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 Mai-Linh Hong are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.
Process Note by Mai-Linh Hong
I was fortunate to go on my first artist residency—two magical weeks at the Vermont Studio Center—in early 2025. The timing was perfect, as I was revising my first collection, Continental Drift, to begin submitting it to presses. At the end of my first week, I did, in fact, submit it to the press that would later publish it.
In my cohort were twenty visual artists and eight writers, a ratio I found wonderfully generative. For me, visual practices are key, particularly during revision, and at this residency they were always on my mind. For example, writers at VSC were encouraged to put their manuscripts up on a wall and were provided with blue painters’ tape for this purpose. On my first day working in my studio, I grabbed a roll and set to work.
Once all the poems were up on a wall, I stepped back and saw the collection in a way I hadn’t before. At a distance, words were a blur, but the shapes they made came into focus. I perceived rhythms of line, density, dispersal, and white space across the collection. These had been impossible to see while scrolling on a computer screen (yes, I mostly compose on my laptop).
There were patterns and surprises. There was movement, and it was choreographed. I guess I had known this on some level, since I had choreographed it. But still, I was surprised to see it.
The question I got most from other residents who popped by my studio—and that I sometimes get from readers, now that the book is out—is some version of “How do you decide what visual form a poem will take?”
Truthfully, I experience poetry writing as a largely intuitive process. For many poems, visual-spatial form happens during revision. Poems vary greatly in how much revision they go through and how much they change. I’m not sure I can explain it, except to say:
The poem tells me how it wants to live on the page
and I try my best to listen.
*
In my Introduction to Poetry class, I teach students:
In written English, the line is the basic horizontal unit of a poem and is read left to write. The stanza is the basic vertical unit, composed of one or more lines, read top to bottom.
A poetic line can be any length, though it is limited by page width. (Well, in theory, I suppose you could digitally write a line that goes on longer, perhaps even forever—)
However, every poem must have at least one stanza, made up of at least one line. (Wait—must it? And who’s counting?)
It is week one, and my lesson is breaking down.
Actually, I want my students to think of a poem as an omnidirectional object. Sometimes, it takes them/me a few conceptual steps to get there.
I admit that two vectors—horizontal and vertical—are mostly adequate for reading most poems. But a poem has the potential to mean in ways other than left-to-right and returning to the left margin to begin each new line. Readers can do more than read one word or line or stanza at a time in a given order. Poems can use space, and order, in unexpected ways.
*
My six-part, speculative visual poem “Field Notes From Aliens Who Float” (first published in Hayden’s Ferry Review and available here) comes about halfway through Continental Drift. It is the collection’s centerpiece, thematically and formally.
I am a scholar of critical refugee studies. In line with much work in my field, I view refugees as a source of knowledge and creativity, and migration as a space of extraordinary insight. This poem expresses some lines of thought (so to speak) I haven’t yet been able to express with conventional academic writing.
I call the poem “speculative” because it is not that concerned with the “real” past, present, or future; rather, it asks what if. What if refugees wrote field notes, like scientists do, from their journey, charting the emergence of refugee knowledge? What if refugees collected, drew, measured, wondered, conjectured, named, risked, imagined, concluded—they do, all the time, of course—and all that was captured here?
Here is the poem on my wall in Vermont, close to its final form:
The poem looked very different early on. Here it is six months earlier, in four numbered sections across three pages:
Formally, two main shifts happened during revision. First, the sections became more independent and I dropped the numbering, leaving each section free-floating on its own page. Second, each section untethered from the left and top margins, allowing it to coalesce into a distinct visual shape. Think of how a water spill will reshape itself into droplets, each distinct from the other, given a bit of time.
Viewed together, the sections remind me of specimens saved by biologists or botanists in the field, perhaps seaweed, as suggested in the fourth section, which catalogs several species of seaweed. However, it is more the acts of observation and cataloging to which I allude with form, not specific species. We don’t go to poetry to identify species; we go to see what is meant by naming.
We might call this concrete poetry, poetry that forms a visual shape related to the topic of the poem. But the relationship between each shape and the section’s meaning is indirect and ambiguous. I want my poems to have space for ambiguity; perhaps that is why they move.
*
Poems can run, rest, wander, hesitate, creep, separate, splatter, undulate, come home. Like a painting, every poem maps the page, tells eyes where to go. Visual form hints whether a poem’s meaning universe is chaotic or rule-bound and which emotions predominate, even before you apprehend any words. It tells the reader how to treat time and space by directing where to begin, how quickly to read, where to pause, how to resume.
Poems ask you to hold multiple versions in your mind at once. This is why rereading is so important.
Personally, I think poetry is more fun than prose because of the frequency with which poets defy language and reading conventions. Students, for the most part, don’t love this about the genre—at least, at first. They want lines to be linear, like time.
I have news for them about time, too.
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Mai-Linh Hong [photo credit: Indigo Rain Photography] is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She also publishes scholarly essays on Asian American and refugee literature. A lifelong crafter, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). She is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Merced.
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