Laura Walker : Process note #32

The 'process notes' 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 Laura Walker are part of her curriculum for her upcoming class for Maker, Mentor, Muse and for her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

I started writing psalmbook the way I usually start a new series: casting about, writing in response to various catalysts, at first hopeful, and then increasingly anxious to find that thing that will move me— looking for a trapdoor to fall through. This time I found it in the Book of Psalms.

The rhythms and cadences of the King James Version of the Bible, their lull and pull, are evocative for me in a way few things are. I grew up in the Bible Belt, but my dad was a proselytizing atheist. Sitting in church, I desperately wanted to enter the world of prayer and faith that seemed to mean so much to my friends and grandparents. But I never could, quite. The ethereal, transcendent language of the KJV, though, transported me, and it also became suffused with all the yearning I felt— perhaps still feel— that yearning of an outsider wanting in. 

I wasn't familiar with the Psalms. When I started to read them, I was startled by the voice I found there (and I’m not assuming anyone else hears the same voice). I'd been expecting a confident song of love and faith. Instead, the voice I heard was overly insistent, desperate, sometimes vindictive and violent, and full of yearning. It was raw and vulnerable: torn between a very present, sometimes violent, sometimes bewildering world, and a very absent, sometimes violent, sometimes bewildering "you". It seemed to me to be declaring its faith even as it faced the impossibility of faith. I'd found my trapdoor.

The process of writing psalmbook was a new one for me, even though I’ve written several books that respond closely to a text (follow-haswed is a collage of found language from a single volume of the OED; story reinhabits fairy tales; bird book borrows from a bird guide to North American birds; etc.). Each page in psalmbook responds to a single Psalm; sometimes I would return to the same Psalm multiple times. In the case of psalmbook, though, it felt less a collaborative collage or creative translation, and more like a kind of channeling. Each day, I would choose a Psalm and read it over and over, until I felt the language start to give and flood and the floor drop away. Then I would write, letting the voice I heard move through me.

I was fairly uncomfortable throughout. I was uncomfortable with aspects of the voice I heard; I was uncomfortable bringing “another voice” across and onto the paper; I was uncomfortable with a personal and idiosyncratic reading of a sacred, communal text; I was uncomfortable with the religious overtones, and uncomfortable with the secular ones. All of those things, of course, also kept it generative— like so many others, I am moved by the awkward, the difficult, and the problematic.  Even so, it took me several years to come to terms with it.

In the end, I think the book became a kind of prayer for me— prayer as plea— with all its contradictions, its very human fallibilities, its wrestling with how to relate to the world and to the divine, its desire to see and be seen, its frustration and tentativeness and confusion, and above all, its yearning—to be heard, to believe, to connect.

 

 

 

psalm 17

         

 

 

a sentence converges        

 

                                    this equals that      you visit me

                        in the night

 

          you will find nothing

 

i will not speak

 

 

there is a narrow path
that widens just beyond
i have never strayed

 

secret places
of children
and salt

 

 

 

 

psalm 84 

 

 

 

 

i need
birds and hosts
some kind of color

 

to wait for you

 

we wade in pools and egrets
everyone appears
but you

 

i will cut myself into a thousand pieces
and give you one — i will stand in your door
and ignore the tents —

 

 

 

 

psalm 12

 

 

 

 

i am thinking of faithful
of frail and unanointed

 

your name a broken door

 

you are silver    
boiled seven times
a pure thing hung round your neck

like an antidote to fever :

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Walker [photo credit: Theo Lemkin] is the author of six books of poetry: psalmbook (Apogee Press, 2022), story (Apogee Press, 2016), Follow-Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), and two chapbooks: genesis (above/ground press, 2023) and bird book (Albion Books, 2010). In 2023 she joined Apogee Press as a co-editor. Laura grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches poetry, keeps bees, and wrangles chickens. 

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks: Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. mawsheinwin.com

 

Barbara Tomash : Process Note #21

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. These poems and process note by Barbara Tomash is part of her curriculum for her upcoming classes at the University of San Francisco in their MFA Program and for Poetry In Process: Creating Together, A Workshop.

 

 

These poems were written during a time of shocked mourning for the loss of two life-long friends who died within the same week at the end of January 2022. How did my stunned body respond? First, there was wailing, which came loud, new, and sudden from my throat, though the deaths were not unexpected. Then, there was loss of bodily function—or I could say, loss of species specificity: we are the only mammals who walk upright, a deeply precarious situation. I went out walking, missed a curb, and fell face down to concrete; the speed of the fall was breathtaking. I was given a new broken orientation. What the body enacts can feel as necessary and correct as a promise fulfilled. Now, over a year later, I am slightly, but visibly, remade, with a new red-raised scar at the bridge of my nose and a persistent ache in the tissue between my eyes.

In the mornings I often think of my dead friends and the narrow verticality of human bodies—
a narrowness we perhaps fail to notice until life has left us and we stand no more. I have written these poems in the form of a narrow rectangle with justified margins and no punctuation. I think the constrained space held between the sharply drawn margins calls to me because grief can feel like a pressurized containment, deep and endless—a hole dug in earth, a rocket shooting into space, a closet-like room with a floor that retreats under our feet. I see my friends’ grieving partners entering these spaces, some windowed and streaming with a too-bright light, some boarded up and dark.

Writing the first poems in this narrow box-like form, I slowly came to see the page more as a window than as a container, a translucence that shapes and makes possible perception, while above my desk, the actual window, filled with tree branches, became the scrawled-upon page. Forgoing the use of punctuation can free the words gathered inside the frame to assemble and reassemble themselves, even as I write them down. Movement is always, for me, an antidote to pain, both physical and emotional. So, I enjoy this fluidity within the process, seeing how fragments seam together in unexpected ways allowing for shifting meanings, multiple readings.

I am currently working on a book length manuscript of poems written in this form, and I am always taken by surprise when I see how frequently end-of-the-world imaginings and the imminent threat to the natural world crop up when I write. In my day-to-day life I am not aware of being obsessed by this theme, and when I sit down to write, catastrophe is not on my mind. I am, however, often writing into the intersection between my unexpressed thoughts and feelings and my close observations of the natural world to which my body, of course, belongs and paradoxically forms an interestingly permeable barrier. Is imagining a poem’s form more akin to constructing a house, looking into a window, or giving birth? I don’t know. But, it seems that finding a form lets language and thinking breathe inside a body, and this movement between inhale and exhale gives me a reason to write.

Of Autobiography

my dear dead friend should I tell of the animals who never sleep of the breakdown of the body how it branches out leaves gaps and gnaw marks how in delirium how in the four walled twilight I searched for your house outside the city should I tell of the garden where I am buried in a text of nowhere and tangled thoughts how migrant birds in their joyful placeless sky beat away our fleshless music with their wings should I tell how disintegration is a body of illegible words scratched in the margins with a stick my dear friend shall we live nowhere shall we not care how things end

 

Of Anima

the bird was dead when the children found it why should grief exist at all the infant body riding in the mother’s mouth or atop her head you have to understand struggling to keep it afloat plunging into the opaque green waters hauling spinning and diving with it you have to understand how to gently touch the skull of a dead adult to stroke the bones rocking back and forth to withdraw into solitude and set aside food for your dead companion even at the risk of your own starvation you have to understand I am alive she tried to revive her but she couldn’t nuzzling and biting she used a piece of dried grass to clean debris from her dead offspring’s teeth when one died the other lay with its head on her neck for hours crows mob and squawk magpies bury their dead under twigs and the word grief is made illicit among us

 

Of Luminous

my dear late friend my euphoric interior moon is it possible your red streamers emit not a shred of observable light we stand still in your path we waver entangled in seeds of burning branches parallel syntax unerring alliteration flaming where not even a vowel is consumed you have for question I am what for obituary I am irretrievable you have arms legs throat breast hands we wash orifices we cleanse eyes and jaw tied shut with strips of clean cotton cloth you fell out of orbit the oceans boiled I hid inside the glare of all mirrors such is the delineation of what is lacking where I went blind

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Tomash is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, Her Scant State (Apogee), PRE- (Black Radish), and Arboreal (Apogee); and two chapbooks Of Residue (Drop Leaf Press), and A Woman Reflected (palabrosa). Her writing has been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, The Test Site Poetry Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, Posit, Tupelo Quarterly, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. mawsheinwin.com

Susanne Dyckman : Elizabeth Robinson’s Apprehend: A Reflection

from Report from the Robinson Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

This is not a review.  This is about an experience.  This is about what happens when I read Elizabeth Robinson’s poetry.

I want to talk about the writing, but first note my close and enduring friendship with Elizabeth.  We have read our work together and written collaboratively over many years. We know one another’s families and have community in common. That said, I want to put those significant truths aside as I think of her writing and how I engage with it.  

Elizabeth is a prolific writer.  Choosing a favorite book of hers is much like choosing a favorite child, which, of course, can’t be done. So it is easiest to focus on a single book, Apprehend (2003), a volume based on fairy tales. It is one I pull from my bookshelf often.

I do not memorize much, have never been very good at reciting by heart.  But Elizabeth’s line “a small thing fits into a small hand” (Treasure Chest, pg. 50) is a phrase I carry with me.  A tender line, that small thing and small hand, a moment of softness to keep. 

Yet in this volume it is not a small thing that fits, but everything.  Immediately following that line, continuing it, is the word “clutched.”  A harder sounding word, a holding tight.  And in these poems, everything is clutched, turned over and inside out and examined. “Things sent down seep from one conclusion to the next” (Treasure Chest, pg. 49).  The spirit, the environment, the body, beauty, and disfigurement are all equal inhabitants of her poetic world.  I am as likely to find who she, the poet, calls God high in a nest in a tree, or in lowly vermin, or detached fingers, or in a tentative kiss, as in that word itself.  And wonder how they can all be so equally embraced. 

Wonder, a result of being enthralled by the leaps that, within the context of the work, all make sense.  The underlying spirit of the language propels me forward.  What is next?  I am not always quite certain, on first reading, what that will be, but it doesn’t matter. I quickly learn to trust. The surprises, the displacement, and, after being temporarily in a wilderness, the resettling.    

Even with repeated readings, the work holds me. The “small hand” of Elizabeth is a generous one.  I am with the spirit of her words as they hover, making a place for me to linger.  “Here we are moved toward battle and warped glass/but moved by/our Lady, the ship, who prefers delicacy.” (Asea, pg. 36). As I travel through the quiet intensity of this poetry, I am always astonished.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susanne Dyckman is the author of two full length volumes of poetry (equilibrium’s form, Shearsman Books, and A Dark Ordinary, Furniture Press Books) as well as number of chapbooks, including two published by above/ground press.  Her work (both collaborative and individual) has been published in a number of journals, the latest being Fence, Denver Quarterly, and parentheses. She has taught undergraduate and graduate level writing courses, and for five years hosted a summer poetry reading series. She lives in Albany, California.