In April of 2025, Milkweed Editions will release Chris Santiago’s highly anticipated second poetry collection Small Wars Manual, which Kaveh Akbar calls “a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.” Alongside MAYDAY’s feature of three poems included in the collection (“6.9,” “6.4,” and “1.4”), I had the pleasure to interview Santiago over Zoom about the poems and Small Wars Manual at large, touching upon erasure and documentary poetics, visual poetry, and writing against colonial legacies.
This interview was recorded in May of 2024 and has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you say more about how your poems published in MAYDAY (“6.9” “6.4” and “1.4”) figure in your larger project and forthcoming Milkweed collection Small Wars Manual? What would you like the reader to know about the poems? How did they come to be?
In my previous book Tula, I wrote the poems and worked on them for a few weeks or months before working on another poem, and after some time the project took shape. With Small Wars Manual, the idea for the book came first. I was inspired by a lot of documentary projects that I had recently read by Fanny Howe, Bhanu Khapil, and Claudia Rankine, and especially Srikanth Reddy’s large erasure project Voyager.
I was also doing research on the Philippine-American War, which most people in the US don’t really know about. I was working on a fiction project and came across a document called the Small Wars Manual, a US Marine Corps manual published in 1940. The more I read about it, the more I discovered that it was amassing all this military wisdom and knowledge that had come not only from the Banana Wars and the Border Wars of the early 20th century, but also from the Philippine-American War. When you read the manual all the way through—which, by the way, is not much fun—you’ll find chapters that include “Disarmament of the Population,” “Psychology” (basically psychological warfare or “psyops”, since that wasn’t yet a term that had come into being yet), “Supervision of Elections,” “Withdrawal,” and “Infantry Patrols.” The manual specifically mentions the Philippine-American War several times. The war between the US and the Philippines ended with a sort of question mark for the US Marines because there was insurgent resistance for many years afterward. And because the US became an occupying force, there were other conflicts that happened throughout the region. The US also later aided the Philippine government in putting down Communist movements within the Philippines throughout the 20th century.
When I found this manual, I thought, here was some DNA for US foreign policy and military interventionism. Reddy’s book Voyager takes former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s memoir and plays with this officially international English of speaking from the point of view of a United Nations Secretary General who also happened to have been a Nazi, right? It’s really fascinating. So, Reddy is doing this excavation of language with Waldheim’s language, and I thought, what kind of excavation of language could you do with this manual that literally says ‘this is how you invade a country with a small force and suppress resistance’?
I couldn’t figure out how to write the project for the longest time. Finally, the method that I landed on is that each one of these sections within the chapters would be a beginning and ending point. So, within the first page of a section to the last page of that section, I could use any word that was inside it. I fragmented a lot of words after a while, I really sort of blew them apart and would take a couple letters here and a couple letters there because after a while a sentence would kind of occur to me. Sometimes there’d be a fragment of a word, like, I’d see the word executive, and I would see just the “cut” in it, the C-U-T, And so I’d use that fragment, and then as “cut” started to be in the back of my mind I would look for other words like “flesh” or “blood.” I would look for those letters in fragments, and there’d only be so much running room between the beginning of that section to the end of the section to find those letters, but it would usually be enough for a short lyric poem.
For the poems “6.9,” “6.4,” “1.4,” each number represents the chapter and section number for specific section within the United States Marine Corps Small Wars Manual: “Infantry Patrols,” “Attacking Houses,” “Feeding the Personnel.” I would digitally highlight certain fragments and put a little note on the edge of the margins to remind myself what word I was trying to make because it’s easy to get lost doing a project like that.
Thank you for that. I’m really moved by how you talk about the jarring encounter with this perhaps somewhat obscure document within the US military industrial complex and drawing upon this “significant wisdom” based on the Philippine-American War. I can imagine how there is significant trauma there, both in the war itself and in encountering this document’s violent representation of Filipinx people.
You refer to your method as an “excavation of language.” In your prior collection Tula, you frequently return to the Tagalog to deconstruct the titular word, and in so doing, conduct another kind of language excavation. Can you talk a little bit about how producing Tula was so different from producing Small Wars Manual? What do you see as the relationship between those respective excavations?
That’s a great question. I don’t know if other people have had this experience, but after Tula came out and I was reading it in different places, I was thinking about Bruce Springsteen. I’m not comparing myself to Bruce Springsteen, but he plays like all of his big hits because there always might be someone who has never been to a Springsteen concert and wants to hear him play that song. So there are certain poems I always want to read when I read from my book. But then I started to experience this weird feeling like from “Borges and I” where I think “is that me?” And then my mom died around that same time, so there was a lot going on in my head and I had a hard time starting to write poems again. I wondered to myself, “am I imitating myself? To what extent am I trying to just write a poem influenced by poems I wrote before and what I thought people liked about them?” So I thought a process like this would be a great way to get out of my head. That way I’d feel like I could get away from my ego in a lot of ways. And so, using the erasure form was great because you’re limited by the text already and you can only choose letters within this space. But the hard part was that there was tension. Of course a lot of the words have to do with warfare and in one of the chapters there’s like this awful phrenology too where it’s trying to psychologize people based on race and based on the experience of the military in Latin America and Asia. It’s clearly racist, so at one point I was focused on bringing to light how terrible this document and its racism is, but we know that stuff already, kind of instinctively. And another part of me wanted to say, “well, how can I use this language and do something completely different, maybe even strange, and maybe even beautiful. How could I repurpose and appropriate it.” So there’s always a tension in the project.
I decided to group the erasures into four or five at a time and then have some related non-erasure poems as a break. One of my readers, Michael Bazzett, helped me see that I needed a break between the erasures because of how pressurized those poems are due to the tension between the erasures and their source material. It’s kind of exhausting actually to write them.
I’m really interested in what you were saying there about the question of imitating oneself. I know many poets have often talked about either feeling pigeonholed or trapped by the precedent that they’ve set for themselves, whether externally to audiences or internally for how they view themselves as an artist. Would you consider this work then as a big departure from Tula or do you see them as different but companion collections in a way? Or is there another way you would describe that departure that you have embarked on with Small Wars Manual?
I think the erasure poems are a departure in a way, but Tula was also very project-minded too with a kind of a narrative in mind. There’s no clear narrative in Small Wars Manual, but maybe because I’m a fiction writer and a musician I kind of like to think in big sections like movements. Maybe in a way the second book is clarifying for me who I am as a poet and a writer, the way I think in terms of cycles. I try to sit down and write individual poems, but I think a large part of me is interested in–to use musical language–if this is the first movement, what is it in relation to the third movement? Are we going fast or are we going slow? Is this a minor or a major key? I’m not literally thinking about those things, but I like to think of poems interrelated in that way.
I love a poem that just stands on its own. I was just reading Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry and he does this amazing job describing how poems are possible and the simultaneous pressure of silence around them and the notion of a poem’s impossibility. I love that idea, and I also love poems’ interconnectedness. If poems are always going to fail to some extent, why can’t you have fun and have them in conversation with each other within a book?
I love that Lerner book as well. I return often to his close reading of Claudia Rankine’s use of the virgule in Citizen to create literal and metaphoric breaks. I think too of Patrick Rosal’s essay “The Art of the Mistake: Some Notes on Breaking as Making” where he talks about breakdancing as a lens to understanding a similar generativeness of breaks in language and movement. With music, I wonder, while we may think of the space between movements as conventionally different parts or chapters, I’m drawn to the generativeness there of that break, or of the tension in a fermata. I’m compelled by your framing of the space between books in a similar way.
And that juxtaposition too, right? I love Spring and All by William Carlos Williams, and it’s funny to think about the “Red Wheelbarrow” being nestled in this web of all this prose that happens and having that all happen before suddenly having this moment of lyric clarity. Where you put the poem in a book is really important too and that drives you crazy like, does it go here? Just go here and that really helps. And people do stuff like print up all their poems and lay them on the floor, put them on the wall.
But then showing it to people, the readers see things too. And giving it time, time is so important just to be like, leave it a couple weeks and then you look at it like, oh, and that doesn’t go together at all. This one should be over here. This one should be over here.
Do the poems that we’re publishing in MAYDAY come close together in your collection or are they in different sections?
They’re actually from different sections. I decided to not order them chronologically. I stay within the order of each chapter, but then I freely move the chapters around so that in the table of contents, there’s the original table of contents struck through. I have that included and then I have my new table of contents that jumps around like “6.9”, then “1.4”, then “12.3” etc.
Because certain poems after I erased them, though they went together consecutively before, I think they’re now stronger if I move them around. And so I hope I don’t get busted by the erasure police for rearranging the table. It’s fun to f— with it too because that’s kind of the point too. This is a war manual; I want to mess with it, I want to chop it up and do these things to it too.
I hope there isn’t any erasure police. If there is, I think we should abolish it.
Haha yes.
That does bring me to another question I wanted to ask you about these poems’ relationship to the document. Erasure poetry is intrinsically a manipulation of a document, a “recontextualization” as you put it, through that splicing of word and letter fragments. I often return to Michael Leong’s monograph on document-based poetry Contested Records, wherein he makes a distinction between “documentary” poetry that responds to or adapts an archive, and a “documental” poetry that visually shows the intervention into the document. Can you speak to your decision to keep the US Marine Corps’ original Small Wars Manual document and its textures out-of-frame/off-the-page and to publish the language in its own compressed space?
Thank you, that’s a wonderful question. There’s a moment in “1.4” at the very end where I left a little bit of the original lineation and the spacing on the page because those words, in their totality, were actually found in the original document. “Solve” and “machinery” and “nature” were actually in the original and I had highlighted.
But then a different poem started to occur in relation to the words. I wanted to leave that, kind of a remnant of the original space. So those words are really kind of a ghost around most of the poems.
But that being said, there are actually some poems in the book where I wanted to start and end the book. I grayed out the original text that I didn’t use in these poems and boldfaced the text I kept (similar to Jen Bervin’s approach in Nets). I wanted to enter into the book and to leave the book with a reminder of what the original US Marine Corps Small Wars Manual looked like.
There’s one more poem in the middle like that that has remnants of the original text because the text actually speaks to the bolo, which is a Filipino machete knife. Not enough soldiers had guns in resistance to the US. The US had superior technology and numbers and training and everything, so some Filipino soldiers would actually ambush American troops just with knives, and jump on them and start hacking away with these bolo knives. So there’s actually a specific section in the original manual that talks about that: what if you’re ambushed by bolos? I wanted that section to be ghosted in the background, even though the poem went in other directions.
I think these three poems can answer that ghostly pressure of knowing as a reader that this is a poem where the language is taken from somewhere else. In any poem, there’s always pressure from white space but I think there’s even more pressure from something that is salvaged or pulled up out of another text.
It’s a choice of constraints. Like oftentimes we think of as, for example, a sonnet having 14 lines and is in iambic pentameter. But with something procedural or documentary or documental there is a different choice of constraints, and I’m compelled by the keeping of the “remnants” or the “ghosts” as one such constraint that dictates your engagement with language, whether newly generated or, more spatially manipulated in the original or on your own part.
In the AWP panel you recently moderated, “Sight Singing: Poetry and the Visual”, you cataloged a variety of ways a poem may engage with the visual before identifying yourself with the “image/text” mode, where the poem’s text responds to or represents an image but is not especially visual itself. You commented too that you’ve wanted to push yourself into more visual territory beyond the “image/text”. How would you describe the role of the image or visual in this sequence and/or your forthcoming book generally?
Yeah, it’s well, in one way my eyes almost felt like they were bleeding when I was doing this erasure because I would be staring at these documents for so long I’d have to look away.
It’s almost like doing a crossword puzzle, but there’s no solution. I’m looking for a pattern and you have to decide what letters I’m gonna use. Then revising them is tricky too, because you want to go back and like, okay, I have to unselect these and redo these. So that’s not really the visual as what we’re talking about here.
Within the book I have two poems in the pecha kucha form. Poems, which is a form that as far as I know, Terence Hayes created, such as with his amazing poem “Arbor for Butch,” which Tina Chang introduced to me. What’s great about the form is that you never feel lonely, as Chang put it, because you’re choosing twenty works of art by a single artist. So you always have this companion with you, which is what’s great about ekphrastic poetry in general, right? You have something that you’re writing about or toward.
I chose two sets of photographs from two different photographers. One was by David Levinthal who rose to fame by taking pictures of small models of war figurines and jeeps and trucks in black and white photography. The photographs look like vintage war photography before you look closer and realize it’s a toy. Later projects of his were racy and some investigated racist toys and memorabilia: he would take pictures of old toys he collected and that would become part of his photography. The poems also include work from An-My Lê, a Vietnamese-American photographer, and she took pictures of Vietnam War reenactors in Virginia. The reenactors sort of said to Lê, “Oh, you’re Vietnamese. Do you want to be in our reenactment?” So she enters into some of her own photos.
It’s interesting to see the photographer in her own photo playing Viet Cong soldiers. I guess she was cool with that which is super interesting to me.
But, inspired by the people I worked with in the panel like Monica Ong, Keith Wilson, Mag Gabbert, and Douglas Kearney, I started to do some visual poems for this collection, which are still in the works. There are some figures that are in the original United States Marine Corps Small Wars Manual book, really vintage-looking graphic organizers and one on horse anatomy since horses were an important instrument of warfare. I’m trying to erase those and make poems out of what remains but keep the graphic too and so Milkweed Editions and I are talking about how that will work in the collection.
You and I have discussed featuring you and your poems in MAYDAY for a long time now, long before October 7th 2023, before Israel’s now ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, though the apartheid conditions well preceded October 7th and our conversation. So I wanted to ask about how you’re thinking about these poems in this new context. For me as a reader I read your poems as reflective of Israel’s—as well as their enablers, particularly the United States—language of occupation and atrocity that we’re witnessing live every day and see reified in mainstream media. I’m sure there are connections to be made between the Philippine-American War over a hundred years ago, the Philippines’ occupation, and the US’s support of Israel now. How do you consider the work of your Small Wars Manual sequence in relation to today’s context?
Clearly my project in wanting to do it is very antiwar, especially against the massacre of civilians. I wish that was a given for anyone, but I’ll just put that out there from the get-go. The project began with a concern and an interest in a really specific event although, you know, there’s a long series of things to talk about. But I was talking specifically about the Philippine-American War and its aftermath. But from that starting point, the document moved me to write poems that speak towards things that happened in other parts of the world that also informed this manual. What I became interested in without realizing it is “how did we form this policy of US interventionism and what does it mean,” not just in terms of how we’ve acted in the US, but also how we got to whatever place it was that we were bombing.
When I was teaching online during the pandemic, the word “essential” came up in a student’s poem, and we all kind of froze. The word “essential” itself had changed: everyone was talking about “essential workers”, “essential services,” and things like that.
“Essential” had this different aura and task to it. So language is always changing right underneath our feet. So if the poems that I wrote in Small Wars Manual start to take on a resonance with what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, I’m not surprised. The poems I wrote were thinking about US intervention, US occupation, what happens to civilians, what happens to soldiers too, what happens to how both the occupier and the occupied become dehumanized. If readers reading these poems feel like it’s really connected to what’s happening right now, that tells me that maybe these poems touched on something true about how the US perceives and deals with these encounters. What’s happening right now is awful and terrible.
I don’t know what the world will be like when Small Wars Manual comes out. Tula came out just a few days before the 2016 election, so when I was touring I was in panic-attack mode like a lot of the country was. At my readings in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco, all of us were sort of shell shocked and were asking ourselves “what the hell happened?”
I think I’m more ready this time, but if I go anywhere to read from this book I wonder how the poems will hit.
CHRIS SANTIAGO is the author of Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, selected by A. Van Jordan. His second collection Small Wars Manual is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in April. His poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELD, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. He holds degrees in creative writing and music from Oberlin College and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment of the Arts, Santiago teaches literature, sound culture, and creative writing at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives in Pasadena.
XANDER GERSHBERG is a Minneapolis-based poet, editor, and educator. His poetry appears in FENCE, The Journal, Plume, TAB Journal, Poetry Online, Great River Review, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor at MAYDAY and on Spout Press‘s editorial collective. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech.
