Kathleen McClung : Process Note #48 : Questions of Buoyancy

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 Kathleen McClung is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

I need quiet to write a poem. Deep quiet. Right now, though, as I write these sentences in the thick of election season, there is extraordinarily little quiet. So much campaigning! So much commentary! And so many of us are working terribly hard to Get Out the Vote by phone calling,  texting, door knocking, and—my preferred method—handwriting letters urging people to engage in the democratic process and cast their ballots. I’ve written over three hundred letters and postcards this season, but not much poetry.

I wrote nearly all the poems in Questions of Buoyancy between 2016-2020, when Donald Trump was in the White House, a dark time in our history. For the first few months of his term, the poetic form that provided most solace for me as a writer was the cento. I found comfort and courage crafting new poems by weaving together lines by poets I admire and love, including Dawn McGuire, Danusha Laméris, Robert Eastwood, Robert Aquinas McNally, and others. I also wrote “Glosa for Those Who Pretend” building from four lines by my friend Grace Marie Grafton in her poem, “Detour.” I wrapped myself in a shawl of words from others. That shawl helped keep me warm and keep me connected.

During that dark time, I also turned to historical figures, mainly women, for sustenance and inspiration. Two linked sestinas open my book. They’re based on an 1883 tragedy near Año Nuevo Island in northern California. Two lighthouse keepers drowned when their small boat capsized, leaving their wives stranded on the small island. As I read about the widows, I became fascinated by their resilience and resourcefulness and how they survived. Writing these two persona poems strengthened my resolve to not simply endure Trump but to protest and resist. “The Comrade,” a pantoum that follows “Whistle Keepers, 1883” and “Ida’s Song, 1945,” is another persona poem, written in the voice of Annie Sullivan, who was Helen Keller’s teacher and friend, and perhaps the person most responsible for raising Keller’s political consciousness and spurring her activism.

I structured my book by grouping poems into two sections, one more externally focused and the other more internally focused. Part I, “Weave them to a wider dream,” begins with these persona poems about historical women and then moves across time to incorporate a variety of other characters, including people I passed hurriedly on sidewalks in San Francisco during the 2020-21 Covid pandemic: a jazz combo setting up outside a café, a cluster of handsome young firemen, a teenager waiting to cross a street, a little boy chasing a pigeon. I added these pandemic poems in the course of revising, reorganizing, and re-titling my manuscript over a six-year period. I finished the first iteration in 2018 and ultimately signed a book contract with Longship Press in early 2024. In the meantime, I submitted to about thirty presses and contests, and honestly, there was a long period during the pandemic when I submitted nowhere. I had plenty of quiet for writing in 2020 and 2021. But publishing a book requires a complex blend of actions and attitudes far beyond quiet. Is it a stretch to suggest that trying to publish a poetry book is sort of like political campaigning for office? “PICK ME! PICK ME!” Clearly, the presidential election is weighing on me as I write this essay.

Part II of the book, “Mend quietly what’s torn,” turns inward and includes poems about my family, my health, and my partner’s health. The title poem of the collection, “Questions of Buoyancy,” meditates on a family legend about my father losing—and finding!—a contact lens on the bottom of a swimming pool. I struggled to come up with a title for this rare free verse poem—mostly I work in traditional forms such as sonnets and villanelles—so I’m grateful to my partner Tom McAninley for suggesting this apt title. Water shows up often in the book—oceans, lakes, pools, tears, rain (and drought). The challenge of staying afloat emotionally and spiritually also shows up in almost all the poems. I don’t use the word buoyancy very often in my day-to-day life, but I love it. And, damn, we need it.

Jim Daniels, Julie Kane, and Amy Miller, the brilliant and generous poets who wrote blurbs for the back cover, praise my use of form in Questions of Buoyancy. I am grateful for their kind words and want to say a bit here about why and how formal poems feel so good to write. Mainly, I find formal verse to be liberating and freeing, rather than stiff or confining. A form equips me to explore complicated emotional territory. I’ve said before that, for me, a sonnet is like a canoe. I get in and paddle. It takes me somewhere, helps me travel across sometimes-still, sometimes-choppy water. It’s not very big, but it feels sturdy. And I like how it curves at both ends.

The book ends with a sonnet that has lots and lots of water in fourteen lines. I wrote it on retreat during a huge rainstorm along the Sonoma County coast in California. I was staying by myself and, listening to the downpour, I started thinking about the forest inhabitants just beyond my sturdy cottage. To end this essay—and to keep moving through this strange election season—here’s one last question of buoyancy.

“Gualala Winter”

Keep dreaming of gray deer asleep in woods

as sheets of rain claim every living thing—

tailor bees, bracelet cones, chipmunks, hawk broods

high up in nests that sway but last. Each wing,

leaf, stem of fern—soaked through, wet to the core—

endures these January storms we track,

evade behind our screens, our twice-locked doors.

Nervous, we curse old roofs, new leaks. Come back.

Mend quietly what’s torn. Listen to wind.

Confuse it with Pacific surf close by,

cars crossing flooded roads. Gray deer may find

logs hollowed out, may curl inside, stay mostly dry

under mossed bark. Or not. Our sun will rise,

night storms will end. We animals open our eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kathleen McClung is the author of five poetry collections including her newest book, Questions of Buoyancy (Longship Press, 2024). Other titles include A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly and Almost the Rowboat. Winner of the Morton Marr, Maria W. Faust, and Rita Dove national poetry prizes, her work appears widely in literary journals and anthologies. In 2024 she was a finalist for San Francisco poet laureate, and from 2021-23 she served as guest editor for The MacGuffin, a Michigan-based literary journal. Kathleen is a faculty member in the English department at Skyline College, where she directed the annual Women on Writing conference for ten years. She also teaches for San Francisco State’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and leads private master classes for Bay Area writers. www.kathleenmcclung.com

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