Poets on Residency
Kelly Gemmill
Where are you staying?
There is work that can only be done in stillness. Residency yields the nomad to a settling. We linger, we remain behind. We lift our houndish noses from the ground, and go inside. For a time we are still, and may attend to the work of the internal.
We live, we reside. Plant pothos and basil. We expand, we reside. Unpack suitcases or boxes. Place opens a door and allows itself to be claimed, yet not owned. We reside at home. Or— Hiatus! We come to work in a place. We recollect. We acknowledge time. We reside as ever in transience.
Place offers its stillness to our stillness. Place holds us like a roomier skull—fills the air of our making with light and moment dust. We reside with stillness, with place. We spread our books out on the floor, and the floor receives them. Receives our spilled coffee. The dropped grape stems. We sweep. We stay with place. With the foundation and the dirt. They keep us still. We choose each other, and belong together for a while.
Who are you staying with?
There is work that can only be done in community. Residency dances with public. We are common people, we stay in common. We place in common. Residency congregates. We reside together in a common place for a period of time. But when is now? And what, now, is place?
In different time zones, our faces reside side by side on our screens; we are gathered. We stay, we still, we unpack in the place of the poem and in the place of the mind.
Mary Cisper
It comes down to living in the poem, a poet told me. Walking yesterday on North Shining Sun I pass a person on their phone saying, “it’s not about accommodating–”
A note on my desk: “legal pads.” Also, a stapler, a staple remover, a tiny pile of removed staples. A gnome applique from Deborah. For a friend who loves donkeys, a donkey sticker. A calendar that celebrates the Riviera Italiana in February. East-facing light. A view of the Truchas peaks, snow melting off. Paper, more paper. A very partial list—
Living in the poem, as opposed to making one? “As if” the reality of living in the poem (not that a summation of reality is possible) comes down to embracing (or dismissing?) what the moment offers—
Given the impulse of framing from details, the assemblage of cosmologies. The construction (constriction?) proceeding from what has been attended to—recorded, measured, squeezed, modeled; also, what has been rejected—fitted into a frame developed over a lifetime. Or millennia—
“As if” the Universe is one big moment factory? Each moment transforming all that came before, and if “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” this moment of grief or regret or euphoria becomes part of the “rippling fabric of spacetime” or whatever this is, if residency is—
Living in the poem. The way I’m addressed by a bumper sticker at a trailhead in the Sierras: I’D RATHER BE SLOWLY CONSUMED BY MOSS. That is, it meets me and I meet— what feels like the luck (grace?) of that accident? or is it the choice of living in the poem— and responding to what the Universe of moments offers?
Kelly Egan
A residency is a time out, a portal to the void, dark night of the soul. Officially described as a time and place where artists and writers can step away from their daily obligations and devote themselves fully to their craft—unofficially, a residency is often a time of boredom, procrastination, and despair. Paradoxically, it is often recollected with fondness.
Officially, and although fully in service of some of the most non-commercialized arts such as poetry, the purpose of a residency is understood in capitalistic terms—to be productive in the sense of having, at the end of a prescribed period of time, something tangible to show for one’s self, an empirical measure of the time’s usefulness. Unofficially, the residency’s true purpose and function, as I have come to experience it, is, largely, to do nothing.
To take walks, take naps, take coffee breaks, to drink wine into the night with the others (and yes! it is a place to find the others) may on the outside look frivolous, lazy, and self-indulgent, but these are all ways of being in relation to the blankness of the page, the non-concreteness of the task, the no one saying that you have to, the no one caring whether you do or don’t, the lack of a timecard to punch or to-do item to scratch off, the being wholly and suddenly set loose from the concrete assignment of consensual, transactional reality—
Someone’s got to do it. And if this land of boredom is the artist’s country, then the residency is the fountain at the center of the capital, a calcifying terroir. To tread time there, where the modern human increasingly dareth not go, is an art and an end in itself, whether or not that time is “productive.” Engagement with such a space will, eventually and according to its own time signature yield, but, for the moment of the residency itself, it is a feat of existential heroism, an offering at the terrible mouth of the void. It’s no wonder there should be wine, lots of wine!