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 David Booth
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.
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Let
me begin with the well-known literary concept that inspired my book Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter: Poetry
& Prose (Blue Cedar, 2025), with a focus on three poems from
the collection, “Ringtones,” “Jaunt,” and “Mood for a Day.” Thinking of it as
the poet remaining level and clear in a storm, I became interested in Keats’
notion of negative capability in early 2017. Keats means it as “when [a person]
is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact & reason.” He insists that the poet must be okay with “half
knowledge,” with all they can’t understand about people separated by their
beliefs and circumstances. For Keats, this is bound up with a further claim: in
a great poet “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or
rather obliterates all consideration.” Beauty, if I understand Keats correctly,
is not the product of the poets’ nonjudgment in the making of poems but instead
what makes an empathic approach possible in the first place. As the beautiful
necessity stands against propaganda, the search for beauty moves the poet away
from sides. They remain in uncertainty without reaching irritably for a
verdict. Bringing this mindset, whether natural in a poet or learned, into our
modern parlance, Allen Ginsberg describes Negative Capability:
the
possibility of seeing contending parties, or your mommy and daddy, or yourself
and your wife, or your baby and yourself. You can see them all screaming at
each other and you can see as a kind of comedic drama that you don’t get
tangled and lost in it, you don’t enter into the daydream fantasy of being
right and being one side or the other so completely that you go out and chop
somebody’s head off. Instead you just sort of watch yourself, and watch them in
and out of the game at the same time, both in and out of the game, watching and
wondering at it…the ability to have contrary ideas in your head at the same
time without freaking out….[1]
If
negative capability helps me describe my disposition, I write poems in forms
that hold it. “Ringtones” comprises eleven paragraphs set together like
episodes or meditations. A single sustained mishearing links them. What we
think is a ringtone turns out to be larks in the birch, then rain, then hair
brushed out with plastic brushes, then a wildfire, then ice shifting in a glass
as it melts. The refrain—what we thought, what we mistook—keeps a
perception and its source slightly out of register. Meaning happens in that
gap, hedging against doubt as it goes (we guess, god knows who, do animals
make slurping noises?). This is half-knowledge we can hear. It is also
periodic, as the ringtone is a recurring signal. Recurrence runs through all
three poems in different registers—acoustic in the refrains and in a line like bind
and move, bind and move; tidal in the ferry going back and forth and the
coupling rhythms of box springs; orbital in the seven Earth-like planets
circling Trappist-1; and generational in the mothers and sons who keep arriving
to fail or to see. And though the poems drift associatively, this is not stream
of consciousness. Each sentence is placed as assuredly as a line in a
conventional lyric. What echoes is not only language itself, articulated,
enunciated, and the real-life sounds that words on a page evoke, but also the
question in the wind, the question the sound carries: can we perceive and hold
one another authentically? In “Ringtones,” the bodhisattva Guanyin “hears the
cries of the world” and listens “without judging or reacting.” Against her
stands the man who closes “Jaunt,” whose fatal flaw is that he “can never hold
let alone cradle the suffering of others.” The ringtone gag is the playful
surface of serious questions about caretaking.
Such
questions do not stay literary for long. The year 2017 shows U.S. Americans in
conflict with each other, with little of Ginsberg’s “comedic” or Keats’ “beautiful”
about it. Democracy feels more stress-tested than many of us are used to. A
record crowd fills the streets in the Women’s March. “Fake news” hardens into
an accusation, the press becoming “the enemy of the people.” [2] The Muslim ban
arrives as an executive order. Government offices empty of career staff. DACA
is rescinded. #MeToo goes viral. As the NFL takes a knee and Charlottesville
takes a life, I ask more questions: What would it look like to keep faith with
friends and family first, before politics, without looking away from a
government trampling my own ethics? And how might negative capability, applied
to the prose poem, a form built to hold prose and lyric at once, and so to
contain contraries, help me present image over argument, attention over
position?
Here
disposition becomes method. My poems do use the first person—I’m in the
storm—but it is not quite me. Because I build these poems partly by
appropriating text from my own notebooks, some kept as far back as the
mid-Nineties, a speaker, a chatty “I,” emerges from across decades, before any
poem gets made. This distance is itself a version of the Keatsian stance. The
Self is both in and out of the game because I meet my past as archived
fragments rather than as present confessor. Working from fragments long
forgotten until I find them again in my own handwriting and letting the “I”
occasionally surface in poems that ape a kind of omniscience depersonalize the
conventional lyric “I.” The fact of this “I” coming into view in my poems only
occasionally and never with a fleshed-out personality—he’s not even a protagonist—brings
me back to the storm analogy. Poet Robin Blaser (1925-2009) found fun
nomenclature for this when he was young:
In
the reading at UBC, I used the term that I thought the poet was a commoter, and
then I said I discovered the word commoter as a little boy in Hawthorne
and it’s quite true. The word commoter means simply a guy inside the
commotion, and we don’t even use the word commoter but I do love that
word. [3]
Blaser’s commoter is the poet, and also Keats’s
poet of negative capability. I situate the role inside the poem as speaker—me
but not me. Like a narrator who says “I” but whose story belongs to others—the
witness in the scene, not its protagonist—my commoter is a distant first person
turned outward. It pays attention to the experiences of others rather than
explicating my own victories and losses, my connections, my trauma. It finds
its voice in events I may or may not be part of but that reach me as someone
drawn to the plights of others as a shared humanity. And here Blaser and I
part: for him the commoter is single, a child’s delight remembered, the memory
illuminating his older self. For me the figure splits. The speaker heads into
the commotion while the watching stays outside, with me.
Many postmodern poets model in instructive and
liberating ways aspects of my process. Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022) uses the
notebook in a procedural process centered on daily diary entries. I admire in Memory
and The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters the intimacy
of colloquial speech, the colorfully plain voice of a diarist going public, in
the presentation of her own messy humanity. As for Blaser, I’ve read him for a
long time. His poems don’t read like diary entries but are instead sites for
language to pass through from his notes on his own political and professional
and love lives, and on friendship, framed by a life of reading. I point the
plain speech of Mayer’s diaries in its direction.
I
read postmodern poets to watch them collage fragments, pile up paratactic
statements the way consciousness does, and take up self-reflexive concerns for
what remembering even is. At its limit, their toolkit argues narrative away. My
reluctance here finds articulation in Carla Harryman’s craft statement “Toy
Boats.” [4] She wants “to distribute narrative rather than deny it.” She adds: “The
enemies of narrative are those who believe in it and those who deny it. Both
throw existence into question.” This is the negative capability of a poet
writing indeterminate poems without insisting on telling or refusing a story.
In my poems, story surfaces and recedes as a chess game, a shaved beard and the
cancer under it, and a night in a yurt. These narrative moments aren’t relief
for readers seeking plot. They show the personal lodged, more or less deeply,
in the societal, and they render the mundane as beautiful. Such beauty is at
once the commoter’s experience and the poem’s offering.
If “Ringtones”
builds on mishearing and “Jaunt” moves toward legacies of ethics, “Mood for a
Day” shows a poetics of indeterminacy more starkly. The leaps can be long
between sentences and paragraphs. The “I” I describe isn’t just Self stitched
from old notebooks but a Self open to other people’s words—sites at times like
the ones I imagine in Blaser. I quote Susanne Langer’s Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling
at length. Ann Hamilton’s “Labor is a way of knowing” is complete as an
injunction. Yet the voices in the poem, a flickering persona, live worlds
apart. An eighty-one-year-old mother sits at her drop spindle making linen with
the Fates close by. Seven Earth-like planets circle Trappist-1. Madonna is
Mater. A puppy strains against its collar. In the sense Kristeva gives the
word, this intertextuality means many borrowed voices and many kinds of
speech kept in one place without being smoothed into one.[5] This cuts against
our assumption of the lyric poem that the speaker is the poet. Speech operates
throughout my poems not to identify any one person but to place catastrophe
next to tenderness. Speech gives motion to a “smoldering planet” as cosmic
context for the question of how we should work now that we’re failing. Speech
gives life to the plainest of lines, I’m happy to be going through life with
you, but not before the Caring Cart Drawn by Mammals appears as that
half-joking vehicle of mutual carrying. The apocalyptic and the tender share
the same sentence in ways that the prose poem, like a cart, accommodates. The
steadiness Keats asks for isn’t a place outside the storm. It’s the willingness
to sit in the cart while mammals pull.
Notes
[1]
From Ginsberg’s essay “On Walt Whitman, Composed on the Tongue or Taking a Walk
Through Leaves of Grass,” collected in Deliberate Prose, published by
HarperCollins in 2000.
[2] Here is where the capability is
hardest to keep, and not only for poets. This is the test everyone feels. A
phrase like “enemy of the people” works by ending the search. It names the
villain and offers the relief of no longer having to doubt anything. This is propaganda’s
pull, which is often beautifully constructed—stirring, shapely, moving. But its
beauty is a beauty that, arriving, sets you down on one side and shuts the
question. The beauty Keats means keeps you in the uncertainty. It keeps you
from the verdict. The search for beauty and the manufacture of an enemy are
antithetical. One stays open, the other closes. That they can look alike for a
moment, both moving, both made, is exactly what's misleading and can cheat
people and get them displaced, hurt, or killed.
[3] From transcripts of taped discussions
that poet Robin Blaser (1925–2009) had with his peers in the mid Seventies,
collected in the 2015 book from The University of Alabama Press The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and
Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends.
[4] “Toy Boats” first
appears in Non/Narrative (1985) and is reprinted in an anthology a
guide to Poetics Journal: writing in the expanded field, 1982-1998
(Wesleyan University Press, 2013), edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten.
[5] Julia Kristeva
coined the term “intertextuality” in her 1966 essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel.”
Here she reworks Bakhtin’s dialogism into the idea that every text is “a mosaic
of quotations.” It appears in English in Desire
in Language (1980). She later refined the concept, preferring the
term “transposition,” in Revolution
in Poetic Language (1974).
Ringtones
The birds we mistook for
a ringtone, the larks in the birch beyond our window glass. Ringtones made the
sounds of rain and the swish of the sleeves of strangers brushing. Water falls
through the head of a tree, hard, deciduous. Tomorrow’s forecast calls for
ringtones rioting like spring flowers while we wait out the rain.
These boys like to hang
out and talk to each other all day long, but it’s never the two of them alone,
as their phones are always abuzz and ringing. The one on the right, who
uncharacteristically wishes to remain anonymous, texts god knows who after
beating the one on the left, brainiac Tray, in a game of chess one Sunday afternoon.
If there weren’t something unknowable going on with him, he would gloat to Tray’s
face and Tray would ruminate on it behind forced smiles. What a novel ringtone
this would make: the sound of a child gloating mixed with the softer sound of
his friend, half-shy, gloating counteracted.
What I thought was a
ringtone was the sound of my stepping whole-sole on the whole of my eyeglasses.
If you haven’t heard by now, it doesn’t matter about the awful past.
What we mistook for a
ringtone, the soft-scraping sounds of those brushing out their hair with
plastic brushes. Rubbing scalps of enigma. What we thought was a ringtone was a
source of causeless laughter. This is neither here nor there, but my niece’s
ringtone sounds like a flip-book animated snowdrift across a forest floor up to
the earliest branches.
All day long travelers
arrived from the front to be halted by an impassable river, so stand they on a
muddy bank like figures out of a mythical literature. Frozen, drenched, far
removed from cell reception, they watch the ferry and the ferryman going back
and forth. They yell in vain their long-drawn summonses. One begs not the
question, What is the Song of Deborah, but what is its melody, scoreless in
Judges?* The spiel I was going to give I believe I have forgotten. There’s a
forgetfulness in…. I forget where this comes from, but I’ve heard it said that
a nuclear winter begins with a regional war fought with conventional weapons.
I read lips, you know. I’m
reading yours now, while you explain to Little Boy Arnold the equations he must
work out on the dry-erase boards around him. Up the hill from where I stand, a
cordoned off area, ragged hill pine, falls into the ocean. The tearing sounds
of collapse are not phones ringing. They say to the boy, “Show your work why
don’t you?” His reply: “I’ve done it in my head since the beginning.”
The bodhisattva Guanyin
is the one who hears the cries of the world.† She listens deeply without
judging or reacting while he, who is he, talks prettily about shrubs. All the
pretty talk in the world can’t do justice to the long-necked birds and the
boats bobbing between kelp beds. Ringtones ring out across this setting. What
we thought were ringtones were kids these days using the phrase “Just saying”
in their enjoyment of each other.
After two stressful weeks
for both of us, we ran away for two days and a night to a yurt in the Salinas
Valley. We forgot our phones. The springs of box springs called out coupling
rhythms. Trouble seemed not to exist, or not to have followed us, like in these
antique sentences from Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven: “The farmers
at last lived prosperously and at peace. Their land was rich and easy to work.
The fruits of their gardens were the finest produced in central California.”‡
What we thought was a
ringtone was a wildfire. That the population of the world grew exponentially
was one cause of such fires. What we thought were ringtones were human herds
thinning.
He remembered he had a
little pot on him, but it hardly seemed worth it. Every part of the landscape
and sky, especially at night with stars multiplying and whining coyotes
trotting somewhere in the distance, was like an outward expression of inner
life.
It would happen several
times that evening before he realized that the mysterious sound nudging him
awake was the ice in the glass (on his nightstand) shifting as it melted. In
the meantime, in the moonlight with the water slowly collecting, he closed his
eyes, and getting this beautiful kind of curve, took up inventing again.
Notes
* It’s hard to know Deborah (d. 1067 BC).
In the Book of Judges, she is a prophetess of Judaism. She is the fourth Judge
of pre-monarchic Israel. The only female judge mentioned in the Hebrew Bible,
she is a charismatic military leader who also calls herself a “mother” in
Israel (5:7), which must mean “parent.” Though I think of her as a courageous
woman called on by the Lord to engineer the Israelite’s defeat of the
Canaanites under Sisera, full credit for this victory goes to Yahweh (5:5).
Deborah may be ordinary after all, yet illuminated by the Spirit of the Lord in
a moment of crisis. Putatively written by her, this song, a poem really,
suggests that ordinary people do extraordinary things.
Jaunt
My feelings I like to conceal from the
eyes of my fellow men, of course without any fearful strain to do so—such
strain I would consider a great error, and a mighty stupidity.*
—Robert
Walser
Thigh muscles bind and
move the femur, bind and move, bind and move, thighs give life to long bones
lengthening. Why does an angel reach for Jacob’s thigh? Why touch it? How many
people have been born from a thigh? We want to know but know no one who can
tell us. Who among us has suffered a serious thigh wound? What is a
serious thigh wound compared to a charley horse? What is the thigh’s role in
impulsive, regrettable behavior? We’re told the word femur means to engender
but can find no record of this in old saw lit.
What little boy doesn’t
make the mistake once in a lifetime of racing through the crowd of a picnic on
his exclusive plane of existence to hug the loving leg of another boy’s father?
Looking down at the boy, a new father whose beard gives the impression of a cat
burglar promises to shave it off if he doesn’t want to scare the new son half
to death before they’ve gotten to know each other. He’s looking less conniving
at the start of night, when he discovers a mole on his chin the size of a
fossil snake for a doctor to burn off with liquid nitrogen. “I loved my beard
more than the face it covered,” he admits to the new son, “and removed it to
find a spot of cancer.” The new son says he must grow it back pronto if he
doesn’t want to look like a sudden child locked in no one’s memory.
A man carrying a car
battery in a crosswalk holds it in his hands like a sling for lugging. Sixty
pounds we guess and it caves the shoulders and the chest and, straining the
face, pulls the body forward while we wait in traffic for the light to change.
The cold sore on his lip squeezed open like an old cherry to engender
conversations about boys and the men they’re becoming, we watch his swagger
pass and accelerate.
A woman who can’t see far
enough in front of her to know what’s coming walks on the sidewalk with the aid
of a walker toward a coyote eating the entrails of a trashcan as
lackadaisically as distractible homo sapiens with cups of clam chowder. The
coyote hasn’t relied on birds’ eggs in ages. Animals make slurping noises. Do
animals make slurping noises? “We worry more about the spread of zoonotic
diseases,” we roll down our window to tell her, “and less about wanderers
devoured.” “Anything can happen,” she shrugs. The sidewalk where a coyote
eating remains intersects an old trail stretching down to the coast through a
non-native forest featuring Eucalyptus globulus, Pinas radiata, Cupressus
macrocarpa.
When poet Rae Armantrout
(b. 1947) ends her poem “Native” with the lines, “Here eucalyptus / leaves
dandle, // redundant but syncopated,” it’s Lovers’ Lane we imagine in the woods
where the coyote lives and the old army barracks in the north of San Francisco
stand. A footpath carved out by Spanish soldiers and missionaries after the
Costanoans and the Californios is a shortcut from the Main Post of the Presidio
to the Mission on date night in those first moments in the life of a city. A
path for young lovers to walk, countless people walk it. Some are pueblo
settlers and mission fathers and some are men with pointy muskets, game birds
hung from belts, mess-tins, toiletries. Walking together and always apart, as
individuals they can neither smell their own noses nor kiss their own mouths.
But they can admire each other’s faces and lean into each other’s bodies. Given
their numbers, at least one of them wears his emotions on his sleeve and is
well known for how exasperating this can be. If he is brave, intelligent,
honorable, noble of action, his fatal flaw, a family trait passed down through
the generations, is his inability to imagine these same fine qualities in those
of his own and other species who naturally and tactically dissimulate. He can
never hold let alone cradle the suffering of others.
Notes
Mood for a Day
Looking down from a balcony onto a blazing bright
spectacle of some kind, she wears a sequined dress, backless, while he looks
past her from deep inside their condominium not to what he can’t see her
looking down upon but what must be a smoldering planet. God how he hates a
smoldering planet. Hating with every fiber of his being, he soothes himself
recalling Madonna, who is Mater, and Mater who is Mother of the Lilies and the
lilies who go with Lily of the Heart, to whom he says, “I commit myself to you.”
It is the Year of the Woman and scientists have discovered
seven Earth-like planets orbiting a star some thirty-nine thousand light years
distant. My eighty-one-year-old mother asks, “Will humans bring sexism to
a new planet or can we start without it?” She holds in her hands a drop spindle
to make fine linen. An abridged version of an endless book called Mind: An
Essay on Human Feeling* sits
beside her on a basket with its knees up and chin propped on loose fists of
inquiry. She has stopped reading at the sentence “It is natural for a person
reared in the atmosphere of European common sense to assume that the use of
ritual in connection with the ordinary, daily chores—gardening, hunting,
fishing, handiwork—must have a practical aim, and to ask a native of forest or
veldt how his work would be affected if the sacred forms were omitted.” A
hundred pages from the end, she won’t pick it up again. Refusing any and all
companion texts, she works out her interiorities on her own in anticipation of
the busy day ahead. From a fiber mass does life after all continue.
Recession can be a father of conscience. How should we work
now that we’re failing? Like our own mother making it work? By some kind of
rotation? To amass a deck? To make an intervention? Portfolio-sharing? In
saying, “Labor is a way of knowing,” the artist Ann Hamilton (b. 1956) asks
what it means to live and work inter-generationally.† What do you like about it? What’s not to like unless you
carry wounds from childhood and in your case such carrying is involuntary and
unseemly?
The star at the center of the new solar system is called
Trappist-1. True Trappists devote themselves to silence in the face of
insatiable wonderment in the near and far of their wonders’ objects. Its leash
taut, a puppy called Prince Mutt gasps for joy and breath under the press of
the collar against its throat as it strains to smell another’s feces.
On a personal note, I’m happy to be going through life with
you. It’s a relief to sit beside you in a metaphorical cart that we may call
Caring Cart Drawn by Mammals in our occasional practice of kenning upon a road
grown less bumpy nearer the horizon. But what is an actual cart like? To my
mind it is more practical than ornate when pulled by horses with minds of their
own who treat us kindly while biding their time in their current occupations.
In any event let us sit for a few minutes after some kind of communion and
coughing stops, nose-blowing stops, throats stop clearing. The more palpable
silence grows, the less cliché an ambience for self-reflection.
Notes
*Susanne K. Langer (1885-1895) wrote Mind:
An Essay on Human Feeling, first published in 1967.
† Like Noda and Neel in this book, Ann
Hamilton is a popular artist. Known for her large-scale installations, public
art, and collaborative performances, she explores communal exchanges and the
representation of individuals and communities.
David Booth is the
author of two books of prose and poetry, Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter (2025) and Too Bright to See (2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Rain Taxi, Prairie Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cerasus, Missouri Review, Fourteen Hills, Transfer, and Washington Square. The M.I.T.
Press published his scholarly work about participatory democracy. A high school
humanities teacher Lycée
Français de San Francisco, he lives in SF with his wife Ingrid Hawkinson.
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
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