Maw Shein Win, Percussing the Thinking Jar

 

Thought Log

Swinging on an old rope from the edge of a cliff.

A lit-up room, a giant X covered in sequins.

Gone lawns, fan crowns, drone town.

An orange ceramic swallow from Portugal.

My love’s laughter from the study.

Reimagine cures.

Amber nimbus, ochre hawks, spring shambles.

I believe in the healing power of crystals.

They thought my hair had turned white due to pandemic stress.

My sinuses are being occupied.

I feel lonely & then I don’t.

I eat another bowl of kitchari, the bits of ginger.

Sorry fabric, mild steel, jade traps.

What are we in for?

The somatic therapist leads us on a guided visualization through a sacred grove.

I swim in a field of pathogens.

San Francisco poet and editor Maw Shein Win’s third full-length collection, following Invisible Gifts: Poems (Manic D Press, 2018) and Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2020) [see my review of such here] is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024), an accumulated and expansive lyric of thought logs, articulating thoughts and movement across a wide swath of health, aging, family and memory. At nearly two hundred pages, there’s some serious heft to this collection of poems composed as elements of point-form: how her lyrics hold, stretch and extend, one step after another. “A friend tells me she wants to live in a house with no light.” she writes, as part of the poem ‘Tympanum,” “Only / rooms with walls she must touch to find the door that leads to / the dirt path beneath invisible trees. Growing from a break in the / brick.” She writes of loss and body changes, aging and her mother’s stroke; she writes of memory and her late sister, ripples of a log book articulating movement and recollection in physical detail. The craft allows for the feeling of the quick-sketch, a notebook of her days and thoughts, but one composed with a sharp eye, logging a list of entries on thought and eye and blood pressure and sleep and weather and hyphens and missives to friends, all held as a way to not simply articulate but to process the whats and whys of her landscape and beyond. “Dad knew he was going to die because he was two vultures / that morning.” she writes, to open a further “Thought Log,” “Suitcases breaking open display queen conch shells. // Apparition of snapped bone trees. // Pataflafa, Flam Drag, Triple Stroke Roll. // The suburbs are sinking.”

There are elements of Win’s clipped language that I find reminiscent of Quebec poet Pearl Pirie’s work, but only other writer I’ve been aware to reference the notion of the poem as log entry is Ottawa poet Roland Prevost, having composed a daily journal of entries he refers to as his “logbook.” It was through him reworking a handful of entries that formed the poems of his full-length debut, Singular Plurals (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2014). The daily diary/journal is how Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) composed those first drafts of what became By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), after all. “Monitor coffins,” Win writes, through a further “Thought Log,” “banister motif, creek ballots. // We unpack our elegance armor. // Is emptiness a placeholder?” Through her own journal-poems across Percussing the Thinking Jar, Maw Shein Win’s poems offer a freshness, an immediacy, across the crisp and electric buoyancy of lines that extend out into a singular, continuous ongoingness of thought and process. These are difficult times we live in, and through these log entries, Maw Shein Win might hold us all together. Or, as the poem “Sleep Log” ends:

I hear a disembodied voice, snap alert.

For years, nails & shards of glass flew from my mouth. I imagined this as rage.

Sleep under four heavy blankets.

Dream about losing a purse even though I don’t own one. My older sister visits me. She died six years ago. She swings a leopard skin pouch around on a golden chain, she is glowing.

I whisper: everything is going to be okay.