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.
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