listen to words.
Devotion
to
say I
say
Ice
to
say an
say
hand
not
clouds
unbroken
red
fall—
said
rust
said
rupture
red
groves
clouds
under
the deck
said
I’m
an
angel of
space,
hands
spiraling
chimes,
dust—said creases
continue
to
crease
sharp
said
I’m
what’s
in
your
blood
I embraced the fragment form. I read Sappho,
Oppen, Keats, Char, Pound. When I pressed on the words, they rearranged
themselves into something new, stability in randomness, into a moment of
maximal possibility, where the next word could go anywhere or nowhere. I read a
lot of poems and fell in love with their sounds and images. I wanted to live
inside of them. I cut up pieces of poems and pressed them together, broke their
rhythm and stitched them back together. I imagined I was making something that shouldn’t
exist. Something impossible refracted through my ear, leaving an afterimage on
my retina. They became an homage to people and places I love that don’t
entirely exist, brought into being through chance combinations.
14th
St.
The
voiceless man who lived in my house loved the keys, loved
His
lightblue wall on which floating shells were painted.
When
he died the knives began to sing.
Images,
too, are things.
So
my father was a bucket of bright sand.
Do
I glow
I’ve
been
buzzing
in
a corner.
Agitated
birds
press
their bodies
next
to mine—
maybe
they
could
beat
the
stutter out
of
me.
I
am an affront
to
the order
of
noises.
Silence
I
say, I am
here.
Importantly, these poems weren’t what I “meant” to write.
Whenever I thought I knew what I was doing it came out stale. Could I say these
poems found me? I know that sounds way too cute. They told me who I needed to
be to write what wanted to be said. Language, like a grid, can be an
indispensable tool and a prison. I let the grid bend and warp in ways I hadn’t
considered before.
Anything
shut in with you can sing
we
were alone we were not
silence
formed a grid
the
night
inside
the gate
broke
off flowers
like
evening faces
if
only I could hear the grid
I
could inhale every voice
in
this room
open
my mouth
against
their names
I found voices, people looking back at
me from my hiding place in the eaves of the dream. These poems, like
stuttering, weren’t something that I did—they happened to me. I was obsessed with
writing something I didn’t have any control over. I was being written by the
poem. I could feel the shape of what was to come but couldn’t even describe
what that meant. No one knew what I was talking about. I mined my nightmares
for inspiration, things that truly scared me. I brought them into the light of
day. It turns out day has its own nightmares, too.
The
body is the twin—
in a
dream my arms
are
thin and curved
they
cover my eyes
son is
formed
to say space
say haste
let sky
make
its
incisions—
I read a lot of books at the same time,
very different books and loved something different about each one. And I could
hear the poem calling to me from inside the other poems. I read Stevens’ Harmonium,
Guest’s Fair Realism, Williams’ Spring and All, Wright’s The
Branch Will Not Break, Hejinian’s My Life, Stanford’s The Singing
Knives, Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Dickinson’s Collected Poems. I
wrote for hours, wrote as fast as I could. I bought huge notepads and
fine-tipped Sharpies. Wrote big, messy lines. I wrote while walking, on the
bus, with friends and enemies in mind, in anger and in love. I picked up
cadences from everything, especially automated voices, let my ear and throat do
the writing for me. I never “thought” about what any of it sounded like because
I couldn’t get any of it out of my head. I completely lost myself in the poems.
They were much longer than they are now. They were crazy spells, journal
entries, letters, confessions, essays on aesthetics, condolences, obituaries. I
sent them out and most of them got rejected. I carved away the words like
marble until the poems looked me in the eye.
And
another thing
If there is red there must be green
If there is blue there must be
carcasses
of brass washed by sand
If there are cranes there must be pages
smeared with charcoal
If there is ash there must be almond
the secret flavor of freebase
and cyanide. If there are clouds they
must
be the allergen of shadow, a rash
of sparks singeing the few bones
that are trees. If there is a beach
it must be the width of my body so that
I
am the twin of the tide
If there is a house
there must be a darker house
If there is dope my veins must be
tiny birds
There must be palms, there must be ash
distance cut with yellow dashes
If there are lips there must be coral
against a wall of dead coral
If my life is a codex holding questions
outside the boundaries of speech
If there are crowns there must be gulls
eating rain-colored trash
If there are shades they must be sprung
from a circle fixed by the fugue of
mammals
If there is time there are questions
a sea dividing them, a page floating on
my lungs
sun daggers through this dilating room
If there are lemontrees.
Colin Partch
is a poet, teacher, and researcher living in Los Angeles with his wife and four
cats. He received an MFA in Writing and MA in Visual & Critical Studies
from California College of the Arts. He edits the literary journal Second
Stutter with Solomon Rino. His research focuses on the intersections of
speech dysfluency, psychoanalysis, and ontology.
Maw Shein Win's recent
poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn), which
was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for
the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent
Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. D.A. Powell wrote of it,
"Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion,
perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside
and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is
considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement
floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit
houses inside their storage units.…These poems are portals to other worlds and
to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely, and
resilient book." Win's previous collections include Invisible
Gifts (Manic D Press); her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering
palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series on periodicities : a journal of
poetry and poetics features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito
and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers.
mawsheinwin.com
