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 Dane Cervine 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.
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My first book
of prose poems with Sixteen Rivers Press, The World Is God’s Language (2020),
is a collection that spans two decade’s worth of writing. The title comes from
Simone Weil, rooted in her notion that “Attention is prayer”. I collected
“uncollected” prose poems that were “waiting in my drawer”, so to speak, for just
such an effort, since previous books focused on the lined poems I had mainly
worked with. My second book of prose poems with the press, Children of Obscura – This Mysterious Human (2026) is a different animal, written over
the course of a year around a central conceit. One that explores a full range
of obscure, idiosyncratic scientific facts about not only the human body, but
our animal nature, the strange histories and anthropological stories that make
reality a very interesting animal indeed. Perhaps the best way to explain this
overarching premise, which guided the book’s making, is to quote the preface,
which is perhaps its own “process point” – I occasionally use a preface to set
the frame for a book:
The universe may have had suspicions about what it was
to become. Mathematicians and physicists know that hidden in a few simple rules
are complexities that become worlds. I offer these poems as mirrors to that
original intuition. Each prose poem an assay, to use Jane Hirshfield’s
metallurgic word, to investigate the nearly fourteen billion years it’s taken
to produce life on Earth and we obscure human beings. As the astronomer Edward
Robert Harrison says, “Hydrogen . . . given enough time, turns into people.”
We, the children of this brief moment on an enigmatic globe with a random
cosmic address, are perhaps flowering into something the universe wanted more than
anything. The anthropomorphic language itself is a product of this flowering,
this arrogance and tenderness of language.
Perhaps the universe itself desires every hint of its
own liveliness. Including us, the children of such obscura. As Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Everything, in some extremely attenuated extension
of itself, has existed from the very first.”
Even if only as a twinkle in the dark eye of that
first singularity.
As I tend to
say in my readings, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re a materialist or a
mystic: the facts of this universe elicit awe. This was Carl Sagan’s
sense anyway. As a poet, I’ve attempted in this book to not attempt easy
answers, or even any answers. As a Zen student (not a very serious one),
I practice the arts of curiosity first, of not-knowing but
looking with awe at, well, most everything. Which is how the book came to be:
scouring a range of sources listed in the back of the book—from Atlas
Obscura to Bill Bryson’s The Body to Carl Sagan’s Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors and more. Reading, reading, reading, most every
morning, jotting notes down from facts or stories that riveted me, then later,
returning to them in a meditative way to see if a poem was hiding therein. And
often it was. I’ll give you an example. The first poem in the book came from a
story:
How To Build a
Human
We pass our
existence within this warm wobble of flesh
and yet take it
almost entirely for granted.
—Bill Bryson
The miracle is that
a jumble of inert chemicals & atoms makes you, somehow, you. For
five bucks, in 1960’s money, a chemistry teacher in Iowa said everything
you’d need could be bought in a hardware store. Though the list has grown:
fifty-nine elements are ultimately needed, including trace amounts of vanadium,
manganese, tin & copper. The thirty pounds of carbon today would fetch
nearly $70,000, but mostly you’d just need oxygen & hydrogen, a $40 tab
with inflation. It’s the strangest thing in the universe, he says: we’re
sentient dirt. We may come cheap, but you couldn’t build one of us even if you
tried.
Each poet has a
method for using, or not using, sections as scaffolding for a collection. Mine
is to loosely align poems with a section theme that further delineates the
thrust and range of a book. The first section of this book is titled “What Is a
Human Being?” and explores the unique and sometimes, well, obscure facts
of the body. Like this one:
Choreography
Staring at my hand,
I imagine its twenty-nine bones, seventeen muscles—eighteen more in the forearm
to control it—the two main arteries, three major nerves plus forty-five others,
and one hundred twenty-three ligaments. To write these words, scratch my eyebrow,
uproot weeds, love my wife, not pull a trigger, takes as much delicacy and
precision as the cosmos choreographing its orbits.
Proof enough, the
old philosophers thought, of divine design. For me, it’s enough to feel the two
hundred thirty-seven dancers of my hand intertwine with yours, flawlessly.
But I didn’t
want to write a book only about the human body, though I could have. The second
section is titled “Beautiful Animals” and roots the human in the realities of
Nature herself.
Beautiful Animals
Komodo dragons
rattle tails, inflate their throats. Crocodiles bully their competitors under
water—roaring, lunging, biting. A toothless, brightly-colored frog intimidates
intruders with vigorous push-ups. Skinks sometimes ignore the ritual of turning
their heads bright red in bluff, simply tear into each other on sight. When
hermit crabs meet, they stroke one another with their antennae, the smaller
promptly submitting to the larger. Stalk-eyed flies do the same, the more
dominant one having more widely-separated eyes. There’s only one silverback ape
on the hill.
This is where we
begin: not among seraphim, but as gorgeous animals. The dance of Kali, of
wild hair and skulls. Where the better angels of nature lick the letters of evolve
as though they were blood, another sweetness, a strange food.
The book then moves
to a section titled “How to Use Emptiness” (a Zen phrase), comprised of what
might loosely be called “parables”, a purposefully contrary word referenced in
the back of the book while exploring the boundary between prose poem
and parable. Here’s how the San Francisco writer Lawrence Fixel frames
it:
[T]he ancient parable, as a brief
narrative, sometimes with an explicit moral, sometimes as riddle or enigma,
still provoked controversy… The modern parable, still not widely known, was
assigned largely to the seminal examples of Kafka and Borges and their
penetrating, often devastating illumination of a world split between psyche,
spirit, and material concerns. At present, however, an increasing number of
writers are finding in the parable a flexible, versatile instrument especially
suited to convey the distilled essences of a fragmented world…
[from the Foreword
to “Truth, War, and the Dream-Game” in Gerald Fleming’s finely edited book,
The Collected Poetry
and Prose of Lawrence Fixel]
A sample poem
from this section that illustrates the multiple levels on which a prose poem
can operate:
A Zen Koan: How to Use Emptiness
In Thailand, the
monks of Wat Pa Maha temple wake surrounded by empty beer bottles.
They’d begun recycling empties to keep the local streets clean, using them as
building blocks to expand the temple. Mosaics of bottle caps and pebbles
intertwine with a million green Heineken and brown Chang beer bottles, becoming
the walls of prayer rooms, a crematorium, a water tower, restrooms, residences.
The more empties brought to the monks, the larger the temple grows.
I’d found a
brief news item about this hilarious and fascinating use of beer bottles to
build a temple, and sensed in it a wry nod to Zen’s notion of emptiness
as a precursor to enlightened mind. Folded into the reality of dirty streets,
recycling, the role of art making something of the world’s detritus, and so on.
This section of the book contains weird factoids ranging from an Icelandic
Phallological Museum (yes, frozen penises) to a black volcanic rock in India
worshiped as embodied light, to the origins of a vaccine that saved my
daughter’s life:
The Cantaloupe From
Peoria
In 1941, an Oxford
policeman, while pruning his roses, scratched his face on a thorn. Ignoring the
slight cut, it grew infected, spread, taking his eye and bringing him close to
death. The doctor had only a trace of penicillin, because it was still difficult
to produce. The sample saved the poor gardener till it ran out, and, like the
dead roses, he became mulch.
As World War II
unfolded, the Brits stopped producing penicillin, so the quest moved to Peoria,
Illinois. Secret soil and mold samples poured-in from around the world to help,
but to no avail. Till Mary Hunt bought a cantaloupe one morning from a local grocer,
shared it with her lab colleagues, having first saved the “pretty golden mold”
from its skin for study. It became the most potent penicillin ever, all of it
descended from the single random cantaloupe Mary bought from the now anonymous
grocer. Saving multitudes. Including my daughter after her appendix burst when
young, lying in our bed upstairs while I gave a poetry reading downstairs
thinking she only had a tummy ache. A thorn, a cantaloupe, a daughter—the
miracle a detail makes.
The final
section titled “Secrets of the Matrix” stretches the book’s conceit even
further, in turns philosophical, or even whimsical like this poem:
Radiohead
Afloat in an
anonymous cosmos, the materialist is certain that when the brain dies, the
music of consciousness dies too—like a radio that’s suddenly switched off. The
spiritualist is certain that this little radio does not produce its
music, merely broadcasts its waves from a remote, though ubiquitous, source.
The psychologist wonders if the radio has an unconscious, the engineer only how
the damn thing works. The musician is happy anyone bothers listening at
all—whatever these invisible waves are, and whoever might be playing them.
This poem is an
example of composition not of a single incident or scientific fact, but an
amalgam of broad readings across multiple disciplines. The process of writing
remained the same for me: intensive (or casual) morning reading, using any hour
of the day (or night) to drop into an informal meditative state, then write.
Some poems emerged easily from free associative writing, while others took more
time to craft, or rather “chisel” from a block of bald fact into a smaller kind
of music.
The book ends
with this poem, as good as any to nail my process to the wind:
The Question Bone
Penetrating so many
secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless,
calmly licking its chops.
—H. L. Mencken, Minority
Report
Reality, the astrophysicist
says, tenaciously resists easy answers. He wonders if the universe is
more slippery than imagined. That like math, reality comes into being through
the questions asked of it. And that once asked, can never be unasked. The
universe is nuanced enough, he says, to hold a peach, an hour, a swig of
whisky, along with black holes at the center of galaxies. And to create
miniscule parts of itself to reflect on the whole catastrophe, as though it
were the best ride in the cosmos. He ends the book with three questions: Who
am I? What is this? Where, from here? As though the universe, like a dog,
has buried the asking itself deep in each bone.
But, of course,
there’s more than wind to the making of a book of poems. I live in Santa Cruz,
California, where I returned to live after undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz,
then becoming a therapist post graduation from the California Institute of
Integral Studies in San Francisco. My poetry education germinated in
long-running association with a local poetry group, the Emerald Street Writers
(we first met at a fabulous house on Emerald Street). I cannot emphasize enough
the communal critique and support aspect of a good writing group, and the
relationships formed over two decades of time. Most of the poems in this volume
have endured the usual editing suggestions and expert eyes of fellow poets. At
two levels, because the Sixteen Rivers Press collaborative has become a new
poetic home, and these two books of prose poems received a second wave of
reading and feedback. Each poem begins in solitude, for me, then wends its way
through the communal before emerging as an actual book in the world.
The role of
mentors is just as catalytic. Gary Young, prose poem and letter-press master
from UC Santa Cruz, opened a door for me with his meditative framing of small
prose poems. Without his example, I might not have walked through.
Then, in terms
of poetic process, I need to couch my two books of prose poems with Sixteen
Rivers Press in the context of my larger poetic output. Much of my previous
work is in the form of the lined poem, using poets such as Ellen Bass, Joseph
Stroud, Robert Sward, and the irascible Tony Hoagland for inspiration. The most
recent example of this is Nine Volt Nirvana (World Poetry Press – 2025).
I am also experimenting with contemporary use of the Japanese haibun for
travels in Europe, Morocco, and America: DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the
[Burning] World (Saddle Road Press – 2024). There’s also an unusual pairing
of both lined and prose poems in my Zen-inspired book The Gateless Gate –
Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press – 2018). Some poets spend years
honing their poetry in one particular form, often yielding a marvelously
refined voice (such as Dorianne Laux, for instance). Others use a range of
forms to explore their poetics, either over time, or in one volume (I’m reading
Dana Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are as an example of this).
All of which is
to provide a glimpse into my particular poetic process. For additional insights,
you might read an interview of me by David Garyon in the LAdige
series - Dane Cervine: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems https://davidgaryan.wixsite.com/ladige/post/dane-cervin-california-poets-part-8-five-poems
. It begins with five poems from Nine Volt Nirvana, and explores more of
my background as a therapist and meditator as it has influenced my poetics.
Dane Cervine’s
books include Children of Obscura – This Mysterious Human (Sixteen
Rivers Press), Nine Volt Nirvana (Word Poetry Press), DEEP TRAVEL –
At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), The World Is God’s
Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth
Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony
Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple
Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly,
Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine,
among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website at: https://danecervine.com/
https://sixteenrivers.org/
https://danecervine.com/
https://davidgaryan.wixsite.com/ladige/post/dane-cervin-california-poets-part-8-five-poems
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
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