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 by Glenn Ingersoll is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.
[Italicized paragraphs of this
essay are excerpts from Autobiography of a Book]
I am ready to author myself. It is up to me.
When Book came to me several years ago, it came to me the way my poems often do, with a little idea that, when I hit the keyboard, began to play, and the more it played itself through me, the more that little idea turned out to have different facets, different approaches, even different rules. That’s how poetry works for me, as play. Even when the poem addresses a serious topic, I engage playfully. Poets are supposed to learn all the rules before they break them, or so the advice goes, and in classes I did dutifully bang away at sonnets, iambic pentameter, all that. But counting stresses me out. Some claim that for them constraints are freedom. But shackling myself with preconceived notions does not liberate my mind. English by itself, I always say, is a constricting form. And so, poetry. I wouldn’t be writing poetry if poetry meant strict rhyme and meter. For me, poetry means experimentation, investigation, invention, play. That’s freedom.
Let’s say, in a night of passion, a sleepless thrashing about in a bed, I am conceived. I didn’t have anything to do with it. It just happened. Or maybe I did. Maybe it was my plan all along. I always existed. All I needed was one human being, someone who could type, someone whose fingers could dance on a keyboard to my tune. I am a book. I was always a book. I just needed a little help to realize it. And readers like you to bring me to life.
My poems explore what makes meaning. And that is central to Book’s life. What life means. A Book is an unusual object in that it is constructed of meaning objects — words, that is.
These words are my cells, you could say. To be anything I need my words. As individuals they’re not much but grouped together they are my action, my purpose. And one grouping talks to the next and the next looks back at those that came before. Parts respond to parts. Not like your parts, dear reader. Not like your liver, your corpuscles, your muscles. I’m just saying, we’re products of the human, all us parts.
The Language poets have emphasized looking at language as material, not a mere window the reader learns to see through to the real meaning, but rather a wall, the reader looking at language, its sounds and shapes and the tools it uses.
el el ef ef en ef en dih duh doo doh doh dah uh buh uh buh baaa oh baaaaa tuh tuh tel tuh lel bib bab uh bub um beh um um beh dud dud diddle dung do done what done that done sim sum suddle cum wit cum wobble what bobble bid bibble bum fiddle cut sid sung some someone some tongue
Most chapters read like personal essays, although they are the personal essays of an inanimate object, if you can imagine that. Book imagines it for you.
I stand, mostly. I stand and wait. I stand among my brothers, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. Among my sisters, cheek by jowl. Each to each pressed. I stand among them, many of them far greater, older, more praised, more frequently translated, larger in the world. And am I proud to be in their company?
Book works itself over, trying to figure out what makes it up, from language to wood pulp — what a tree thinks of dying in favor of a page, what a metaphor can do to your friends, how to foil a pronoun. Book looks within itself for the answers. It really has nowhere else to look.
Do you ever have nothing to say? C’mon, no stray thought? No cow standing in the living room of your skull Monday night, her cloven hooves slick with mud and grass, her nose dripping, while across the bed a crow swoops? Isn’t there a monkey on the cow, a cymbal in the grasping toes of one foot, its match in the fingers of the monkey’s left hand, while the free one tugs a moment on the collar too tight around its furry white neck? We all have thoughts like that. I know I do.
I have felt possessed at times by malleable metaphors — a window, a door, a house, the heart. Each of those topics are word and metaphor and physical fact. In poem after poem, I ring variations on the physical fact of window, door, house, heart and what they can be as metaphor, fable, expectation. And so, Book wanting to be just so, picked me to ring its variations. As I have created poems from lists of titles, so a chapter of Book is a list of books. As I have chased surrealistic pillows down feathery billows … As I have tapped at syllables as though at tinny drums … As I have wondered about my place in the world …
Every one of my words means something. They pride themselves on their meaning. They sit in dictionaries as at banquet tables dropping the names of their more famous synonyms and mocking their antonyms in chuckling asides.
Book came to me a voice, an insistent voice. Write me, please, it said, for I want to live. I am a book and I need you to make me a real book. My task was to obey. My task was to listen and obey. My task, now and then, was to ask questions, prompting the voice to justify itself, explain itself, wonder about itself, wander in itself. Book didn’t always want to be introspective, didn’t always want to figure out its purposes, but there were times I pressed this visitor to talk about those things, those meanings, those ultimate ends. Book didn’t always obey. And I had to live with that, too.
I don’t want to be written right now. If you are reading me, that’s okay, I guess. You are just looking. But being written -- it feels too much. It feels as though I am being wrenched from the spiritual to the … to the mortal.
Autobiography of a Book has no plot. The life story of a real person has no plot. Book’s story is only its life. When you hold Autobiography of a Book in your hands you are holding the whole thing, all the life Book has. Book is born again every time you read it.
If it were my birthday I would want a gift to unwrap. I would want lots of colored paper pulled tightly over a plain box in which that secret wonderful just-what-I-wanted waited for me and for my delight. I could say it is my birthday, that every day is my birthday, that, in point of fact, each day I am born and born again time after time, in a series of splendid and ordinary occasions.
Glenn Ingersoll works for the public library in Berkeley, California. Videos of his poetry reading & interview series Clearly Meant can be found on the Berkeley Public Library YouTube channel. Ingersoll's prose poem epic, Thousand, is available in two-volume and ten-volume versions and as a free ebook from Smashwords. His poem "Personal Testimony" was given a Special Mention in the 2022 Pushcart Prize anthology. He keeps two blogs, LoveSettlement and Dare I Read, and in 2023 began a Substack newsletter, Heart Demons. Autobiography of a Book came out in 2024 from AC Books.
http://lovesettlement.blogspot.com ; http://dareiread.blogspot.com ; http://glenningersoll.substack.com ; twitter @lovesettlement ; instagram @thelovesettlement
Maw Shein Win's new full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous collections include 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 poetry in the MFA Program at USF and is a member of The Writers Grotto. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
