Saturday, February 4, 2023

Process Note #10 : Colin Partch : Sharp Said

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