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 Brian Ang is part of her curriculum for upcoming classes at the University of San Francisco in their MFA Program and for Poetry In Process: Creating Together, A Workshop.
The 2008 economic crisis and global backdrop of struggles by 2011 renewed possibilities for thinking totality, materializing it for apprehension. I wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022) from the desire to be interested in everything, sampling from discourses of history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities, knowledges of what constitute totality. The Totality Cantos is open to the totality of discourses in one hundred cantos of one hundred lines each. Every canto consists of ten sections of ten lines each. totalitycantos.net includes the complete text, links to buy copies, and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections.
The Totality Cantos introduces assemblage poetics: “Assemblage poetics, constructive verse, writing adequate to apprehending totality” (“Preface: Totality and Method,” The Totality Cantos). I’ve begun elaborating assemblage poetics in an essay, “Assemblage Poetics,” and a collection, Assemblage Sampler, and started ASSEMBLAGE, my new publication to continue constituting assemblage poetics: “Assemblage poetics is concerned with how words and things may connect, how assemblages and practices that articulate them may connect, a collective project for reassembling totality” (“Assemblage Poetics”).
Now that I’ve written The Totality Cantos and initiated assemblage poetics, I’m writing about multiplicities that constitute totality. My current poetic project is A Thousand Records, open to the totality of music in five hundred sections. I began writing it on New Year’s Day 2022. I’ve written two hundred sections and aim to complete it by New Year’s Eve 2024. A Thousand Records commences a series of book-length poems called The Multiplicity Project. From A Thousand Records:
196 Downward sacred bitter identity numbness future longhorns
Egotist equivalent flashpoint
Live auxiliary psychedelic
landscape bongos
Enormous ace deadpan shoestring
distinction performance news school
Anomaly
Brutally ethnic-flavored epilogue sale car
clothes
Cursed concerned rioting dinosaur parlor
mesa series focus atmosphere soundscapes
Gospel bait
Accessed expressive historiographic acumen
Listening
history darkness rime spiral opportunity image energy solo
197 Monster making
Hi-fi snide difficulty twilight trail
shadow metamorphosis career clue
Assured college marine eyeliner trip
stones
Absent fantastic photographs
Warm mythic people chocolat
heartbreakers
Sparse
omnibus exclusion river summer bridge critic
Triffids
Precariously vintage yodeling
tabletop offset fiddler poetry peaches
Passing real experimenting sweethearts
Total upgrading medicolegal
polyrhythmic shredder sarcasm snare meme process chicks
198 Contingent dance
Whining oversexed mature
permission partnership finger
Beauty
Pontificating life religion record
Robotic country banquet light ton
kick angels
Postindustrial crystallized
cool meningitis pillar pilgrim persona pleasures
Spilt mixing self
Normative
nudity drive art amnesiac
Unusual prospective minor meaningful
autonomous thrash child member dreams
Forever split well-made repulsion return
kid conflict church labor discourses
199 State-of-the-art sure question palette perch majority multitracking
interview
Late lost quiet enjoyable nice emancipated
reuse finale sophomore take
Undead
Thug
electricity hindsight attitude freedom resource tapes
Metal cowboy surveillance
Rough pitchfork perfectionism
bloggers
Repeatedly homeless eponymous comfortable
middle red honor dove ash
Touched spouse papa success icons
Demotion departure footing
thought tusk girls
Connection copy
200 Notorious island idea guitar
Blurred forward chiming choir
inspiration gas feet octaves
Jam
Confused laid-back gyro power passage
metaphor museum space crowd cutbacks
Twentieth-century melody rhythm arrangement
rain dimensions
Morning bollocks
Archly gigantic sermon shit
essence sleeve response project call
Streetwise amazing aura
Sinful speed strum love wisdom
cloud rumours
Regurgitation military motel
exec clique
Brian Ang wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022). totalitycantos.net includes the complete text and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. Prose: “Assemblage Poetics”; editor: Assemblage Sampler and ASSEMBLAGE; current poetic project: A Thousand Records, open to the totality of music.
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