Process Note #76 : John Cross : “Endangered Animals of Ohio”: Mathias Sets Out

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 John Cross are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor,Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

          Ohio haunts me.
          Though I’ve lived most of my life in the Los Angeles area, my formative years unfolded in Northwest Ohio. Strange dances of dreams and memories aswirl in the pipe smoke horizon mimicking battlefield haze my dad puffed out as he read to me from books steeped in the blood of history, much of it local accounts of the War of 1812 (maybe one day war and destruction won’t define us?) come up for air whenever I hear in the intimate distance a train, notice the soft golden light on a stand of trees (the very same light that used to slant through the living room of my childhood home), or smell fresh cut grass. Much of my poetry broods there.
          “Dudley’s Massacre” comes from that twilit space. The so-called ‘massacre” was actually the defeat of a few hundred foolhardy Kentucky volunteers who marched into an ambush near the spot where the Maumee branch of the Lucas County Library now stands. The poem offers some specific memories from my life – allusions to the library, a nearby ice-cream place, the beautiful Maumee River, my favorite bass amp, the Ampeg SVT, and one Saturday morning when my dad and I went to an “Indian Guides” recruiting effort. White kids and their dads dressed up as stereotypes of Native Americans and…I’m not sure what they did, Cub Scout-like activities. After an uncomfortable half-an-hour on rigid chairs, we snuck away from our guides. My dad suggested we go fishing every Saturday morning instead. We went once. Anyway. On to the poem.
          A bunch of memories along with markers of loss inspire this piece. The little bit of lost childhood, my amplifier that someone stole, memories of playing in the countryside while my mom and aunt gathered wildflowers to dry. These thoughts led me to consider the growing tally of other living beings we lose, fauna specific to Northwest Ohio and the larger fabric of our shared world.
          At the time, I’d been reading David Byrne’s beautiful book How Music Works and was struck by the acoustic qualities of spaces. Having worked in a church as a custodian (in order to eat and pay rent while playing in bands), I had experienced the uncanny, almost dizzying physical sensation enveloping me when standing in a particularly resonant space. Again, there’s that distant train. Cicadas droning on a close summer evening…In that sacred place, the poem ends on a note of hope. One almost-plea of a “hello” sent into the abyss.
          These hazy ideas join together in the piece. 

 

 

Dudley’s Massacre

Everything keeps pulling to the

left margin, toward a point of

origin, a strumming of zithers, a

full stretch of the slingshot not

far from the soft-serve ice-cream

palace. Plumes of summer

clouds, sudden storms,

something cool, sweet, &

fleeting, I went fishing with my

dad once not far from here, near

the library, where the Indian

Guides & the screeches of metal

folding chairs made us

uncomfortable, so we left the

library & fished the Saturday

morning rapids. Later from

garage & basement I Ampegged a

deeper thunder through the

neighborhood, something they

could feel, but someone stole the

amplifier & now the bees have

been Africanized, so they’ll have

to go away too. The big cats in

the zoo still pace their cages.

Someone thought we should call

it the “corrections” system.

Someone else thought we should

trust Exxon. I wonder who will

collect the damage deposit, their

trucks’ rumbles, screes, & back-

up beeps. From this distance I

mistake the wind for voices:

gathering Queen Anne’s lace &

lupines outside the old

workhouse, prying loose the

boarded window with my belt

buckle, Black bear, Graceful

underwing. We didn’t catch

anything that Saturday 40 years

ago. There’s so little left in the

river that metaphors don’t make

sense here anymore. The only

signified is revenant in transport.

I’ll wait here, floating for a

moment, cartoon Coyote over

the abyss, seeking a sacred space

chosen for its echoes. Hello.

 

          Ohio, memory, and all that we’re losing in the name of blindly seeking profit; that’s what beats at the heart of this collection. “A Volcano Half-Consumed Holds Its Crater” deals more explicitly with socio-political strife and struggle. This one was written as we were dragging ourselves our of the pandemic. A time when some of us held fast to a belief that things might change for the better if we made it through alive. In this piece, statues are torn down, a fat-cat rat wallows “stuck in his tub at the edge the edge of the crater”, and then the language slips into a child’s dreamworld. The last three paragraphs offer two clear observations. My partner Christine and I were walking our dog when we ran into a former student. She’s in the poem. The occupier of the White House makes an appearance. Then the poem closes by stepping back into the child’s dream, a frightened, hunkered down, perhaps threatening source of fire peering at us.

 

 

a volcano half consumed holds its crater

 

Windswept world, I watch them pull down the hollow bronze statues; the soldiers crumple, swallowed by the howls of their hats, closing like time-lapse flowers in reverse under the weight of their own plinths. Candles drop like parachutes from the stars through the swirls of dust and smoke, charring Uncle Pennybags stuck in his tub at the edge of the crater.

As a child, I left a water bowl inside the door for love when I heard the raptors in my head. Now, I leave the door ajar and a cup of wine set out for the guarded night,

in the shadow of the volcano. Sometimes we forget to say, hello.

A young woman tears up as she recognizes her teacher who’s grown old.

A president’s thrown his people to the wolves.

In the dawnlessness, the sun screws up its eyes to peer through its tiny periscopes.

 

 

          Form?
          Like the volcano half-consumed, two poems writhe and grapple with their respective forms. There’s a sonnet and a Sapphic. The Sapphic verse holds itself together until the final stanza, where it falls apart. This poem was inspired, at least initially by Étienne-Jules Marey’s photography. The poem tries to slow down the fleeting visuals, to catch “light’s brief shudder”, to capture simultaneity. The same challenge we encounter with language.

 

After Marey’s First Mechanical Bird

 

 

o        dusk field      panicle of washerwomen
when the eye skerricks to frame  light’s brief shudder         
birds are a particular problem      each surge
                               brokenly language 

 

and a northern raven tokking up the spine
of a winter maple        (closing of a hand)
wing shards cooked in a star        about to happen
                               first dazzling slivers 

         

descend           descend out of the edgy god-light
you spangly nail studded        [missing]  black hangar
awned           plangent    drift
                               the disassembling glitters  

          

          The sonnet started in my mind at a pizza joint in Iowa City. My friend referred to pepperoni as “the off-scourings of the hog.” The phrase conjured some troubled imagery! The sonnet does its best to hold true to the formal architecture, expanding until bursting and contracting back to the “well behaved” familiar. I love the sparks that shoot out of that tension between form and content.

 

The Off-Scourings Of The Hog

  

If I succumb to hunger    pouring sand
At my sunken hips    a bow, and arrows made from scratch
Already leaching into leaves    poking for small game
Or picking at Jerusalem Crickets behind damp stacks of plywood   

To knock at your house of uncertain aspirins
Strike-anywhere    my feeble reprobate lamps
And all these brittle slivers    red with me
And these awkward hard-ons 

If I have to ask    what do I know
And who are you    behind this darkling Woolworths
Where the stalking moon fingers us
Through slanted trestle slats   

To convince my wracked windows it isn’t time
By screaming out of them it is not time

 

 

          Mathais sets out.
          I learned about Marey while studying Dada. Dada led me to Fluxus. I’ve been reading Báyò Akómoláfé recently. All of these elements, in interesting ways, help me to shed light on the Mathias poems that open this collection. Mathias is a kind of avatar/trickster lost in repetition and stasis, ending where he begins. He offers no solution to our collective predicament, but he does invite us to dwell in bewilderment. There we might reimagine our way of Being. We may never achieve true liberation thinking from inside any established form. We have to imagine. Akómoláfé writes that “legibility = incarceration.” Mathias seems to seek illegibility. Some of the Mathias poems were composed in a more “legible” narrative lyric, inspired by frayed wires in the sky, a trip home to Ohio in the summer, growing older, but several were born from the Fluxus artist Emmett Wiliams’ experiments with disrupting the alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet is replaced by a word or short phrase. I composed a poem, phrase, or sentence, and replaced each letter utilizing the new “alphabet.” Then I went back into the piece to revise. The first summer away from grad school. I needed to play. Mathias satisfied that itch, and the play turned serious. What might be exposed by cracks in the narrative framework and associative thought? I’ll close with the poem that opens the book. Mathias born into a world on fire.

 

Mathias sets out to study birth

 

                     a hole off center blazing from body to soft ear
dragged on as Mathias could carry gender shriek at first
          he stood still                                                
           a hole off center he thought dark birds 

dark birds blazing from body very bareness stripped tree
   a hole off center braves the debris 

at first he stands still blazing from body gathered up gender shriek    
blazing from body as he could carry
             like skin   sky strands   very bareness 

like skin stripped trees dark birds
bolts gears twisted wire dark birds dark birds dragged on
   black crayon to cover dark birds gathered up
                as Mathias could carry 

 

 

 

 

John Cross was born and raised in Northwest Ohio and moved to L.A. to play bass guitar in a rock and roll band. He earned a B.A. at UCLA and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the chapbook staring at the animal (Tupelo Press), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Prize, and his work was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has appeared in Volt, Lana Turner, Yalobusha Review, New American Writing, among others. His first full-length collection What Bleak Angels Carried Your Bed was published by Omnidawn in May, 2026. He lives with his partner, artist Christine Kiphart, in Los Angeles.

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

Process Note #75 : Mai-Linh Hong

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 Mai-Linh Hong are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

Process Note by Mai-Linh Hong

I was fortunate to go on my first artist residency—two magical weeks at the Vermont Studio Center—in early 2025. The timing was perfect, as I was revising my first collection, Continental Drift, to begin submitting it to presses. At the end of my first week, I did, in fact, submit it to the press that would later publish it.

In my cohort were twenty visual artists and eight writers, a ratio I found wonderfully generative. For me, visual practices are key, particularly during revision, and at this residency they were always on my mind. For example, writers at VSC were encouraged to put their manuscripts up on a wall and were provided with blue painters’ tape for this purpose. On my first day working in my studio, I grabbed a roll and set to work.

 

 

 

 

 

Once all the poems were up on a wall, I stepped back and saw the collection in a way I hadn’t before. At a distance, words were a blur, but the shapes they made came into focus. I perceived rhythms of line, density, dispersal, and white space across the collection. These had been impossible to see while scrolling on a computer screen (yes, I mostly compose on my laptop).

There were patterns and surprises. There was movement, and it was choreographed. I guess I had known this on some level, since I had choreographed it. But still, I was surprised to see it.

The question I got most from other residents who popped by my studio—and that I sometimes get from readers, now that the book is out—is some version of “How do you decide what visual form a poem will take?”

Truthfully, I experience poetry writing as a largely intuitive process. For many poems, visual-spatial form happens during revision. Poems vary greatly in how much revision they go through and how much they change. I’m not sure I can explain it, except to say:

The poem tells me how it wants to live on the page

and I try my best to listen.

*

In my Introduction to Poetry class, I teach students:

In written English, the line is the basic horizontal unit of a poem and is read left to write. The stanza is the basic vertical unit, composed of one or more lines, read top to bottom.

A poetic line can be any length, though it is limited by page width. (Well, in theory, I suppose you could digitally write a line that goes on longer, perhaps even forever—)

However, every poem must have at least one stanza, made up of at least one line. (Wait—must it? And who’s counting?)

It is week one, and my lesson is breaking down.

Actually, I want my students to think of a poem as an omnidirectional object. Sometimes, it takes them/me a few conceptual steps to get there.

I admit that two vectors—horizontal and vertical—are mostly adequate for reading most poems. But a poem has the potential to mean in ways other than left-to-right and returning to the left margin to begin each new line. Readers can do more than read one word or line or stanza at a time in a given order. Poems can use space, and order, in unexpected ways.

*

My six-part, speculative visual poem “Field Notes From Aliens Who Float” (first published in Hayden’s Ferry Review and available here) comes about halfway through Continental Drift. It is the collection’s centerpiece, thematically and formally.

I am a scholar of critical refugee studies. In line with much work in my field, I view refugees as a source of knowledge and creativity, and migration as a space of extraordinary insight. This poem expresses some lines of thought (so to speak) I haven’t yet been able to express with conventional academic writing.

I call the poem “speculative” because it is not that concerned with the “real” past, present, or future; rather, it asks what if. What if refugees wrote field notes, like scientists do, from their journey, charting the emergence of refugee knowledge? What if refugees collected, drew, measured, wondered, conjectured, named, risked, imagined, concluded—they do, all the time, of course—and all that was captured here?

Here is the poem on my wall in Vermont, close to its final form:

 

The poem looked very different early on. Here it is six months earlier, in four numbered sections across three pages:

 

Formally, two main shifts happened during revision. First, the sections became more independent and I dropped the numbering, leaving each section free-floating on its own page. Second, each section untethered from the left and top margins, allowing it to coalesce into a distinct visual shape. Think of how a water spill will reshape itself into droplets, each distinct from the other, given a bit of time.

Viewed together, the sections remind me of specimens saved by biologists or botanists in the field, perhaps seaweed, as suggested in the fourth section, which catalogs several species of seaweed. However, it is more the acts of observation and cataloging to which I allude with form, not specific species. We don’t go to poetry to identify species; we go to see what is meant by naming.

We might call this concrete poetry, poetry that forms a visual shape related to the topic of the poem. But the relationship between each shape and the section’s meaning is indirect and ambiguous. I want my poems to have space for ambiguity; perhaps that is why they move.

*

Poems can run, rest, wander, hesitate, creep, separate, splatter, undulate, come home. Like a painting, every poem maps the page, tells eyes where to go. Visual form hints whether a poem’s meaning universe is chaotic or rule-bound and which emotions predominate, even before you apprehend any words. It tells the reader how to treat time and space by directing where to begin, how quickly to read, where to pause, how to resume.

Poems ask you to hold multiple versions in your mind at once. This is why rereading is so important.

Personally, I think poetry is more fun than prose because of the frequency with which poets defy language and reading conventions. Students, for the most part, don’t love this about the genre—at least, at first. They want lines to be linear, like time.

I have news for them about time, too.

 

 

 

Mai-Linh Hong [photo credit: Indigo Rain Photography] is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She also publishes scholarly essays on Asian American and refugee literature. A lifelong crafter, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). She is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Merced.

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

Process Note #74 : Jan Conn : Peony Vertigo: biology makes some noise

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 Jan Conn are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

“AUTUMN ELBOWS THE WINDOWS/LEAVING A RUSSET SMUDGE” 

Autumn in a rural setting in western Massachusetts is visually stunning and suffused with the sadness of a season pitching downhill toward winter. Not quite transitional, but preparing for a colder, darker, quieter time. Working from home rather than in my biology laboratory and office in Albany, NY, I had more time in the presence of woods, fields, family, and gardens. Michael Dickman’s spare, dynamic, propulsive-yet-allusive “Lakes Rivers Streams” in Days & Days (2019) adroitly captures the ebb and flow of contemporary living, and this combined with my work on Japanese-inspired haiku and renga as one of Yoko’s Dogs, allowed me to focus more deeply and intuitively on my immediate exterior and interior landscapes.

The result was several long poems—fragmentary and ecstatic—written in a sort of frenzied rush the summer before the manuscript was due in the fall of 2023. What propelled them, exactly, remains a mystery, but a trip to France in 2022 that centered on the Lascaux caves, combined with a sudden flourishing of myself as a visual artist may have propelled the poem “Lascaux”, and a longer-than-expected stay in a tiny Peruvian Amazon village for mosquito research provided tangential perspective on aspects of my childhood in southeastern Quebec and gave me a small window into the Peruvian families we lived among (“A Roller Coaster, A Hit, A Pint-Sized Devil Machine, Some Dark Chocolate”). My long-term links to Mexico through many visits (starting alone, age 25) influenced “After-Image”. As for “Part Star, Part Venom, Part Bone, Part Microplastic” I can only say that meditation on the current human condition may have prompted parts of this. “Early November” and the final poem, “Late Summer”, were written back-to-back, finally allowing me to sense the profound connection to the Mohican land where I live, and together with those mentioned above, form the backbone of Peony Vertigo.

 

Early November

-excerpt

 

+++

 

A late firefly flashes in the ironwood, the motherboard takes a coffee break

 

          Wind picking up, track lights humming, here comes the solstice

 

Right when there’s an overload of wasp nests in the canopy

 

A party of voles celebrating their discovery of Tulipa and Crocus

          Galanthus and Allium bulbs

 

          After a slight hitch in the space-time continuum

 

An effervescence between the indoor palm

          and the red-chili-pepper lights

 

The afternoon reappears in a tube of cadmium yellow

 

Accompanying hillside hums continuously where it meets the skyline

 

Borders of evergreens and flickering shadows

 

          To whom shall I reveal my horoscope?

 

What are my options now that permafrost is not a thing?

 

Are there more decades to be found?

 

To whom shall I address my questions?

The poems in Peony Vertigo are image-driven; many are lyrical and associative, and others use a narrative framework to convey memories and dream sequences. Poems in earlier books (e.g., Tomorrow’s Bright White Light, Tightrope Books, 2016; Edge Effects, Brick Books, 2012) have been rooted in anxiety about eco-environmental damage and climate change, but in Peony Vertigo there was, in addition, the felt urgency of a major socio-political crisis, perceived through the stuttering, soul-eating lens of a global pandemic and a long term opioid epidemic.  

As I biologist I have always been connected to both the non-human and human worlds, and I have a particular fondness for amphibians (my spirit animal is a frog), whose absorbent skin and complex life cycle make them vulnerable to ecological disturbance and pollution in water sources.

 

Depth Model of the Self as Eft

 

An eft, incandescent orange with darker orange spots,

indescribably itself, crawls across the forest path

 

toward the sheltering leaves and flowers of a woodland violet.

It enters the Camino del Sueño—or is this me, a member

 

of the species that has carelessly contributed to the near-extinction

of newts and their erstwhile friends and relatives

 

long before a marvellous and monstrous black donut hole

re-envelops the foreseeable and beyond.

 

Among the violets I find moisture and shade¾

there is iNaturalist and my photo now added to the cloud,

 

distribution of myself and kin where once there

were pristine water bodies and native insects. As my CNS

 

is now deranged, incapable of envisioning the self

as adult newt with the attendant responsibilities of

 

aquatic mating, offspring production and the like,

I note in my journal we need to create a pool immediately

 

because after leaving the shelter of the violets

we are bound to seek the aquatic over the terrestrial

 

as our life cycle requires, and no newt on earth

can survive without its divine pool, vernal or otherwise,

 

preferably surrounded by beech, maples, oaks,

and ash, unless you deem essential the addition

 

of certain microscopic organisms, dear amphibious spirit,

with which to succor your acolytes—

 

+++

 

Our Camino del Sueño is now a tectonic fault. As we awaken

in the west having fallen asleep in the east, continental drift

 

is triggered. Before the delicate instruments invented to measure

such large-scale motion, we were the ones who most longed for

 

a pathway to the water. Now with the shimmering moon

heretofore thought to be solely a Hollywood invention

 

beneath which untold numbers of persons, and my friend,

are calmly shooting their bodies full of fentanyl

 

and other horrific substances, I awake a full-bodied

if slightly careworn human without substance or solution,

 

aghast, overlooking a vast corrupted inland sea,

nowhere on earth to lay my or my beloved friend’s heads.

 

UNEXPECTEDLY

One striking motif across Peony Vertigo I would never have imagined myself incorporating is floral. The appearance of various species (goldenrod, iris, violet, morning glory, dandelion, devil’s paintbrush, and, of course, peonies, among other species) throughout gave me pause. Why flowers? Many responses are possible – symbolism, beauty, seasonality, visual art, texture, color, scent, uniqueness – perhaps all of these in differing proportions influenced me. Also, travel – my biological research takes me frequently to landscapes, both anthropogenic and wild, in Central and South America, to conduct fieldwork. I always seek botanical gardens, wild places, and unusual environments that might harbor odd or surprising plants – their very ephemeral nature draws me in.

Marriage to an evolutionary biologist who researches plants and is an avid gardener, is undoubtedly another factor. And yet – peonies – I had forgotten that my mother loved to garden, and in a different section of “Late November” I incorporated a dream sequence of her “kneeling in the garden, shears/in hand, delirious pink of peonies”. I’ve discussed the importance of this poem in Peony Vertigo in an interview - “A Peony to Pique the Senses: Chloe Hogan-Weihmann in Conversation with Jan Conn” in the literary journal The Malahat Review, see https://www.malahatreview.ca/interviews/conn_interview2.html

 

Peony

 

There is too much orange—

the eft I cradle, salmon on whole wheat,

the sitter’s nail polish

 

This morning my brain is programmed

to unfold its peony

 

I turn off the house lights

recite my self-help list

 

                               how the scent disrupts the brand newness

                               of mid-May air

                    

petals in my vesicles, vaulting the synaptic

                               clefts

 

So quiet in the house

the sound of a fox swishing through grass on black toes

is amplified

 

Sharp snap could be a twig

but later I discover

 

a vole’s velveteen jacket

flung into the undergrowth

 

bright lantern of the delicate face

snuffed

                               neurotransmitters

                               texting from the peony seeds

 

Another strong influence on the continued evolution of my poetry has been incorporation of the lessons learned (constraints new to me) in composing renga (linked haiku) with the three other members of Yoko’s Dogs: Mary Di Michele, Susan Gillis, and Jane Munro. Most fundamental to me have been 1) economy of language; 2) unpredictability; 3) seasonality; and 4) attunement to and incorporation of all five senses. Metaphor and simile are not generally part of a haiku/renga tradition. Another fascinating aspect is the non-narrative linking between verses in renga that form a zigzag of associations.

In ordering poems in sections of a manuscript, I frequently use this form of connectedness for its flexibility. A link can be subtle or direct, an image, an inferred seasonal object, a shape, a scent, a sound, time, touch or cadence. It’s intense and challenging. It can provide a distinctive subterranean context for individual sections or a complete manuscript. As an example, the poem immediately following “Peony” above, is “The Archive of Liminal Rhetorical Thought”, seen below. There are, to me, two primary links (lines) that connect these poems and happen to occur at the end of “The Archive…”: I disappear into graffiti, outside chronology. and Moving like the force that opens morning glories. The initial line above, in italics, refers (I think) to the narrator in “Peony” who experiences too much orange and recites a self-help list—this narrator might be inclined to disappear to a place, situation or emotional space outside chronology. In the italicized second line, I associate both the force and the morning glories with neurotransmitters and the peony.

 

 

The Archive of Liminal Rhetorical Thought

 

My clothes are compilations of vinyl records. Many are 78’s; several

still spin.

 

Underexploited, the metaphysics of garments: an occasion for weeping.

 

Among petals of clouds, tapioca, hospital sheets, I cannot locate my commodities.

 

At intervals there is a tenderness in my condition.

 

Which is more like a chandelier, a dog or a daydream?

 

Every banality has an edge; concrete is both brutal and serene.

 

An urban planner dictates gravel here, sidewalk there, and the voluptuous shade of a downtown tree vanishes.

 

With it, the former sky. The sky does not perceive its formerness. It beats the sidewalk blue. Clouds imagine their future as water drops.

 

I disappear into graffiti, outside chronology.

 

Moving like the force that opens morning glories.

 

As an aside, I used to sew many of my own clothes until I began graduate school in Vancouver, British Columbia, after which, aside from science, there was only time for poetry, which was portable (a lined notebook, a mechanical pencil, and a few books of poems to get started), and could be undertaken in small bouts of time on buses, airplanes, trains. And a confession: I have never taken a creative writing class and I don’t belong to a writing group (with the exception of Yoko’s Dogs). I find my support in individual poets and visual artist friends, family, and I read.

 

TRANSFORMATION(S)

In addition to becoming an eft (above), I discovered that my sense of empathy and interest in other life forms aside from humans readily lends itself to imaginative transformation, possibly transference. In Peony Vertigo, I become a prehistoric horse (the poem Lascaux), an eft (Depth Model…), fog (One Morning in the Life of Fog), a bronze rat (Ai Weiwei’s Rat), a fish (Autumn Trout), and a snowdrop (First to Flower). Transformation is magical, complex, and intuitive. Fog itself is a form of water that I have found, since childhood, to be eerie, delicious, chilly, and mysterious. I love to walk in its swirls and near-clouds, to be inside its moist muffledness. So much remains unknown in science: one may find evidence in support of a hypothesis, but this is never the whole story. One Morning in the Life of Fog is after Alice Oswald’s “A Rushed Account of the Dew” in Falling Awake (2016).

 

One Morning in the Life of Fog

 

I who have often imagined myself as an irrational number

I who can disappear by closing my eyes

 

I would like to know the absolute value of anything

in case I am asked

 

In the curious hour before daylight breaks open

I walk into a bank of fog

 

where I can practice being a decimal point

a fraction of

 

I would like to know how a falling cloud

feels, on descent, briefly touching down

 

onto the back of a swan asleep on a pond

beading on her feather gown, temporary

 

suspended between water and air

oxygen discarding then calling back its hydrogens

now lifting away, leaving below feathers, swan, pond

curve

of

      blue

 

 

METAPHORICAL

Alongside more elliptical, fragmentary poems, I love to try my hand at metaphor, and am immersed currently in further exploration of this, under the influences of poets such as Frank Bidart and Sylvia Plath, to name a few. Such poems are challenging to me and thus I have only a single one in Peony Vertigo, called “Ironweed” but I am always drawn to read it when the occasion arises. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it focuses on a plant, a very tall one, that is uncommon in the Northeast.

 

Ironweed

 

There is something in you of an iron-sided steamship

an architecture of unpliable stems, toothed

leaves, a crow’s nest of disk flowers

 

a pile of deep violet slippers

uplifted on junkyard stilts

 

stiff-kneed, towering overhead

as though dredged from some scrap iron seabed

 

and winched roots-first into place

overrunning meadows and pastures

 

obdurate perennials, late-summer bloomers

 

witnesses to nightlong astonishment

as the Perseids brilliantine their long hair and flare

and the stars stutter, waking from a long dream

of falling 

 

A final note, this process piece would not be complete without mention of the poem “To Remember What Never Existed: Lament and Lyric for Clarice Lispector”, located near the middle of Peony Vertigo. Lispector was a brilliant Brazilian writer who captured my imagination the first time I traveled to Brazil (1987). After reading and rereading her books and working in Brazil for many years, I finally found a voice that enabled me to write, in the context of environmental depredations in Brazil, about her visionary and difficult life, profound love of Portuguese, and playful surrealism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jan Conn, visual artist, poet and biologist, is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Peony Vertigo (Brick Books, 2023), and, as a member of the collaborative writing group, Yoko’s Dogs, of four books, most recently Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025). Her poetry has been supported by a Canada Council travel grant to Japan and a senior writing grant to conduct research in Brazil and at Kew Gardens on the British botanical artist Margaret Mee. Conn has received a Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) Literary Prize, the inaugural P.K. Page Founder’s Award, and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award. She has been represented by Lauren Clark Fine Arts Gallery in Great Barrington MA since 2022. Her visual art has appeared on the covers of “Planetary health approaches to understand and control vector-borne diseases”, Vol. 8, Series: Ecology and Control of Vector-borne Diseases, Wageningen Press, The Netherlands; The Maynard and Geist, literary journals, and together with a poem, in the UK-based journal The Prose Poem. She has exhibited paintings in Toronto, New England, and Cederedge CO. As a biologist, Conn has published >150 scientific articles, mainly on the vector biology of mosquitoes in Latin America that transmit the malaria parasite. She grew up in southeastern Quebec and lives in western Massachusetts. Visit her Instagram: artistatplay001or check out her paintings here https://laurenclarkfineart.com/collections/jan-conn

 

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