Sunday, February 4, 2024

Laura Walker : Process note #32

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 Laura Walker are part of her curriculum for her upcoming class for Maker, Mentor, Muse and for her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

I started writing psalmbook the way I usually start a new series: casting about, writing in response to various catalysts, at first hopeful, and then increasingly anxious to find that thing that will move me— looking for a trapdoor to fall through. This time I found it in the Book of Psalms.

The rhythms and cadences of the King James Version of the Bible, their lull and pull, are evocative for me in a way few things are. I grew up in the Bible Belt, but my dad was a proselytizing atheist. Sitting in church, I desperately wanted to enter the world of prayer and faith that seemed to mean so much to my friends and grandparents. But I never could, quite. The ethereal, transcendent language of the KJV, though, transported me, and it also became suffused with all the yearning I felt— perhaps still feel— that yearning of an outsider wanting in. 

I wasn't familiar with the Psalms. When I started to read them, I was startled by the voice I found there (and I’m not assuming anyone else hears the same voice). I'd been expecting a confident song of love and faith. Instead, the voice I heard was overly insistent, desperate, sometimes vindictive and violent, and full of yearning. It was raw and vulnerable: torn between a very present, sometimes violent, sometimes bewildering world, and a very absent, sometimes violent, sometimes bewildering "you". It seemed to me to be declaring its faith even as it faced the impossibility of faith. I'd found my trapdoor.

The process of writing psalmbook was a new one for me, even though I’ve written several books that respond closely to a text (follow-haswed is a collage of found language from a single volume of the OED; story reinhabits fairy tales; bird book borrows from a bird guide to North American birds; etc.). Each page in psalmbook responds to a single Psalm; sometimes I would return to the same Psalm multiple times. In the case of psalmbook, though, it felt less a collaborative collage or creative translation, and more like a kind of channeling. Each day, I would choose a Psalm and read it over and over, until I felt the language start to give and flood and the floor drop away. Then I would write, letting the voice I heard move through me.

I was fairly uncomfortable throughout. I was uncomfortable with aspects of the voice I heard; I was uncomfortable bringing “another voice” across and onto the paper; I was uncomfortable with a personal and idiosyncratic reading of a sacred, communal text; I was uncomfortable with the religious overtones, and uncomfortable with the secular ones. All of those things, of course, also kept it generative— like so many others, I am moved by the awkward, the difficult, and the problematic.  Even so, it took me several years to come to terms with it.

In the end, I think the book became a kind of prayer for me— prayer as plea— with all its contradictions, its very human fallibilities, its wrestling with how to relate to the world and to the divine, its desire to see and be seen, its frustration and tentativeness and confusion, and above all, its yearning—to be heard, to believe, to connect.

 

 

 

psalm 17

         

 

 

a sentence converges        

 

                                    this equals that      you visit me

                        in the night

 

          you will find nothing

 

i will not speak

 

 

there is a narrow path
that widens just beyond
i have never strayed

 

secret places
of children
and salt

 

 

 

 

psalm 84 

 

 

 

 

i need
birds and hosts
some kind of color

 

to wait for you

 

we wade in pools and egrets
everyone appears
but you

 

i will cut myself into a thousand pieces
and give you one — i will stand in your door
and ignore the tents —

 


 

 

 

psalm 12

 

 

 

 

i am thinking of faithful
of frail and unanointed

 

your name a broken door

 

you are silver    
boiled seven times
a pure thing hung round your neck

like an antidote to fever :

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Walker [photo credit: Theo Lemkin] is the author of six books of poetry: psalmbook (Apogee Press, 2022), story (Apogee Press, 2016), Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), and two chapbooks: genesis (above/ground press, 2023) and bird book (Albion Books, 2010). In 2023 she joined Apogee Press as a co-editor. Laura grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches poetry, keeps bees, and wrangles chickens. 

 

 

 

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

 

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