Contributor’s Marginalia: Kelan Nee responding to Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s “List”

Reading Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s poem “List,” I found myself taken over by the urgency of it. I’ve been thinking about tension, and this thin form seemed to me a gorgeous enactment of exactly what I think tension ought to be: the feeling of being pulled forward by a poem, and simultaneously being pushed back. In “List” the tension is immediate, opening with what feels like a command: “Lean me to you”. I was not expecting this thin “List” to contain open in the imperative, or to open in the address. What I mean to say, is this poem teaches its reading while it is being read.

There is deft use of enjambment. The first sentence of the poem reads:

Lean me to you
me to your up-
standing, held in
tilt, in kilter.

When I arrive at that the second “me” opening the second line, I’m pushed back to the first, and pulled forward by the momentum already created. The mid-word enjambment of “up- / standing” also sends my eye and my ear in multiple directions. In that directionality is where I begin to feel a sense of urgency. The poem is sending me down multiple roads simultaneously, equally. There is a breathlessness, and a need to consider “me to your up” as much as “standing, held in” while also considering “me to your upstanding held in.” If this poem is teaching me to read it, it’s teaching me to understand that things are as they seem, and of course also not only as they seem at all. It is showing me the duality of tension, the pulling forward, the pushing back, letting me experience both, and more, at the same time. There is an urgency of bothness, as if it is saying look closer and watch it grow.

Take another example:

let the space be-
tween you and me

In my reading and considering of this poem, the enjambment between “be-“ and “tween” makes me repeat the “be-“ leading me across and down the page. I cannot help but read, “let the space be between you and me” while also reading the already doubled possibility made available on the page. Here “be” grows larger, gains meaning and sheds none despite being eventually completed across a dash and a line. Rather, in the separation of “be” and “tween,” they each gain more agency, like a little hydra, separate and together.

It is worth noting that enjambment and use of line is far from the only device creating tension here. I feel less adept at articulating it, but the sound work of this poem also carries me through it, and carries meaning beyond it. Take the final four lines:

here I loosen
list in to who
is who I’d over
ever lean to.

In fourteen words, I feel the sonics of this poem becoming locomotive. The “L” sound active in “loosen,” “list,” “lean” and the long “O” in “loosen” “to” “who” “who” and “to” could overwhelm but instead lull. There is an undeniable rhythm to these lines, and a logic therein. The tension of it, the urgency, as if words themselves were blending, as if the “List” was all that one could use to contain them. Their containment, this thin poem, showing how uncontainable the sound actually is. Let’s not ignore “over” and “ever.” How two words, one letter apart, enact two different senses of surplus, of endlessness all headed back in the direction of “lean,” which is where we began.

It’s fair to say to that I admire this poem in ways that I feel difficult to fully communicate. The feeling of it is what struck me first, what has brought me back. I’ve been calling it urgency, and tension. I’ve called it endlessness. I think it is all three, and much more. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if the feeling I’m thrown into by “List” is the excitement and mystery of simultaneity. Of possibility enacted. I love a poem that enacts simultaneity. Each reading of the poem lends me some new lens. As my understanding grows, the poem does too, and the way the poem can offer a new vantage to understand from. Simply said, I think reading a poem like “List” gives us the rare opportunity afforded by poetry: to find new texture in the world, new surface and area. Even if it is only in a small way, it makes the world bigger. I’m very thankful for that.