The poem as list (2.12.18)

One of the most approachable methods for practicing poetry is to make a list. If nothing else, a list encourages another line of language, or image, or other figure, so a writer can propel a poem down the page. The trick is knowing when to stop. Poets have practiced this trick since the beginning of figured language.

"Listing" is an ancient poetic strategy. Open a bible to just about any page and you will find a list of some sort. It's an essential component of the great oral epics. The Illiad is packed with lists, often of warrior lineage, and, in the form of litotes, of war-bragging.  The great sagas (Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied) certainly come to mind. In an oral poetry culture, listing is an aid to memory. More radically, it's one way the ancient mind works. Stylistically, listing emphasizes lyric and incantatory qualities you're not likely to find in more academic, literate composition (that is, in print culture). You won't find it so much among the Scholiasts, and not among the MFA Programs, where it's likely considered a sign of laziness.

Many nursery poems and songs depend on the lulling quality of a list or set of repetitions. "This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb . . ."

Listing, to be sure, can get monotonous. Tonally, a list can sound like pounding sand, or worse, the gavel. Making lists is something everybody does, but not every poet in a poem. Thus, our project for this week at Wednesdays@One, which was to write a "list poem."

The group didn't set out to create a modern saga, of course. Nor did we mean to rewrite the family pedigrees of the Bible.  Our goal wasn't necessarily to tap the spiritual or the mystical or the far-away-and-long-ago. Rather, it was to get some practice establishing rhythm in a poem through repetition . . . WITHOUT REDUCING THE POEM TO TEDIUM OR THE SUPERFICIAL (stuff to pick up at Whole Foods Market).

Everyone found out pretty quickly that making a poem out of a list isn't so easy after all. Doing so involves a delicate balancing of repeated sounds, beats and breaths. Everybody discovered that a good deal of restraint is called for, for a poem that is only a list isn't much of a poem.  But a list strategically inserted into a poem, or a poem strategically organized like a list, when done well, can be a very good poem.

Here are some of the examples we used as entry points to the project . . .

For Every Nail in the Bomb There Was an Act of Kindness

─Martin Ott, 2 River View, Winter 2018 issue

For every song rising above the gathered crowd

there was an edict of night.
For every house missing a door
there was a stranger who held the villains at bay.
For every banned book hidden from the rabble
there was a pyre extinguished by voices.           
For every drone zipping toward its foe
there was a message left for a loved one.
For every outburst of anger billowing to rend
there was a congregation holding on.

from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

─ Galway Kinnell,  1990

When one has lived a long time alone,

one refrains from swatting the fly

and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike

the mosquito, though more than willing to slap

the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad

from the pit too deep for him to hop out of

and carries him to the grass, without minding

the toxic urine he slicks his body with,

and one envelops, in a towel, the swift

who fell down the chimney and knocks herself

against the window glass and releases her outside

and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,

when one has lived a long time alone.

Song of Myself (Section 42)

─ Walt Whitman, 1855

Ever the hard unsunk ground,

Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,

Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,

Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,

Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,

Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,

Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

from Ash-Wednesday 

─ T.S. Eliot, 1930

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign.

. . . .

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.