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 Jan Beatty is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
My new book, Dragstripping, which was published in
September, 2024 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, begins with a floating
voice. This voice talks about violence against women, and it includes lines about
my birthmother’s attempt to abort me:
I was born in a steel mill
I was born in the violations of others
I was born blue
I was born blue
half-aborted by my mother’s hands
and a coat hanger
But, who cares?
It’s one small almost death, in the many deaths—
The women killed and never found:
the women killed in their own homes
then disposed of; the women killed by
boyfriends, husbands, partners, strangers:
buried in the dirt of this country—
The unknown bodies of women
There are many kinds of wars. The story that I was given, the story I received was that my birthmother tried to give herself an abortion with a coat hanger, but that she stopped—there was too much blood. I wanted to include that in my book, but could I? I survived, I wanted to write about violence against women—but how?
I’m 100% pro-choice—I’ve worked as a counselor in an abortion clinic. I wanted to point to the ongoing, epidemic violence against women, the wars against women that are surging, not diminishing. And, part of this obscene violence is the war against control over our own bodies.
In terms of the craft of the book, what is this floating voice? It’s the voice of the poem. It’s my voice. It’s a voice that rises from place, from a city, from particular violence, from the unknown. It’s that longing that can’t be named because bodies are missing. It’s the reason I included the line, “But, who cares?” after the half-abortion. There is the lost history of the personal, and there’s the larger tragedy of the countless women who are gone, lost, victims of violence.
I’m writing the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, rewriting this crime scene of the body in war—with the missing or murdered as her own investigator. The investigation extends to form that’s linguistically more adventurous, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech. These poems push against “restriction,” creating deep, colliding structures between compressed language and an urge to move, to spread out in terms of content.
On a visceral, foundational level, the culture’s unwillingness to complicate the idea of “woman” and all gender places an untenable burden, casting her into a restricted role that is impossible in its requirements. And unreal.
It’s not important “what really happened” in a poem---it never was. And yet, if you write about something that you have no first-hand experience with (in your body)—it may show up in the poem as off, shallow, or just ill-conceived.
We’ve all read or heard poems that don’t ring true to experience. That’s not to say they “didn’t happen.” It’s the spirit of truth that needs to live in the lines of a poem. I had a friend once who was writing drug poems. He had never taken street drugs, and he knew nothing of the ways of buying, selling, talking about drugs. That’s good news for him, but his poems sounded posed, fake, and it was very clear through his choice of language that he didn’t know his material. No amount of academic research would have given him the “feel” for these poems.
I was unsure about placing this floating voice at the beginning of Dragstripping. I was afraid that I was claiming too much territory. Was it my place to mourn, to call down the tragedy of brutalized, assaulted women? I’ve known violence, and even if I hadn’t—I’m a woman writer, I know the pain of that floating voice---like all women—the terror of assault. I included the lines of steel mills, abortion, the murdered and missing women as part mystery, part statement. This floating opens the door to the voices in the book/the voices of these women remembered and still moving through the air. Yes, it is my place. Yes, it’s my right to say it.
Here’s a poem from Dragstripping that speaks of violence and survival:
When Rape Was An Ocean,
she became larger in it
In the box apartment off the side road,
she said yes, one drink.
She doesn’t remember his face,
just the flat boulders on the sandbar,
man-made
for protection:
ocean water coming in/
water going out
Follow the line of shore with a string:
She was dropping down,
her body falling
Before the sky star splits, before the
water
rolls back into her—
cutting wires of light
cutting wires of light
The line of shore can’t be replicated,
the string
now gone, her body marked
How she reads water
in the moment of trauma/
there is cutting and there is light
These are her new directions
Don’t pretend you can’t see this
She swims headlong away
she wants to be ocean, wants
to find the sky
She wants to be sky
She swims headlong and larger
headlong and larger
larger
Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, was
published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024. Her memoir, American
Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The
Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, which won the Paterson
Prize. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security
prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed
creative writing, Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program. www.janbeatty.com
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Maw Shein Win's new full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous collections include 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 poetry in the MFA Program at USF and is a member of The Writers Grotto. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com