Christian Gullette : Process Notes #42

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 these poems by Christian Gullette are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

Process Note for Coachella Elegy (July 1, Trio House Press, 2024)

 

One sound has been with me all the way from the beginning of this first book journey, all the way to the final poem in my collection, Coachella Elegy. It’s the buzzing of bees. Sometimes it’s a sting. Sometimes it’s absence, as in environmental loss. Sometimes it’s ecstasy, as in the bees drunk on red syrup in the collection’s final poem “Bees in the Maraschino Cherry Factory.” And sometimes it’s a state, Utah, named after hives, where bees transform pollen into gold. This book’s journey to publication actually began as a manuscript titled “Beehive State.” It feels strange to put that title in quotation marks since it was the manuscript’s title for about three of the five years that I’ve truly had a collection of poems that I was actively revising and submitting. Strange because I always thought that’s what the title would be. That the collection would resonate out from the high desert of the Beehive State, where my younger brother Jeremy went to boarding school before his death in a car accident. All the echoes, the buzzing, seemed to be located in that valley between the mountains and the Great Salt Lake, despite the fact that I have lived in California for over fifteen years now. But my mind returned to the desert and mountainous landscapes of Utah to try and understand something about my grief.

And it felt like a place I could also explore my husband’s cancer survival. Also many years in the past, we nevertheless lived in three- or six-month installments decided by scans and tests. It’s another type of grief, that unknowing. Add to that grief environmental and political precarities, and the poems really yearned for beauty and pleasure and hope in the face of many challenges.

During the pandemic lockdown, that yearning became a desire to write a poem that gave me a sense of escape. I decided to sit down and write about a place we feel very drawn to and that fills us with rest, Eros, queerness, and closeness to the natural world. Nearness to architecture, pools, hummingbirds, and date palms. A place that also gives me a way to consider environmental catastrophe, drought, fire, displacement, and the destructive myths of California. When I completed that draft of the poem “Coachella Elegy,” I never foresaw that these Palm Springs poems would start pouring out of me. “Coachella Elegy” sparked a new way of writing into my manuscript, one that holds intimacy and survival in tension with melancholy and loss.

In the poem “Coachella Elegy,” I set out to write an homage to the Coachella Valley, which it still is. But a feeling surfaced about an actual event: the time my husband and I went to see the Salton Sea and I forgot it was the anniversary of my brother’s death until I received a push notification on my phone. The poem is about that complicated mix of emotions, but from the wider perspective of recognizing a signal that it was ok to start letting go. That maybe instead of needing to fully understand grief, I could be with it however it was in the present moment, even if that meant moving on. The same with the specter of cancer; it would be there, but there could be pleasure, too.

A mentor encouraged me to focus on the poems that felt more like where I wanted to go. So, one evening, I took a breath, deleted the entire “Beehive State” half of the manuscript, and titled it “Coachella Elegy.” After the momentary terror and ruthlessness of such an editorial choice, the poems felt freer. The new manuscript found a home 8 months later, winning a prize from Trio House Press. During the editorial process, I received the gift of working with two editors who not only supported the book but encouraged me to re-include several poems about my brother that I had cut. I decided to retitle them “elegies” to be a series along with “Coachella Elegy.” There are echoes of loss from the past, but the book is now very much in the present, searching for beauty and the erotic and hope despite all the loss in the world. The bees are disappearing, but they haven’t disappeared completely. Or some are transformed, even just for a moment, before we’re left to seek them out again.

 

Airbnb Art

 

Under a Sputnik-shaped lamp,
a Picasso with three eyes.

My husband’s prosthetic eye
is as blue as the other.

After the surgery,
we had sex,

his eye under a gauze tent.

I injected lidocaine through a tube that
coiled behind the bandage.

I wiped his armpits
with a washcloth.

There were still traces
of a purple arrow

drawn by the nervous surgeon.

The ocularist hand-painted his pupil.
It looks like the eye I always loved.

 

Originally appeared in Los Angeles Review.

 

 

Coachella Elegy

 

Somewhere there’s music.
We drive by Coachella

to the Salton Sea.
A sea as dead as Salt Lake.

My phone buzzes.
It’s the anniversary

of my brother’s death.
There are no reeds

as there are at Cana
and this water will not

become wine.
Shorebirds drink it,

not because they love
the world

but because
there’s a magnet in it.

Is that freedom,
this wandering?

There’s a forgotten
swing set submerged

in this sea. Young people who
once swayed on it still exist.

Salt, I float on it.

 

 

 

 

Christian Gullette is the author of the debut poetry collection Coachella Elegy, winner of the 2023 Trio House Press Trio Award and included in 2024 must-read lists by LitHub, Electric Lit, and Debutiful. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, the Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), and The Yale Review. Christian completed his Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and when not serving as the editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review, he works as a lecturer and translator. He lives in San Francisco.

 

 

 

 

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