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 Lucille Lang Day are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thank you for reading.
My latest book, The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems (Trio House Press, 2026), covers about 50 years of my poetry and includes poems from my seven full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, as well as previously uncollected poems. During my 50+ years of writing poetry, my focus has mostly been on things like the quality of light illuminating a particular field, the sheen of a resplendent quetzal’s blue-green feathers in a cloud forest, joy that makes me feel fizzy as champagne, or sorrow so heavy it seems there is no moving it, which is to say that it is the individual poems that have occupied and obsessed me, not the arcs, structures, or concepts of books. The poems have sprung from everything from the idea of branching bubble universes called the “multiverse” to my mother’s insistence that I bring her red purse to the hospital following a 911 call because it matched her red shoes. Pretty much anything can trigger a poem, and when I’m working on one, it is usually an end in itself: I want to say something about the women talking on their cellphones and smiling at me from their windows in the red-light district of Amsterdam, and there is no larger goal.
With just one exception, the desire to compile a book or chapbook has only come after writing all or most of the poems the book will contain. Sometimes a theme emerges from all the individual poems and calls out to me, and when this has happened, the resultant books have pleased me more than the ones for which a specific theme never congealed. Once I identify the theme, I might write poems to that theme in order to fill in gaps that I perceive in the manuscript. To give some specific examples, Wild One (2000) is a sequence of autobiographical poems that trace my life from rebellious kid and teen mother through marriages, jobs, travels, and medical scares to middle age; Infinities (2002) is a collection of science poems that includes poems of the cosmos, biosphere, and lab; Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems contains poems inspired by my visits to museums and historical sites ranging from the Holocaust Museum to the Pinball Museum and Giverny; Becoming an Ancestor (2015) explores the connections among my ancestors, contemporary family, and mortality; and Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place (2020) offers poems in which specific places in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America play central roles.
The one exception to this process is my chapbook The Book of Answers (2006), which I wrote after taking a course on the poetics of indeterminacy from Stacy Doris at San Francisco State University and reading Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions. Somehow, with Neruda and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a text for the indeterminacy class, knocking around in my head, I found myself writing surreal, unanswerable questions and then answering them. The questions became the titles, the answers 12-line poems that relish the mysteries of the cosmos without resolving any of them.
So this is what I had to work with when I started compiling The Cosmos and Me: six poetry collections and chapbooks with central themes; five collections and chapbooks that were not randomly compiled but are decidedly less focused; and lots of poems that had not appeared in any of my books. Rereading the poems, I realized that there were important themes that appeared again and again across my books and the uncollected poems. If, in the new and selected, I were to present a selection of poems from each book and arrange these in chronological or reverse chronological order, with the new poems at the beginning or the end, there would be a great deal of jumping around among themes. So I decided instead to organize the book thematically, starting with the cosmos and progressing through sections going down my own version of the great chain of being to Earth and its ecosystems, the environmental crisis, history and ancestors, my lived experience, aging and mortality, place, the pandemic and finally the current moment in my life.
The Cosmos and Me has eight sections. The poems in the first three sections—I. Dimensions of Space-Time, II. Blue-green Planet, and III. Fate of the Earth—draw on both my study of science and my firsthand experience as a creature in the biosphere. We are of the universe and of the Earth. The molecules of our bodies were forged in exploding stars, and our lives and experience are interwoven with those of wolves and lions, oaks and redwoods, roses, mushrooms, and all other living things, even those in the microscopic world of protozoa and bacteria. I both celebrate this and worry about climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, and extinction of species.
Here’s a poem from Dimensions of Space-Time that was influenced by that course on the poetics of indeterminacy:
Form/Formless
A flock of red-winged blackbirds
swooping and swirling
in cyclonic and anticyclonic patterns
always in motion like Jovian clouds
that appear, then disappear
according to the mathematics of chaos
in yellow, brown and salmon-colored layers
The exquisite shape of an Allen’s hummingbird—
ruby throat, rufous tail, emerald
cap and back—hovering over a cluster
of tubular flowers unraveling in fog
like the writer whose work
is obscure to future generations
and mistranslated in her own time
Words worked like horses
bred for plowing, strong and patient
yet with wills of their own
The universe is something like that—
beautiful and shifting,
each galaxy alive
like a seaside sparrow or a rose
This poem does not have a traditional narrative structure, but moves by association. Most of my poems, however, have a more recognizable approach to narrative, including “Where the Radiation Goes” from the Fate of the Earth section. This poem came from reading about and worrying about the Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl nuclear reactor disasters:
Where the Radiation Goes
When
an earthquake cracks
a
reactor, iodine molecules
ascend.
Tumbling in hot wind,
they
drift to a grassy slope
where
mottled cows graze.
Soon
children will drink milk
that
scintillates like a galaxy.
A
woman opens an umbrella,
but
broccoli, lettuce, mustard
and
spinach are suddenly
bathed
in strontium rain.
There’s
nowhere to go except
earth,
sky, and sea—algae,
fish,
clouds, birds, trees.
Radiation
from a test in China
ends
up in Utah and Colorado.
Fifteen
years after Chernobyl,
the
isotopes were still found
in
stalks and delicate gills
of
wild mushrooms gathered
by picnickers in France.
The next three sections of Cosmos—IV. Ancestors, V. The Gambler’s Daughter, and VI. I Remember—bring us to the more purely human realm. My ancestors include both the Mayflower Pilgrims and the Wampanoags who helped them survive their first winter in Plymouth: they are both the colonizers and the colonized. During my first three decades of writing poetry, I did not write about my Native American heritage. I was inspired to embrace it in my poetry only after taking a DNA test that confirmed it and attending a David St. John master class that focused on Native American poetry.
My mother never knew her Wampanoag relatives. Her mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918-1919, when she was seven years old, and she and her twin sister were adopted by a Caucasian couple who brought them from Massachusetts to California. The loss of ties to the Wampanoags felt profoundly sad to me. After my mothers death, I wanted to meet them, so I visited the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe on Cape Cod. The first thing anyone said to me was “Welcome home”:
Welcome Home
Welcome
home to Mashpee,
where
snapping turtles and painted turtles bask
on
logs in the marsh amid water willows,
ferns,
and pickerel weed with purple flowers
reaching
up from the shallows.
Welcome
home to the place
where
your great-grandfather whispered
to
trout he caught at Santuit Pond,
then
sat in a circle
and
offered his pipe to Earth, Sky
and
the Four Directions.
Welcome
home to the coast
where
your ancestors built wetuash
and
gathered cranberries,
to
the woods where they hunted
turkey,
deer and bear,
and
to the clearings clad
in
goldenrods and asters
where
they danced for 10,000 years.
Welcome
home.
The
elders have been waiting for you.
Listen
to their drums, the beat
of
your own heart.
Take
this wampum necklace
made
from the sacred shell
of
the quahog clam.
When
you wear it, walk through
redroot
and wild lupine, hear
the
quickening rhythm
of
the field sparrow’s song.
I am open to and employ a wide range of poetic strategies to drive my poems forward, including narrative, association, repetition (as in “Welcome Home”), lists, collage, and traditional forms. My earliest influences in poetry were formal poets, including the Romantics, especially Shelley and Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, but when I joined the Berkeley Poets’ Co-op in 1972, the members discouraged me from writing rhymed poems and I started writing mostly free verse instead. I still write mostly free verse, but I also love traditional poetry and am sometimes inspired to write a sonnet or villanelle, even today. This villanelle from Cosmos is about my mother’s figurines:
Figurines
They seemed old-fashioned when I was a
child,
as they curtseyed above the fireplace.
I didn’t like them, but my mother was
beguiled
by the way they cocked their heads and
softly smiled
in their flowing gowns, ermine muffs
and lace.
They seemed old-fashioned when I was a
child,
with their parasols, bouquets, blue
eyes so mild,
and curls adorning each bone china
face.
I didn’t like them, but my mother was
beguiled.
I yearned for all things new and free
and wild,
not Dinky Do’s and Genevieve’s prim
grace.
They seemed old-fashioned when I was a
child
from their petticoats to how their hair
was styled,
but now I keep them in an oak-trimmed
case
in the dining room. My husband’s not
beguiled
by the bows and hats and fans I once
reviled.
In my home, my mother left her trace
in figurines old-fashioned to a child.
She cherished them, and now I am
beguiled.
The last two sections of Cosmos—VII. It Matters and VIII. Only Luck—focus on the places we visit and inhabit, reflections on the isolation and dislocation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, and attempts to come to terms with the current moment in time and place. Here’s a poem about a meal I had in Athens when my husband was declining into dementia:
Dining Alone in Athens
Strofi restaurant
On
a rooftop beneath the Acropolis, I eat
sea
bass wrapped in vine leaves, served
with
white wine sauce and olives. Yes,
a
true feast! The Erechtheion and Parthenon
rise
above me, columns lit and glowing against
the
darkening sky. Though cracked and crumbling
after
twenty-five hundred years, they’re more
intact
than the Arch of Hadrian and once
towering
Temple of Zeus on a field below.
Athena
planted the first olive tree here
in
a contest against Poseidon, whose magic
was
seawater. The twelve gods of Olympus
declared
her the winner and gave the city
her
name. But now the old gods are gone,
their
statues in museums, their temples in ruins.
Around
me, parties of men in short-sleeved shirts
and
women in sleeveless white dresses chatter;
couples
gaze at each other, speaking softly.
I
order baklava to share with my husband, age
seventy-six,
who waits, neither sick nor well,
back
in our hotel room, and I complain
to
the moon that even the gods are fleeting,
but
I like that story. The tree. The goddess
who
holds her own against the sea.
This poem from the final section of the book pivots around two lists:
The Lost Years
They were the fear years
fear to go out
fear to answer the door
fear that someone might
breathe on me without a
mask
or worse yet: cough or
sneeze
The years without my
grandchildren
as they grew and changed
connecting only in little
boxes on Zoom
or socially distanced
walks
Now I’ve truly seen
everything:
the plague and more
the triumph and
cancellation
of Roe vs. Wade
the collapse of the
Soviet Union
war in Ukraine as the
first step
in a plan to re-establish
it
the coronation and death
of Elizabeth the Second
the marriage and death of
Princess Di
the hippies, the yuppies,
the millennials
the deaths of everyone
in the family I grew up
in
the aging and senescence
of childhood friends
men leaping on the moon
the eradication of
smallpox
Webb images of Cosmic
Cliffs
the first Black president
followed by the first
psychopathic one
the Proud Boys storming
the Capitol
the Amazon rainforest
burning
What will be next?
When fires are out, a
storm arrives
and floods start rising
I don’t have a method for choosing the right form or structure for a poem. Sometimes it’s a matter of trial and error. “Figurines” started out as free verse, but it was wordy and rambling, and I couldn’t make it work. When I decided to try a villanelle, the words snapped into place. I’ve also had the opposite experience: trying to force a poem into a form, only to find it refused to exist except as free verse.
My favorite place for writing is my home office, although I might take notes and jot down lines anywhere. To focus on a poem, I need to be alone with no distractions. Morning is best. If I go to my email first, it ruins everything, pulling me in multiple directions, reminding me of bills I need to pay, forms I need to complete, friends I need to answer, etc.
To do any type of writing—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, song lyrics, plays—I think it’s necessary to enjoy the process. Most of the experience is process, not reward. When I’m writing a poem, hours can seem like minutes, and I’m never bored. Another thing that often happens is that I let go of oppressive emotions like sorrow, anger, and fear. Sometimes the emotions get channeled into the poem and sometimes, with the magic of altered nerve impulses and neurotransmitters, they simply disappear.
Lucille Lang Day is the author The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems, as well as seven previous full-length poetry collections, four poetry chapbooks, two children’s books, and a memoir. She has also edited the anthology Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery and coedited Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two Josephine Miles – PEN Oakland Literary Awards, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, was selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature, and her memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in more than 200 magazines and anthologies, such as The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, River Styx, The Threepenny Review, Scientific American, ZYZZYVA, and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. The founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she received her MA in English and MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her BA in biological sciences, MA in zoology, and PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.
Website: https://lucillelangday.com
To
buy The Cosmos and Me: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cosmos-and-me-lucille-lang-day/f464f374eab183ba
Book
DNA: https://bookdna.com/best-books/discovering-your-place-in-the-universe
Quill
& Parchment interview: https://quillandparchment.com/archives/Oct2026/inter.html
Trio
House interview: https://triohousepress.substack.com/p/the-cosmos-and-me
“Finding
Poetry in Unexpected Places”: https://www.writersdigest.com/finding-poetry-in-unexpected-places
Famous
Interviews with Joe Dimino: https://famousinterviewswithjoedimino.blogspot.com/2026/09/accomplished-poet-author-lucille-lang.html
California
Poets interview with David Garyan: https://davidgaryan.wixsite.com/ladige/post/lucille-lang-day-california-poets-part-3-three-poems
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
