Cintia Santana : Process Note #43 : for The Disordered Alphabet

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 process note and these poems by Cintia Santana are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

THE DICTIONARY

"The first time I read the dictionary, I thought it was a poem about everything," says Stephen Wright. When I read this quote, it didn't occur to me that it was a joke delivered by Stephen Wright the comedian. The dictionary is that one book I would take with me to a deserted island.

In the 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. That same fall I enrolled in a continuing studies non-fiction workshop. But the instructor 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, I enrolled in the only creative writing workshop that still had room: poetry.

A couple 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 the free dictionary I'd been given in grad school when I opened a bank account. I sat in the afternoon light of the living room, looking out onto the yard.

 At first, I simply gathered words I found interesting and made a list. As the abecedarian took shape, I found myself writing about the mushrooms. And about something else. Something to do with language that was new to me. As I attempted to describe and decipher a mushroom, I began to see the mushroom as language: "World that was wood that is now word/ expressed in you; tongue of earth's constant labor,/ You blister forth/ Zero hour and speak."

The abecedarian, "Agaricales," preceded the idea for the collection, The Disordered Alphabet, by several years, and yet would find its place within it as the earliest-written poem. I had dipped into a magical marrow, a palpable richness of language and words. It was as if after decades of a deep friendship with language, I had realized just how deeply in love with it I was.  

 

DISORDER

Nearly five years after I wrote the mushroom abecedarian, I watched my grandfather die. Never trust a word to name what you intend. When I write grandfather, I mean to say father; sometimes unconditional love skips a generation. Language is always excessive, always insufficient. I had experienced grief before, but the grief over my grandfather-father left me without language.

After my grandfather died, and because I carry the leftovers of my Catholic upbringing, I remember telling a poet friend that I wanted to take God to task in my writing. Beset by one of those crying jags, seemingly without bottom, I began to write a letter in my head: "Dear A: You are the Alpha and the Asshole. The ass of the assassin..." It was a pretty terrible poem; no line survived in the final manuscript version of what came to be The Disordered Alphabet. But I had stumbled into a form for my grief: a series of epistolary poems to the letters of the Roman Alphabet, secular gods to whom I could speak, and in whom I believed.

Thus a 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 in alphabetical order (surprise!). After which I realized that they also didn't need to appear in order within the book (surprise again!). My grandfather's death, and all the previous losses it re-opened, introduced a sudden swerve, a sudden disorder in what had felt to be an ordered period in my life.

 

THE INTERIOR LIFE OF WORDS

Manifold and movable are the ways in which language embodies itself. I love to tinker: with words, letters, syntax, and sound. I am fond of homonyms, homophones, and homographs; Skyping and skipping and pings from the sky; how an upright piano easily becomes an uptight piano; the nine ways in English there are to pronounce -ough.

Over the next few years, as I continued to write poems, I discovered something about the interior life of words, beyond etymology. Sometimes a word may be found under the spell of another word. Folded, it waits to be liberated; in anger, for example, lies danger. Sometimes it's the folding away of a letter that coaxes forth different speech, magic conjured by a letter made to disappear; and so a harbor may become an arbor.

A narrative, too, may wait for release. One winter, while reading an essay on intergenerational trauma, the word "inherit" caught my eye. In my notebook, I jotted down "In her it. It in her." The following summer I looked back over those notes and the poem, "Inherit," came into being. Words may be broken apart and made anew.

There is also the way words can be compounded and, by fiat, create what did not exist in the mind before its naming: a pinberry, or a sonnet factory. Language can be applied perversely, also, to horrors that words cannot contain. Enola Gay, the name given to the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was named after the pilot's mother.

My grief felt like a party of one, even as I knew I was hardly alone in the experience of grief. Attempting to gain perspective, I found myself trying to situate my personal grief within the larger scale of historical and collective grief. My husband is a physicist and the son of Japanese immigrants, and as I continued to work on these epistolary poems, the atom and the atom bomb began to weave themselves into my manuscript. Like letters, atoms are fundamental blocks 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 had held the shadow of a mushroom cloud.

 

ATOMIC SWERVES

The first sentence in the Wikipedia entry for "atomic swerve," defines it as "a fundamental principle of Epicurean physics: it suggests that, as atoms travel down through the void that contains them, they swerve minimally from their course, lest they all remain isolated, and never meet to form the complexity of the universe."

Over the course of the nearly three years I sent out my manuscript, I worried about the 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 the order of the poems right, the manuscript would be accepted. Until the day I realized there was no one order; all that time, I had missed the irony of the book's title. There are only ever many possible orders, many possible manuscripts.

Disorder has a way of swerving into and across the seemingly most ordered lives. It may arrive as death, on scales personal and collective—a father, a city. But it may also 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 water table issue; a dictionary given out by a bank; a bad poem; a letter and word as humble and as Alpha as a. On as small a scale, too, as the order and disorder 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 / to its 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 quiver and 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 / roe spilling / 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

                     is nothing like a bird.

A bus

          become a boy.

                     Little Boy.

                               A boy become a bomb.

 

Let bygones be.
Let bygones be.

 

Breath
          is but borrowed,

brief.

          And the body betrays

                               because you be:

burrow.

          Bury

                     the black in the berry.

Bury

                     the bumble in the bee.

Bless the bean.
Bless the butter
and the cup.

 

 

 

 

 

Cintia Santana teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and English at Stanford University. Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, and in numerous journals. Her debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023), received the 2024 IPPY Awards Bronze Medal in Poetry, the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver Medal in Poetry, and was short-listed for both the 2023 Golden Poppy Award in Poetry and the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Poetry. cintiasantana.com  

 

 

 

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. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com

 

Jérôme Melançon : Notes and Theses on Zong!

Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
Invisible Publishing, 2023

 

 

 

 

I write with a certain measure of doubt as to whether I have the ability to meaningfully add to the discussion around this book. Zong! opened possibilities for poets and the visual aspects of its form (the methodical filling in of the full space of the page through gaps allowing each cluster of words to breathe) made its way to me before I even read it. This book has been read out loud by so many voices to create as many echoes as possible for the voices the author wanted to bring back to life; it deserved an anniversary edition so it could be discovered anew, like new; it required a reedition and a restatement of its purpose and being after it was flattened in an unauthorized translation.

I doubt myself, but I see Philip doubting herself in the entries she shares from her writing journal. The weight of Zong!’s history and of the history it carries, combined with the weight of the book itself, makes the paper even more beautiful, the reading even more solemn. The new essays it contains, by Philip herself, Katherine McKittrick, and Saidiya Hartman, come to explore its significance, both at the time of writing and in relation to the scholarship on slavery and Black life. In every aspect of these poems and of the texts that support them there is song, there is incantation, there is a singing of the dead to rest and a singing of those who lived to be slaves to another kind of rest. To read it is to learn about the possibilities of reappearance of what was thought to be lost and to participate in bringing it back to the surface, to another kind of life.

I

Books only come through books, like voices only continue the speaking of earlier voices.

.

This book comes announced, lauded, read, spoken. Reeditions are rare, anniversaries even more so. Its merit is already established, it only needs to be discovered anew. Once opened and its pages felt, its chronology effaces itself, it propels itself, it finds its own wind. Yet having been talked about and around, mentioned, named, it remains more grave, more solemn, its aims grander, wider – too wide for any two hands.

II

Voice is material. Carried onto paper, voice brushes against ideas, faces its flattening. Writing is an effort to maintain a voice.

.

The material is everywhere, the words are ostentations, pointings, cries. The poems are told by a person who is fictional but entirely real in their standing in for others unnamed and unknown; told by those who reported in cold legal prose on a mass killing; told by a person who carries rather than author, molds rather than create, compose for an ensemble rather than paint. There is urgency in the timber, furious helplessness in the silences and spaces; resignation in the inability to choose the voices heard; new meaning in the vibration of ink on the paper; creation and new life in the capacity to tell, to rearrange, to refuse a linear telling.

III

The changing of verb tenses creates equivalence as well as difference. They who tell are out of time at the moment of telling, ahead of what is to be told, behind the arrival of their words. Those written, those writing, those receiving the words are entirely present to one another, fully alive – but not at the same time.

.

Taking on someone else’s voice creates equivalence in spite of any difference in humanity, in treatment, in respect. Philip knows this and searches the entanglement of authority and justification – “the could.” She deflects her own authorship, deflects the authorship of the legal documents, finds herself and places us at the moment of an act that can neither be authored, claimed, recognized, nor be justified. In “Zong! #19” she permutates authorship and justification until they cease to bring any certainty – shows both as neither afloat nor grounded, perhaps only run aground, without a reason. In “Zong! #9” lines on the right-hand side end with “in” until “in” moves to the left side at the end of the poem. She breaks the harmony of repetition, opposes her authorship to the author of the document and to the author of the action, even as she refuses to have the last word.

IV

Silence is not a gap; it is what up-holds speech.

.

Permutation and erasure make us experience the bad faith in the speech of legal documents, the speech of declarations, the speech of sales; they make us see the choice of words as well as the choice of deeds and the impossibility of their meeting. Murderers and underwriters, all those who take part in the slavery that stops being ‘ordinary’ or ‘of the time’, lose all their ties and positions, are left out to drift without an anchor or any recourse. The poet and the voices she carries choose their deeds as belonging, as actions against their own dehumanization and deaths.

V

Not every text is within every text. Every text can be turned into its opposite. Not everyone is capable of everything – or anything. Within the words we speak there is potential for fewer words. We need only speed up, chop up, to give life to what the text had prevented.

.

The section titled “DICTA” is about permutations and the hope that some version of the past might have led to a different reality. Words are aligned, each and none qualifying the reality they attempted to slant, to distort. The tort is turned against them, then, becomes unspeakable harm, as the succession of events is both ascertained and affirmed and shown as possibly other, possibly fictitious, replaceable. Other events could have taken place, every murder of slaves disguised as loss of cargo could have been imagined, every person taken could have remained with their loved ones, carried on with their lives.

VI

There are always many people in each voice. Voices are not found, voices are composed.

.

Philip sought out voices, and ensured that her own did not drown them again. There is attribution of a first telling to a collective voice, that of Setaey Adamu Boateng. Philip lets voices pass into hers, not through hers, does not make them a vehicle for her own (and here I sadly flatten the page onto a single line, marking distance with a >):

“tes moi > je am he / am at last > omi water / l eau > l eau” (84)

She does not delineate or distinguish voices, nothing cuts through them. Slave owner and slave are at a distance but in tension through their bonds.

In other poems, she separates each ‘s’ from the words it pluralizes, thus keeping the plural at a distance, keeping the third person at a distance, maintaining the individuality not of each death, but of each life. Plurality exists in distance on these pages, in a coming together Philip makes possible. And the coming together is clear: Philip lets us feel the proximity of words by separating them, but also by moving between languages. These poems are a microcosm of the rest of the book, where the same separation is performed upon words; this separation of the plural ‘s’ reminds us of the aim of the book as a whole, the smallest distance being the most deeply felt.

VII

Experimental writing is writing that makes us learn to read again, writing that is exhausting because it does not rely on habits, because it aims to break habits to make us hear what we could not hear, beautiful because we can feel what we are achieving by reading.

.

The second last section is the most challenging to read. Most of the text is chopped up into small bits, couplets of words. Reading requires so much effort in bridging the gaps between the words. There is so much meaning to create, so much meaninglessness to overcome.

Similar clustering of parts of words can be found throughout the book. The format of publication of this review limits what we can do, a picture from page 134 will serve as an example for those who have not yet encountered the book:

Philip protested against a translation upon which there had been no agreement and, more importantly, which flattened her poem. She was right to do so: no matter in which language, “we are outside of time and out of time” would not read the same as

“ers we a > re out s > ide of time and o /
>ut of ti > m dar” (144)

VIII

The law silences and ends speech. Even where certain devices elicit speech and defenses and discourses and dissenting opinions, others come to stop it, destroy its movement. Under the rule of law, speech must be constantly kept in movement, and some poetry can accomplish this task.

.

In the poem there is a challenge to the authors, to the men who share in the responsibility of the crime and the larger dehumanization, as they are forced to reckon with their actions as they write to women (Claire, Ruth, many others) – and as they avoid this reckoning, reflection, or responsibility by falling from the us to ius, that is, law, right, what they have the right to do by law. Philip shows that the law is what holds them together, what binds them to others, and what makes them able to enslave and murder others. The law becomes an alibi, a well of bad faith, a permission, a disappearance of the “I” into an unspecified but well enforced “us.”

“let us / claire / just / us > just / us / & / ius” (94)
“in this age > of gin rum / & guns this age > of los negros les / nègres ignore the age > the rage of sane / men just > us ruth just / us just ius” (115)

IX

Poetry can breathe life into what we can no longer experience as it was.

.

So much of the poem is about making it possible to tell the story, its horror, its mundanity, without flattening lives, that the act itself only rarely appears, and only appears in its full strength. We see mourning on page 110; the weight of truth on page 111; an admission of guilt on pages 120-121. On pages 140-141, we understand that if the horror is seen as sin, it is lessened, because it becomes both inescapable (humans are sinners) and expiable, thus forgivable.

X

To allow a story to tell itself is to avoid throwing it overboard in exchange for some kind of compensation or certainty.

.

Philip’s own thesis is that there is a mystery in the story of the slaves aboard the Zong, “the mystery of evil.” Philip’s own thesis in writing the story is that “this story must be told by not telling” (190) so that the mystery may be preserved.

A story that cannot be told other than by not telling cannot be flattened, have its gaps filled, have its refusal of structure brought into the immediate access granted by prose, have its hope turned into certainty. Philip gives us poetry at its most political, as it rearranges the elements of reality, of certainty, as it refuses the alibis of authorship and justification, as it refuses the underwriting that holds up those who risk others, as it rejects balance sheets, tidy orderings, and placement.

Post-Scriptum

Other theses would be about slavery and (in)humanity. To continue turning slaves back from objects, cargo, resources, into human beings.

Writing them is beyond my current capacity – not my role as a reviewer or critic, which very much includes the need to develop the capacity to do so, but exactly that current capacity as ability, that knowledge of a lack of knowledge, that reflection that ends at the fact of ignorance, that presence on my bookshelf of works by Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott. That current capacity as leading into a future possibility.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.

ryan fitzpatrick : Six poems from Spectral Arcs

 

 

 

 

DODO
(Raphus cucullatus)

Nothing vanishes, is gone ever. One might believe that there is nothing new under the sun, but something briefly flickers in and out of sight. Eyewitness accounts doctor a cooling account of the world left strewn like magnetic tape spooled out. One might build a shell from a hail of gunfire or hide behind the charred folly of the law. One might fall asleep. Shooting bison from a train window, one collects but a range of ghosts, faint in the way one might think of drainage.

There are trees cut down in worship of the stump. There are bands of iron and bronze that turn dates forward, hanging from the stump of a mast. In a green dawn, one must commune with more than one’s eyes passing over the ghost shape of a tree. In an object dawn, one must retain one’s coat of arms with the faintness of two smouldering stumps to measure the temples of God. One must stare into tamer versions of the sun where soft light denies the mythological.

It is loathsome, when the weight one must shovel reappears as shit. Each channel is a fraud of water. Each season a two-note sound. One must stretch and train each procedure and checklist to conform one’s self. How much energy does one have? How does one gather? Don’t be discouraged by the lack of answers, since one can train the eye to locate everything.

 

 

LEARNING TO OUTLINE ABSENCE

You might wonder how to describe the world around you. Typically, we make our first identifications by sight, but when compact consumption interrupts our patient weaving, our eyes fail. They fail in each attempt to wean away the apparent, instead desperately turning to time-lapse or multiple exposure, stacking lens on lens, map on map. The effect is the slow drift of transparencies over one another or the slow wind of pipelines through the trees of our ever-commodifying forests. In this, your description might resemble a spit take or a calm shipping terminal.

When you are in love and you can’t describe your feelings, this sentinel sticks to the script. It acts handsome and clever in each strike against attention. You might know my mind and I yours, but sound advice keeps us chained to the nightlife of our dense environs. But when I ask what the use of love is in all this, what straightforward braids mourn lost tableaus? A proper search invokes a captive speech. We raise our hands in vicinity and it is in that closeness that we press our faces deep into the grass, letting our arms scratch the branch of the nearest tree. 

With the faint bait of a gold rush, you ought to forget all romance, clasping no cameo, adorning no calico gown with fur stitched to the cuffs. Employ instead a childhood formula, starting with a dioramic shrine to brilliant choreography. The shot should open under the crush of a final spread, the table filled with curdling childbirth. From there, pin until a territory marks no straightforward wish. And, as the light streams in from the collared shirts of your school uniform, watch nature stream watercolours more vulnerable than most.

This is what it means to let go, yet often there is a subtle underpinning to our endless pining. Often a melody turns where a head cannot. Great care must not describe each feral bird as if its flight were silent. The art of description is instead monotonous, sounding just one syllable until it nods its head as it walks.

 

 

IMPERIAL WOODPECKER
(Campephilus imperialus) 

He pinned the delicacy of his crest next to old-growth distribution maps. A faint watercolor portrait of border intensification in the countries that feed on the heartwood chessboards whose lines are defined by 700-mile fences. Feathers will be ground into the thinning broth of youth, which silences the desert’s skeptics by conjuring magnificent languages that race the wriggling course of the Red River. Cheap wood in a barrel-type heater chokes out English to the beat of jet engines and biodiesel. He ground his chest into beating sheet metal to mobilize public opinion of the amber-glowing dim of ecotourism and its vision of a cure for country living distilled from the fading documentations of winter.

 

 

GREAT AUK
(Pinguinus impennis)

First, one must learn to abandon carbon and oxygen and water without a cheat sheet. This new climate carries no rookeries, no seashore access, no nested common. It is a rich clime of bare rock, serializing each wave.

One tiny swallow a day pumps months from one’s process. Perched between towers, many an aquarist attaches to bacteria. Many a swallow seeps into the stomachs of better filters. One’s body must interrupt all vitamins and nutrients. One must cling to dress code. One must dissolve the diamond dispersal patterns of one’s own molecular structure, where there may still be small enclaves.

Even young children know to finance. They bet on quick transitions and a diet that proves no one will need to live without disease. Each of them dreams of a slow swim to burial. A dream that begins with oil pouring from the eyes, a white patch or blindfold. A dream woven of a fine down. A dream whose price is a textbook series’ rich disapproval. In this, remember that a redwood tree lives for a thousand years and a man can drink saltwater without harmful effect. The nitrogen cycle is mere fiction and settlement patterns are cyclical. If one dreams, it must be with an eye on cost, since, even with more adept equipment, the desert may not reveal a rich diversity. One may only catch a glimpse from the grave, buried in a stone cloak. The arctic wind is deaf. There is no test of end, no great day when the pan fails to taste like fish.

 

 

LAUGHING OWL
(Sceloglaux albifacies) 

If one opens a pocket, it may be picked. The coins will tickle the folds of the mantle, edged with snow that melts in a thought. A melancholy stroll marks the mewling notes of fabric as it shifts. A drifting rain weeps in an accordion’s drawl. From a distance, then, one scene unfolds across the frame of another and, now, can accommodate new populations that choke up little support. The past deposits little that stands firm in storms, little that flees to caves from madness. None in a pair will turn blind, but, fruitless, none will congregate in the trees, folded between the leaved shag of sight. One must carefully tease out the threads of outbound saddles following the well-rutted garden path. One must peel back the vivid hues of each summit to confirm the faint wastes in each trip. One must keep a careful vigil.

 

 

HOUTING
(Coregonus oxyrinchus) 

There is a startling falsehood to the turning current, the flow brackish. A failed nation traced overlap, its migration a poured refuge. One must distinguish useful from the rise of harbours, the accretion of cardboard and tin. The basins that cobble into accident. One should look deeply into the startling music of rivers draining the nation of conversion, of sails numbering in the thousands throating airborne spears.  Numbers turn the air. Titles turn the flooded meadows, waking estates in the reed beds.

 

 

 

 

 

ryan fitzpatrick is the author of four books of poetry, including the recent Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023) and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021). Their first creative nonfiction book, Ace Theory, will be published by Book*Hug Press in 2025. They are the 2024-25 writer-in-residence in the University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies. Their chapbook Spectral Arcs will appear in September with above/ground press.