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Write a poem that incorporates a list.
Suggestions (Only Suggestions) for lists. (Remember these are just suggestions—there are a lot of things you could do with this assignment.)
- Future—List strange, exotic things you want to do, things you want to accomplish in life, things you want to do tomorrow.
- Past—List things you regret doing or not having done, the food and all the surrounding details of one memorable meal, friends with whom you have lost contact, names you can remember from an early grade school (and what has happened to them).
- Objects—List things in your room (a favorite room or a room you dislike), things on your desk, in your pockets, in an attic or a closet, things you've seen in a pawnshop window or some other business window (a mom-and-pop store, a foreign restaurant), all the objects you have lost in your lifetime.
- List times in history you're glad you didn't live.
Remember: a list and nothing but a list probably will not be anything but a list. For it to be a poem, the list should appear in a fuller context, perhaps some commentary made on the listed items that makes them come alive for the reader. Sometimes a poem of lists can draw subtle, unobvious, and previously unseen connections. A list of objects on your desk may show what kind of person you are. You can turn a list into a narrative poem, a story woven
around events in history or images of food. A list can be subtly incorporated into a lyric poem so that you hardly recognize it as such, but so that it acts as a focus. You can create parallel or opposing lists: what we loved and what we hated, sounds of night and sounds of day, then and now.
Some amazing things can be done with lists and I've included a only a few examples.
You may also want to look up any of the following to see how other poets used lists in a wide variety of ways:
- Many of Charles Wright's poems are very "listy."
- Gary Soto—"Ode to the Yard Sale," "The Soup," "Song for the Pockets"
- Peter Everwine—"Back from the Fields," "Leaming to Speak"
- James Tate—"The Blue Booby"
- Charles Simic—"Forest Birds"
- Lynne McMahon—"Earth"
- Walt Whitman—"Song of Myself'"
- Allen Ginsberg—"Howl"
This exercise was taken from course materials prepared by
Judy Jordan,
Southern Illinois University
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