Yesterday I mentioned Gerard Manley Hopkins’s habit of making word lists, and this has got me thinking about poems that list and poems that are lists. There are, of course, those sweeping, anaphoric, Whitmanic lists (‘And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, / And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf…’) and, at the spectrum’s other end, imagistic lists (‘petals on a wet, black bough’) and the still, small lists of haiku (‘The ancient pond / a frog jump / the sound of water’).
Lists can give poems an espresso shot of concrete detail, and they can be used to astonishing rhetorical effect. I am often moved to tears when I reach the part of ‘Easter, 1916’ where Yeats chants the names of the fallen (‘MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse’) or Blake’s magnificent list of demands in ‘Jerusalem’(‘Bring me my bow of burning gold! / Bring me my arrows of desire! / Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold! / Bring me my chariot of fire!’). Even the most mundane things, the kind my mom used to write on her ‘laundry list,’ can take on symbolic power when brought together within the strange alchemy of a poem. A poet I respect very much once told me that too much detail can smother a poem, and I don’t doubt this is so, but these days I’m drawn to poems that go the other way. To misquote Richard Wilbur, ‘Oh let there be nothing on earth but laundry lists!’
Now this is probably one of those discoveries that’s painfully obvious to everyone else. (I’m not so good at ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’, but I’m a master of ‘What oft was known and I just figured out.’) It is a truism that sometimes what is not said in a poem is more powerful than what is said, but what we often forget is that what is not said is still in the poem somewhere, even in absence. The speaker of James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock…’ says, in the poem’s last line, ‘I have wasted my life,’ but what is not said is why or how he has wasted it; those answers are not present, but neither are they wholly absent. I may just be repackaging the old ‘show don’t tell’ / ‘No ideas but in things’ argument, but for me the discovery is that it is the accumulation of showing, a list of things, that gives the poem its power.
Many poems contain some kind of list, but there are also poems that are nothing but lists. (I don’t mean for that ‘nothing but’ to sound pejorative.) We might think of these as ‘strict list’ poems. One of the first assignments I had in a creative writing class was to write this kind of poem, and it’s an exercise I’ve started doing again. I enjoy it because there’s no external rationale or overriding idea determining what belongs and what doesn’t. I don’t want to be thinking too much about any poem when I begin writing it (that comes much later, when I’ve traded my writer hat for my editor hat), and list poems take away the pressure to make sense of what is happening. They remind me that a poem grows out of its own elements, and that if I don’t force the issue, it will let me know what it wants to be. These lists also show me to myself. They are inevitably paired down, and more often than not, what remains represents what matters to me. I don’t necessarily mean in a raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens kind of way (though the idea of poems as lists of favorite things is an intriguing one). Rather, I have in mind something more immediate. Much like a lyric poem rises to answer the demands of a moment, a list poem can reveal the take away, what remains after the moment. In theory, a list poem could be very boring, never adding up to anything. In practice, I rarely find this to be the case. Try it, and I think you’ll see what I mean.
I’ll end with one of my favorite ‘strict list’ poems, ‘South East Wales As Characterized By Its Phone Book,’ by Peter Finch. In a carefully chosen and arranged list, Finch manages to offer a funny, diverse, irreverent, and ultimately hopeful vision of a region of Wales. If you have a favorite list poem (‘strict’ or any other kind), I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
South East Wales As Characterized By Its Phone Book
Abduljabber, P
Abed, Itadel
Aberaman Original Band
Akers, Irving
Big John’s TV
Big Battery
Baldwin Temporary Health
Beer, B.L.E.
Boocock
Bundock
Bumps
Bunce
D. Caesar Jones, Undertakers
Co-operative Funeral Service, Lime Kiln Road
Chavalier Casket Supply
Choice Place
Clench
Click
Cobbledick
Dial a prayer
Fear
Fawcett
Fawlty Towers Motel, Pencoedcae
Gaygirl Separates, Brynmawr
Heavens Heavy Goods
Il Figaro Gents Hrdrs, Y.M.C.A.
Izatt
Izett
Izzi
Jimmy Kitchen Chinese Take Away
Keeling Terence
Keen, Marion
Kerley, Margaret
Large Robt, Beddau
Light Relief, The Rising Sun