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 Nathan Spoon is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.
While I gradually got better at both reading and writing, I’m certain I do both in very, well, divergent ways. This is to say I don’t do either as I am supposed to—and, by now, this feels exhilarating. I feel like I belong to the tradition of poetry. This tradition includes so many of us who have found ways in language that enrich and sustain ourselves and that, sometimes, enrich and sustain others.
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I also have a rare and life-threatening autoimmune illness. This means my body has been in constant pain and fatigue for many years. I was diagnosed and began treatment earlier this year. While my illness is in remission now and my pain and fatigue have lessened, there is no cure for my condition. It will probably always be waiting to progress again, if it can, in terrifying ways.
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Due to these factors of neurodivergence, chronic illness and disability, the poems in this collection are certainly poems of neurodivergent and disability poetics. However, ecopoetics, documentary poetics (if we count persona poetry and poetry of witness as belonging under the umbrella), and spirituality, are also prevalent in this collection, and in my poetry in general.
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Key approaches in my poems involve spontaneity, provisionality, and amateurishness (like that observed in the paintings of Sengai Gibon or Bill Traylor).
Regarding the first, my poems are written in a single draft. Usually, a feeling of spontaneity in a poem is achieved because of protracted effort on the part of the poet. But my own poems are more like the routine of a gymnast or works of Zen calligraphy or painting.
Next, due to my single-draft approach, I regularly put things in poems that I’m not entirely sure about. Such things are the best I can do in the moment, and I’ll even have the thought, Maybe I can come up with something better later? But then, I never manage to. So, due to my failure to circle back later and find something better, the provisional thing stands as a permanent part of the poem.
Finally, presenting things in an off-the-cuff manner, because they are in fact being done off-the-cuff, is a bit unexpected. Most poets will be unwilling to seemingly throw away their writing careers by making poems in this way. Most of us would not want to be seen as beginners, as amateurs. We want, instead, to be seen as capable, perhaps even masterful.
Possibly due to being self-taught (independent learning is common in autistic culture), I have strong feelings about this. I love venturing into new territory. I love beginning. I love not knowing. In fact, when I sit down to write a poem, while I occasionally do have an idea, I’d rather not know what the poem might be. I write because I have a feeling that a poem is waiting, and I am always curious to find out what will emerge.
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Another thing worth mentioning, although it’s really the opposite of divergent, is that my poems are very much of the current episteme. This means that they are expressive of a metamodern sensibility for all the ways they bring together qualities of literary modernism and postmodernism: irony and earnestness, naivety and cunning, tenderness and toughness, etc. At least, I hope they do this. I also hope they make use of what Greg Dember has brilliantly described as “eleven metamodern methods in the arts.” In fact, I highly recommend Dember’s book, Say Hello to Metamodernism! Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity (Exact Rush Publishing, 2024). In its pages we learn all about how creators have increasingly been making art since the beginning of this century.
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The remainder of this note will cover the above five main themes, suggesting related poems along the way, before concluding with a passage on how I arrived at the book’s organization.
Neurodivergence
Neurodivergent is a term for how some people process the language and the world
differently. Of course, poetry is usually made from language, so being both
autistic and ADHD (AuDHD as some in the neurodivergent community say) has
considerable bearing on my poems, probably more than I know. Oh, and my
dyslexia, too.
As an easy example related to being autistic, my poem “Be Monster” reflects on a situation of bullying. Many people think of bullying as something involving children and teens. The idea is that when someone grows up, they will have learned better than to resort to bullying. If only this were true. Many autistic people experience bullying into their adult lives. The instance touched on in this poem occurred when I was an adult. Basically, I have loved books since childhood. I love them so much I am rarely out and about without a book or two in hand. I take them to work, the grocery store, the doctor’s office, while getting the car serviced, etc. At the time I was working in a bookstore, and a manager asked me the question included in the poem. For dramatic effect, I call the behavior of this person monster.
While this poem addresses a difficulty, it is also a poem, I hope, of autistic cunning and resilience. And the core idea is relevant for allistic (non-autistic) people—namely that we are each responsible as human beings to be as aware as we can be of our own capacity to hurt and harm. We are all capable of being monster, and the more we realize this, the less likely we may be of letting the monster within us out.
As with content, neurodivergent has bearing on the structure of poems. I’ve already mention writing poems in a single draft and adding things in provisionally so I can move on to what comes next. I’m certain this is due to being ADHD. In my poem “All Our Spoons at Once” I write “hey you writing you must be a writer you must b-,” effectively cutting off the sentence and the word (albeit, while also completing the word) before moving into the next section of the poem that is a mini monologue about snakes. Going out from this example, there are plenty of poems in this collection that make sudden shifts in what is being said from one sentence to the next, although I always hope I am doing this in ways that still allows non-neurodivergent readers to feel invited to continue reading and reflecting on a given poem.
Dyslexia is another thing that shows in these poems, if not as overtly as it might show in a poem by, say, E.E. Cummings (who was posthumously assessed in a joint paper by scholar J. Alison Rosenblitt and clinician Linda S. Siegel as mildly to moderately dyslexic). While Cummings, for example, has words and phrases of the poem jumping through each other in “Grasshopper,” I feel dyslexia shows up in my own poems as big-picture point of view and overtly visual thinking. As more than one reader of my poems has put it, “Your images and colors are striking.”
Disability (Chronic Illness)
In addition to neurodivergence, chronic illness figures in this collection. In contrast with other aspects, I feel it shows both least and most overtly.
While I don’t mention the constant physical pain I was in while writing these poems, they are markedly fabulist. I attribute this to a large degree to my practice of using imagination to take breaks, by briefly detaching from pain, which is mental and psychological as much as physical. My poems often overtly break away by holding hope through imagining a better future. Indirectly, entering the realm of creative imagination (what the philosopher Ibn 'Arabi called the barzakh—a place that divides and connects, like the em dashes in the poems of Emily Dickinson, or this process note) and this kind of creative leave-taking can give any of us perspective on life and be sustaining—even transformative.
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Adjacently, I spent formative years of childhood living in the Ozarks. This region is known for its unique storytelling—that includes “tellin’ tall tales,” “sawin’ off a whopper,” “spinnin’ a windy.” In the past, windy gatherings would sometime draw hundreds and last for days. The main rule for attendees was, when your turn came to speak, you could not tell the truth. Hilariously, politicians would sometimes drop by for the crowd and get booed off stage if they tried to talk about issues.
This kind of storytelling was everywhere in the Ozarks. Many of the tales were collected by a scholar named Vance Randolf into books like We Always Lie to Strangers (Columbia University Press, 1951) and other volumes. In the Introduction to this book (outsiders were a favorite audience for whoppers), Randolf mentions a man who stopped by to drop off some bass. The man chatted a bit and as he was leaving told Randolph, “I catched ‘em with my bare hands.” When Randolph took the bass inside and removed the paper used to wrap them, he saw they each had bullet holes in them. The reason this was a classic Ozark tall tale is that it was illegal at the time to shoot fish—but noodling them was also illegal. So, this man was claiming he did the other illegal thing to the illegal thing he had obviously done.
This outrageous approach to narration makes its way into many poems in this collection. While they may tickle the poetic sensibility more often than the funny bone, the poems do sometimes elicit laughter.
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“Beauty and Shadow,” “Cabinet of Wonders” and “Wrapped around Eleanor” are great examples of fabulist flights of imagination. Poems like “Have a Great Day” and “The Scholars,” both written during trip to present for a conference at Yale University, are examples of the way the spirit of Ozark tall tales shows up in my poems.
Ecology
Nature looms large in these poems and in my poetry in general. Of course, ecology is not limited to nature. There are countless ecologies, including what we might call neuro-ecologies. Time in nature often helps me feel restored and connected. As a result, both nature and human nature, more than anything else, send me toward writing a poem. Regarding these, “Behind a Home,” “Early Saturday Evening” “Holding a Pinecone,” and “To January” are poems that braid together reflections on both, specifically in terms of marriage.
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Also, and in sharp contrast with close relationship, “Rolling with the Schadenfreude” is a poem that, like “Be Monster,” was inspired by the underbelly of human nature. It is a kind of banishment poem, in which the narrator seeks to exorcise a toxic spirit. In the closing lines, sandhill cranes arrive to enact imaginary, yet severe, judgement on the addressee.
Documentation
“The Deer in Late November” is probably an example of ecopoetry, yes, but even more so of documentary poetics, as it is situated in the land Jamie (my spouse) and I live on, and accounts for the impact that a dying cedar tree our neighbors had taken down had on a family of deer living in the area. The deer had to adapt to the change, as did the owls and other birds—not mentioned in the poem—that regularly visited its boughs. Also not mentioned in the poem, Jamie and I had to adapt, as the big tree sheltered one end of our home from heat in the summer and wind. Shortly after, wind took down the Bradford pear tree that had grown up beside the cedar. We felt lucky that the wind didn’t topple the tree into the bedroom end of our home as we slept. My own most cherished memories are of snow on this big old cedar tree. It was magical.
“The Genie Speaks” is persona by way of dramatic monologue. The genie speaks and, as the monologue proceeds, begins to sound increasingly like he is talking about poetry—in a poem written by a poet. This is also metamodern for the ways persona that a modernist poet like Loren Niedecker made use of is combined with the kind of ironies found in the poems of a postmodernist poet like John Ashbery. As a result, the poem is simultaneously naïve and ironic. I hope it raises this question for a reader: “Am I meant to take this content to heart or not?” To which I say, “If you know you know.”
Spirituality
While I mostly take in these poems what Greg Dember calls a “spiritual but not religious” approach, I often feel I have lived several lives at once for having connections to practitioners and teachers and teachings from several contemplative traditions including: Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Christianity, Kashmir Shaivism, Sufism, Tantra (the proper kind), Taoism, and more. I’ve also studied the Enneads of Plotinus and spent a year during my 20s only writing haiku (this path is called haikai—the way of haiku).
Taking only this last path as example, writing haiku helped me for the way this practice cherishes the pause. As Clark Strand explains in his marvelous book Seeds from a Birch Tree, the pause is like two stones, one bigger and one smaller, arranged near each other in a Zen garden. Considering how a haiku is a seasonal poem, of seventeen syllables balanced on a pause, this pause is very much like the barzakh of Ibn 'Arabi. While a haiku can look to anybody unaware of these three core aspects to be merely an odd sort of poem, it is anything but. The pause invites a rich liminal space into each haiku that, despite the brevity, allows for endless exploration and expression.
For example, if I were to
write “wrapped around my toe / like the skin of an onion—” this would feel
incomplete. And if I were to write “a wet autumn leaf” this, too, would feel
incomplete. But, if I put them together by using the pause (in this case a soft
one), there is something that feels expansive:
wrapped around my toe
like the skin of an onion—
a wet autumn leaf
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A few poems expressive of spirituality include “Getting a Vibe” and “The Question”—both of which do make overt mentions of religious things, while poems that make use of liminal pauses include “Forever Tympanum” (that addresses Nicolas Flamel at its end)—along with “The Susquehanna by Moonlight” and “Waiting by the Door.”
Organization
In conclusion, the organization of the book is simple: all 100 poems are presented alphabetical by title and without any sections.
The inception of this book began with a chance meeting I and my autistic friend, Angela Weddle, had on a San Antonio sidewalk, not far from where my longest poetry friend, Naomi Shihab Nye lives, with K Iver and Kaitlin Rizzo. Initially, Angela, a San Antonian, was giving directions to K and Kaitlin—and soon we were deep in conversation. Afterwards, as we were all there for that year’s AWP, we kept crossing paths and hanging out and talking more. At one point in a conversation with K—a beautiful poet and human—they said something that got me thinking I could call the collection I’d been pondering Thicket.
This thought stuck and I put a shorter collection together that was divided into sections as usual. Of course, shorter, more manageable books are currently in. Nonetheless, while coyly submitting a few manuscript versions, I kept tinkering and adding more poems. (When I’m writing, I write a lot.) I eventually had more than 90 poems gathered. Then, after changing to the current title and discarding the idea of sections, I had the thought to use the current alphabetical arrangement (which seemed to support the new title) before submitting one more time, by sending the whole glob of a manuscript off for the Propel Poetry Series.
After hearing back from the editors at Nine Mile Books (and due to a loss at the press that led to delays), I had a few years to tinker more. Still, I did nothing with the manuscript except remove one poem and add a few others to arrive at 100 poems—because why not?
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I have learned much and been pleased with responses to my poems so far. It has been heart-warming to travel in recent years to give readings and talk with students. It meant a lot to hear from a young poet that she and her bestie were reading and discussing my poems. I also loved learning I was invited to one university because students had voted for who they wanted to visit. I hope this collection, that gathers many of the poems scattered across the pages of various magazines, journals and anthologies, will be of interest.
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities. Author of The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded (Nine Mile Books, 2025), his poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community and Friends, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. He is editor of Queerly.
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Maw Shein Win's latest
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 and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has
recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins,
The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural
poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime
Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts
and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone.
She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in
the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn
Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor,
Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
