Process Note #61 : Dawn Angelicca Barcelona

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 Dawn Angelicca Barcelona are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.

  

Process Note for Roundtrip by Dawn Angelicca Barcelona
Finishing Line Press, March 2025

As I packed up my apartment in Seoul in 2016, preparing to return to the U.S. after two years teaching English to elementary school students, the simple act of gathering hangers into a paper bag to sell on Craigslist unexpectedly spiraled me into an afternoon of tears. In my poem “Guro Station, Line 1,” a love letter to the train station I most often used, I wrote: “I wonder if it’s possible to love another city / or two different countries / so tightly.” Sitting with this tension—holding both the found home of South Korea and my birthplace in New Jersey—is what inspired me to start writing the first poems in Roundtrip.

The poems I wrote first attended to the intense reverse culture shock I experienced for months after I returned home. I kept trying (and failing) to articulate to people around me why small things upset me. The manners and gestures I internalized while living as an expat became jarring to others: I instinctively bowed to greet new people instead of shaking their hands, insisted shoes must be taken off before coming into the house, and passed everything with two hands. I missed my students deeply—I loved the classroom—but I also found myself torn on where to get my teaching license and nervous about how the state of education would be imperiled by the first Trump administration. Ultimately, I decided that I would pivot away from teaching for personal reasons. What had once felt like home in New Jersey had become painful. My independence shrank as I moved back in with my parents, had trouble landing a job in the tri-state area, and grappled with how I felt like life had really gone on without me.

          I slipped into a rhythm of sleeping in, applying to jobs, and writing late into the night. Alongside emails from Indeed and LinkedIn alerting me to jobs that might match my profile, I also received emails from literary organizations about their first book deadlines coming up. I decided, with no real plan, that I would aim to write and submit a manuscript to one of these contests no matter what condition it was in. In one month, I had done it: I generated enough work to meet the requirements of a full-length manuscript and hit submit without editing it. Admitting this now is quite embarrassing, but just knowing I could generate a lot of work in order to process my reverse culture shock and grief was a satisfying experience.

          In January 2017, I left New Jersey for San Francisco. It would be a fresh start for me, a place that held no personal trauma and a place I had first visited because of the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her book Dictee felt especially poignant during my time in South Korea as I reflected on my parents’ immigration story, reckoned between my racialized identity, and the role imperialism plays in fracturing countries and families. My poem “Muse” is dedicated to her:

After all these years I still scan bookshelves for your name, walk up and down

staircases thinking of you. I revisit your book when I fly around the world

only to return back to the place I came from.

My poems were raw and diaristic, still containing much of the same themes as the manuscript I drafted in 2016: my yearning for home while always wanting to leave, my tendency to leave before being left, and the things I forgave while living with my parents that I decided to no longer tolerate as I built a life on my own. There is a circularity I’ve noticed in my work that comes from the constant desire to establish a home because my own sense of home and family of origin was painful. Through therapy, the idea of creating a found family became very important, and I chased it through participating in writing communities such as the Laguna Writers Workshop where I generated new work for three hours every Tuesday night, took classes to meet other writers through the Writers’ Grotto and Left Margin LIT, and when the pandemic came upon us, I wrote alongside others in different time zones through Zoom writing workshops. Writing in a community with others helped me confront fears (such as driving in “Bilateral Stimulation”), experiment with surprising metaphors (“Portrait in Sepia”), and listen deeply to the stories of others (“Dear Violet”). I printed out my drafts from each writing session and classes, organizing them in folders in my filing cabinet: Edit, Save for Later, Maybe Not. I began to edit poems on an individual level to submit to journals and literary magazines. As I participated in readings and open mic events, I saw how my work connected me to people and vice versa, and decided it was ready to look at that haphazard manuscript I wrote in 2016.

The book took seven years to complete: five to generate the bulk of the work and two to revise. The oldest poems are from 2016; the newest poem, “Woman Lost While Looking at Stars,” opens the collection and was composed in 2023. Editing early poems was hard—I didn’t want to strip away the intensity of visceral moments but I also wanted to prioritize clarity in order to have my work resonate with other readers. When it came to ordering the collection, my impulse was to first arrange poems chronologically, but that approach lacked cohesion. My next attempt was to group poems by phrases that proved to be too abstract such as “In An Alphabet-Driven Dream,” and “When Kinetic Madonna Arrives.” I also came to terms with the fact that even though I had a large volume of poems, I did not need to stick them all in the same book. This is when I decided that I would go for a tighter, chapbook-length collection to make this manuscript project more achievable. I took out all of the poems that had to do with the Kinetic Madonna character I had created since they were unrelated to the core theme of home, longing, and migration. I removed some of the more whimsical and surrealist poems as well, finding that embodiment was what was helping to link poems together.

Finally, I had a breakthrough after deciding to organize my chapbook by place, which corresponded to themes. This created an emotional arc for my journey with (im)migration: from growing up in New Jersey, imagining relationships with my grandparents in the Philippines, being unable to articulate myself in a new language in South Korea, my brief interlude back home in New Jersey, and finally landing in California, where I felt I had truly established a home and found family I could rely on. One major revision that I was extremely hesitant to make was changing the title of the collection. I often think of titles for my poems first and then write into them, and it gets difficult for me to change them even when they no longer fit what the poem has become. I made a list of alternate titles that were short and encapsulated movement. The idea of circularity came to the forefront, and thus the idea of booking roundtrip tickets and flights came to mind. The original title for my collection ended up becoming a line in one of the poems—I’ll let you guess what it was!

I hope readers find themselves reflected in the relationships and places I write about. I want to continue exploring mental health and how it travels with us. I want readers to ask: Where did this bruise form? What does it look like now? How can I hold it with love? I strive to be generous toward the version of myself that endured loss and sadness.

I still don’t know exactly what I want or need in a home, but I know that physical space leaves imprints on me to discover later. Only after I leave a place do I begin to understand its meaning. Now living in Chicago, I haven’t yet found that clarity, but I trust that living attentively will allow these poems to take root in the future.

 

 

Cake

 

we grilled our own meat at Restaurant 108
and drank beers and soju, sitting Korean-style.
we spent too much time teaching our own language
to learn the language of this new country.
we leaned on each other to pick from the few
words sown inside our mouths.
we were just kids wondering how to eat. 어떻게^[1]?   

we planted a new alphabet to help us sprout through the soil
of Sejong, a province new to us and new to the country.
with soft-spoken syllables, our courage boils up: 맞아요^[2]? 

back at home, we said “fork” and “spoon” or “please” and “thank you”
now we only point and say “여기요, 이거 더 주세요^[3]”
our tongues burn, digging for more words when we see a kitchen. 

we set the cake down next to our grill.
here we sing 생일 축하합니다^[4] instead of happy birthday.
the song tastes like an expiration date
another birthday I wish I could be home for, hoping after a year
it will still be waiting for me in the fridge.

 

  

December
          after Natalie Diaz

It is December and we must be brave.

In the twinkling lights of The City by the Bay
I can see where the inlets stop the power supply.
The city’s howling bridge: what the engineers call
an aerodynamic phenomenon. Golden hue majestic
enough to disguise the suicide nets below. 

The tree–always fake until this year–drops its needles
and clutches the Win Long Hardware Store string lights.
I braid wicks and pour wax into yogurt containers,
sift through magazines and slice dancers away from their stage. 

The things I know aren’t easy:
a sibling neck-deep in conspiracy theories
a father nauseous to the touch
a mother in N95 masks every night.
I curate a found family in my adulthood. 

I fly six hours and visit the house on Lavender Drive.
The neighborhood streets are full of namesakes: Wintergreen,
Azalea, Periwinkle, Honeysuckle, Ivy, Oak, Boxwood.
What was once a small crack in the sidewalk erupted with weeds.
How can I call this a home if nobody says,
we need to let go of what we never had. 

If we are what we love, what does love look like unreturned?
Is it me? I spread love with my tongue licking envelopes
which is why I still write letters and buy postcards from every state. 

The first incandescent light bulb illuminated my hometown,
a little known fact by people who still live there.
This is why I dread going to Stop and Shop or Dunkin’ Donuts
where I am no longer nameless in front of my classmate’s kid. 

What is happiness if not the absence of natural disasters–
a lack of power outages and reliable clean water.
I open entire drawers filled with hospital soap bars and inkless pens.
I beg my mom to throw them out. But in Cebu, the kids will need this.
I read about Typhoon Odette and how it chewed up then spit out their houses.  

We heat our food on scratched up Corelle dishes
then transfer it to the dishes from Mikasa with gold trim.
Once, I made a plate spark like lightning in the microwave.
I feel like that sometimes: breakable, explosive. 

In between spoonfuls of sinigang, my dad asks me again:
Why are you still afraid to drive? Meaning, What did we do wrong?
as if Martha’s picture isn’t still on my wall, the New York Times headline fresh:
Young Dancers in Speeding Car Leave a Long Trail of Grief. 

The cloudless sky beckons the streetlamp to turn on.
It hiccups until it offers a path from Lavender Drive
toward Wintergreen Avenue, winnowing through the neighborhood
to feed the mouth of the Garden State Parkway.   

Somewhere far from Ilaya, Dumanjug, Cebu,
an American family cleans up the dinner table,
Saran-wrapping leftover kare-kare and steak.
The placemats, sticky with vinegar, read
There’s No Place Like Home. 

(Originally published by Firemaker Troublestarter)

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn Angelicca Barcelona is a poet from New Jersey. She won the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2022) and Epiphany Magazine's Fresh Voices Fellowship (2023). Her work has been published in Epiphany, Tampa Review, Red Ogre Review, Atlanta Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and BRINK. She's currently a candidate in the Litowitz MFA+MA Program at Northwestern University. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Fulbright Program, Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, VONA, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Her debut chapbook, Roundtrip, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. She likes to dance, talk about mental health, and travel via public transportation.

· Website: dawnangelicca.com 

· IG: https://www.instagram.com/dawnangelicca/

Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com

 

---

^[1] Ottoke, How?

^[2] Majayo, Is it right?

^[3] Yogiyo, igeo deo juseyo. Over here, more of this, please.

^[4] Saengilchukha hamnida, Happy birthday!

Karla Brundage : Process note #31 : Blood Lies: Race Trait(or)

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 Karla Brundage 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.

 

 

 

 

 

Each of us finds ways to process our generational trauma. I began writing these Blood Lies in college, but perhaps did know I was writing it yet. The idea of Race Trait(or) was an insidious nagging that continues to plague me, as I am always wondering about what makes one enough, and to the point, what makes one Black enough or white enough to be considered?

 While taking a course on Brazilian culture, one of the readings included a list of all the legal terms encoded into the laws of governance. The list included at least 50 categories of heritage and “blood” mixtures, some examples being mestizo, pardo, and mulatto. This caused me to wonder about categories and categorization of people.

As I was writing this book, the main idea I was trying to interrogate was that of mixing and sorting. As more and more genetic information is read, shared and categorized, beliefs on blood purity are questioned. I wanted to examine this, and because I had a personal connection to the word Mulatto, I decided to start there.

Growing up, until the political shift in the 90’s with conflation of the multi-cultural movement and hip hop, the most common question I was asked and had to answer was: “What are you?” As a result of being asked this question several hundreds of times by friends, strangers, acquaintances and teachers alike, I began to discern that this was a very important and significant question. What was I after all? I was not Black or White? Was I anything? I began to say I am ½ Black and ½ White. This is the definition of Mulatto.

A poet and a skeptic, I did not go to science for the answer, I went to the dictionary. I was not looking for an equation but a definition or category for my own body. What I discovered was math.

These poems are then, the multiplication of multicultural and multiple subject ideas. They are equations.

Due to the complexities, my inquiry into math became algebra which led me to form theorems. This was the second form of poem, the “if, then” poem.

From this question, developed a second question.  If I am mulatto, how far back in my history would I need to go to start measuring the halves? I already knew from family lore that those on the Black side of my family could claim mixed ancestry whether from intermixing with Native Americans or from the legacy of rape endured and perpetrated when my ancestors were enslaved. But due to the one-drop rule, my Black family only claimed Black.

This led to the question about dilution and condensation. If one’s blood can be diluted, can it also be recondensed? Is it possible to work towards “purity” once again?

The point of Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) seems to have evolved. It started off as a way to example the connection/relationship between racial violence against women (specifically Black women) and victimhood. But also to examine the idea of predator. A large theme of this book is betrayal which and also can be seen as enlightenment. What if all one believes is not as was expected? Is this betrayal or enlightenment?  The cover image is a veil being lifted which is in homage to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man which was set in Tuskegee, Alabama. My mother’s side of the family is from Tuskegee, as was my second cousin Sammy Young Jr. He was shot and killed for using a Whites Only Bathroom. The generational trauma caused by his death is the topic of two of the poems in this book.

The book is dedicated to the State of Alabama whose anti-miscegenation laws directly impacted my fate.

The idea of examining the root of the word “mulatto” was an excavation of an obsession I had. Whereby at 17 I had a pre-determined concept of my sexual value as a commodity to be traded, and this led to my being the victim of sexual violence at a young age.

I felt that this exotic presentation of my physiognomy could be bartered,  but from where did that concept arise?

While growing up in Hawaii, a direct reaction of my parents to the threats of violence they faced as a mixed race couple in the 60’s, I was isolated from any construction of self-concept. I began to inherently know that to be mulatto meant to be available for sex trade, to be placed on an open market, historically speaking.

I learned later that historically women of my skin tone and hue bartered our skin tone for more comfortable lives closer to the Big House which left us alienated from our community of Black women of darker shades. I think upon reflecting on how some women chose to use this desirability of light skin to their advantage and to save themselves from further victimhood is when the idea of being a traitor, or trader evolved.

The discovery of the term mulatto at a young age, accompanied by various blood quantum associations, such as quadroon and octoroon only complicated the idea of definition.

This also led me to integrate into my childhood thinking the aspiration to whiteness/light and moving away from Blackness/darkness as is reaffirmed Biblically (note The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison) and has been discussed by many scholars, writers, and religious figures.

It was through examining these definitions that my experiences began to connect phonetically. I could hear echoes of these terms in my personal history as if whispered. The poems came from the etymology of the words in the book.

 

Both, And

Mulatto:
of mixed breed
young mule
a half-ass.

Of mixed race
two segregated halves of privilege and want.

Socially acceptable and degraded.

Mulatta:  feminine

Kept in the Big House for breeding:  Mulatress
irrevocably composite, hysterical and rigid,
so called-black and so-called white.

Old English:  Sunderboren "born of disparate parents."

Related Entries:  Mule

 

Quadroon (noun)

1707, "offspring of a white and a mulatto," from Spanish cuarteron (used chiefly of the offspring of a European and a mestizo), literally "one who has a fourth" (Negro blood), from cuarto "fourth," from Latin quartus (see quart ), so called because he or she has one quarter African blood.  Altered by influence of words in quadr-. 

This can be explained as having one Negro grandparent
or two grandparents who were octoroons
but who’s counting?
America is counting...
counting slaves, counting bodies
counting profit
counting drops and one drop counts
One Drop of African blood
makes you legally a Negro in 1707

Constitutes three fourths a man.

 

Octoroon (Definition in Process)

Grandpa is a Black Indian.
His parents 14^th Amendment certified
          full persons
Black Indians: 1/2 Native American and ½ Black
So if grandpa’s parents were Powhatan and Black
          Grandma is building back the black blood
Are you mulatto?
Then you marry Black
Are your children are ¾?
but the word is now African American.
Then maybe they marry out
division causes erasure
lines in my math
grey smudge in ivory parchment
my theory no longer a proof.

 

 

Poems reprinted with permission of Finishing Line Press.

 

 

 

 

Karla Brundage is a poet, editor, essayist, teacher, and beach lover.  A recipient of a Fulbright Teacher Exchange, she spent a year teaching in Zimbabwe and three years in Cote d'Ivoire where she founded West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange. Along with her newest publication, Blood Lies: Race Trait(or), she is author of two books, Swallowing Watermelons and Mulatta- Not so Tragic co-authored with Allison Francis. She has performed her work onstage and online, both nationally and internationally. Her poetry, short stories and essays can be found in Essential Truths, Multi-America, Konch, Hip Mama, sPARKLE & bLINK, Bamboo Ridge, Vibe.  In 2020, her poem Alabama Dirt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Check out her latest projects at http://westoaklandtowestafrica.com/ as well as on https://www.karlabrundage.com/.

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

Edric Mesmer : GLEAN: 34 MORE PRINT INSTANCES FROM THE FOREVER FILE

 

 

The cataloger’s task of making a gift backlog discoverable continues—though with this caveat: I’ve called this further selection “glean” over “cull,” as the latter suggested some decision of deaccession…

That’s never so for this collection of 20^th- and 21^st-century Anglophone poetry, where every unique instance is kept in an exhaustive attempt to illustrate a “library of record” within the collecting parameters.

By way of these items, I continue to practice what’s called “catalogers’ judgment,” weighing the needs of the piece alongside descriptive standards, paired here with brief appreciations—as each gift described presents an invitation to future researchers.

 

042
Powers / John Perlman.
Mamaroneck, N.Y. : Kachina Press,  ©1982. 

From “‘The Millet’”:

Trying the Shih Ching
          by a lake
          lathered by wind

[…] 

imagining
          a branch
          as centerpole

Shih Ching (Book of Songs) in the Library of Congress index of uniform titles presents as Shijing, to tie together works of translation and homage thematically. Not only does the passage formalize the influence of the Shijing, but also recognizes the asynchronous idiom of Lorine Niedecker, found in the allusive inventory of this poem of hers: “a book / of old Chinese poems // and binoculars / to probe the river / trees.”

 

043
Transient / Jeff Vande Zande.
Greensboro, North Carolina : March Street Press, 2001. 

Jeff Vande Zande has found a way to speak to the “local habitation” of Michigan through roadways that crisscross the peninsulas, simultaneously ancient and modern, as in “Night Travel”:

The long shores of Michigan’s
          peninsulas shape the inland living:
          no crow routes, no easy bridges.
          North of Saginaw, after dusk,
          the absence of semis and salesmen
          abandons travelers to roll
          out of darkness into darkness,
          mining for more road
          on the promise of their headlights.

where travelers follow unlit roads, path-making as they go—following shoreline the way no crow flies, at least, not visibly, by night lights.

 

044
Smithereens seasonal sampler. Vol. 1, no. 1.
Bolinas, Calif. : Smithereens Press, 1982.
Charlie Ross, editor; Mary Lu Banta, managing editor; Joanne Kyger, contributing editor.

Was it Hoffman who said (with Allen and Ulrich, in their landmark study) that most little magazines “fail” before issue two?—of that analysis, this is a most fabulous example! No known no. 2 ever arrived, but it needn’t have: because the first time around was such an anthology of a certain slice of happening. Here’s a list of contributors:

Mary Lu Banta, Bill Berkson, Chris Breyer, Reed Bye, Janet Cannon, Tom Clark, N. Cole, David Cope, Barry Cox, Brad Erickson, Dick Gallup, Jim Garmhausen, Merrill Gilfilan, Robert Grenier, Donald Guravich, Bobbie Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Alastair Johnston, Steve Klingaman, D. Kolokithas, Joanne Kyger, Diana Middleton McQuaid, Kathlene McGill, Duncan McNaughton, Sara Menefee, Dotty Le Mieux, Arthur Okamura, Simone Okamura, Michael Palmer, Louis Patler, Ken Petrelli, Simon Pettet, Tom Raworth, Tasha Robbins, Bob Rosenthal, Charlie Ross, Joe Safdie, Al Sgambati, David Levi Strauss, John Thorpe, Anne Waldman, J.M. Werle, and Michael Wolfe.

 

045
Postcards from Coney Island / Tina Posner.
Brooklyn, NY : Black Canal Press, [1996] 

Here are poems placed in and around New York City, and in and around memory; these notional spaces overlap in work (sometimes prose, sometimes not) where images are strikingly set in a belying talkiness often labelled “speech.” Though there’s little excess, as “talk” might imply—take this opening from “Elopement to Maine,” which works quickly through contrasts to bring us to the heightened, everyday states of relationships, saving time for an occasional/pastoral, with muse—

By day the numb blue breaks into
          mountains of fir and the odd cloud.
          By night, we navigate under
          innumerable seeds buried in the sky
          with only our wine for warmth.

Reaching Isle Au Haut (secretly hope),
          we head, deep in the interior,
          toward Long Pond, to bathe in
          mocha shade and gold shavings.
          Watching from the bank, you split us
          in two: subject and object. You shoot,
          but the image flatters over the wound,
          an idolater’s conjuring […]

 

046
Other people / Ian Heames.
New York, N.Y. : New York Stock, 2013.

Working by way of, these poems take French forms as “source text”—Baudelaire, Villon, du Bellay. Source here is often just a point of departure, though some poems linger closer in vocabulary, as with this from du Bellay’s “Sonnets from L’Olive augmentée”:

Now that Night her starry chariot plies,
          Are you not weary (my desire) of following,
          Already night has gathered in her train
          River-god who receives in your humid flow,
          Not Dryads running lightly through the trees (trans. A.S. Kline, ©2009)

become, in Heames’s spare flourish— 

          Night is my guide now, whose chariot is sleep

          rivers, fountains, desert places
          the elements are emptied of your pain

          wood nymphs, demigods, water nymphs, animals
          all different kinds

Each of three sequences focuses on one of these French poets (a subsequent edition of Other People appearing from the author’s own Face Press in 2014). Consider especially the lasting influence of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal—splendidly, in Heames’s rendering, Bad Flowers—from the modernist lyricists (Millay) through the New York School (O’Hara), signifying long into our own moment by way of image, mood, or intimation. Example: this ending to the poem “You’re Barely Sonic” (of “Le Cygne”?)—

sky to be used
          which ship it slips down they stand

beautiful
          it is but is

you’re barely sonic
          you go into exile to land

 

047
Begin, Buffalo! / by Cyn Mat [Cynthia Ruffin-Mathews] ; preface by Selena Ball ; illustrations by William Yancy Cooper.
Buffalo, New York : Cyn Mat Publications, [revised edition] 1984. 

I saw the license plate CYN MAT about a week ago, driving down by the Erie Basin Marina… Is that the poet?! I wondered. Cyn Mat is the pseudonym for teacher Cynthia Ruffin-Mathews, states a bio note, “given to her by Celes Tisdale to distinguish her from other area authors named Cynthia.” These poems address Blackness, Reaganomics, urban thruways, integration, parallels to Native American struggles, differing approaches to revolution, and a critique of capitalism—all in one slim chapbook! A sample, from the poem “Silent Cries”:

          Silent cries
                             of pains unheard
          through false fantasies
                             of false hope
          through pillagers’ lies
                                  and murderers’ weapons
          of sin’s shameful sorrow.
                             Deaths totaling
                             Bells tolling
                             Mothers woe-ing
                             Country’s showing
                                  ignorance in its
                                  worst form. 

As icon, this self-publication is an invaluable manifestation of a post-Black Arts network local to Buffalo—the connection to professor and workshop facilitator Celes Tisdale; a prefatory poem by Selena Ball (presumably Cynthia Selena Ball-Williams, author of the poetry collection Womaning (Williamsville, N.Y.: Serendipity Arts Unlimited, 1978)); illustrations by writer, painter, and muralist William Yancy Cooper; and graphic design made at the Langston Hughes Institute (formerly on High Street).

 

048
excerpts from Camera Obscura / Erica Lewis.
San Francisco, CA: Etherdome, 2009. 

From Etherdome—that great publishing venture that culminated in As if It Fell from the Sun (An EtherDome Anthology: Ten Years of Women’s Writing), compiled by series editors Colleen Lookingbill and Elizabeth Robinson (San Franciso, 2012)—this chapbook jointedly alternates between blocks of justified text and Mallarmesque spacing. The poems are meditative, enacting the difference described between image and reality; how “time and the constant mutability of everything is actually the underlying story of all the stories we write,” as phrased at opening. Add to this the visual text: images by Mark Stephen Finein, often with the poet’s text floatingly overlapping. Lewis’s mediations (collected as a full-length volume in 2010, published by BlazeVOX) also enact a poetry-criticism that reminds me of Juliana Spahr’s imperative in Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism: a poetry able to comment upon itself as a poetics: “that you do not identify with the image allows for its manipulation…” [erica lewis].

  

049
Longitude of longing : and other poems / Patricia Michael Morimando.
[Place of publication not identified] : Patricia Michael Morimando, [2004] 

The self-published often presents as guide to poems thinking through the daily concerns of social, political, relational, and economic occurrence. Here I’ll attempt to faithfully recreate the concrete-ness of Patricia Michael Morimando’s “Words”:

c
r
y
s
t
a
l
stars
quiver
in remorse
while CEOs suck
up  lichen,  leaving
landscapes  lurid,  forlorn
loons lament to cement-colored
moon   —   this  abysmal  cosmos
composed of allegorical phantoms
permeating  credulity  encrusted
minds numbed by infinitesimal
numbers   products  of  an
incubating species stuck
in   a   chrysalis   of
ignorance beyond
star - tossed
chasm

 

050
The Broadside annual 1973 : introducing new Black poets / editor Jill Witherspoon Boyer.
Detroit : Broadside Press, 1973. 

Can enough ever be said about the publishing phenomenon Broadside Press? Founded by poet and librarian Dudley Randall, this is the second volume of a chapbook serial that lasted two years (1972-1972); in her introduction, editor Jill Witherspoon Boyer says: “We believe that Black readers are actively seeking new directions in literature. We are just as convinced that there are unknown Black poets who can creatively translate and transform the space around them, if encouraged and given the opportunity to do so.” The press and the editor have provided this space, and “all of the poems presented here are as exciting as they are different,” with work by C.S. Berry, Sandra Cox, Walter Cox, Stella Crews, Dennis Wilson Folly, Darnell Hawkins, Jacelyn Lewis, Elouise Loftin, Frank Lamont Phillips, Mbembe (Milton Smith), and Richard W. Thomas.

 

051
Bright seeds : poems / by Kathryn T.S. Bass.
Georgetown, Ky. : Finishing Line Press, ©2005. 

Finishing Line is a small press whose publishing poetics has made space for hundreds of voices; most printed from 2002 forward, often in limited print runs. This chapbook is #39 in their New Women’s Voices Series. With every poem title beginning “Garden of,” the author works her way through Demons, Architects, Insomniacs, Storms, Algebra, Convalescence, and more. I like this kind of parameter, and Bass’s images are as specific as they are encompassing. From “Garden of Landscapes”:

          what a day

          distant curtain
          dropped

          every within
          a far
          metonymy 

          […]

          horseman
          saluting
          or trying to see 

 

052
Catullus : blues from ancient Rome / translated by Ryan Gallagher ; photography by Derek Fenner.
Boulder, CO : Bootstrap Productions, [1999] 

Catullus always makes modernism seem a Roman invention. (Greek, even.) Ryan Gallagher translates the ancient into an idiom of the now, bacchanal and bawdy as ever. What works about the pairing with Derek Fenner’s photography is the resemblance of the latter to Fellini’s Satyricon, where miniature figurines walk before, toward, and lean against monumental props of glowing kinetic aura.

 

053
World’d too much : the selected poetry of Russell Atkins / edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough.
Cleveland, Ohio : Cleveland State University Poetry Center, [2019] 

A book like this is essentially what a poetry archive is for: per Janice A. Lowe’s foreword, the editors “have combed countless anthologies, journals and storage spaces and have unearthed rarely seen examples of Atkins’s writing.” This work clearly exceeds the dimensions of the archive, as Lowe traces through conversations and associations; but the attempt to collect exhaustively finds purpose when accessed as a “forever file” of publications and manuscripts. Caveat: if the poet’s papers have been saved, and stored safely… I was gratefully introduced to poet, composer, theorist, and editor Russell Atkins through a talk given by Tyrone Williams, around the time Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series published Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of an American Master (a volume coedited by Prufer with Michael Dumanis). From Atkins’s “Lakefront, Cleveland”:

          so thunders sea

          it gathers strength
          summoned     ascends     huged up
                               then softs!
          curls up about rocks
          upcurls about thick
          about bold     curls up
          about it
          then     dangerous’d soft!

 

054
An inherited ocean / by Morten Søndergaard.
Chicago, Illinois : Beard of Bees Press, 2005. 

Operating as translational sampler, this collection draws together shorter poems and excerpts from longer sequences found in two books from the Danish by translator John Irons. I almost took Søndergaard’s imagery purely as surrealism, perhaps obscuring another lineage to the Sartrean disorientation of the everyday—

                                         […] a rose
          dipped in liquid nitrogen
          pulverized at my shoulder blade,
          to change position
                     just before sleeping and to regret,
          to feel an inherited ocean
                     sluice over one’s brain with salt […] 

 

055
Amelia Etlinger : an American original : visual poems from 1972 to 1983.
[Milan] : Osart Gallery ; Treviso : Galleria arte contemporanea l’Elefante, [2019] 

Ellen Marie Helinka, in the introductory essay to this exhibition catalog of Etlinger’s visual poems, cites Marta Werner’s recovery of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems as possible antecedent. The comparison is striking, especially given that Etlinger likely never knew of Dickinson’s earlier practice. Etlinger belonged to a circle of mail artists and visual poets exchanging handcrafted pieces across international borders, where the sending of the piece—its materiality as “post”—is of essence to the work itself. This is a poet who worked in threads, papers, petals; and these fifty-plus photographs of Etlinger’s startling missives remain only partially open to the viewer… thoughtfully bound in a gatefold  cover with string tie as packaging, still awaiting re-opening.

 

056
SHOSH NE NS / Matthew Cooperman.
Buffalo, NY : Plantable Chapbooks, [about 2019] 

An exploration of materiality has a certain lineage in Buffalo—from Ferrum Wheel to Hostile Books. In this volume, from Plantable Chapbooks, we encounter “hand-made cover paper from Porridge Paper embedded with wildflower seeds,” the back cover bearing visual instructions on How to Plant a Chapbook. Cooperman’s poems—sampled from Ed Dorn’s Shoshoneans—fit this sensibility, featuring erasure procedures that textually “go to seed” and reconfigure as new flora. [Also consider that the Undercurrent edition of Richard Brautigan’s 1968 Please Plant This Book (in Cooperation with New Student Review) was issued from Buffalo.]

 

057
Rhythm & colour : Hélène Vanel, Loïs Hutton & Margaret Morris / Richard M. Emerson.
Edinburgh : Golden Hare, 2018. 

Dance seems the most difficult of the arts to write of; even its gestures are not easily, if systematically, recorded; entire languages have been invented to attempt this! As a lasting vestige of modernism, the interconnected history of modern dance to other arts might remain hidden from us—at least, that’s the feeling from this richly researched, densely illustrated tome, tracing the biographies of three figures moving between artistic communities in Britain and France. Social, critical, archival—take this historicizing analysis of a review found within:

Maryse Dubois’ review is interesting for what it does not say but strongly implies. For the first time the audience is characterised as predominantly homosexual. Previous references to “young women with firm serious expressions” and “serious women peering through the transpiration with gloomy intentness” may have been coded but were certainly ambivalent. Dubois’ observation is more amused than judgmental, as is her reference to esoteric and hermetic views […]

 

058
After the mountain : the A.M. Klein reboot project / compiled and edited by Jason Camlot.
Montréal : Synapse Press, 2011. 

Among the many forms of memorial and recovery is the tribute volume (e.g.: Homage to Frank O'Hara, edited by Bill Berkson & Joe LeSueur (Bolinas: Big Sky, 1978)). This oblong volume, printed as a companion to Failure’s Opposite: Listening to A.M. Klein (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), brings together more than two dozen contemporary poets, remixing and -fashioning Klein’s poem “The Mountain.” A posthumous festschrift of sorts, the tributes work like an exercise with WCW’s plums: the results are varied and playful; most winning of all, each demonstrates the continued relevance of Klein’s poetry.

 

059
Lines crossed out / Jason Camlot ; with art by Betty Goodwin.
Montréal : Delirium Press, 2005. 

Part catalog, part poem, (part personal essay,) Camlot walks the reader through his connection to the work of Canadian visual artist Betty Goodwin, a connection—and friendship—that sustained him through the era of his dissertation writing. Such kinships are not always formal, especially across “disciplines,” preferring the airier spaces of correspondence and more humid atmospheres of talk. But such connections can be vital, as here, where subject and form, Camlot’s poems and Goodwin’s artwork, bring that across-ness to the fore.

 

060
Missing / Bill Berkson ; collages by PAVE art students, New Rochelle High School.
San Francisco : Missing Edition, 2009. 

What I find most delightful in this volume is the equal emphasis on the artist-collaborators. The poem hangs above, only two or three lines per page, allowing room for the students’ collages, which are pensive and engaging. There is an aspect of teacherliness, though not at all pedantic; rather, the kind that shows, invites, collaborates. There are many authors of this book, gazing in mutual admiration.

 

061
A pin’s fee / David Melnick.
[Philadelphia] : H·dn·g Press, 2019. 

Sometimes the poem waits for us, quietly… in an edition of 100, covers and pages of double-ply folded sheets, “composed […] in 1987. This is its first print publication.” Each poem within arrives in three sections, clearly labelled: 1. Fable; 2. Sujet; 3. Morale. [La Fontaine.] They negotiate lists, charts, cross-outs, fields of space, erasure (seemingly), and grids. The press-struck letters on the soft, folded pages match the mode of thought: jaunty as exacting: “Why my vocabulary is so (small)   (small) is: guitar, clap, nonetheless.”

 

062
Onde o lugar = The where place / Sandra Guerreiro ; translation by Anna Reckin.
Lisboa : Glaciar, 2019.
[cover illustration by Jeffrey Vincent]

Focusing on “the balance between the poems’ near-abstract expansiveness and the precision of specific detail,” poet Anna Reckin’s afterword to her translations of Sandra Guerreiro’s poems (from Portuguese into English) describes a process of collaboration and comparison, capable of minding how “with very little internal context, the translation could easily snag on misunderstandings of particular words.” Parallel translations invite such comparison, even for the reader fluent in only one of facing pages of text; how

antípodas do cheiro lâmina
          de luas paralelas
          ex.planada planície atracada
          em batida de vagas de pele

in Google’s literal-handedness reads

antipodes of the blade smell
          parallel moons
          moored plain terrace
          in hitting skin waves

instead, in Reckin’s deft handling, becomes

opposite side of scent’s blade
parallel moons
ex.plained plane, docked
at the beat of skin’s waves

 

063 & 064 & 065
The exchange. Margaret Elizabeth Mahan. Parts I-III.
Harwich Port, MA : Combat Paper Press, 2011. 

Each of these poems is bound individually: “Cover paper was made by the author at St. Lawrence University, using military uniforms donated to the Combat Paper Project by former U.S. Military personnel.” An earlier publication of Mahan’s poems, under the same title [not held by this library], was made at Sara Marshall’s print shop, University of Alabama, with foldout cover paper by Drew Matott, one of the founders of the Combat Paper Project [BFA in Printmaking, Buffalo State College, 2001]. The Project’s mission is therapeutic: to run papermaking workshops that allow veterans to repurpose their old uniforms into paper for journals, chapbooks, and broadsides on which to write or print their own narratives. These poems by Mahan are from her experiences working with veterans in such workshops around the country.

 

066
The minor arcana / Dglas N. Røthschld.
[Honolulu, Hawaii?] : Subpress, ©1997. 

This must date later than the “CopyWright” year, with references to 9/11 and commentary further beyond neoliberalism and the [First] Gulf War. The binding of this copy (a fourth printing) is somehow emblematic of a politics worn on the poet’s sleeve: the cover is scored to be perfect bound as octavo, but wraps around in stapled signatures, printed side-by-side. Douglas N. Rothschild’s poems put into sequence—are sequence of—events echoing concentrically, from the domestic terrorism of the Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing to the oilfields of Iraq and back again, with stops at local New York City politics and post-World War II “normalcy.” All of these are brought to bear upon the “little mystery” of worldwide aggression as a means to economic ends: “So someone asks me what’s going on with Europe^TM / & all these right-wing events. & I say they must be // experiencing an Economic Downturn^TM.” [N.B.: A wonderful description of the full poem, collected in Rothschild’s Theogony (subpress, 2009), can be found on Mark Scroggins’s blog Culture Industry under the entry for Monday, March 15, 2010.]

 

067
The little golden book of lesser New York School poets.
[Place of publication not identified] : Bibliophasia Reprint Service, [1988?] 

Great poem gods!—didn’t I just mention [026] that I’d never seen this, and BAM!—it floats across the cataloging desk… The frontispiece drawing by Anne Waldman says everything: no, literally: it’s a signpost pointing the way to Calais, Bolinas, Gloucester, Cooperstown, Tulsa, St. Mark’s Place, Bustins Island [Maine], Port Jefferson, Iowa City, San Francisco, Hyanis Port [sic], Angel Hair, and Cut City [Burroughs]. The drawing provides its own antithesis—we’re “in” New York at the same time we’re “at” all those locales—a humorously New York School gesture: Where is the New York School? According to this little golden geography, it centers around the loci soli:

Dick Gallup, Larry Fagin, Charlie Vermont, Kit Robinson, Tom Veitch, Joe Brainard, Stephen Rodefer, Joseph Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Lewis Warsh, Maureen Owen, Hilton Obenzinger, Merrill Gilfillan, Alan Senauke, Harris Schiff, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Jamie MacInnis, Ted Greenwald, Bill Berkson, Alan Bernheimer, Tony Towle, Simon Schuchat, Michael Brownstein, John Godfrey, Robert Creeley, Peter Schjeldahl, Tom Clark, Michael-Sean Lazarchuck, Jim Brodey, and Joanne Kyger (back cover).

Also includes a Further Reading List, and Index of Titles and First Lines—all in under 50 pages!

 

068
Hagoromo : a celestial robe / Yoko Danno.
Kobe : Ikuta Press, 1984. 

Danno is a cofounder of the Ikuta Press, publishing Anglophone poetry in Japan since 1970—including the serial Anthology. In this retelling of an at-least-8^th-century-old story (also a Noh play), sections are told in scenes, and I’m struck by the questioning way Danno allows the narrative to move, and hang at remove: “Do I see all, / do I see through all, do I / see the other side of the mountain, // or the bottom of the sky?” These shifts offset and hold back an “I do” mirrored in the story of the celestial maiden trapped on earth. An architecturally minimalist style is able to support such subtly cantilevered subjectivity, inversing “I am” for the more encompassing if speculative: “what am I, who dreams, // or is dreamt?”

 

069
Culture war III : ecstasy / Don Byrd.
North American Ideophonics.
Minneapolis, MN : Mark Nowak, [1994].

The mail arrives… a folded, stapled newsletter, postmarked 1994. A discourse on poetics, this polemic’s divided into three parts: 1) The Sound; 2) Love; 3) The Soul… Byrd asserts that the modernist soundscape has become dogma, with post-WWII poetry purporting the same Pound-Stein-H.D.-WCW-Eliot sound system—by grammar and by diction (Olson-Levertov-Duncan-Creeley)—which Byrd diagnosis as a problematic “philosophic site or generality of desire.” Complexity has replaced intelligibility is his thesis. Byrd finds an antidote in Irigaray’s response to J-L Nancy’s question: who comes after the subject? Not to give it all away (I mean, it’s a dense seven pages!), but who comes after might be without the discursive concerns of the subject… if indeed we’ve reached full enfranchisement of the subject, emphasizing Byrd’s concern surrounding the “irregard” for content.

 

070 & 071
Webs of Argiope / Laynie Browne.
New Haven, Conn. : Phylum Press, 2004. 

Scorpyn Odes / Laynie Browne.
Tucson : Kore Press, 2015.

Browne’s writing oppugns division between poetry and prose. This goes for a full inclusivity of the prose poem, too, and even that catchy category, the “hybrid.” Similarly, division between the realms of fable, history, philosophy, and the natural world. These two pseudo-metaphoric works—on spiders and scorpions, respectively—exhibit this, both in the hand-sewn chapbook from Phylum (“Of wool being rained / the filmy threads / Ballooning habits / often misrepresented / thus Pliny speaks”) and in the small press, perfect bound volume of a decade later, juxtaposing multifarious odes with “Departures” from various forms of constriction:

From this place not beginning to begin, from beginnings are most difficult, meaning I’ll just stand here and wait. Departure from the furniture resurrecting a dream in which beginning is another sort of trap, forsaking tapestry and topiary.

 

072
Factsheet5 Zine publishers’ resource guide.
San Francisco, CA : Factsheet Five [1990s?] 

A zine operating as zine index; makes me long for folded & posted days… (equally, for Selby’s List). Factsheet Five was a periodical reviewing periodicals, and this outbranch guided those creating such small press serials to Distributors, Print Shops, and Retail Outlets. Tied as these “institutions” were to print, it’d be an interesting (if disheartening) study to see which of these “guilds” still exists, from Iowa City to Ireland: Fuck Shit Up Distribution; Marrakech Express; Quimby’s Queer Store (“Cool to deal with”). Talking Leaves of Buffalo is still here! (and I remember Tower Books…)

 

073
from Ark : the ramparts / Ronald Johnson.
[Place of publication not identified] : Furnitures, ©1991. 

Just side-stapled in white papers, postmarked Rochester, NY. Often it takes years for a collected volume to come into print, and these little iterations reveal the zest and zeal of such aggregate. Parts of Ark appear from Xero Ox Books between 1980 and 1983, as well as from DBA Editions, New Mexico, in 1980 (12 unnumbered pages). Also 1980, from North Point Press (about 90 pages), with various bits from KQED, San Francisco (audiocassette, circa 1983), Dutton in 1984 (57 pages), a broadside from Woodland Pattern in 1985, and a volume from Living Batch Press in 1996 (about 100 pages), culminating in 2014’s 318-page volume from Flood Editions. This particular one is a 12-page sampler of centered text, circulated as reminder to future self to collect said volume—“cue: the end of a thing, / signal for another / as clue unroll ball of thread.”

 

074
Pages from an abandoned journal / Edwin Denby ; [cover] photographs by Rudy Burkhardt [sic].

This “edition limited to 200 copies as part of a Tribute to Edwin Denby held on April 9, 1997 at St. Mark’s Church on the Bouwerie” was published fourteen years after the death of the poet-dance critic. What better format than these transcribed pages?—“[e]xcept for these entries, this untitled journal remained empty.” Typed up and printed on a single sheet (folded to form a 4-pager), with mylar wrap featuring photos of Denby by his close collaborator Burckhardt. The pages [words] continuously slip from underneath the mylar, unable to stop moving beneath their images.

 

075
Crucified / John Chinworth.
Boulder, CO : Harmsweigh Press, 1999. 

Take the press name. These poems, by formal experiment and emotive content, attempt to address the murder of Matthew Shepard, written in the days and months that followed. In one instance, using a most traditional device of repetition, turned through pairings of pronouns, different and identical, the poem embraces a homogenous variability of joy where it declares and declares and declares “how beautiful we are / in our sexuality.” Thank God.

 

 

Edric Mesmer works as a cataloger for the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, where he edits the Among the Neighbors pamphlet series on little magazines. Now & Then, is just out from BlazeVOX (Buffalo, 2020).