WORKING NOTES on poems by Beth Anderson
In Residence is a cycle of twelve poems. The project was initiated on a manual typewriter one autumn when the prospect of moving loomed large and nearly definite, when my professional obligations loomed equally large and very definite, and when I had finished rereading Williams’s Kora in Hell. I took as my model Williams’s writing process as he describes it in his introduction to Kora; he wrote every night for a year no matter the circumstances and revised the results into the poem. My typewriter gave the act of writing a physicality that meshed with the concerns of the writing; throughout the cycle place and replacement recur, generated by motifs of structure and structuring, buildings and building. In Residence was completed some months prior to my move and before I knew where that move would land me, so the poems are acts of anticipation. Their descriptions of place imagine the hunt for it, the method of finding placement, the process of giving up a city where I’d lived for a decade even as I continued to live in it.

Four poems from In Residence:

An accusation abetted

Yonder dry dry grasses

A deed of title

The royal we

An accusation abetted

When you refuse me stories because of slight variance
I cannot clear a space for lightning. It remains veiled by environment,
prepares to sail through gorges along the river that will be
purposely flooded in twelve years, beside the coal-dusted buildings
that will adorn the innards of a gargantuan lake. What we haul
across our shoulders and breathe out is drifting with the river’s surface,
too, barely missing barges and coating the water with near-words.
It is a form of fjord, a means of holding the tongue against the teeth
in preparation for speech. I have never seen anything
like this balance of shore and current and so will myself to have
visual recall, using this profile as if it were the beginning of a familiar movie
to generate cues, nearly serial, nearly three thousand miles long.

The accusatory posture was accentuated with brows, arching
to voice a desire for the skeletal. Ready to admonish, fingers cocked,
we wrote barter systems in the minutes but did not follow up.
In each lyric was lyricism rendered by a sullen face,
by fatigue without armor, unable to tell the tale
and excuse crying wolf. Tomorrow we may strive for
the correct balance of pause and gesture, settle for learning how
to read the months as signals. Perhaps with a wave toward function
or with spread fingers hovering over the floorboards, or by assigning the unruly
monosyllabic names. And then to learn that your house is not
your house but a group of stances taken together to indicate tenancy.

(back to top)

Yonder dry dry grasses

Yonder the meadows indicate signatures pressed into beach sand
somehow heaped between a twisted oak and soil spilled with the tides.
Tantalizing wind. We expected this momentum to be seamless
and all our preparations were as if we could rely on two remaining episodes
and details of their scripts. Changing the paper for the next day
ensures pretense will continue gently
but leveling the page and land requires a responsive interlace.
The envisioned means of coming true will either conjugate or fall.
We set that territory apart as if we meant it, leapt from bell towers when necessary
and craved happiness between times. I knew many of the streets and landmarks,
was prepared to climb and admire and enter into history
and its keeping, all for the sake, needing memory,
dallying over when to move on in the most comforted way possible.

The spaces skipped, the back would break, these can be fought
like the laboratory’s resemblance to heaven. The town cudgels
its place with the locals like salt. Quality and its issues
begin to curl when neglected, tendril-headed, a clear and graphic rule
that will provide per samplers and other offerings.
Weaving through crops in order to identify botanical names
we came to the dank pool where we hoped to see portraits but settled
for dislike. Rehearsals transmuted into performance, bodies arched
to fit over bicycle racks and shoes came untied. These
were the only things about us that adjusted to the new century.
As if giving could lend credence we gave and gave
while the water’s metallic taste affected vision and indicated a figure
silhouetted imprecisely where the pond had been drained.

(back to top)

A deed of title

When I came to understand myself as able, I sent word to the island
and nearly made it around before ownership changed and
distracted me into misinterpretation. Always abrupt, such transference,
but we will meet again where names are shortened and the familiar
is like a housepet swimming in its cage. Where the air thins
the earth takes another name, announces its frugality
despite a supply of views that will never dwindle. We leadenly swam
to an escalation and traced our shape in its paper wingspan.
Numbers of pebbles made up a stark beach below us, one by one
nearing the surf nigh upon a fortnight and an imminent bestseller.