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 by Matt Daly is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
My most recent book The Invisible World (Unsolicited Press, 2024) began as a series of call-and-response experiments with the writings of Cotton Mather. I have an indirect ancestral connection to Mather which I felt I needed to address. I had questions about how lineage and responsibility (culpability?) interact. How does a person face and live otherwise from a problematic ancestry? Questions that I asked but didn’t engage with for many years. When I did get going on a response, it made sense to me to begin with Mather’s writing as a way of trying to engage in a conversation. The first text I found of Mather’s was titled, in part, The Wonders of the Invisible World. I loved that title, but not the writings it housed. Much of Mather’s preoccupation was to instruct readers on how to identify witches and others in cahoots with Satan and then what terrible things to do about them. His logic and rhetoric, his doublespeak and fear mongering, felt and currently feel alarmingly familiar.
I had thought that my poetic responses would focus on gender and race, class and power and the misuse of power. To my surprise, the poems that emerged all gravitated toward intimate relationships with people in the wild places I grew up in or near. An undercurrent in Mather’s writing defined wilderness as the habitat for evil. In my life the wild has been a place of friendship, attraction, solace and whatever passes for good. What to do with this divergence? I kept writing.
What follows is an early draft of one response. My approach was to read a passage from Mather and then to just write and follow whatever arrived. In this case, Mather recounts a story from a witch trial.
Stand-alone draft of “The Wonder is Land: Wildfire”
“Moreover, one using a Pipe of Tobacco for the Cure of the Beast, a blew Flame issued out of her, took hold of her Hair, and not only Spread and Burnt on her, but it also flew upwards towards the Roof of the Barn, and had like to have set the Barn on Fire.”
--
Cotton Mather, “A Modern Instance of Witches Discovered and Condemned, in a
Trial, before that Celebrated Judge, Sir. Matthew Hale.” The TRIAL of ELIZABETH
HOW, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer, Held by Adjournment at Salem, June, 30.
1692
A Discourse: ON The Wonders of the Invisible World. Uttered (in part) on Aug. 4. 1692.
Of
course, in this way I have loved
a
place enough to call it homeground, I
have
wanted
to ember. I have stepped
over
snags still smoldering, branch knots
whispering
smoke, and I have listened
to
the crackle as if a language might
be
useful
for conflagration. I have thrilled
to see
a
run of canopy flames along a
ridgeline
and
been ashamed after hearing no homes
were
lost. What I have built is not so
much
a
life as it is a pile of sticks. Once,
I helped
my
son blow a spark into charred cloth,
placed
the ribbon of glow into dry grass
he
blew and blew until it caught. I
speak
and
go on speaking. Once, a friend
assumed
I would burn for not believing
and
I thought, here I am. What burns in
me
grows
faint and then it keeps on
burning.
The central caesurae in the poem, and in many of the early drafts of poems written for the collection, was chosen as a way of writing in an American English that did not use all of the structures and patterns of Mather’s English. I was struck when reading Mather how much his way of speaking and writing sounded similar to contemporary political speech and commentary. If one of my intents for this collection was to resist Mather, how might I call on structures of language unlike his. I decided to try some structural elements of Middle English wondering if that earlier period in the evolution of our language might have been earthier: a language of the tongue not “I think therefore I am.” I liked where the poems went so I followed them.
So, the manuscript came together with these formal constraints and with a lot of references to people and places and plants and animals. Although I really liked the riff on Middle English structures, the collection needed more variety. I decided to start grouping poems around central reference points and/or images, and very quickly three categories emerged: landforms and weathers, plants, and animals. If these were to be the three sections of the manuscript, I thought each might have its own internal structure. The plant section (now “Plant Apparitions”) maintained the caesurae which became a sort of visual root or tendril through what became one long poem with many plant images. The middle section, “Animal / Ancestor,” gravitated to shorter poems with right-justified, sentence-length lines. If Mather’s text clung to the left margin, what response came from the other side?
This all left the land, weather, and now the wildfire section. I decided to block-justify the section and to add caesurae throughout as a nod to the aggregate quality of the granite prevalent in my home mountain range. Something about a visual acknowledgement of the land made sense to me. “The Wonder Is Land” now looks like this.
Final excerpt from “The Wonder is Land”
Of
course, in this way I have loved a place enough to call it homeground,
I have wanted to ember. I have stepped over snags still
smoldering, branch knots whispering smoke, and I have listened to the crackle
as if a language might be useful for conflagration. I have thrilled to see a run of
canopy flames along a ridgeline and been ashamed after hearing no homes were
lost. What I have built is
not so much a life as it is a pile of sticks. Once I helped you blow a spark
into charred cloth, placed the ribbon of glow into dry grass that you blew and
blew until it caught. I speak
and go on speaking. Once, my
ancestor, you assumed that I would burn for not believing and I thought, here I
am. What burns in me grows
faint and then it heats back up.
What burns in me coats my life in soot. You might see ways the world chars
that I have not noticed and how, with or without us, it springs back up.
In this final version, you might notice another solution to a problem in the early drafts. At first, there were many companions running through the poems. Early readers became confused when trying to track all of these characters. Was one “he” that seemed like a friend, the same friend later in the poem or a son or father of someone else? I got bogged down trying to clarify individual companions, and in a “take that!” sort of moment, I changed every reference to a person and every pronoun, to “my ancestor” and to “you.” Although meant merely as a revision strategy to then polish later, this wholesale change unlocked something in the collection. If the word “ancestor” means a person who came before, then it made sense that all of the companions in a vibrant (and not at all devilish) wild world came before me, and I followed all of them instead of that troubling ancestor, Mather, who got the journey started.
What I loved and still love most about the process of composing this collection is this sense of following. Mather was trying to lead his readers somewhere he had already arrived. A cruel place. And meanwhile the wild world, through troubled, went on growing and roaming and smoldering, and it could be followed. Listening to the spontaneous emergence from within the wild world, following that, now feels like a response that does not need to resist Mather but keeps going and growing despite his and our attempts to confine it.
Matt Daly is the author of two poetry collections: The Invisible World (Unsolicited Press, 2024) and Between Here and Home (Unsolicited Press, 2019), and the chapbook, Red State (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). He is the recipient of a Neltje Blanchan Award for writing inspired by the natural world and a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council. Matt is the Executive Director of Jackson Hole Writers and co-founder of Write to Thrive, an enterprise that brings reflective and creative writing practices to individuals and professional groups to cultivate creativity and wellbeing. He lives in Wyoming.
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
