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. This process note by Endi Bogue Hartigan is part of her curriculum for her class at the University of San Francisco in their MFA in Writing Program.
The process of writing this involved investigation of clock histories, internal investigation, and roughly ten years of dwelling in questions of measure and presence in our time. Where did the process start? Maybe it was a sense of a rub, an unspoken set of tensions, a molten point. I am not alone in experiencing extremely clocked days for all kinds of reasons. Over the decade in which I worked on oh orchid o’clock (not continually, but in long spells of focus), I was wrestling with a very time-compressed period in my life, working, parenting, more. I started wanting to unravel my own orientation to clock measure, what it does to us, where these forces came from. And like so many people I was also processing incident after incident of our violent American daily reality (news of mass shootings, school shootings, etc.) in real time.
I started working with lyrical voices inside or around the instrument of the clock as way to explore intricacy of presence in this fraught time, its holds. One line in the book reads: “This is not about the clock at all but what the clock surrounds the clock as a moat, the clock as a moat of charred clock parts, arbors, pivots, pinions, escape wheels….” Investigating time measure became a way of seeing into the internal and material machinations of my own and others’ experience, how we are kind of chewed up and flung from history’s machinations and slingshots while we create them.
I dove into reading about the history of horology, clock systems, and theories/philosophies of time and my mind wandered through these histories for years, clock history being an incredible palimpsest of histories: religious, industrial, scientific, astronomical, governmental, economic, natural, more. The history of clocks and time measure includes everything from the capitalist puppetry of measuring industrial time to drive efficiency, to the synchronization with atomic clocks from computers where real time headline bleed into our screens and consciousness, to medieval monks creating mechanisms to wake for morning prayers. Time itself as a concept has no one definition. And while clock measure is cultural it is also so personal, is used to keep us close to our beloved ones and moments. I wrote from this interlay, and the more I wrote the more I wrestled with how we inherit these interwoven histories and constraints, but also fight against them and can slip boundless out of them.
One trusted way forward for me is sound, and of course clocks are full of sound and allowed me to think about internal gears and melodies as a kind of undercurrent. To press on measure is to explore resistance to, freedom from, measure, and of course the poetic line is all about over this dynamic. From the start, they were not singular poems, there were many multiple entrances talking to each other and moving with and against each other in weights and gaps. It had to internally rotate, it had to move.
The clock also became a way to explore other kinds of instrumentation or machinations that we are subject to. Gun violence in the U.S., school gun violence and mass shootings in particular, was weighing on me (and still is). I was also thinking about the machinations and measures of the medical system (EKGs) and health system (gym ellipticals) in relation to the immeasurable experience of bodily presence; the machinations of government; the onslaught of headlines and drumbeat of the information age; the capitalist pressures of hyper-measured work days that dominate so many peoples’ realities, more. I was also drawn to the fantastical; as a parent, the fantastical felt like it was everywhere in our home… cuckoo birds, objects talked. The book kept taking in more and more into its layered hold, and so formally, it took a long time of writing, dwelling, revising, breaking, discarding, to work with this multiplicity.
The forms I arrived at became a way of moving with different paces in time, moving in primarily three different forms/paces: hour entries which are prose-like and which move at a slower loosely-shadowed mental pace that allows for sentences; second entries which are like little insect legs notching forward with alliteration and gap-jumping nonlinear narratives; and a variety of lyrics that often use the slash as an entrance. They work together and of course the forms mix and disrupt their own boundaries too. The slash was important to my mental movement.
/between the actual notches I thought if I could find/ between
the 20-point headline / X dead /trigger moon /school shooting X fled
/if I could find /between the sieving disbelieve the ring and tick I thought
/if I could X out the most actual miniscule nicks of present love
I felt disjuncture between the determined pace of linear clock time and the pace of experience. The slash felt like a way of disrupting or pressing against continuity/linearity, also visually playing with the notches in a clock and our edging closeness. It became a very personal set of forms in ways, pressing in on cusps of experience and slips of measure and prayer, a way of trying to get into a kind of paradox of moving inside an instrument’s gears while being played by it.
For some poems, I was fed by other material/physical processes and collaborations. In fact the very earliest poem founds it seed in an experiment. About ten years ago for a prompt of a collaborative group of Portland-based artists and writers I was part of at the time called 13 Hats, I created a photo/poetry diary of all the clocks in my life on a given work day. I didn’t wear a watch at the time, but the experiment woke me up to how hyperaware I was of where to find each and every of the 23 clocks around me, how I was living in an unconscious choreography of clock sense. Another poem in the book, “4 minutes in the vertical garden,” draws from a collaborative performance with Dawn Stoppiello and Ajna Lichau which fueled my interest in poetic forms as ways of moving temporally. In the performance, for example, every time second entries were read, one of us would hold a “flower cluster” above one’s head and spin. It also gave me turns of phrase like zinniagears and chickenwire of prayer. And for a while as a generative process, I made mini accordion books which I thought of as “instruments” and wrote from their shapes—thinking about the hinged/unhinged connections between segments of time.
These are just pieces of the process. There was a long daily commute. There were so many mass shootings. There were medical tests, elections, conversations with friends. There were school bells. There were innumerable mornings at my desk, thanks to my husband and son. There was reading Alexis McCrossen’s history Marking Modern Times, all of Inger Christensen’s work that I could find translated, and so many other authors. Because it was a long investigative journey, the amount of work I created in the realm of writing this book far exceeds the book, leaks in all directions from it I my mind. I kind of love that. My wonderful editor at Omnidawn, Rusty Morrison, had great editing insight that allowed me to arrive at the final publication. But I will always feel changed by the intensive process years of investigating through writing of which this final book was a part. This book catapulted me into new forms, claimed its own logic. I hope it rings and ticks and pulls and alarms.
Endi Bogue Hartigan’s book oh orchid o’clock was released from Omnidawn Publishing in April 2023. She is author of two other full-length poetry books—Pool [5 choruses] (Omnidawn, 2014) which was selected for the Omnidawn Open Prize and One Sun Storm (Center for Literary Publishing, 2008) which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry—as well as the chapbooks the seaweed sd treble clef (Oxeye, 2021), a series of poems and photographs, and out of the flowering ribs (2012), a collaboration with the artist Linda Hutchins. Her work has also appeared in numerous journals─including VOLT, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Chicago Review, and others─ as well as in collaborative projects with artists and writers. More on her work is at endiboguehartigan.com.
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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