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 Anne F. Walker are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
I started writing this book on the train between Emeryville and Toronto. I had a small sleeping compartment and spent most of my time in the lounge. I collected words from the world around me, my mind and memories. I conceived of all the words like mud pulling together, red mud on the lounge tables, with the sky overhead through curving windows, and world passing out to the side, so that I could then sculpt with it. It started with:
Beating Heart of the Track
Lights out through a tunnel, brief, unexpected. And back into light dry grassland. Repeat. Screen dims in sudden dark. Foothills before the Sierras. An old man with white skin and rosacea, skin that pulls back loose as he drinks beer in observation deck sun. That’s the beating heart of the track the small blond boy drawing points out his picture to the young blonde freckled mom, tired between two small children. My family used to camp in gold country. This train, next to this river. I have seen this track and train from the road and thought one day, maybe.
The idea of 100-words came to me through Lorna Cervantes. In relation to Alfred Arteaga we had talked about her Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, and the idea of 100-word prose poems was in the literary air as I stepped on the train. It felt like the right form.
Before I left I had been to SFMOMA's “Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed” and saw several versions of “At the Deathbed,' created over decades. I was curious what happens when you revisit an image over the span of a life. On the train, as I collected the “mud” for the collection, I wanted to try using some poetry from my first book, Six Months’ Rent, and rework the imagery. One of these is situated in triangles and dimensions at Toronto’s three way junction at Dundas Street West and College:
Loosely Remember
The placement of streets, neighborhoods how they were, houses before renovation. Sidewalk before a pail of soapy water is poured. Loosely streetcar rails. (The frame and) everything (outside the frame) disappears then reappears (as inside disappears): (a street meeting two others in a triangle where everything veers) black wires against blue sky along angles of streetcar tracks, everything sunbaked (like ghost images spilling from a broadcast t.v. channel, a figure behind the glass) disappears then reappears (as a girl on the sidewalk leans on a blue bike squints to see into the chromed greasy-spoon that hasn’t changed in thirty-five years
The poem can be read inside the brackets, outside them, with both. The final bracketed phrase stays open because not everything closes.
Part of the project was to explore the journey from homes, the Bay Area, home of my early childhood, graduate education, and raising my son, teaching, and Toronto. I grew up in Toronto, was a teenager in its suburbs, explored downtown on public transit, worked in film after the Fine Arts undergrad in Toronto, lived downtown as a practicing writer, went through my pregnancy in the Annex and birth at Women’s College Hospital. Both places are home and felt the traveling between them was a fertile creative space.
“Good Use of Beautiful Light (on Clinton Street),” a nine-poem sequence, was a lot shorter when I first wrote it, but photographer Misha Bruk kept reading drafts and gently pushing me to explore deeper. It made for a poem texture I had not wrought before. I use the word wrought because it felt like working with iron, hot, intricate, difficult, with deep permanent/strong/differently-textured results. I titled it from his phrase “Good Use of Beautiful Light” and the location of the poem’s origin:
Coffee comes in like a drug after sleeping dawn to dusk, waking to the faint amber line. Outside the kitchen door. Traffic sound hovers, amplified wasps. Oval skull of winter trees like yellow dye in veins. Silhouette of a couple of large apartment buildings a couple of miles away. Gas blue flame heats a silver percolator in the dark. A world of stars and darkness, like electric snow in a black and white television, the prickly black tugging though cool linoleum floor to pull back under, into dream. Reading all of Orwell’s 1984 in one night, locked in the narrative.
When I came back from the travels, which included a poetry fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing’s Summer Writers’ Conference, and I had started really focussing the collection into the form it wanted to take, I went to SFMOMA’s retrospective Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules. In it I saw the room containing his 1978 “Hiccups,” “a Solvent transfer and fabric with metal zippers on ninety-seven sheets of handmade paper.” It deepened my sense of what I wanted to do with Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length. I wanted to have all different shapes, colors, textures fly over and in multiple same-sized square boxes of the prose poem form.
Visual art and deep conversations supported the creation and editing of this Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length project that ended under the stars in the high Sierras:
Glutted on a Morning Rose
The sky is busy with shooting stars, the milky way, sound of running water. Several at a time, flashing red lights of west-bound cross-continent planes span the Sierras. Last week I was on one, still sleeping. Fitful. Unaware of the huge chirping night below. The bottom of an ocean risen. I can’t shut my eyes to it.
Moths or night-flies buzz around the lit tent. Trying to fan, to thump, to thump, into the glow of the solar lantern my beautiful son lent. Like you, I too have been broken. And put back together, light shining through so many seams.
