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 Jennifer Hasegawa are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading
Process Note by Jennifer Hasegawa, NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire (Omnidawn, April 2025)
I have an extraordinarily faulty memory.
Sometimes, I fantasize about having a photographic memory. Imagine all of the information I could memorize, process, and bend to my will. I’d become an astrophysicist, human rights lawyer, cryptographer, and poet—all in one body. Imagine all of the things I’ve forgotten. Imagine, instead, having a flawless reel of your life readily available for review at any moment. Yeah. That’s where the fantasy ends.
I used to have a pretty good memory. Then I did things in college that wrecked my brain for traditionally valuable memory skills, but which gave me an untraditional view of how reality is created.
My flawed memories come in the form of things that look like still photos or very short animated GIFs. They come at random moments. The same small library. Over and over.
Glow of molten rock
seeped between branches
to illuminate
a true name.
Such monomythical sounds
made sluggish blood
flow free again.
Who here
thinks they are smarter
than spirit?
Who here
is not related
to the volcano?
From “Tombstone Read Mama Cuz They Forgot Her Given Name”
The spark
Why do I remember THESE moments? Good, bad, and anywhere in between. I hypothesize that they appealed to my most primal nature. I decided to capture them all and see. That is how most of the poems in NAOMIE ANOMIE came about.
The process
From the very start, I found myself fighting with getting each memory out. I am deathly afraid of sentimentality in my poetry. In fact, I’d say that I work very hard to keep “feelings” out of it. And of course, what is this flip book of memories but a bunch of feelings like raw meat?
At the time, maybe mid-2021, I’d been hearing “aversion therapy” quite a bit as kind folks mentioned it as a way to coax me out of my apartment. At one point, I hadn’t left in months, afraid of contracting COVID-19 and giving it to someone else and killing them.
I used aversion therapy to write these memories and set the constraint that each one needed to start with “Feeling…” and I could deal with sentimentality later. That permission disguised as constraint, and vice versa, released everything.
As the Google Doc I used to accumulate the writing that turned into NAOMIE ANOMIE evolved, eventually this note sat at the top:
“Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” —Agnes Martin
Somehow, this quote from Martin further confronted my dubious aversion to feelings and guided me to where I wanted to go. It is not that I don’t want people to feel anything when reading my work. I don’t want to force-feed feelings.
For me, it’s the subtle feelings that ripple out from reading a poem. I love a poem that’s just on the verge of losing logical comprehension, and the way it can still evoke a subtle feeling in the reader. And that subtle feeling, whatever it is, is the poem’s true purpose for that reader.
A lot of my work as a poet is just doing stream-of-consciousness web searches. This is how I introduce randomness and surprise. One of these searches led me to *Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie* (*Suicide: A Study in Sociology*), a book by Émile Durkheim published in 1897.
Durkheim describes four types of suicide, one of which is anomic suicide. This led me to the word anomie, which was pivotal to figuring out the force driving this book.
Anomie describes a condition where social values, standards, and guidance break down, leaving people without clear direction and in a kind of normlessness. This is something I felt during the early days of the pandemic, happening around me and in myself. I still feel it now.
Durkheim also proposed that when these social constraints fail, human desires become unlimited and insatiable, resulting in a kind of “malady of the infinite.” What, me, pursue goals that are unattainable? Feel like I’m in a loop of unfulfilled longings? And they only intensify rather than find fulfillment?
The title of the book was going to be *Anomie*.
Starved
for the delicious nada.
Basking
in the luminous conceit
of gonads.
She drives fertility
like a founding father.
Witnesses the joy
of gonozooids
making a salad
of her future.
From “Does This Sexual Cannibalism Make Her Look Fat”
The sequence
One of the most challenging and exciting parts of the book-making process, for me, is sequencing the poems. The process is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, playing World of Warcraft, and solving a Rubik’s Cube. Does each piece fit into the next to tell an engaging story with an overarching theme that will mean something to a reader?
After wrestling with the sequence a bit, I discovered the book’s genre, which kind of solved the puzzle.
When you’ve provided
proof
of the invisible,
they’ll let you do
anything.
Aleluya
to the father of dark matter,
to the son of tenuous gases,
to the holy ghost
of the hot corona.
From “He Asked Her to Fax Sir Arthur C. Clarke, After S.B.”
The genre
As unbelievable as it is, despite my writing poems based on my terrible memory, I didn’t want to write a memoir. I was using the prompt solely to generate new work I could do SOMETHING with. But as I kept writing, it dawned on me that a memoir might be happening. All this, and I ended up doing something I didn’t want to do?
Hey, I’m no stranger to self-sabotage. I thought, but how about an anti-memoir? I did a search for the phrase. I was disappointed to find I hadn’t coined such a cool phrase! But I was also grateful to have something to work from:
“Marco Roth has a good definition for the anti-memoir: ‘Is it possible to write a memoir about how you mistook your own life,’ he asks, ‘about what you didn’t yet know or failed to see, and when you didn’t know it?’” —Yiyun Li, from The Best ‘Anti-Memoirs’ recommended by Yiyun Li
If this book is going to be an anti-memoir, perhaps the sequence was simply going to be chronological.
Comeback
L.A. Woman
Oozing from the tailpipe
of a Crown Victoria.
Police interceptor.
Red-lipped invader.
Driving down your freeways.
Careless and high
on binding intentions
into physical form.
Motel, honey, hoarder, madness.
From “He Claims the Transformer Is a Surveillance Camera”
The title
Now that I had made peace with this being some kind of experiment in anti-memoir, I needed to iterate on the title, *Anomie*.
I dated a guy decades ago. His pet name for me was Naomi. I think he created Naomi as a character I needed to become. I failed to become Naomi. Naomi became a kind of alter ego for me. The woman I could never become, no matter how hard I tried. A woman whose power was in her ability to not give a fuck.
I love anagrams, codes, and loops. When I realized that NAOMIE is an anagram of ANOMIE, I nearly lost my mind. And that is where NAOMIE ANOMIE came from.
The discovery
And just to share one last thing about the genre and my insistence that I not write a memoir. When I gave my final draft to Omnidawn, they came back to me with something along the lines of, “If this is a biography, why all of the first person?”
I was still in unconscious denial about this being a memoir, anti-memoir, biography, whatever, and many poems were still in first person.
Honestly, I used “biography” in the subtitle as a poetic choice, not a literal description. My knee-jerk reaction was to push back and explain, but I stopped myself. Had I learned nothing in this process? I talk about randomness and surprise, but am I a charlatan if I’m the only one allowed to initiate it? It’s sort of like the way you can’t tickle yourself.
Rusty Morrison at Omnidawn knows poetry better than anyone I know. She also intuits what I’m trying to do with my work better than anyone else.
I worked my way through the book, ensuring that everything was in third person. I think it made the book 100x more interesting. And the process of handing over my memories to NAOMIE, the woman I could never become, was cathartic.
“Is it possible to write a memoir about how you mistook your own life? About what you didn’t yet know or failed to see?”
Anti-memoir indeed.
A sesamoid is a bone
stuffed into a tendon.
You
don’t know
what
things are called
until
you break them.
Open sesame!
The satanic meeting
she went to
thinking it was
a book club.
From “Dear Acid Wash,”
Jennifer Hasegawa is poet and community archivist. She is a third-generation Japanese American, born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Her previous work, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and was longlisted for The Believer Book Award in Poetry.
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