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.
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