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
