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 Lisa Rosenberg 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.
Note: Lisa Rosenberg wrote Process Note #1 published on October 1, 2022.
EQUINOX
Six years ago in a weedy
backyard, a poem took shape, coaxed by a well-known work from a pandemic of
another era. William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All”—season, contagion,
weeds, and wiry roots—held my fears and curiosities and whatever whirled
between them, giving support to attentiveness. We were in a newfound, if
imposed, stretch of near silence. I could listen in new ways, discover inroads
and rhythms of composing within and across poems.
“Equinox and All,” a
blank-verse poem roughly symmetric for its occasion, signaled the beginning of
a new collection. For awhile, I assumed it would be the title poem. It
surprised me by completing more rapidly than I was used to. So did subsequent
poems. I questioned my internal editor, felt the skills intact, and kept going.
Speed didn’t signal sloppiness, and slowness did not equal virtue.
Equinox and All
Spring,
2020
It was Thursday. It was warm. Equal hours
of rain and sun to match the parity
of night and day, to catch me—half wonder,
half anxiety—taking comfort in names
as crows gathered in the neighbor’s cedar,
and juncos filled a canopy of oak, here:
a small backyard in the suburbs. A small
parcel, equal to any before the stars.
A season arrives, defies confinement.
We dress for contagion, we quantify
calm, but dance in separate rooms. We might
re-chart the skies. Scour the old maps as if
their errors were not ours, and scrapping them
could right the world. Such vacant streets. Only
birdsong, and cautious distances, and faces
of oxalis, rooted beside the fence.
As a collection, Weeds and Stars itself assembled more quickly than my first book (A Different Physics, 2018). Both books endured and prospered through many
changes, including titles, yet the new one reached book length in what felt
like lightning speed—five years. It coalesced through other dynamics and
organizing principles, and a different edition of me: shaped by parenthood’s
ongoing lessons in imperfection and unexpected circumstances; more firmly
rooted in long arcs of learning and making, and a readiness to put more trust
in them.
This book would hold
nested levels of structure, attracting new kinds of poems as it became a field
in which abandoned threads could grow into poems. A working nexus, it brought
teachers and models from poetry and elsewhere. I was entering into more awareness
of process, and of ways to gain process fluency, recognizing poetic composition
as my sustaining practice and laboratory.
For three decades, the
first two of which were dominated by engineering and consulting, I had been a
poet of short, carefully-honed, imagistic free verse, a few fixed forms, and
specimens from an uneven apprenticeship in blank verse. On the surface, this could
look exclusively like micromanagement. It was also practical. I rarely had
writing time before my 50s, and worked mainly on what I was able to carry
around in my head. Things had to be musical, memorable, and not too long.
Toward the end of
composing A Different Physics, and especially with the start of
quarantine in early 2020, more forms became accessible to me through routes I
could not have guessed. I’m probably conflating artistic growth with the
circumstances of global crisis. Both were happening at once, creating a tipping
point: the crisis caused a sudden change in daily environment, one in which old
habits and their limitations could become visible and make room for alternative
ways of working. Ongoing political strife added a layer of urgency to
everything, including artistic thought and craft.
If this were a slide
presentation, the bulleted list of shifts leading to and through Weeds and
Stars would look something like:
- More comfort proceeding in (not
just acknowledging) uncertainty
- Greater adaptability and
willingness to work with what’s there (“available resources”), especially:
allusion, immediate surroundings, internal guides and guideposts
- Trusting the wisdom of forms
(poetic, somatic, physical—both biological and nonbiological)
- More play with iteration
- Greater collaboration with
unknowns
- More awareness of what can be
generative
- Constraints shifting from being structural
supports and pattern interrupts, to acting as conduits.
All of these are
interrelated. The last two are tightly coupled.
TIME AND SPACE
Quarantine slashed my
driving duties, bringing more intact stretches of writing time for exploring
longer compositional elements and forms. I took essay-writing classes, online
(that was relatively new, remember?), through which a cache of nascent essays
could finally develop. I found my poet’s sensibilities and stubbornness to be astute
guides. Experiencing longer compositional elements (phrasing, sentences,
paragraphs), and more spacious forms (short and medium essays) impacted my
skills and strategies across genres. And longer phrasing meant I had more
things to work with when the starting point of a poem emerged.
I continued my
apprenticeship in pentameter (not my default meter). Greater ease here allowed
me to resume working toward the sonnet, with the help of Sir Patrick Stewart’s
generously annotated online Shakespeare recitations. I had a sonnet prompt
stashed in a drawer of my mental desk for over thirty years. With stronger
skills and unofficial virtual coaching, I was ready to learn how, in poetic
composition, meeting a set of constraints was not the same as crafting a
functioning whole (“necessary but not sufficient!,” cue my 8th-grade math
teacher). That was such familiar wisdom in engineering, why had I applied it so
unevenly in writing poetry?
COSMIC IRONY
Then a funny thing
happened on the way through the sonnet. Prose poems arrived. Like a new
language for which I had lacked the ear and structural knowledge to grasp, the
prose poem opened to me as both reader and writer.
The first to take shape
was a series on plants of Western Greece, my husband’s homeland, where we spend
part of almost every year with family. These were short poems (~ 30-110 words)
that I wrote in fairly rapid succession. After the fourth or fifth, I
recognized the undercurrent: it was, in part, a grief journal, coming amid
several years of losses in both Greece and California.
“Ionian Rural,” an
eight-poem sequence, landed in the literary magazine Quarter After Eight
and brought my first Pushcart nomination. It spurred my momentum in prose
poetry and let a longtime engagement with plants move deeper into my writing,
attracting more botanical prose-poems later on. They invited playfulness and a
broader range of voice and tone than I was used to inhabiting, or allowing
myself to inhabit.
Herbarium: Giant Reeds
Guardians, whisperers.
Mythology let you off easy. If I had a secret, you’re the last place I’d bury
it. Lined up creekside, roadside, edge of the farm: pointing the way to watery
greed. Abundance loves you—wild, bundled, woven as fencing, what and whenever.
The lush wind-fluttered lot of you pleading nothing to see here, no
one to shield, somewhere to get to, somehow to be.
GUIDE STARS
Finding ways to proceed
past the initial kernel of a poem isn’t a new challenge, but it eluded me more often
during the extended crisis of the pandemic: questions of framework, ways to
form a line, and to move from line to line without my energy (and the poem’s)
vanishing. I had rhythmic, sensory-imagistic, and tonal sense as ongoing
guides. I knew from experience that line and stanza structure could also
support me, but could they sustain me?
Allusion kept showing up
for me from “Equinox and All” onward. So did ekphrasis. Both modes offer
something focused to start from, react to, or enter into conversation
with.
Late in quarantine,
standing at the kitchen sink on a winter weekend, my morning brain met a swath
of coffee grounds and orange peels and could not not hear Wallace
Stevens. A series of blank verse poems modeled on, and borrowing from, “Sunday
Morning” took hold of me for several months.
Beyond the easy allusive
start, “Complacencies of the kitchen, and late / coffee grounds and orange
peels in the sink, / and the gray freedom of sunlight through clouds…,” I
wasn’t clear on how to proceed until I chose minimal rules for each constituent
poem: twelve-lines of pentameter, incorporating words, phrases, and other
elements (tonal cues, narrative shifts) from across Stevens’s sequence. There
was no other way I was up to an arduous poem-project at that time. It felt
exhilarating—such welcoming support. It felt like theft. It felt like the slow,
jagged progress of assembling a jigsaw puzzle that quietly accepts your
tinkering in the corner of a common room.
“Quarantine Morning” built
over four months. It was sturdy and roomy enough to reflect on fear, quandaries,
injustice, and corrosive undercurrents that continue to this day. It gave me
momentum. When a poet-friend forwarded a submission call for micro-chapbooks, this
sequence offered a solid center. I had a poem to precede it (“Equinox and
All”). I wrote one to succeed it (“Inventory for the Ecliptic,” which underwent
extensive rewriting the following year). Each held a complement of plants and stars.
Now I had a micro-chapbook, according to one publisher’s guidelines, anyway. It
was a larger center to build on.
SYMMETRIES AND SYNERGIES
The next prose poem to
arrive shifted everything: process, thematic linkages, trajectories,
integration, and an abrupt expansion of process awareness.
“Sun, Flower” was prompted
by a looming deadline for a community ekphrastic project. After multiple
extension requests, I had an exquisite piece of visual art to write to, but
still nothing to write. The first phrase arrived in a moment of insomniac musing
as the third deadline approached. I scrawled it on a scrap of paper on my
nightstand. In the following days, surprisingly simple things swirled into this
poem, regardless of the relative grandeur (hello, Sagittarius A*) of any single
image. The title’s format— a compound word with a comma inserted for thought—is
a device I use elsewhere in Weeds and Stars.
Sun, Flower
The center of anything has
work to do. Bearing, spinning, taking things in, sending them out again. Pupil
and iris. Axle and hub. The dense, dark center of our gathered stars, swathed
in what light it hasn’t swallowed, dragging bright dust in arced scarves. Aster
to aster, disk to disk. The way a word begets a world. Say inflorescence. Say
one bent petal rests on the rim. A tear. An inflection. Say the mind travels
there, a foot explores the unexpected curve.
“Sun, Flower” brought new
awareness of the resources of pattern. I felt it come together as I followed the
movement and shape suggested by the artwork. Botanical asters (daisies, heath, sunflowers,
etc.) are radially symmetric; celestial asters are spherically so. Spirals are
likewise concentric, but dynamic. That we feel and understand them so universally
and instinctively illustrates embodied, nonlinear wisdom—one of our oldest
inheritances.
In focusing my attention
on a pattern of movement, other things (especially things made for
differentiation or division, like taxonomy and scale) fell outside the scope of
compositional concerns. There was less to think about and manage. The sunflower
itself, suns/stars, flowers/inflorescences, eye, and wheel—they all unreel from
somatic sensibilities, shared forms, or shared movement patterns indifferent
to scale and subject. That choice of functional lens underlies the way a
poem might appear to leap and travel associatively. (A few years later, this
approach strikes me as resembling Lagrangian Mechanics in physics, but that’s a
longer conversation for another day.)
I didn’t see this poem as
suited to the pandemic-centered micro-chapbook at first. But to progress beyond
‘micro’ I had to consider including it, along with a handful of other poems
completed since my first book. Things stellar and planetary wove through them. Maybe
more plant-based work could come in. Several species in the Greek sequence were
equally at home in California. I just had to open the gate, and pieces like
those in “Ionian Rural” arrived, moving beyond connection to Greece and into
other tonal shadings and speech registers as well. They soon overtook the
quarantine sequence as a source of cohesion, being more agile in finding
connection. They became structural elements, like little vertebrae strung
throughout the growing collection, creating a trace narrative, holding space
for other poems to enter, and indicating possible gaps (if I could listen for
them) in the developing whole.
More than anything, I
loved playing in opportunities of voice that each plant offered, whether
scruffy weed or fancy cultivar. The new prose-poem series includes the original Ionian
pieces. Each one bears the title “Herbarium” plus a common or Latin plant name.
Most have a third-person speaker, some are in first person or direct address.
Here’s one of the last to be composed.
Herbarium: Arum italicum
Sometimes
a spadix is just a spadix. Sometimes a spathe is frank as all get-out—not
calling it a spade, not pretending toward the flare of famous callas. Sometimes
it’s futile: best you can do is honor the form, the hue, the mettle of
nonlethal toxins, the showiness of potted cousins placed just so inside a
cottage window. Make of yourself a gazer, dazed. Exonerate a rough, unhindered
bunch in humid shade, vermillion fists of seed intent on being seen, much to
the rare embarrassment of docile mulch and possibly the most plaintive of
inviolate impatiens.
ITERATION, RECURSION,
PROGRESSION
Around this time, the list
poem also entered my reach. “Citrus” had a sensory start (walking by
neighborhood lemon trees), and the opening line rode in on echoes of Robert
Frost’s ruminative pentameter. I proceeded with a newbie’s strict adherence to
identical format of the repeated phrase, adding a commitment to maintain every
line as a sentence fragment. Later, reluctantly, I agreed to experiment with
changing the initial word/phrase in some lines. This allowed the poem to
progress in the way thinking and memory might progress: incrementally informed,
unresolved and unfinished despite insightful gains; each line acting like a refinement
or addition to the thinking of the preceding line. The end lacks closure
despite its closure-signaling intonation and pacing.
Citrus
By which I mean the blossom, not the fruit.
By which I mean the scent and not the sight.
By which I mean nostalgia, its sudden bite.
As if a tree, a patio, a street.
The way the concrete had a fragrance.
The concrete and the asphalt and the quiet, tiny yards.
Because the windows and the curtains.
Because the timbre of a passing car.
And how the dampness of the grass
in which I meant to pause.
Or when the stippled light on stucco
walls.
Because a slow forgetting.
By which I mean the acrid with the sweet.
Working in uncertainty is a
standard feature of physics. Now it was integrating further into my life and writing,
expanding pathways and landing places.
The cento, pantoum, and
villanelle proved up to ventures in uncertainty, too, and all appear in this
collection. The villanelle has been my go-to support form for political crisis.
The cento is the least familiar to me of these forms. The 24-line cento “Home,
Planet” knits the work of poets from disparate eras and formal styles: Elizabeth
Bishop, Lucille Clifton, John Donne, Li-Young Lee, and others. It became the
title poem of the book’s last section.
The pantoum, by definition
recursive, is especially suited to carrying quirky paths of lyric inquiry, as
each line transforms through new placement and constellations of meaning. The
title poem of Weeds and Stars (written well after the book title
decision), is a pantoum that moves between the sea floor, minor moons, music,
and motley stars. It’s one of three pantoums in the book, none of which began
with the form as prior intention, but rather as exploration early or midway in
composing. (Speaking of seas, the aquatic creatures in Weeds and Stars arrived
in the last months of writing, usually via star-like geometry.)
Form and pattern can become
increasingly fruitful resources as we attune to them. I mean this not only in
the literal sense—that patterns arise and can act as motifs—but also in terms
of compositional logistics. Constraints, whether in fixed forms or invented
rule sets, can be conduits for unexpected elements, and can also provide ways for
us to enter and navigate daunting terrain, overly familiar terrain, doldrums, or
confusion. I’ve found this learning to be cyclical, often hard to assess from
the inside.
To complement the lonely
bullet list up top, here’s a quasi-map of learning, discoveries, and process
evolution from book one to book two.
EMERGENCE
Some of the structure and dynamics
of Weeds and Stars seemed clear as they unfolded, but it was a patchy
clarity. The most striking aspect to me in retrospect is that, similarly to
putting my trust in other poets’ work as starting places and anchor points, I
was putting my trust in self-organizing principles to a greater degree, and
more deliberately, than previously. Not that I stopped trying to micromanage;
rather (and thankfully), I was finding approaches where that type of headwork
and handiwork wasn’t perpetually active or on call.
“Sun, Flower” has a
center. It came into being as I centered patterns of movement, spiraling more
imagery into the poem. The poem and its properties drew more poems into its
field. It felt like a quiet, recursive dance unfolding over years. Now the
whole collection appears to enact that dynamic, within poems and within sections,
pattern as generative and attractive. Each of the finished three sections
(“Sun, Flower,” “Still, Life,” and “Home, Planet”) holds weeds and stars and a
different locus of concerns. The foundation is the original micro-chapbook. The
book is a nested whole.
I sent a (non-micro) chapbook
manuscript out a few times in 2023-24, first as Equinox and All, and
later as Weeds and Stars. From late summer through the end of 2024, it
almost doubled in length, surpassing both the threshold for full-length
collections, and my notions of how my writing could progress. Arrival of new
poems overlapped with revision as I began submitting Weeds and Stars as
a full book manuscript shortly before a midnight deadline on December 31, 2024.
It went to many prospective publishers (competitions, open reading periods, and
cold queries) as it grew and sharpened. A thrilling acceptance call came eight
months later from The Word Works. For sobering comparison, my first book
traveled over two decades to find a publisher; a frustrating span that allowed abundant
rounds of rehearing, revising, and reconfiguring.
Weeds and Stars subtly reorganized as it progressed.
It holds ongoing experiments alongside image-based poems in free verse, my
earliest sustained mode of poetic composition. The blend of lyric impulses in
the free verse poems is very close to my earlier work, but the sensibilities
are broader, more at home in this gathering of questions and allusive song.
Again and again, everyday encounters set the mind, the senses, and the mind’s
eye in motion.
Of Mere Seeing
after Stevens
A quill at the edge of the street—
crow, most likely,
the bird gone barking
up the wrong tree
somewhere. The right tree
rising like the tree
at the end of the mind.
The mind at the end
of one tether or another,
as frayed or smooth
as a quill, sings
beyond thought.
One shiny, dark quill
trims the unswept gutter.
Then, another.
Lisa Rosenberg is a poet and essayist
formed by physics, engineering, somatic practices, and fine and performing
arts. Her work has been recognized by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, MOSAIC
America Fellowship, and Leonardo@Djerassi Residency. She served as the second
Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and worked as an engineer in the
US space program on satellites including the International Space Station. Her
prose spans poetics, satire, science, and memoir. Her poetry centers
interconnectedness across nature, culture, and perceived extremes: from the
fantastic to the mundane, the subatomic to the cosmic, the global to the
hyperlocal. Through workshops, talks, and essays, she addresses process and
systems skills essential to integrative thinking. Her collections Weeds and
Stars (April, 2026, The Word Works/Hilary Tham Capital Collection) and A
Different Physics (2018, Red Mountain Press) reflect decades of
polydisciplinary inquiry. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives
part-time in Ilia, Greece.
Website: www.LisaRosenberg.com
Instagram: @lisarosenbergwrites
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lisa.Rosenberg.poetry/
Medium: @lisarosenberg9
Bluesky:
@1lisarosenberg.bsky.social
A Different Physics: purchase | description
NOTES
• “Sun, Flower” responds
to the cyanotype “Sunflower in Blue” by Buffy Davis.
• Cover art, “Golden Cosmic Whirl,” (2025)
by Karen Cox. Talk about synchronicity!
• Author photo by Thinh Le
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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