Glenn Ingersoll : Process Note #52 : Autobiography of a Book

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

 

Natasha Dennerstein : Process Note #51 : Thrashing in the wind

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 poems by Natasha Dennerstein is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

 

 

A process note on Caught in the Machine, Veronica Lake Poems by Natasha Dennerstein, Be About It Press, 2024.

This chapbook consists of biographical poems about 1940s film star, Veronica Lake, a misunderstood actress and bad girl who faded quickly from the limelight and then died young of alcoholism. It’s a partner chapbook from a series about misunderstood women, the first one being “Broken, a life of Aileen Wuornos in 33 poems.” A third chapbook will be forthcoming to make up a trilogy. Let’s call it “a project.”

I think this following poem is successful, a sort of contemporary sonnet in that it is 14 lines with a closing, snappy little couplet. It contains all the overarching themes of the chapbook: sleight-of-hand illusion, accidental iconography, the arbitrary nature of public success, the divide between reality and fantasy.

1936 Connie Keane, Underage Teenage Beauty Queen.

 

Entered for a lark with my sorority sisters;

paraded like a piece of meat in the cattle market.

Wanted to bump and grind like a burlesque artiste,

make a joke of it, clown around and jerk their chains.

 

On stage I felt nervous and weak at the knees

but wowed them with my transition. A black

satin gown falls quick to the floor: a stark white bathing

suit revealed like a magic trick. Third place in

 

Miss Florida and Mister Richman told

Mom I could be a star. She lit up like a dog

with a porkchop, oh I saw her.

On such serendipity a whole career can turn:

 

the weight of the satin gown; the accidental

contrast between black and white.

There is quite a lot of “form” poems in this chapbook and the following are a pair of ghazals. Sometimes the ghazal is a form that is well-suited to something with a repetitive action or something obsessive or a recurring thought. It behooves a poet well, I believe, to master (or mistress) these forms and use them, or use elements of them, when the occasion suits. As in many disciplines/arts practices, you have to know the rules in order to break them. Like the jazz musician who knows their classical chords and can read music, but then freeform it.

 

1939 Forty Little Mothers

 

I was an extra on the set of Forty Little Mothers

and my pesky, unruly hair kept falling in my eye.

 

Mr Busby Berkeley caught it in his lens and said:

Tell that little blonde to let her hair keep falling in her eye.

 

The camera noticed it and for the sake of continuity

I always had to let my hair keep falling in my eye.

 

From then on in, Paramount made it my trademark and billed me

as the sultry dame with the hair falling in her eye.

 

They even had a name for it: the peekaboo hairdo, but I was

just a seventeen year old kid with hair that kept falling in her eye.

 

In this first ghazal, I tweaked and slightly altered the phraseology and tense of the final repetition of each couplet, the “hair that kept falling in my eye.” I like these micro changes in phrasing. The conceit is that the hair kept accidentally falling in her eye, with no intention on her part. An accident that had to be repeated for the purposes of cinematic continuity, the hair had to always fall in her eye. This serendipity, Lake asserts, is how she accidentally became a star. It echoes the falling black gown in the first poem that reveals a white bathing suit. On such accidents a whole career can be formed. In real life her look and persona were perceived as being artfully constructed, but Veronica Lake said that it was all accidental. As we know, Dr Jung said there was no such thing as an accident/co-incidence, that everything is pre-ordained, that a situation was always just waiting to happen. I don’t think Lake agreed with Dr Jung on this.

The following poem is the other of the pair of ghazals in this process note.

 

1949 Slattery’s Hurricane for 20th Century.

 

We all went down to Miami, a raggle-taggle Hollywood

troupe and the Florida palm trees were thrashing in the wind.

 

Linda Darnell, Richard Widmark and me

and the Florida palm trees thrashing in the wind.

 

Airforce involvement, a love triangle, hurricane chasers

and the Florida palm trees thrashing in the wind.

 

André de Toth (aka Bandi, my husband) directing

and the Florida palm trees thrashing in the wind.

 

I was professional on set but our marriage was breaking

and the Florida palm trees were thrashing in the wind.

 

We drove separately to the set in matching Cadillacs:

locked in celluloid eternity, the Florida palm trees thrash in the wind.

 

I used the repetitive nature of the ghazal to a visual effect in this, with the idea that the visual iconography is eternal, that anything that happened on celluloid would stay that way forever. These thrashing palm trees were pleasing and tempestuous for Veronica but in this poem she is saying “I actually don’t need to be there. Once the thrashing palm trees are in place I can walk away.” She understood that she was just a prop, just a piece of visual iconography and she deliberately walked away from her movie life because it didn’t suit her. There was something self-destructive in her. She preferred to drink her days away with ordinary people of the streets and not hobnob in the rarified circles of the elite. She didn’t think she was one of them and she didn’t want to be. She took her own life into her hands in order to choose to destroy it. In this poem I have Veronica saying “Look at the thrashing palm trees that are thrashing forever. While your eyes are engaged I’m gonna step off set and into my own life. You won’t even notice I’m gone. I’ll be in a dive bar around the corner, yukking it up with some sailors. The palm trees will keep thrashing in the wind.”

 

 

 

 

 

Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally, including The North American Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has had several poetry collections and chapbooks published including, most recently in 2024, the collection Apps Poetica from The Los Angeles Press and the chapbook Caught in the Machine from Be About It Press in Philadelphia. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is the editor-in-chief of Cherry Pie Press, a new LGBTQ Poetry Imprint. She is a Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

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