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 David Koehn is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
https://open.spotify.com/track/4GUpKRJDkQC2KR2oPakQNB?si=6b91dca0736448ea
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Responsibility
is to oneself; and the highest form it is
irresponsibility to oneself
which is to say the calm
acceptance of whatever
responsibility to others and things
comes a-long
Cage, “Lecture on Something”
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More pastiche than poetry, Sur delves into the essence of connection and the perpetual in relation to others and the natural world. The book tries to paint a landscape where wilderness intertwines with the complexities of human emotions and, usually, ill-fitting relationships. For me, the poems were designed to invite readers on a reflective journey into the animated world while, in duality, being a part of and apart from it.
The poems willfully wander and confront the weight of choice with discomfort. Not sure what the word austerity has to do with anything but it has shown up here on the kitchen counter like an ant, the first one of winter. Throughout, I snapshot imagery – a snake drinking from a stream, a mountain god – and blend such with, what feels to me, like an intense landscape of my tumult, exploring themes of wildness – whatever that means – and an inevitable unraveling of secrets.
If the poems have done their work, they will juxtapose the mundane with the profound, blending everyday actions and observing the natural world with, what I hope, is unexpected introspection. The work looked to capture the essence of internal conflict, the struggles with imperfection, identity, and the impact one has on others, all set against a backdrop of a natural world in flux.
I wanted to journey through the wilds of emotion in self and in the natural world. It’s a book for those who find solace in the patterns of a forest, in the rhythms of the ocean, and in the shadows of the words that hang in the air between people. This is a book that wants to resonate with the unspoken edges of self, a tribute to songbirds, meadow grasses, and wildflowers, to the parts of ourselves that refuse to be tamed or defined. This is a book for folks who want a magic carpet ride in geologic time.
—
What, asks Cage, is more angry than the flash of lightning and sound of thunder? The attitude is, finally, one of affirmation. An affirmation of life…That it is so because it doesn’t constitute an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation but is simply a way of waking up to the very life you’re living, which is so excellent once one lets it act of its own accord.
Justice, “Silence and the Open Field”
Elliston_Donald_Justice_02-28-67 (1).mp3
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II.
Typing Sur’s poems on my Corona slowed me down. I’m a poor typist to begin with so adding into my process the 1940 hammer and hope keystrokes of a Corona Standard created the kind of delay I was looking for between word imagined and word, letter-by-letter, rendered; the advent of the next word, held in suspension, kaleidoscopic suspension actually, until it could be plucked from the ether and as the next word materialized letter by steel-armed letter – ribbon-inked into the paper.
Living and working and breathing technology all day, every day allowed me to mature processes of writing poems where my body - my full sensible body - was absent in their construction. The speed at which a computer lets me type, retype, correct, and render sentences and paragraphs, let alone any given letter, is so quantum that my mind holds no space during the injection of consciousness into the rendering. What a boon it has been.
I did not want to make Sur that way. The 1940 Corona–the imprint of a single letter in any given word–this was the depth of feel I wanted in my body let alone in my process.
—
It’s like mishearing. Often when I write something literal and straightforward, I will alter it so that it is a little blurred, as if you somehow misread or misheard the line. This idea comes from several sources–not only Oulipo but also Kamau Brathwaite, NourbeSe Philip, and even Freud’s analysis of the verbal error, the slip of the tongue that we call a Freudian slip. So, our tendency for error or misunderstanding is in contrast to the confident prediction that we are on our way to understanding everything.
Mullen, “From A to Z”
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III.
Some years ago, at Esalen, I lugged my Corona into the barely above-average room I’d get as a personal retreat and began to type. The trails of Big Sur and the skies over the coast and the ocean in everything kept my lower self with sensory study and allowed some other self to contemplate the secrets of my nature, my beloveds, and the monstrousness of my affections.
Most of the book was composed in these days-long Corona lagged ink set bursts. All of these poems, from the outset, started as pantoums. Almost all these pantoums shed their clothing on the way to the dance. A few managed to look akin to the soul of the form. What never felt lost was that inner guitar, that tuning, coiling, and strumming of the work underneath the surface of the surface.
Years later, the poems post-triage either died or seemed to have survived their hospice and made their way into the collection. The collection needed a reboot and so I hauled the Corona back off to Esalen, and I spent another coast-soaked half-naked sojourn pounding out poems with the heavy strokes of the ill-quieted keys. Ill-quieted because I’m sure each time I sat down, my clacking down those stairs irritated the nearby karmic lovers, their soft-petaled lovemaking all but disrupted. Maybe I overestimate my sound-making and underestimate their ardor. Maybe their ardor is really my ardor.
—
“On one day, in San Carlos at Roman’s house in La Rancheria, some of the old Indian women got drunk, in a little room there were Estefana, Teodocia, Mrs. Post, Loreta, Maria de la Cruz (Cleotilda’s mother), Loreta, etc.; while the people, in general, were dancing country dances in the ramada. The old women sang, drunken. These old women were all a little drunk, and some started to dance some, Carmelo danced a little, and Juana Barrera was present, and when she heard the song, she said that it resembled much what she heard in San Buenaventura, and then she herself danced and sang a little.
This was the same general dance in the
ramada that the women wanted to take off Ponciano Manjarez’s pants and that
they ripped open a pillow and threw it over Ponciano’s head while he was
dancing with them, and their hands wandered, tempting his genitals (putting
their hands on his penis). Ponciano thereupon said to my Aunt Magdelana: You do
not get this, comadre, it’s that I’m doing you a favor, comadre (he did not
want his comadre Magdalena Joe Hitch’s [wife]). (75:685B)”
Isabel Meadows, Esselen, Ethnologist, as quoted in MIRANDA, D. A., &
MAKERETI, T. (2016). "THEY WERE TOUGH, THOSE OLD WOMEN BEFORE US":
THE POWER OF GOSSIP IN ISABEL MEADOWS'S NARRATIVES. Biography, 39(3), 373-401.
https://doi.org/26405110
—
IV.
Linda is the mother of my youngest son, Bay. Over the years of Corona, I typed this book on my Corona. In these same years, I was lucky enough to have the attention of my frequent collaborator, Rebecca. Rebecca is also the name of my father’s wife, who died last year. Death is always on the prowl. Diana, the mother of my older kids, Anna and Andrew, died a few months before that. Diana died from post-covid complications. She was 50. Send My Love to Linda is a song by Jimi Hendrix. Michelle is the middle name of my daughter Anna. Anna was my mother’s middle name. Anna is Linda’s middle name. Michelle was also my cousin - she died young from MS/MD. My sister, Deb, is a doctor, her middle name is Anna. Michelle is also a Beatles love song. Rebecca and I erased Doyle’s Sign of the Four, and the residual text is a map of our minds in relation to each other, from this we failed to publish and then managed to publish intervals of. We also berry-picked similes from Melville’s Moby Dick, and Rebecca handmade, As a Signal Magnification of the General Miracle. Linda, beautiful in Spanish. So all this made perfect sense, erased mysteries, Corona conflations, people (Bay, Rebecca, Diana, Anna, Michelle, Andrew, and Linda) and the sea, and Sur.
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Perhaps poetry itself can be defined as those literary instances of language in which the nonquantifiable aspects of its information overshadow the quantifiable.
In this light, Michel Serres offers a particularly useful perspective. He bases his definition of noise on its etymology; the word shares a common root with “nautical” and “navy,” associations that reveal its original relationship to the sea, and thus connect noise with ideas of endless motion and unorganized energy, with the “white noise” that is the background sound of the sea and for which Serres is the basis of being. It is the background against which any information figures and out of which any information emerges. So rather than constituting an extra element that invades information, here noise is the default state of all information, that out of which information organizes itself or is organized.
Swensen, Noise That Stays Noise
V.
Sur contains a wide range of flora, fauna, and geological features. I
don’t know how many creatures, 30? –big and small, make trail in here; 54
plants and wildflowers litter the landscape; even 5 types of soil get named by
tongue or touch. One might think such a short book of poems with so much
landscape would be free of humans, but we manage a dusting of a dozen or so
people beloved, famous, and infamous throughout.
Animals (real and otherwise)
1. Catfish
2. Otters
3. Steller’s Jay
4. Cormorants
5. Ravens
6. Hummingbird
7. Beetle
8. Horseflies
9. Deer
10. Coyote
11. Black bear
12. Quail
13. Brewer’s blackbirds
14. Wild turkeys
15. Wild boar
16. Minotaur (mythical)
17. Mosquitoes
18. Damselflies
19. House wren
20. Moths
21. Monarchs (butterflies)
22. Ants
23. Wasps
24. Crickets
25. Grasshoppers
26. Great blue heron
27. Wild rabbits
28. Wolf hound (dog)
29. Carp
30. Turtle
Plants and Wildflowers
1. Ivy geranium
2. Lemon tree
3. Pumpkin
4. Concord grapes
5. Radishes
6. Zucchini
7. Tumbleweed
8. Goosefoot
9. Common yarrow
10. Bromage
11. Nasturtiums
12. Rosemary
13. Cosmos
14. Pampas grass
15. Tobacco plant
16. Angel’s Trumpet
17. Sequoia
18. Morning Glories
19. Eucalyptus
20. Bird of paradise
21. Firecracker plant
22. Flowering chives
23. Leadwort
24. Wild oat
25. Yellow rocket
26. Sedge
27. Manzanita berry
28. Wild cherry
29. Swallows
30. Wildflowers
31. Sedges
32. Grasses
33. Blue-bead lily
34. Red larkspur
35. Ohia Tree
36. Blue-eyed grass
37. Poison oak
38. Himalayan blackberry
39. California poppy
40. Olive
41. Garlic
42. Cherry tree
43. Strawberry fields
44. Cottonwood
45. Common geranium
46. Pine
47. Mint
48. Calendula
49. Dragonflies
50. Bluebottles
51. Snapdragons
52. Sow thistle (mentioned in context of bacon fat smell)
53. Fescue grass
54. Monkeyflower
Geological Features
1. Delta (mentioned in various contexts)
2. Rendzina, alluvial, peaty, loamy soils
3. Cryoconite holes (implied by "cryo")
4. Clay soils
5.
Basalt tremens
A Few of the People
1. Isabel Meadows
2. Linda
3. Anthony Bourdain
4. Muir
5. Nat
6. Mel Brooks, referenced in relation to "History of the World Part 1."
7. Reyna and Lulu
8. Bay
9. Anna
10. Jim
11. Gillian
12. Michelle
13. Andrew
14. Astrid
15. Rebecca
16. Benicio Del Toro
&
17. Rutger Hauer
—
…bluff and range is a fascinating place of intersections, of meeting places, of edges. For us–the visitors, the guests–the smell of the sea seems to blend with the smell of the flowers, the rolling of the water seems to merge with the windblown rippling of the blossoms, and something deep in us stirs in response.”
Blackwell,
Wildflowers of California
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YI.
Sur,
a river. Sur homonymic deprecation to the he who walks through me. We explore the mysteries of personal and
collective memory, using nature and the environment as motifs. The title is
taken from the French word "Sur," which means "on." The
Little and Big Sur rivers in and around the Ventana Wilderness of Big Sur,
California, intersect to form this "on."
The
poems in the collection reflect on the connections between the natural world of
Big Sur and northern California and the complexities of human emotions and
relationships – as if mystery and a kind of terror were underlying spaces and
people.
I
engage with spirits of wonder, contemplation, self-implication, and
critique. Here, Love, capital L, which I
don’t believe in, which at its core, seems to be an act of secrecy and
avoidance. Boundary, boundaries, trespassing, I delight in trespass.The book
values introspection and naturalism as the beautiful but diabolical exploration
of humans in relationship. We are slightly more bacteria than blood. The human body has roughly 10-20% more
microbial cells in our gut and on our skin than we have human cells in our
body
I wanted to consider the nuanced and often ambiguous nature of our connections to the world around us and to each other, suggesting a contemplative engagement with the beauty and brutality inherent in these interactions.
I
am always on trail here, and mention trails, hiking experiences, and the
emotional and physical landscapes of Big Sur. The trails weave experience into
the broader themes of the collection, using walking as a backdrop.
Hiking, walking and tending the wild, is not romantic, but is reflective. We are not just part of the physical space of Big Sur but also, through the exploration of self and the natural world, seeking and failing to fully grasp a bigger "on."
—
While
the mountains themselves may be relative toddlers, many of the rocks bear
ancient origins, tens of millions of years old. The convoluted topography means
that rock types formed under radically different conditions lie confusingly
side by side. Ancient mountain ranges, seafloors, stream sediments, and molten
rock form a jumbled matrix that continues to baffle geologists.
…
Two massive chunks of Earth’s crust, the Nacimiento and Salinian blocks were ripped from their moorings along the North American plate and pushed northward along the numerous major faults associated with the San Andreas system. These faults generally run northwest-southeast, parallelling the coastline and general trend of the coastal mountains. A prime example is the Sur-Nacimiento which separates the Salinian and Nacimiento blocks, relieving pressure along the San Andreas Fault. As the tectonic plates collided, compressed, and fractured along these major fault lines, the land buckled in on itself like folds in a loose carpet, giving rise to the peaks, ridges, and forges of the Sant Lucia Range.
Stream courses mark many of these indiscernible faults. The lower Big Sur River from the gorge to Andrew Molera State Park offers startling proof of how fault movement can alter a watercourse.
Heid, Hiking & Backpacking Big Sur
VII.
Meadows meadow.
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“What I have said in my poems I am sure I
could not otherwise have said. Indeed I might have said too much. A poem is
built on silences as well as on sounds. And it imposes a silence audible as a
laugh, a sigh, a groan.”
Hayden, “How it Strikes a Contemporary”
David Koehn is
the author of four books, Sur, Compendium, Scatterplot,
and Twine, which won the May Sarton Poetry Prize. Koehn
is also the author or co-author of three chapbooks, intervals of (with
Rebecca Resinski), Tunic (translations of Catullus), and Coil,
which won the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest. Koehn has taught "Prosody
& Revision"(based on Compendium) online since 2014
and "Breaking the Bowl: Organic Forms" since 2022. Koehn's writing
has appeared in several literary magazines, including The Rumpus, McSweeney's Kenyon
Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina
Quarterly, Diagram, Greensboro Review, North
American Review, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzyva, and Prairie
Schooner.
me: davidkoehn.com
UCP: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/K/D/au43347565.html
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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