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 and poems by Gillian Conoley are part of her curriculum for her upcoming class for Maker, Mentor, Muse. Thanks for reading.
I like to keep my process messy and free but it does have a container. From when I first started writing, early drafts are always written in black-bound, hard-cover, unlined sketch books, like the ones visual artists use, usually 9” by 12” in size. I love the tactile feel of them. And that they are already books. Anything can go between their covers: stray thoughts, images pulled from what I see in the day, overheard conversation. I like the page being unlined as it keeps things nonlinear and undetermined: it’s a wide-open field. Sometimes none of this material is useful but eventually some lines will strike me as belonging together, so from this disarray often written on the diagonal, or with brief sections of automatic prose (though I don’t really think writing can be “automatic”: the brain is quicker than the hand), I’ll start to number lines in a kind of order: this is how my stanzas form and reform. I experience my imagination with pretty much equal amounts of the aural and the visual. If I could walk into a painting or a film I would. If I could be a folk singer I’d do that, too. This sketchbook process keeps me writing, and for me, it may be the closest way to begin writing within the unknown.
And then there’s language, which for me has a dimensionality and the properties of a portal. Its sonic qualities coupled with multitudinous meaning can lead one astray into stubborn opacity or directly into the ineffable. So there’s a tightwire there: if one wants a reader to stay with you, and I do, I have to find balance in language’s physical/metaphysical consequences, vibrations and frequencies and its capacity to think, to sing, to say. I think of all poets as guides into this thicket, as language is our main material: each work begins anew with its own score, painterly stroke, a dancer’s singular gestural syllable or a whole line-length of words in movement. I like the idea of using techniques from other art forms.
Content shows up. It dips and dives as if in water or can be quite insistent. I try to let it do whatever it wants and observe it, attend to it. Of late, particularly in Notes from the Passenger, the dead have been my companions. I grew up with them, literally, but that’s another story. In our current terrifying historical moment, the dead and the soon-to-be dead all around us, we’re killing each other and the planet off. The truism that humans always think it’s the end of the world is starting to ring a little hollow.
It occurs to me that in the process I’m describing––because I’m interested in poetics/aesthetics as much as the social/political, and really don’t see much difference between the two, I’m often thinking of how to be present to our world in its unrelenting speed and saturation. The realm of the didactic sits on a throne for those who “know,” not poets, who traffic more in the unknown.
Another thought due to so many dead is can an artist’s mark leave something behind? I’m not talking about fame here, or what is worthy of being left behind. On all lands over which human ego is hotly contested and displayed, what lasts and is perhaps of most interest is the art left at the crossroads, if it doesn’t get destroyed. Aristotle believed that if one wants to know what it was like to be alive at a certain time, we must look at the art of that time period over historical record for the nuances and mysteries of what it is to live, to breathe, to have the life force within us. Aristotle, moving from mimesis to pleasure and back again, plants the seeds to a pathway more open to the ineffable, leading to Plotinus, Lao Tzu, and so on. In terms of having the political come into one’s work, Nietzsche might be of the most use here: in the Dawn of Day he writes: “the surest way to corrupt youth is to instruct them to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
I imagine the sketchbooks are connected to my interest in consciousness and perception, its associations and disassociations, its intimacies and distances. I also love the book as book. I have so many sketchbooks that I’ve lost count, and of course I have more sketchbooks than published books. I don’t think I could have one without the other. Writing takes so many forms.
A metropole that unpeoples and peoples
The burnt tropic masticating its vine stock wand and wind––
Cracked I-phone glass : raying thought, chatter : susurration and aftershock
hair matted below our ears receiving signals // not all that synthesizable––
rhythm and phoneme saying hey there, hey there
[until more gessoed grew the honeydark summer street––
when you] coming back––
sang––
the heat ––fecund–– nightfallen
Partial to sky––tadpoles gone celestial––
Our vocabulary split
into two columns in which: a lexicon likes beginning ––carrion, nightingale––
cloud bank and snow–– A waitress slept in her car for the heat
breathing in the half inch of the window left open
White Spruce
If all experience
is mystical
the white spruce
swayed in the window
branch by branch almost to the doorstep
willow-like
near your sun-damaged eyes
And
what do dirt’s
sinuous motions
have to do
with leaf’s actions
I asked the young woman
I
asked the grandmother
and the entire family
crawling across the floor
And who is the young returnee who
would carry his AK-47 past the 7-11
almost to the corner and back
wanting chips sometimes candy
a contemplative on duty
This
wake, sleep, this wake sleep sea
the planet
and its lost parts
lay plow to the furrow
dream a little dream
with me
How it was no longer only the country that was divided
It was the order and their words So that when someone said work
We lay down so that when someone said art
Memory was our insufficiency We caught it in our hands grievous sharp
After 5 or so years the T-shirt pills Every day I say try throwing it away
To teach my daughter something new Your grandfather’s war helmet, I say
your grandmother’s high pile of cottony tresses the opal axis of her hairpin
steel mink of her closed eye Something new Who speaks through your mouth
Throw it away do you want it to say Sister Perpetua or Mother Apocalypse
on your T-shirt Tumbling out, a word order reveals a pack of boys
who unzip to sire the city seepage I say if dust’s cosmological camouflage coats us,
we re-route to another street I mean, who knows, the house might not even be here
You, however, are my wonder fatal, prenatal as water down a leg I was born after a war
came of age in a war leave war everywhere who speaks through your mouth won’t be me
Something very large and open and waiting waiting I errand to fill my hole
You scroll and want worlds the many worlds of wanting worlds The gentle body of light
enters the car slow-surfing the speedbumps carrying us along oceanically
because I am vanishing I think to show you how but not just now let’s not talk just now
Return, return, says the body of light deciding to not decide which one of us to call
Into gentle body of light’s luscious quandary settling also into the front seat
transmuted inflamed our faces our voices If as mother I gave you mortality
if as daughter you gave me immortality’s brief mirror glint You are reaching
into screen to play your music if this is the end Empty hands of humanity
will not tomorrow be enough for you? Mortality upon us with its rosy edge
of want Mortality upon us with a rosy edge of what So nothing cannot go unsaid
to pass the night in open air Saint Perpetua invented the diary in prison
and after requesting water knew not to ask for any other favor
but perseverance of the flesh I’m green and strong as live oak on dry gold grass
I’m blue externalizing my interior enemies when they are gone I aspirate in primeval mist
James Joyce wrote The Dead until the last page was snow full
If there is fire we will pick it up play with it
Gentle
body of light, I am lonesome pine for
you
Who speaks waits under the blind glare of Jane Eyre’s mysterious red room
Unlock and we rivercane the lyric you know that patois?
Gentle body of light you’ve got such a cruel Ideal
Grievous sharp-nailed coyote steps at seafoam’s edge
If we isolate the isotope may it rain in the echo chamber
Gentle body of light, when we’re within you we’re outside you we swim the plasma
We woodshred the threshold find airport by matchlight
Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.
Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. Often comprising narrative, lyric, and fragmented forms, her work takes up an inquiry into spirit and matter, the individual and the state. Her new collection is Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat Books, 2023) her tenth book, short-listed for the California Independent Bookseller’s Golden Poppy Award. Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane, and Sonoma State University. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is editor of VOLT magazine. Her translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights.
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