The 'process note’ 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 Tim Xonnelly are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College. Thank you for reading.
I'd taken early retirement and cared for my dad for 13 months in Portland,
Oregon, following his below-the-knee amputation and strokes. Now what? In
December of 2019 I kept running into Sharon Coleman, who kept encouraging me to
take her poetry class at Berkeley City College. It'd been literal decades since
I'd taken a poetry class, and the idea appealed to me. This semester's focus
would be surrealism. As you may remember, on St. Patrick's Day eve of 2020 came
the shelter-in-place order. Surrealism moved into the mainstream. My poetry
class moved online.
The Pale Blue Luck
Of scab romance! Frozen statutes! Human juices!
Neon's second wind! The he she they we of it! Neon crawling to
the finish line! How blue the blue, how pale-
Noise of nothing, barely the hum of sidewalk breathing.
Languages not English, cyclone fence placid with ads. Another
brilliant cafe gone to premium student
housing. A somber yellow stretch in glass bashful bane yes
further pale the blue. Of steam and breath oh paper cup. Oh
crane construct blot the sky, dot the eye, blue the blue for
all despair to come. The cold
hard work of folding silences, fed shirts, powder boots.
Wet air. Barnabus bus with nobody in it.
This is a looser poem than I might ever publish, but it's true to my 2020 experience: commas and exclamation marks, the day chugging to a start with both dawn's hopeful light and those lights that brought us through the night ("neon's second wind"). I am not the only person in this poem, but the others are moving almost silently, kicking the city to life. A month later, I was copying figures into my notebook of the ill and the dead; by city, county, state, nation, world. Many of them these essential workers.
Here's another poem quite unlike my usual voice, influenced by Breton's "Free Union" and by a randy young man, a graphic artist. Allen Ginsberg finds Breton "a bit wooden" but praises "Free Union" for its freeing influence. This Dude woody indeed but hardly wooden!
Could I sing his praises in the cubist/uglyish manner of Breton? Let's see.
Dot One
Dude goes that ring new can I see it I just love yr cute chub
sausage fingers
Dude crack me up check out every old fat guy pass by
Dude slip into gizmo chipmunk puppet voice
Dude texts his finders fly
Dude we fit like Legos don't let go
Dude hammers like a barn raising
Dude sweeter than the one I stole from a witch
Dude flower and beeeeeeee
Dude hammers like a barn raising
Dude palm tree hair
Dude fireworks paint the sky
Dude goes I want to know you spreading three fingers in
front of my nose he's enlarging my font
Dude. That.
I want that as
well
These poems made a pastiche before-and-after document that I fussed with long after they should have flown the nest. Five years later, I expanded the original chapbook Dremes of 2020 with a part two, Out Like a Lion. Dremes of 2020 remains mostly poems written or published in that year. Out Like a Lion is a return to my more typical style, with the tools and memories of that surrealism class and the dreams of 2020.
Like this one:
Glitterpen
Apocalypse
Because people
subconsciously unconsciously consciously
& in isolated cases determinedly
will try to prevent you from writing
because writers tell secrets because
as you know a good secret is a good story
because as you know
when the words you write feel so dangerous you
stop & look around then you know it's
getting good
because some of the secrets poets tell
are secrets everybody knows
and they lived happy ever after
then a dragon came and ate them all
This is quite recognizable to someone who knows my work: bombastic/oxymoronic title, 14 quick lines, no punctuation but one apostrophe and two ampersands, confiding tone, punch line. In readings, I often close with this one; poets laugh and cheer. It's a poem as influenced by George Carlin as Frank O'Hara.
I've collected my dreams in the morning, free as rainwater, since before I wrote poetry. It's a way to build a bank of personal symbols. Some of my poems are one dream narrative (“Fishing with a Construction Crane,” “A Marriage of Cats”); some are explorations of a single dream image (“Stapled Amaryllis”); some are pileups of dream symbols (“Dumb Socks,” “Dreams of February”).
I build from these dreams.
I stand behind my experiments.
I thought I knew what my poetry's like.
My poetry continues to school me.
Special Education Paraprofessional and Union Negotiator, Berkeley Unified School District; retired.
Chapbooks: Velcro Heart (1989), A Season In Bed (1998), I Skip the Long Ones Too, (2004).
Anthologies: Cross Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco (Otis Books 2015), 1001 Nights (Redondo Poets, 2018).
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
