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 Barbara Tomash is part of her curriculum for her upcoming classes at the University of San Francisco in their MFA Program and for Poetry In Process: Creating Together, A Workshop.
These poems were written during a time of shocked mourning for the loss of two life-long friends who died within the same week at the end of January 2022. How did my stunned body respond? First, there was wailing, which came loud, new, and sudden from my throat, though the deaths were not unexpected. Then, there was loss of bodily function—or I could say, loss of species specificity: we are the only mammals who walk upright, a deeply precarious situation. I went out walking, missed a curb, and fell face down to concrete; the speed of the fall was breathtaking. I was given a new broken orientation. What the body enacts can feel as necessary and correct as a promise fulfilled. Now, over a year later, I am slightly, but visibly, remade, with a new red-raised scar at the bridge of my nose and a persistent ache in the tissue between my eyes.
In
the mornings I often think of my dead friends and the narrow verticality of
human bodies—
a
narrowness we perhaps fail to notice until life has left us and we stand no
more. I have written these poems in the form of a narrow rectangle with
justified margins and no punctuation. I think the constrained space held
between the sharply drawn margins calls to me because grief can feel like a
pressurized containment, deep and endless—a hole dug in earth, a rocket
shooting into space, a closet-like room with a floor that retreats under our
feet. I see my friends’ grieving partners entering these spaces, some windowed
and streaming with a too-bright light, some boarded up and dark.
Writing the first poems in this narrow box-like form, I slowly came to see the page more as a window than as a container, a translucence that shapes and makes possible perception, while above my desk, the actual window, filled with tree branches, became the scrawled-upon page. Forgoing the use of punctuation can free the words gathered inside the frame to assemble and reassemble themselves, even as I write them down. Movement is always, for me, an antidote to pain, both physical and emotional. So, I enjoy this fluidity within the process, seeing how fragments seam together in unexpected ways allowing for shifting meanings, multiple readings.
I
am currently working on a book length manuscript of poems written in this form,
and I am always taken by surprise when I see how frequently end-of-the-world
imaginings and the imminent threat to the natural world crop up when I write.
In my day-to-day life I am not aware of being obsessed by this theme, and when
I sit down to write, catastrophe is not on my mind. I am, however, often
writing into the intersection between my unexpressed thoughts and feelings and
my close observations of the natural world to which my body, of course, belongs
and paradoxically forms an interestingly permeable barrier. Is imagining a
poem’s form more akin to constructing a house, looking into a window, or giving
birth? I don’t know. But, it seems that finding a form lets language and
thinking breathe inside a body, and this movement between inhale and exhale
gives me a reason to write.
Of Autobiography
my dear dead friend should I tell of the animals who never sleep of the breakdown of the body how it branches out leaves gaps and gnaw marks how in delirium how in the four walled twilight I searched for your house outside the city should I tell of the garden where I am buried in a text of nowhere and tangled thoughts how migrant birds in their joyful placeless sky beat away our fleshless music with their wings should I tell how disintegration is a body of illegible words scratched in the margins with a stick my dear friend shall we live nowhere shall we not care how things end
Of Anima
the bird was dead when the children found it why should grief exist at all the infant body riding in the mother’s mouth or atop her head you have to understand struggling to keep it afloat plunging into the opaque green waters hauling spinning and diving with it you have to understand how to gently touch the skull of a dead adult to stroke the bones rocking back and forth to withdraw into solitude and set aside food for your dead companion even at the risk of your own starvation you have to understand I am alive she tried to revive her but she couldn’t nuzzling and biting she used a piece of dried grass to clean debris from her dead offspring’s teeth when one died the other lay with its head on her neck for hours crows mob and squawk magpies bury their dead under twigs and the word grief is made illicit among us
Of Luminous
my dear late friend my euphoric interior moon is it possible your red streamers emit not a shred of observable light we stand still in your path we waver entangled in seeds of burning branches parallel syntax unerring alliteration flaming where not even a vowel is consumed you have for question I am what for obituary I am irretrievable you have arms legs throat breast hands we wash orifices we cleanse eyes and jaw tied shut with strips of clean cotton cloth you fell out of orbit the oceans boiled I hid inside the glare of all mirrors such is the delineation of what is lacking where I went blind
Barbara Tomash is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, Her Scant State (Apogee), PRE- (Black Radish), and Arboreal (Apogee); and two chapbooks Of Residue (Drop Leaf Press), and A Woman Reflected (palabrosa). Her writing has been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, The Test Site Poetry Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, Posit, Tupelo Quarterly, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
Maw Shein Win’s most recent
poetry collection 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 CALIBA’s Golden Poppy
Award for Poetry. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts
(Manic D Press) and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and
Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets
and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and
teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often
collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently
selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and
Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary
community. mawsheinwin.com