The 'process note' 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 by Chris
Stroffolino is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry
classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
In The Here There: Process Note
(or gathering is not those flowers on the wall)
Moving from NYC to Oakland in the 21st century as the technocracy was reshaping American social, cultural and commercial life, and gentrification was decimating local proletariat fine art scenes, I found it difficult to find a literary community milieu as nourishing (if at times contentious) as I did in NYC or Philadelphia. Sure, there were still many reading series here, but very few magazines or presses to supplement the here by bringing in a there as in NYC. The 21st century felt much more impersonal (contests, blind submissions, form rejections).
Being a teacher of pre-transfer level composition at Laney Community College since 2008 also changed my relationship to reading and writing poetry on the page at least as much as 21st century accelerating techno-capitalism did. My students’ stories of their struggles to survive made me severely question my “over-educated” academic training and passions for sophisticated writers like John Ashbery, Laura (Riding) Jackson, etc. (like trying to read Ralph Waldo Emerson after reading Harriet Jacobs). I fell in love with the brilliant street-smart hard-knocks wisdom of my (mostly non-white) students; even though many struggled as writers on the sentence-level, they were amazing talkers, and taught me things I wanted to teach my teachers.
On a genre level, I found myself trading in the duality dance of yin and yang for the almighty Venn diagram, lyric flights of fancy into argumentative prose and agit-prop rants. Though I still had poetic cravings, I simply couldn’t find time and leisure for the more contemplative mode that I had in grad school, or teaching at an MFA program in a rich white school. When I’d steal a little time to read some new poems by old friends, I felt they didn’t speak to me as they had before. Sometimes I felt poetry had left me behind. Other times, I felt I left it behind.
In 2014, however, I magically became aware of a new genre-smashing book by an old internet poetry-scene acquaintance, Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women. I immediately felt simpatico; here was a working-class poet breaking many 20th century poetry taboos, and, like me, struggling to extricate herself from her elitist (by default) training. This inspired me to write my first poetry review in a decade, which allowed me to combine elements of the argumentative, rhetorical skills my day job required with my love of contemporary poets.
As more poets sent me review copies, I found, over and over, that, despite accelerated negative trends of techno-plutocratic global disaster capitalism that could make one nostalgic for the 90s, the 21st century poetry book-scape is better than it was in 1999. Perhaps more poets and critics have come to realize that it is indeed wiser to embrace a more porous and fluid unity-in-diversity attitude among diverse poetics with more equanimity against a common crisis that goes by different names.
I am not a prolific reviewer; I rarely do more than two reviews a year, and I’m terrible at the pithy sound-bite that characterizes my favorite blurbists (Tongo Eisen-Martin’s blurbs are more poetic than many poems). As a slow reader, I usually spend at least two months reading the book, living in it, measuring my life against it, it against my life, copying quotes or stanzas. I overwrite and overthink; I inefficiently write 20 to get four good pages. I get excited when I see sparks fly between the poem on page 24 and another, seemingly unrelated one, on page 88, and I’m fascinated with old-fashioned close readings too much to feel I ever adequately cover a book. My primary audience is usually the writer themselves; I really hope the writer likes what I write, even if I say stupid things they (or I) didn’t really intend.
I try to remember that every poem I mention knows much more than what I say, that every review is a kind of erasure, especially when they prescriptively vet. Many before me have written in prose to defend poetry (as an unknowing that needs no defense) against the rational discourse of prose that often attempts to co-opt or colonize it, and certainly, I won’t be the last to do so. But, as the poet Gillian Conoley puts it, sometimes “we have to wire prose into talk to get to the poem.” The prose-mind that writes these essays comes to the poems discussed in the spirit of a question mark.
Recently, on Facebook, I was blessed to be part of this exchange:
Uche Nduka: It’s not so important to interpret a poem as it is to experience it.
Ben Friedlander: I dunno, maybe. I’m probably the outlier, returning to those that help me think much more than the arouses of sensation.
I found myself agreeing with both points of view, and was happy they were in dialogue with each other, so I wrote, “Sometimes I have to try to interpret it to feel more immensely its irreducibility.”
I experienced both of them pressing the like button (whatever that means).
Collecting the essays that make up this book has allowed me to step back from the apparent mandate to constantly keep up with the demands of the reactive mind that renders contemplation an endangered species. Although the writers/books discussed range from eco-poets to contemporary avant-garde conceptual writers to anti-corporate journalist muckrakers to veterans of the Black Arts movement, from Civic Poetry to Hysterical Surrealism, they all offer tools to move beyond, between, beneath, the binary thinking of Cartesian dualism (whose dominance can be felt in the increased disembodiment of the 21st century technocracy). Not only do the books discussed stand-up on repeated re-readings, but become even more alive with each reading, as time gives weight to the white space in the words.
The biggest flaw, I feel, of In the Here There is that, if read too fast, as I cram ten years of writing into one book of dense and quirky-clumsy prose, is that the space gets lost. The book needs a supplement, a performance, if it is not to be another crowded, barren object: It needs an opening party ritual! On Tuesday, November 5th (Electron Day) the book release party will be held at a Creative Writing Class at Laney College. I will give free copies of my book, as a non-required text to my students, since the primary text is their writing—but if something comes up organically in class (either in writing or conversation) that reminds me of the book, we could talk about it.
In The Here There also needs a warning to the general reader: Read the books I write “about” first! If you can’t afford the books, perhaps, we could make an ad hoc little anthology that collects four or five pieces by the writers discussed sans my comment (which you could then read later if you want). At best, then, this poor little unfinished book is like notes to a syllabus (subject to change), to give beginning writers permission to seek out their own affinities beyond some ready-made reductive high-school common core curriculum or AI sense of the limits of what proper poetry is. Maybe it’s more like a script to a play that allows improvisation with friends in a reading discussion group that could be at least as fun as the more monologic form of the poetry reading with music breaks; roundtables, or like when Judy Juanita’s poetry reading in the Laney Library morphed to a Q and A and back to a poetry reading again, gently smashing rigid genres!
Although most of this book consists of reviews/essays written about books of American 21st century poetry, the essays on Emily Dickinson and Phillis Wheatley were occasioned by an Early American Literature course I taught. I included them because I feel that trying to understand the dominant 19th century American zeitgeist through these writers’ attempts to change it sheds light on these 21st century writers’ interventions into the current zeitgeist.
The third section takes a side trip into discussing poets who have worked at the intersection of politics and music, Gil Scott-Heron and David Berman. The essay on David Berman is the longest piece in the book. Though it includes a couple of close readings of his song lyrics near the end, this hybrid essay begins with an informational screed into the workings of one of the most powerful corporate lobbyists, Berman’s father, and a critique of a negative ad hominem review of David’s swan-song album. It includes lengthy excerpts from my personal correspondence with David, and is the most autobiographically confessional piece in the book, navigating some stages of deep grief (from anger to wonder) after David took his own life, to celebrate parts of David many of his fans prefer to de-emphasize, as well as how he helped me when homeless, and the love we have for each other.
Finally, there are dialogues with poet Daniel Nester, Martine Bellen and uncategorizable multi-media writer Adeena Karasick. These dialogues are the most recent pieces in this collection; it’s a genre whose interactive possibilities I’d like to explore further. Maybe just two of my essays here could turn some beginning writer (or skeptical curious veterans) on to the plenitude of 21st century poetry in ways no more partial than the canonicity of the blue and yellow Norton Modern or the light blue Poulin Anthology did, as gateway, for me, at 18, in the 80s.[2]
https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/In-The-Here-There.html
[1] Anne Boyer, Joanna Fuhrman, Adeena Karasick, Krysia Jopek, ko ko thett, Sandra Simonds, Danez Smith, Danielle Pafunda, Alissa Quart, Martine Bellen, Daniel Nester, Tureeda Mikell, Maw Shein Win, Delia Tramontina, Judy Juanita, Mary Dacorro, Brenda Hillman, Alli Warren, and maybe Gillian Conoley
[2] Note:
Many of these reviews were originally published in journals. I am especially grateful to Hannah Tawater, who regularly published these pieces in the online magazine Entropy. I felt I had a confidence-building context again, a platform that inspired me to continue for a decade. When Entropy ceased publication, and couldn’t afford to keep their old issues archived, Alissa Quart encouraged me to collect them into a book, and include a few essays on music to break up the flow.
Chris Stroffolino has published six
books of poetry, most of which are out of print, including Speculative
Primitive (2005), Stealer’s Wheel (1999), and Light as A Fetter
(1997). Most recently, Crisis Chronicles published Drinking from What I Once
Wore (2018). A book of prose reminiscences at the intersection of the
personal and cultural, Death of a Selfish Altruist, was published by
Iniquity Press in 2017. Radio Survivor.org published his history of the
corporate takeover of radio, Radio Orphan, in sequential form, in 2012.
He co-authored a study of Shakespeare’s 12th Night with David Rosenthal (IDG
Books, 2001). Spuyten Duyvil has also published an earlier collection of essays
on mostly contemporary poetry, Spin Cycle (2001), a prequel to this
book. He has released four albums of songs under his own name, including
Single-Sided Doubles (2009), Predator Drone (2011), The Griffith Park Sessions
(2014), and 12 Songs of Goodbye, and 1 Song of Hello. (2019). Recent poetry has
appeared in New American Writing, 14 Hills, Bennington Review, Volt, Konch,
Chiron Review, Big Hammer, and The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets
(Nomadic Press, 2023). He is currently seeking a publisher for Medi(t)ations,
his first full length book of new poetry in 20 years. He has taught Critical
Thinking, and, sometimes, Creative Writing, at Laney College in Oakland since
2008, where he lives in a closet with no heat but a piano in a hallway.
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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