233. Alphabet Poems - Claire Wahmanholm
Gustav Klimt, Apple Tree II (1916)
That’s how the sequence started, with my children in mind, but as it’s progressed, it’s become more and more a guidebook for me, living as a parent in our world.
For the last six years, since my first daughter was born, I’ve been working on a series of alphabet poems. The very first books we read to her were abecedarians—you know the kind: A is for apple! B is for Bear! This is how we introduce children to the world. The more of them I read, the more I thought about what a “realistic” abecedarian might look like for this particular generation of children.
That’s how the sequence started, with my children in mind, but as it’s progressed, it’s become more and more a guidebook for me, living as a parent in our world. Much of my current work is in the eco-poetic tradition, and so several of these alphabet poems are about climate catastrophe and the more-than-human world, broadly writ. Others are about police brutality, gun violence, and war. Still others are about connection, motherhood, and choosing hope and survival. Writing these poems means sitting in attention with a wide range of emotions—terror, ecstasy, anxiety, longing, gratitude.
There are some kinds of poems that I write more or less out of my own imagination (whatever that means). Not these. With an alphabet poem, I begin by going through the Oxford English Dictionary and making a list of as many viable words that start with a given letter (usually it’s a couple hundred). Then I’ll step back and see what arises from that list: how those words talk to each other; what little webs they make; whether there are certain words that clump together semantically, sonically, or even visually.
This often means that the worlds of astronomy and architecture will cohabit in the poem; the worlds of ornithology and mythology will share an ecosystem. It reminds me that you can make connections out of anything: there are far more ways to be alike than different.
When I first started writing these poems, they were fairly pithy, fewer than 200 words. But some in Meltwater, my newest collection, have swelled to almost 500 words, and because they’re prose poems, they look pretty imposing on the page. I sometimes picture them as chunks of soil, and the individual letters as roots running from the top to bottom of the poem, holding it all together.
I let them swell because I want to resist the soundbite, the “take,” the speed at which we are asked to digest information and then respond meaningfully to it. I want to slow down and insist on attention. I want to dive deep and let the exploration take as long as it needs to.
- Claire Wahmanholm
