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://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
