Percussing The Thinking Jar, Maw Shein Win
Omnidawn Publishing, 2025
It’s said there are instruments–gongs, drums–whose voice, struck once each seven years, releases a cyclical surface of Time to tongue the Infinite. Maw Shein Win’s instrument, amalgam of L.A. post-punk rock drum-kit, El Cerrito citizenry, Burma, global eyes, curious ears and deep generosity, projects pulses of the mundane and the ethereal in overlapping polyrhythmic paradiddle-flamming syncopation that lovingly squeezes change out of the daily-received. In Percussing The Thinking Jar it seems there’s no Thing unturned: All is treasured while tossed, slip-sliding into a re-mix-ReNew:
Amethyst tadpoles, rumble strips, sacred airspace.
To be percussed: CPR’d, mouth-to-mouthed, air forced through its container till earthly matter breaks down, distilled to energy-essence. This volume appears, first glance, too long: 150 pages of poetry? Then, just as in the Pandemic birthed them, the poems’ disregard of clock-time strokes the reader’s anxiety into a homeopathic, shamanic Through-the-Looking-Glass. I kept thinking I’d tire, while page after page enticed . . . broadened . . . empowered . . .
What’s working right now?
It’s possible to be okay & not okay at the same time. I lost my sizzle reel in the void.
Emerald swans, cricket satchel, yodel odes.
Think you (want to?) know who/where/what
you are? “Reality”? Here, delightful and frightening crumbs
of sensation to perception to thought lead us like the child’s
boats in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Garden
of Verses brook till our feet are deep in silt, our hems soaked:
You look up at the sky. Ask questions. You see one eye. Or perhaps a kite. Must make decision. You have one minute. Time almost
up. An icecap melts. A spouse betrays. Buzzer goes off. Sun beams. You crack an egg. You marry an olive tree. Brightness arrives...
To be percussed: tested (for reflex), tapped (mined), played/performed (gamelan or orchestral symphony). The volume percussed here is the airspace of Lockdown Time. This book-length zen parfait is layered with seemingly oppositional senses of time – null, endless, urgent – as was the worldwide void we all sat in. These time scales are composed via language and its visual placement. Many poems are at least half-empty page, the white lavishly surrounding and floating within stanzas. This blank synergizes with sonic play and worded image in a simplified concrete poetry founded, perhaps, in Johannes Itten’s Elements of Form, or Agnes Martin’s (and Brian Teare’s) felt variations thereof. Admiring, I’m drawn to call out a few of the signatures from Win’s orchestration:
There are squarish stanzas titled “Log Thought”, musically and visually reminiscent of temple blocks. Each is cut equally of emptiness and lined letters, so full of hollow, and a dark-timbered, deeply resonant mystery. Hung below these, two-faced wind-chimes whirl quick, dissonant answers:
...cabinet, bite
...vein, machine
...drench, blanch
Elsewhere, Win’s signature of shock and obsession sudden
rumbles with quiet
ferocity like Elvin Jones soloing on the snare with
brushes:
...where should I donate my clothes, picture my mother alone in bed at the monastery, the abbess in her kuti sending out newsletters on compassion, soldiers gun down village in Myanmar, text a client two close-up photos of the scars on my abdomen which I meant to send to my doctor at Kaiser: a thin trail...
Repetitive titles, variations on repetitive shape and trope, echo the Covid Times’ benumbed rhythm, while urban-zoo caged soloists rattle a John Cage-Charles Ives-wise question: aren’t we all collabora- tors?
The child who lives upstairs
runs. Sometimes she falls. She rarely cries. She doesn’t
stop. I lie in bed. Tears roll into ears.
and,
Cutie Thunderstorm upstairs annoys and amuses
us.
while,
We construct 25-minute sessions....my
slideshow of falling
architecture...Review feedback in third nightmare...divvy up light...
Such barrages of singularities, their I-blinks of image-thought, touch the Dalai Lama’s definition (in his The Art of Happiness) of consciousness: Now Now Now Now, within a field of infinite Void . . .
Do you hear me? I am
silent.
As Win’s accuracy of rhythm and rhyme establishes time/space she infuses it with visual acuity. Shapes shift, depicting a morphology of consciousness evolving like the discovery of physics: sliced Thought, the slivers spliced, exponentiate as, increasingly delicate and diaphanous, language spins a silken consciousness: Light-filled, absorbent and radiant. Watch tectonic geography metastasize:
Log Thought
stuck in the thicket, remote country
metamorphic coffins...
dissolve in a descant of circles,
...I miss the palm pinwheel move, sleeping wolf spiders yawn explosions...
and culminate in an act –domestic? political? spiritual?– of decisive volition:
...I
swipe away the
muck...
as consciousness blooms:
...surcease, fronds
As in Lewis Carroll’s reality show, sorrow shades the tea party, and flimsiness of the sacred body haunts:
Pain coiled within skull.
and
Apparition of snapped bone trees.
and
Children play air guitar on trains for coins.
and
when you see it disappear
everything is phenomena : insect decline no matter how pleasant
things are they do not last
What saves us is music. As in Stein’s Tender Buttons and Zukofsky’s 100 Flowers, the familiar and the strange wed here with succulent sound:
Smaze, foke, flair.
and
long jaw minnows
swim a language
A conjoined
twin of disaster, this celebratory language:
I conspired with the sun today. Tom-tom, timpani, celesta.
...Fake meat pork chops & white rice. The Earth’s hottest years on record.
...The universal is personified.
A die-for cover plus ink drawings by Mark Dutcher, and poems translated by Kenneth Wong into Burmese–a script whose rounded geometry reads to my ignorant eye as outer-space jewelry–riff with Win’s surrealist/comic use of collage. The sureness of her text’s strokes recalls classical Asian landscapes of inky pigment flowing on a soaked page, while their sum weaves a meditative fabric glinting All-Mind, reminiscent of works by Arthur Sze and Mei Mei Berssenbrugge,
What do you notice when I say this? Silence is my companion.
but with her own charming,
cheeky snazz:
dizzy blister, sunny buckets, timber knocks uncle’s teeth, blaze swells
I keep my distance from the cult I have a hidden life
I disco then distill
Poet and visual artist, C Pirloul-Broshi has one foot rooted in California’s Bay Area Arts scene: ritual, performance, environmental installation and synesthetic embodiment practices develop the forms, that invite words, that become poems . . .
. . . with the other foot firmly planted in 40 years’ study and practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu (a Japanese hands-on art of harmonizing the energetic ecosystem within the body, which she’s taught internationally since 2001).
Her doubleheader chapbook, 7 Cervicals / Riga Pine is available from Thixotropic Press (of which C is a founding editor). Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing; Interim Poetics (print and online); Lana Turner; Volt; Portland Review; The Santa Fe Telepoem Project and elsewhere.
Some of her previously published work can be read or heard at www.cpirloul.net.
C gratefully acknowledges the indigenous peoples, present day Pueblo Nations who, for time immemorial, have cared for the land where she lives, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
