The'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendumto her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshopsand classes. This process note and these poems by Cintia Santana are part ofher curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the Universityof San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
THE DICTIONARY
"Thefirst time I read the dictionary, I thought it was a poem abouteverything," says Stephen Wright. When I read this quote, it didn't occurto me that it was a joke delivered by Stephen Wright the comedian. Thedictionary is that one book I would take with me to a deserted island.
Inthe fall of 2007, having recently moved to the Bay Area, enormous mushrooms,unlike any I'd ever seen, sprung up seemingly overnight in my backyard. Thatsame fall I enrolled in a continuing studies non-fiction workshop. But theinstructor was more interested in having us contribute to a weekly potluck(i.e. his dinner) than teaching. When I dropped the class the following week, Ienrolled in the only creative writing workshop that still had room: poetry.
Acouple of weeks into the class, Rita Mae Reese, a wonderful poet and teacher,asked us to write an abecedarian. I had never written poetry in a serious way,nor had I ever written an abecedarian. At home one afternoon, I paged through thefree dictionary I'd been given in grad school when I opened a bank account. Isat in the afternoon light of the living room, looking out onto the yard.
At first, I simply gathered words I foundinteresting and made a list. As the abecedarian took shape, I found myselfwriting about the mushrooms. And about something else. Something to do with languagethat was new to me. As I attempted to describe and decipher a mushroom, I beganto see the mushroom as language: "World that was wood that is nowword/ expressed in you; tongue of earth's constant labor,/ You blister forth/Zero hour and speak."
Theabecedarian, "Agaricales," preceded the idea for the collection, The Disordered Alphabet, by several years, and yet would find its place withinit as the earliest-written poem. I had dipped into a magical marrow, a palpablerichness of language and words. It was as if after decades of a deep friendshipwith language, I had realized just how deeply in love with it I was.
DISORDER
Nearlyfive years after I wrote the mushroom abecedarian, I watched my grandfatherdie. Never trust a word to name what you intend. When I write grandfather,I mean to say father; sometimes unconditional love skips ageneration. Language is always excessive, always insufficient. I had experiencedgrief before, but the grief over my grandfather-father left me withoutlanguage.
Aftermy grandfather died, and because I carry the leftovers of my Catholicupbringing, I remember telling a poet friend that I wanted to take God to taskin my writing. Beset by one of those crying jags, seemingly without bottom, Ibegan to write a letter in my head: "Dear A: You are the Alpha and theAsshole. The ass of the assassin..." It was a pretty terrible poem; noline survived in the final manuscript version of what came to be TheDisordered Alphabet. But I had stumbled into a form for my grief: a seriesof epistolary poems to the letters of the Roman Alphabet, secular gods to whomI could speak, and in whom I believed.
Thusa very orderly series of poems began to take shape: "Dear A,""Dear B," "Dear C," etc. When I became stuck on"F," I realized that I didn't have to write the letters inalphabetical order (surprise!). After which I realized that they also didn'tneed to appear in order within the book (surprise again!). My grandfather'sdeath, and all the previous losses it re-opened, introduced a sudden swerve, asudden disorder in what had felt to be an ordered period in my life.
THE INTERIOR LIFE OF WORDS
Manifoldand movable are the ways in which language embodies itself. I love to tinker: withwords, letters, syntax, and sound. I am fond of hom*onyms, hom*ophones, andhom*ographs; Skyping and skipping and pings from the sky; how an upright pianoeasily becomes an uptight piano; the nine ways in English there are topronounce -ough.
Overthe next few years, as I continued to write poems, I discovered something aboutthe interior life of words, beyond etymology. Sometimes a word may be found underthe spell of another word. Folded, it waits to be liberated; in anger, forexample, lies danger. Sometimes it's the folding away of a letter that coaxesforth different speech, magic conjured by a letter made to disappear; and so aharbor may become an arbor.
Anarrative, too, may wait for release. One winter, while reading an essay onintergenerational trauma, the word "inherit" caught my eye. In mynotebook, I jotted down "In her it. It in her." The following summer Ilooked back over those notes and the poem, "Inherit," came intobeing. Words may be broken apart and made anew.
Thereis also the way words can be compounded and, by fiat, create what did not existin the mind before its naming: a pinberry, or a sonnet factory. Language can beapplied perversely, also, to horrors that words cannot contain. Enola Gay, thename given to the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was namedafter the pilot's mother.
Mygrief felt like a party of one, even as I knew I was hardly alone in theexperience of grief. Attempting to gain perspective, I found myself trying tosituate my personal grief within the larger scale of historical and collectivegrief. My husband is a physicist and the son of Japanese immigrants, and as Icontinued to work on these epistolary poems, the atom and the atom bomb beganto weave themselves into my manuscript. Like letters, atoms are fundamentalblocks of creation and destruction. And so bus combined with boy,and an atomic bomb had been named Little Boy, and in the news, boys themselves,could be made into human bombs. All this while the mushroom abecedarian hadheld the shadow of a mushroom cloud.
ATOMIC SWERVES
Thefirst sentence in the Wikipedia entry for "atomic swerve," defines itas "a fundamental principle of Epicurean physics: it suggests that, asatoms travel down through the void that contains them, they swerve minimallyfrom their course, lest they all remain isolated, and never meet to form thecomplexity of the universe."
Overthe course of the nearly three years I sent out my manuscript, I worried aboutthe ordering of the poems. While I believed the manuscript to be complete,every rejection led me to obsess about its sequencing; if I could only get theorder of the poems right, the manuscript would be accepted. Until the day Irealized there was no one order; all that time, I had missed the irony of the book'stitle. There are only ever many possible orders, many possible manuscripts.
Disorderhas a way of swerving into and across the seemingly most ordered lives. It mayarrive as death, on scales personal and collective—a father, a city. But it mayalso appear as a serendipitous meeting, through the found—as well as the lost.Through the only workshop that still has room for you; a new yard with a watertable issue; a dictionary given out by a bank; a bad poem; a letter and word ashumble and as Alpha as a. On as small a scale, too, as the order anddisorder that shaped the writing of The Disordered Alphabet.
Ode to Your Salmon Soul
to your mother and your father / and their mothers and
their fathers / to the pale pink of their love / and their
cold / unseasoned waters / because they made / you
/ you / you / Ode to your mouth gasping / toits echo
of my gasping / to your bludgeoning / which is my
bludgeoning / and the tears lost to this water / Ode
to the bear’s maw / wound-wide and lovely-dark /
To the quiverand muscle / the barb / the tidal marsh
and the cruelty of shallows / To the fight / the current /
the heave and the climb/ to the higher / higher / heights
and the estuary’s sky / a riot of stars / silent winks that
bind / Ode to the slope / the steepness / the leap and the
/ lope / To the feast / and the stones /to Chinook and
Chum / To the / sweet / eelgrass / to the first gravel
nest / and the next / To your / rings / narrow /wide /to
your hump / your growing / teeth and your / kype / Ode
to your / cherry skin / your darker / silver / blues to
your / milt your red / roespilling / ripe / Ode / to you /
to / you to / you / to the / river rumoring / home
Dear B
Never the bride.
Never been better.
Nor best. A burden
isnothing like a bird.
A bus
become a boy.
Little Boy.
A boy become abomb.
Let bygones be.
Let bygones be.
Breath
is but borrowed,
brief.
And the bodybetrays
becauseyou be:
burrow.
Bury
theblack in the berry.
Bury
thebumble in the bee.
Bless the bean.
Bless the butter
and the cup.
Cintia Santana teaches literarytranslation and poetry workshops in Spanish and English at Stanford University.Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets2016 and 2020, 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org,Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, and in numerous journals. Her debutpoetry collection,The Disordered Alphabet(Four Way Books,2023), received the 2024 IPPY Awards Bronze Medal in Poetry, the 2023 NorthAmerican Book Award's Silver Medal in Poetry, and was short-listed for both the2023 Golden Poppy Award in Poetry and the 43rd Annual Northern California BookAward in Poetry. cintiasantana.com
Maw Shein Win’s most recentpoetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) whichwas nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted forthe PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden PoppyAward for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win'sprevious books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts andtwo chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Winoften collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and herProcess Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFAProgram at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelonaand Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literarycommunity. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar(Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com
