Alphabet Soup [by Tomás Q. Morín]

My first memory of the alphabet is seeing the letters—they were about the size of a mug—printed on one of those long pieces of posterboard that is meant to rest above the blackboard. I think there were apples and worms next to the letters, and the worms may have even had glasses. What fascinated me were the shapes of the letters, especially those that had tails facing this way or that. And I can’t forget the serious, attentive looking capitals standing next to the miniscules so that the whole picture looked like a silhouette of the Alps or a train of parents and children waiting outside a store the morning after Thanksgiving.

I’ve always wanted to write an abecedarian, to use the structure of my favorite mountain range to order my thoughts in the way those giants Czeslaw Milosz and Ezra Pound once did, but I could never decide on what would be worth sharing. The last year or so as I’ve been happily answering the smart, probing questions of interviewers, I’ve been anxiously hoping no one would ask the dreaded question: “Who are your influences?” It would be like a geneticist walking up to someone on the street and saying, “Here’s a pencil and paper. Now sketch your genome.” It would be impossible to remember every distant cousin and great-great grandparent on someone’s side twice removed, much less to whom you owe your odd-shaped toes or your long eyelashs. The same is true for literary influence. What’s more, I object to a literary family being shaped like a tree because it implies that Homer or the writer of Gilgamesh is the old, hidden root to our twigs when nothing could be further from the truth because I just saw Homer in a bookstore; he was lounging on a whole shelf in fact, and looked as vibrant and full of fire as any debut author.

What follows is an attempt to head off that question of forebears. Some purists will see my alphabet as messy or even sacrilegious since I’ve opened the doors and let in the digraphs, those crazy uncles that never get invited to family reunions. If I made this list tomorrow, it would surely be different. Happily so, indeed.

a – Anna Akhmatova

b – Elizabeth Bishop

c – Amy Clampitt

ch – Charles M. Schultz

d – Annie Dillard

e – Ralph Waldo Emerson

f – Flannery O’Connor

ph – Philip Levine

g – Gerald Stern

h – Seamus Heaney

i – Isaac Babel

j – Jorie Graham

k – Franz Kafka

l – Stan Lee

m – Czeslaw Milosz

mc – Cormac McCarthy

n – Pablo Neruda

o – Sharon Olds

p – “Papa” Hemingway

q – David Quammen

r – Robert Frost

s – Mark Strand

sh – Sam Shepard

t – Leo Tolstoy

th – Henry David Thoreau

u – Du Fu

v – Vasko Popa

w – William Carlos Williams

wh – Walt Whitman

x – is for the anonymous author of “Tom O’Bedlam”

y – W.B. Yeats

z – Zbigniew Herbert

& – is for Jack Gilbert who is not last but first on my list when I start over tomorrow.

Comments

[Leslie McGrath]

This is delightful. I love the way you bent the bars in order to fit in more of your favorites.
It's been a fun week reading you, Tomas. Enjoy the holiday!

[Tomas Q. Morin]

26 letters just didn't seem like enough, you know? This week has been a lot of fun. I hope I return before too long :)

Happy holidays!!!

[Rick Najera]

What kind of Latino is you?

[Tomas Q. Morin]

Warm greetings, Rick! Thanks for stopping by and reading. I'm Mexican-American. What part of the country are you from?