Process Notes for Autobiography of a Book

Maw Shein Win edits a column called “Process Notes” for Periodicities, an online magazine about poetry. 

Each month Maw lines up a poet to talk about their new book, how they came to write it, the way they went about it, etc. When she asked me to contribute a note about writing Autobiography of a Book, Maw said the column focused on poetry, and Autobiography of a Book is prose, but she thought it was poem-like and was curious to read a discussion of my process. 

This is the first paragraph of my process note:

When Book came to me several years ago, it came to me the way my poems often do, with a little idea that, when I hit the keyboard, began to play, and the more it played itself through me, the more that little idea turned out to have different facets, different approaches, even different rules. That’s how poetry works for me, as play. Even when the poem addresses a serious topic, I engage playfully. Poets are supposed to learn all the rules before they break them, or so the advice goes, and in classes I did dutifully bang away at sonnets, iambic pentameter, all that. But counting stresses me out. Some claim that for them constraints are freedom. But shackling myself with preconceived notions does not liberate my mind. English by itself, I always say, is a constricting form. And so, poetry. I wouldn’t be writing poetry if poetry meant strict rhyme and meter. For me, poetry means experimentation, investigation, invention, play. That’s freedom.

You can read the rest at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.