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 by Michael Tod Edgerton are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.
My
guardian angel is afraid of the dark. He pretends he's not, sends me ahead…
~ Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End
The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again.
I
did not begin again I just began.
~ Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation”
What better way to begin than with a digression (if one can digress from nothing and nowhere…). There’s an adolescent-minded lit’l faerie-winged imp in me (okay, it’s just me) that loves the fact that serendipity has assigned my process note to number 69. (Or so I thought… ! And so, from the beginning, I erred as any knight might. But I shan’t, no, I shall not begin again and let it stand as an example of that happy accident every artist knows well.) Not only because it references a sexual position (one that boggles the mind—how’s a girl s’posed to focus on work and succumb to pleasure at the same time?!), but also and especially because it references one of my fave topological structures, the figure-eight-shaped, one-sided Möbius strip that somehow flips “sides” with a twist that leaves indiscernible just where one “side” ends and the “other” begins. It’s how I think about binaries in a way that preserves what’s unique to each term but puts them on a continuum rather than in false opposition (or having one consume the other like an evil in utero twin), e.g., sex/gender, masc/femme, dom/sub, or, in terms more directly related to art-making, form/content and the artist’s leading/following the “agency” of the work (the muse, inspiration, intuition, etc.). I think of the writing process on a dialectical model. Instead of thesis >> antithesis >> synthesis, however, moment by moment of writing it’s lead/craft/choose >> follow/associate/intuit >> poem. (Or, in the case of a good 69, work it >> feel it >> boom!)
In my poem-writing, as often as “leading” by making conscious choices, I follow blindly via a kind of third eye-ear the path that gets laid/I am laying in the process of following its lead, step by step enchaining analogical, imagistic, semantic, and sonic associations, similarities, and differences. And that again across poems, poems concatenating and pulling others into their orbits, to mix metaphors (or to link rings of chains around links in the larger chain, moons around the chain of poem-planets in the book-system…). And then, abracadabra et voilà—a book!
Or not. If you’re li’l ol’ moi, you’re just as likely to have an asteroid come break up the whole shebang and see one half drift off into the outer reaches… And that’s what’s happened to me one book manuscript after another over the past decade-plus…
Flash back 2014: I’ve published my first book and completed my dissertation at the University of Georgia, half essays on social practice artworks (with a detour into the theory of criticism drawing on phenomenological criticism and Sontag’s Barthesian “erotics of reading” to experiment with criticism as a form of ekphrastic creative writing) and half creative work. The creative half started like this (and this I take directly from my website for the project, What Most Vividly):
Such participatory, relational and investigative literary and art works as Kate Schapira’s Town, C. D. Wright and Deborah Luster’s One Big Self, the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Bhanu Kapil got me thinking about including other voices in my own literary "voice." Taking my cue from Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, from which I took the idea of a questionnaire, I wrote a set of questions. I emailed these questions to friends, colleagues and acquaintances; I placed a binder of them in a gallery in Athens, GA for people to fill out; I started this website to cull further responses; I posted them along a stretch of the Atlanta BeltLine green space as a participatory text art installation; I waited and wait for answers. I hope you’ll offer me your own on the (questions) page of this site.
This had been brewing but was not yet fully formed when I ran into Lizzie Saltz, then director of the Athens (Georgia) Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA), in some shop or café or another. Having curated a couple of other literary readings by my fellow PhDers in coordination with previous exhibits, Lizzie invited me to do so again, telling me about her upcoming show of participatory art. This was perfect timing and just the extra push I needed to go into full gear on what would become “What Most Vividly (A Choral Work.” I weaseled my way into the show with an unofficial installation piece, a “writing desk” with pens and a notebook full of my questionnaires, the answers to which I would use for my own collage work as well as exhibit in their original, handwritten state, and which I wrote in response to the “upcoming” info on the show on their site. A piece featuring beds by Michael Lease, Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On, prompted my very first question, “What dream do you remember most vividly and what message does it bear?” The rest of the first set of questions followed from that one, as did the title of the whole project, as I followed the lead of my “Muse” (a cologne ad model of a man I hereby christen Rod Sterling for two reasons I take to be squarely apparent…). I almost never before or since (until entering a Lacanian psychoanalysis many years later) remembered my dreams. Right after writing that first question, however, I remembered quite vividly a dream about multiplying simulacra of my cat, Penelope, lost amid an end-times storm reminiscent of Dorothy’s gale. I wrote it down as “notes toward” a poem, later recognizing it as an already-written and nearly-finished first draft of the poem I would title “A Final Flood of Stars” (see the final version below).
In the end, after the ATHICA piece, after the installation as part of the Art on the Atlanta BeltLine project (simple question boards and pens hanging from trees), and responses to my website provided me with enough material from others to work with, a couple of the collage poems from the book-to-be version of “What Most Vividly” were published, including a version of the dream poem that interspersed snippets of others’ dreams. That was encouraging—but in the end, after already sending the book out to the usual publication opportunities, the whole of it struck me one day as simply, irredeemably unsatisfying. I took the best of my own writing, patched the poems back into their in-cohering, errant wholes, and started from those to build a new manuscript, one I would title after one of the art-cum-criticism-essays-turned-poems, “Still Sensate Life with Blazing.” I riffed off this title to title the book.
“Yet Sensate Light” attracted newer poems, in particular a set of Frank O’Hara-esque poems that a call for such by one journal or another (and some OKCupid encounters) had inspired me to write (if not in time to make the journal’s submission deadline). The book grew and developed, was workshopped by friends, and settled into a very strong manuscript that was a finalist in a couple of contests. It held for a few years, as I embarked on new projects, including an opera libretto turned play turned novel-in-verse turned “experimental verse play” that’s waiting for me to return to it for an umpteenth time—and hopefully this time—to finish it. “Sensate” was finished and I sent it out and tweaked it and sent it out and waited and hoped against hope. Then the Covid lockdown hit in March 2020. That summer George Floyd’s murder by police sparked an international explosion of calls for racial justice while a college professor had the police called on him by a white woman for birdwatching while Black in Central Park (or, more to the point, for being so “uppity,” as she would have said just a few decades earlier, as to dare tell her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules).
The poems I wrote documenting my particular perspective and experience of that historical summer completely altered the shape and character of the book manuscript. The ekphrastic poems dealing with more philosophical questions of aesthetics, ethics, and subjectivity no longer fit. The summer of 2020 struck “Yet Sensate Light” in two. I was left with one new book, now titled “Shelter Shutter Swerve,” and and a half-book version of “Yet Sensate Light” that would sit waiting for me for the next couple of years as I polished “Shelter” and focused anew on the play, “Cissy Nicky Unreciprocated (A Femme Mani-Fêste & Queerling Fantasia in Scenes Unwed).” “Shelter” was also a finalist in book contests (funny to be both a winner and loser, encouraged and disappointed, at the same time), and trusted readers assured me it was tight, fantastic, done and did—don’t screw with it. If I were finishing this process essay the day I started it a month ago, I would end with the hope that any day now “Shelter Shutter Swerve” would win this contest or be picked up in that press’ reading period, and we’d all live happily ever after (or at least those poems would…until the book went out of print and the humans stopped reading altogether and/or snuffed themselves out via eco-suicide, or…).
But a couple of weeks ago I was re-reading the whole manuscript. The second act lagged. The third couldn’t quite pick up the slack, couldn’t reinvigorate the energy. I looked at the limbless trunk of “Yet Sensate Light,” realized those brand new poems are fun but not amazing, that these three or four older, long-ago-published poems are pretty fantastic, but maybe too intellectual, too bloodlessly philosophical (so with “Still Sensate,” but you be the judge—and do let me know). From the initial split, “It the Hum” was continually pulled towards both manuscripts, and after multiple confirmations that it belonged in “Yet Sensate Light,” it now seemed obviously meant for “Shelter Shutter Swerve.” As did that never-accepted poem I always worried was too weak. It felt strong and independent while beautifully resonating with other poems in “Shelter.” And the “Closing In” poem that tracks an experience with Bacon (and then, surprisingly, with a Hirst piece) I’d had at the Met and speaks to the nature of subjectivity and to my own self in its specificity, equally, felt pulsing and alive, as well. These three poems, along with two others (part of a sequence that was split between the two manuscripts and now reunited) brought a different but resonant energy to the book that reinvigorated it. Only now the title didn’t work. “Shelter Shutter Swerve” had to be downgraded to the title last, pandemic-themed section. The final (?) version of the book is now (as of now) titled “Yet Sensate Light.” I’ve had to let go, a little painfully (but a little more “Zen” than I thought it’d be at first), the rest of that manuscript’s poems. The one from which this title was derived, first published in Sonora Review and offered below (followed by the Penelope dream poem), may be the seed for the next book or may never see publication again. Only the Angel Muse might know or could, maybe, find out…if he can just find the cajónes to strut his fine runway strut on ahead…
Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com
