The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This excerpt and process note by Judy Halebsky is part of her curriculum for her Poetry Workshop at the University of San Francisco in their MFA Program for spring semester of 2023.
The poem “Glossary” from my book Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) and my current work-in-progress, She: Wolf, are inspired by alphabet poems, dictionaries, and the lists of season markers used in haiku.
Alphabet poems, also called abecedarians, move through the alphabet, often with each word, line, or stanza starting with a successive letter of the alphabet. Using the alphabet as an organizing structure for these poems echoes how so many things are organized - huge expansive things like dictionaries, encyclopedias, libraries, and city streets, and also smaller things like airplane seats, attendance sheets, and even the vitamins and spices in the grocery store. Jacquelyn Ardam, in her book Poetry, describes the alphabet poem as a tool for “ordering the world and also a structure devoid of meaning” (51). These poems have an anticipated flow from letter to letter that many readers have learned by heart and by song as children. Moving from A-Z brings in an element of John Cage’s chance operations which generates energy through contrasts and unexpected pivots. There’s a ramping up of intensity toward the end of the poem, which is a general practice in poetry but specifically here because as the poem is ending the form is also getting more challenging. It’s harder to find words toward the end of an alphabet poem for letters X, Y, and Z compared to words that start with A, B and C.
I think of my alphabet poems primarily as “dictionary poems,” a form I feel confident exists but is not listed in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Nothing much comes up in a google search except for a lovely poem titled “Dictionary Poem” by Jill McDonough published in Three Penny Review. Harryette Mullen’s book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is both a dictionary and a book length abecedarian. Love, an Index by Rebecca Lindenberg has an extended abecedarian that also reads like a dictionary. I suppose there’s more examples of poems that take on a dictionary structure that are named as abecedarians. These “dictionary poems” differ from other abecedarian poems through the presence of a source text. While a dictionary informs the “entries” or sections of a dictionary poem, it also holds and conveys the accepted knowledge that the poems push against.
The dictionary structure draws attention to the struggle of articulation and to how words are an imperfect tool to express embodied experience. We push on these words, disrupt their meanings and reveal their failings. Writing a dictionary poem involves actively making new meaning. For this, it helps to have an expansive dictionary, such as the Oxford English Dictionary with long and far reaching lists of meanings for the same word. A glossary from another field is also useful; with these we are reading meanings somewhat out of context and applying specialized vocabulary from biology or zoology to a friendship or a marriage. This creates another lens or perspective through which to glimpse the human condition.
The alphabetical listing in my writing is also informed by the haiku tradition. One aspect of haiku is to use a word or phrase that evokes a particular part of the season (such as early spring, mid spring, late spring). Haiku groups compile season marker words into lists or a book called a saijiki. There are also apps that have lists of season marker words. Of course, the plants and practices that evoke early spring are different in different places. These lists tend to be regionally specific. I’ve been asking myself, what is the list for Oakland, California in 2023? A list of season markers also becomes a source text for these poems, mostly the idea of writing rooted in an exact moment and asking how to write to this specific time and place.
I read poems as songs and moments of experience. I read poems as instructions. I look to poems for how to make life bright and vibrant, to notice the world around me, to savor the days of our fleeting lives. I read poems as a way to be moved but also as a way to move through this world. I want our ordinary days to be extraordinary, I want our ordinary language to carry weight and pathos. I want the process of writing the poem to be present and alive in the texture and tone of the work. Composer Dylan Bolles said to me once that art is secondary to life, meaning that art or a poem will never be as powerful as lived experience. That might be the case for some but I know that my highest moments, my brightest leaps are in the poem. The lived version is often too bright or too sharp or there’s a car alarm going off nearby. So, in the poem there’s also an act of restoration, an effort to mend what’s torn, to heal and make new.
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Excerpt from the poem “Glossary” published in Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) University of Arkansas Press, 2020
Kingbird — chaser of crows and hawks. Some are crowned with red. Others are ordinary. (I’m looking in the mirror and thinking about the woman from yoga who found a blue-eyed husband to make sure her kids would have blue eyes.)
Kite — wax or very thin paper that flies on a string in the sky.
Language — lost or dead, whale speech or song. When the lyrics are flat-out busted, sing these words instead: ayiyahoo yahee ma haa ya hei nahoo nahey yo.
Li Bai — I should tell you that Oakland is a city on the coast of California with lots of things people want to buy with paper money or lines on a page tracked by a bank. This is called abstract wealth. It means money that exists separate from bags of rice or seashells or gold. It is collected and traded for actual things but in itself is just a concept (see Moneymaker).
Localizer — a landing instrument in an airplane or a writer who translates in proximities — button-fly jeans, Stairway to Heaven, Beachcombers.
Matsuo Basho — in monk’s robes in Kanto, writing to Saigyo and Li Bai, driving a four-wheeler over all that precious court poetry with his bed bugs and buckwheat and working girls.
Martin — purple martin, sand martin, house martin. The so-called bee martin is not a martin but a kingbird.
Moneymaker — lady butt, booty, backside.
Note: Different from honeymaker, which means a bee, not a bumblebee but a baker of sweets, a lover, a sharer of bubbly water and homebrew and jeans, a collector of shells, a man who sends me pictures of wisteria vines trying to get into the house.
Murasaki1 — purple. The name of a character in the story of the Shining Prince. Purple for wisteria. A name attached to the author through the character (b.978—), like calling Jane Austen (b.1775—) Elizabeth Bennet. Except Elizabeth did marry, while Murasaki and Jane did not. (Leave this space blank if no dependents.)
Note: Dear Encyclopedia Britannica, I was checking to see if Murasaki really didn’t marry. And you say that she did. But for starters, it’s the 21st century, why do you list her as a lady of the court first and the author of Tale of Genji second? Would you ever say that William Carlos Williams was a physician first and an author second? (I’ll check.) And why in the world would you write that Murasaki married a man and bore him a son, as though the baby were a gift she would pass on, a gift she would present to him like a new platter or an award for outstanding service?
Note: William Carlos Williams (b. 1883—), American poet who succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary. (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, Monday September 26, 2016, 7:50 a.m., ten minutes after I got out of bed, realized I should go straight to the office, and instead walked around the house naked, saying out loud, fuck you, work.)
Murasaki2 — unforgiving of those who lack elegance, who would stumble stepping up into the hallway, who would make excuses to visit her after dark, to ask to see her unshielded, to open the blinds. She was the one to have studied, to have learned to write by eavesdropping on her brother’s lessons, to not contain herself at his dim wit, to answer the questions in a whisper, to have her father lament she was not born male.
Noise — radiator, electric lights, freeway, music as the sound between dial tone, trapped fly, door lock — if we can change from busy to still.
Normal — a red Speedo, line dancing, eating at the sink, chocolate cake, skin that heals, monologue as conversation, snow melt (we calculate normal based on the last 30 years so we can measure slow changes in the climate).
Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her passions include the Moth-style storytelling and walking as a day-long activity. While living in Japan, she walked parts of Basho’s route in Narrow Road to the Interior and the 88 temples of Shikoku. Now based in Oakland, she directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California.
Maw Shein Win’s most recent
poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which
was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for
the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award
for Poetry. Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D
Press) and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score
and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and
their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches
poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often
collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently
selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and
Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary
community. mawsheinwin.com