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 Eileen R. Tabios are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
I loathe boredom. This loathing poetics, if you will, has led me to my current practice of writing poems in a particularly arduous way: that is, I first must write novels in order to create poems. It’s that arduousness that prevents me from being bored.
I’ve done this
before—deliberately taking a challenging way to write poems because I want to push
myself. Overcoming difficulty, in my experience of not just writing poems but
other matters in life, is a source of strength and, in poetry for me, a muse.
For example, in 2013, I decided to “murder” my poems — specifically 27 poetry
collections published up to that point — in an attempt to find another way for
creating poems. For this attempt, I also wanted to deepen my interrogation (and
disruption) of English narrative which had facilitated twentieth-century U.S.
colonialism in my birthland, the Philippines. Finally, I wanted to develop a
consciously closer link to the Filipino indigenous value of “Kapwa.” Kapwa
refers to “shared self” or “shared identity” whereby everyone and everything is
connected across all of time. What I set up for what became my “MDR Poetry
Generator” was deliberately ambitious—it’s an approach I developed in poetry
where, as a result of being prolific (nearly 90 written and edited books so
far), it became harder and harder for me to create poetry projects that didn’t
just repeat what I’d already done. Recently, I learned that my approach is
consistent with how the novelist Ann Patchett writes her novels; as I’d done
with poetry, I wish to apply this as well to my novels (yes, I write
novels—"poetic novels”—as I’ve also turned to other genres to avoid
repeating myself):
“Set your sights on something that you aren’t quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually. You can go for broke and take on all three. I raise the bar with every book I write, making sure I’m doing something that is uncomfortably beyond what I can manage. It’s the only way I know to improve.”
—from This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett
For MDR, since the matter at hand was poems, “murder” (I thought) meant to forget them. To forget those poems, I read through every one of my poetry books and chapbooks and, as I read, I kept writing that I forgot them. The result is a group of 1,167 lines nearly all beginning with the words “I forgot.” Following this phrase was whatever surfaced during my reading — from excerpts to my real-time reactions to what I was reading. I consider the lines to form a database. For examples, the following lines surfaced from reading my first poetry chapbook, After the Egyptians Determined the Shape of the World Is a Circle (1996) to begin the database:
I forgot I became a
connoisseur of alleys.
I forgot I knew the back alleys of this neighborhood, where beggars made their
beds, whose cats stole their food, which doorways provided for or grabbed the
fragile into a hold of cruelty.
I forgot why lovers destroy children to parse the philosophy of separation.
I forgot the glint from the fang of a wild boar as he lurked behind shadows in
a land where it only takes one domino to fall.
I forgot how quickly civilization can disappear, as swiftly as the shoreline
from an oil spill birthed from a twist of the wrist by a drunk vomiting over
the helm.
I use the word “database” because the group is a source of new poems, whether by me or others. When the database is unused, untouched, the lines are dead. But if the lines are used for new poems — lifted out of the database — they become resurrected. They are resurrected into new poems. Thus, I titled my project “Murder Death Resurrection” (MDR).
MDR’s conceit is that any combination of the lines is a legitimate poem — from the shortest possible combination of a couplet to a 1,167-line poem. Indeed, after numbering each line from 1 to 1,167, one could choose any numerical combination at random without looking at the database—say, 5, 713, 55, 999—then list the lines associated with those numbers. In this example, that resulting quatrain would be a poem… and it would work!
A successful result also achieves my goal of disrupting linear narrative as a metaphorical talk back against colonialism’s reliance on communications to impose order, as well as prove that Kapwa works by relating random concepts to each other.
Whether or not MDR merits its conceit, the project has generated six published books and four chapbooks in five years. Thus, those publishers obviously felt that those MDR poems succeed to be legitimate—and fit-to-publish—poems! I also field-tested the concept at workshops and through visits to local classrooms at both a university and a high school, and the students and their teachers came up with poems that they thought were authentic poems! My book publications range from 44 RESURRECTIONS (PostModernPoetry E-Ratio, 2014), which is comprised of couplets, to AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir (Black Radish Books, 2016), a book-length poem with its lines divided into sections structured to evoke chapters.
It's difficult for me to overstate the against-the-odds success of a project like MDR, and yet I found how it bucked those difficult odds to be the most thrilling way to create a lot of poems. In fact, I asked two mathematicians to calculate the total number of poems that could be created through MDR. This is a math issue—involving, as mathematicians call it, “permutations”—and so I asked the question of Carl Ericson (my son’s former high school math tutor) and Errol Koenig (then a student at Johns Hopkins’s Applied Mathematics and Statistics Department). Both said the total number is so huge they could only estimate it; their estimate was that MDR’s possible total number of poems is a number that has 3,011 digits. Errol, for one, derived the number through the equation 1167! − 1167, a number that roughly rounds to 1.129300103 E+3010 [that is, 1.129300103 × 103,010]! I could spend the rest of my life randomly combining numbers from 1 to 1,167 and know that when matched against the MDR lines I’d just have written new poems.
More information about MDR is available at Jacket2. I love my MDR project for its difficult Oulipo-like constraints which nonetheless succeeded in its goal of generating new poems. In 2018, I was blessed to be able to release my last MDR-related book, which I considered to be the project’s monograph: MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (Dos Madres Press, 2018).
After MDR, I began looking for another equally improbable way to create poems. It took a while to find such a replacement structure because at about 2016, I’d shifted my focus as a writer to novels. I spent 2016 writing the first draft for my first novel, DOVELION: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was subsequently published by AC Books in 2021 (and whose Filipino translation by Danton Remoto was just released in the Philippines by University of Santo Tomas Publishing House). Writing a long-form novel was on my bucket list and I thought to do it, then return my primary focus to poetry. But it was through DOVELION that I found my current methodology of writing poems: I determined I would write new poems by first writing novels!
As part of developing DOVELION’s plot, I wrote a long poem that, in the novel, was supposedly written by the primary protagonist, Elena. Still enthralled by MDR at the time, I created the poem by reading through its database and plucking out lines that seemed to relate to the novel’s themes that range from revolution to love to indigenous culture. But while I wrote poems as part of writing the novel, I also wanted each poem to work on its own. For this, I used the test of whether it would be accepted for publication somewhere. I’m happy that “The Return of DoveLion” was published in the literary journal Erotoplasty 7 edited by Colin Lee Marshall. Another poem that surfaced while editing the manuscript, “The Significance of Perfume,” was included in a 2020 publication, Scents Anthology, in the Philippines.
DOVELION was my first successful attempt at a long-form novel. While the public knew me as a poet, behind the scenes I had been trying for two decades to write such a novel and consistently failed, until one day I didn’t. Since it’s been about eight years since I wrote DOVELION, I consider the space of the novel as still relatively new. But despite—or probably because of—its difficulty, I find it addicting! There is something unique about the space and scale required to create in this long form; scale has always been significant to me and an extremely long poem is one of my still unachieved goals. Some have likened being a novelist as being like God because every inch of the novel’s world is created by the novelist—I understand the logic of this comparison. I find the perspective interesting because I’ve been mostly—still am—a poet and while a poem is also created by its author, the poem ultimately depends on a reader for its maturation, so it’s not ever wholly created by the poet who writes its words. On the other hand, I understand the novelist’s feeling of acting like God by creating a universe as presented by the novel.
But acting like “God” showcases how much of a flawed mortal the novelist is because it is not easy to create a fully realized world such that the work of fiction becomes real(istic). By writing a novel in order to generate poems, I’ve opted for this process that is among the most difficult in literary genres. And I appreciate the difficulty. I had thought I would return to poems as my primary focus after finishing a long-form novel. But having experienced its demands—a challenge that, for me as a writer, would take me closest to failure’s edge—I determined to keep writing novels, with the bonus being how those new novels would be a means for me to write poems.
As a prolific poet, I am always looking for new ways to write new poems as I’m loathe to repeat myself in writing—I would find it boring. I loved the idea of writing novels in order to create new poems. Since DOVELION’s 2021 release, I’ve written four other novels and conceptualized a fifth; I share their (working) titles in the chronological order that they were written, with the last title still in its early stages:
Clandestine DNA
Collateral Damage
The Balikbayan Artist
Conversation with Echo
The Stubborn Art of Disappearance
All these novels include poems, both poems written before the novels as well as poems written through the novel-writing process. The most fruitful has been Collateral Damage which surfaced two chapbook-length poetry collections. The first is Simmering (Otoliths, 2022) which is comprised of 25 prose poems; each of the prose poem is the same as the first paragraph to each chapter in the 25-chapter novel. The second is BLUE (still unpublished as I thought to publish it with the novel) which is comprised of experimental haibuns or haybuns. The haibun is a combination of a haiku and prose paragraph(s) and the haybun is a combination of hay(na)ku and prose paragraph(s). (While the haiku is centuries old, the haybun is a variation of the hay(na)ku, a poetry form I invented whose root is a tercet with the first line being one word, the second line being two words, and the third line being three words.)
Just as the poems written through novels must be able to stand on their own, I also wish for the novels to be legitimate on their own even if they bear the goal of being a source of new poems. I am pleased to share that The Balikbayan Artist will be published by Penguin Random House SEA in late 2024. The others are still unpublished, with at least one likely to be held back from publication because I think they require more polish. But if even a novel’s rough draft surfaces a polished poem(s), I would consider the project already a success. Collateral Damage, for instance, has not yet found a publisher but it’s generated two poetry collections, one of which is published. Here is a sample poem that I created through writing Collateral Damage: (the blue similes were taken from the similes compiled by Frank J. Wilstach for Bartleby.com.)
Longing for Delphinidin
Cherry blossoms or
magnolias—to die petal
by petal or whole
How to live with mortality’s conclusion
Begin with promise because you are born. Eyes as blue as the sea of a dream. Blue as shimmering steel. Blue as eyes of fairy-flax. Blue as the lips of death. “Blue / And beautiful, like skies seen through / The sleeping wave.” Blue as plague. Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast. Blue as your nose on a cold day. Blue as the eyes of a saint. Blue like an ancient Briton. “Blue / As are the violets that hide / Our dewy earth from view.” Blue as the enamel on the statuettes of Osiris. “Blue each visage grew, / Just like a pullet’s gizzard.” Blue as lips’ prolonged immersion in salt-water. Blue as tint of maiden’s eye. Blue like a patch of fallen April sky. Blue as the overhanging heaven. Blue like a corpse. How to live when mortality’s conclusion is known? Perhaps strive for perfection, but not during every moment. Perhaps accept imperfection, but not during every moment. Perhaps be a statue dreaming of steel veins spreading across the corpse-blue sky to hold it up since it hangs over plagues and oceans of salt. Perhaps be—or be the opposite of—a saint.
Placing poems in novels create an aesthetic tension. The poem might be less than stellar and yet might move the novel’s plot along. Fortunately, there are novelistic strategies that elide the issue of quality (I consider “quality,” by the way, as the least interesting ways to look at poems). The Balikbayan Artist presents two poems written through the novel: “Song” and an untitled five-liner. Here is the first poem:
Song
I once licked a pineapple—
that sweetness so tart
from a thin slice of sunlight
remains with me through the years
Perhaps “Song” is fine, but this untitled one surely is lacking by being mostly a one-note poem:
The flowing falls
of your triple chins
hide my view
of red roses
and beauty queens
I recently had a Facebook discussion with several poets on the matter of whether the novel’s context can excuse a mediocre poem—that is, if a poem serves the plot well it can rationalize its existence. Some pointed out that a mediocre poem can be excused by contextualizing the poem as having been written by a less-than-brilliant poet character. This occurs enough so that one friend said she doesn’t expect poems in novels to be astounding. But as a poet-novelist, and notwithstanding the above poem on triple chins, my goal is to write outstanding poems within outstanding novels. Whether readers will agree with my assessments is a different matter, but such would be the case for any poem or any written work given the subjectivity of reader response.
Today, I am considering and re-considering Nabokov’s classic novel, PALE FIRE, whose structure I admire. PALE FIRE presents a long poem, and the novelistic narrative unfolds as footnotes or notes to lines in the poem. My goal is to create a structure as ambitious as Nabokov did and manifest it well. I trust that setting such an ambitious goal of writing novels to generate poems will mean that even if I fail, what I would have achieved is something that would not have been possible if I hadn’t aimed high to, as Ann Patchett put it, “Set your sights on something that you aren’t quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually.” Because this is one of the paradoxes of Poetry: each work cannot truly fail if it’s a building block to something else or to a general poetics approach.
Last but not least, difficulty is not boring.
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. She is the inaugural
poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length
poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a
glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with
visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series
features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the
University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary
Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community.
Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is
forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com