Introduction

In this introductory lesson, we’ll first learn about the history of literary lists as well as the list poem and then look at examples of one specific structure: the numbered list poem. We’ll also get busy composing our own poems with numbered lists.

Think of all the lists you make yourself or use in your daily life. To-do lists, wish lists, bucket lists, grocery lists, guest lists. Personally, I make a to-do list every single day. I started this practice in college when I felt overwhelmed by all I had on my plate. I didn’t know how I’d ever keep track of all my class assignments and extracurricular activities. (I was the editor of our campus lit mag and put out three issues a year!) List-making seemed like a practical and efficient way to keep my thoughts organized. It works!

But there’s another application for lists with which you may be familiar. The list poem, or catalog poem, is what it sounds like: a poem arranged in the form of a list.

Brief History of Lists

Lists have been utilized since our prehistoric ancestors created a visual tally, using cave paintings to depict the various animals they hunted. With the advent of written language, the functional written list was born. Roman Alexander Barton and his co-authors echo this point in Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function:

From shopping lists and to-do lists to inventories, genealogies, indices, and chronicles, human beings have always made lists. List-making is one of the most basic and oldest practices that give utterance to cognitive processes. It articulates how we categorize and manage the knowledge of the world around us.

Likewise, the literary list in prose and poetry has been around for a long, long time. For example, lists appear in such works as the Bible (Genesis) and in ancient Greek and Roman poems. Literary lists also famously occur in classic and contemporary novels, including Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses by James Joyce, and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. In his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing, Robert Belknap classifies literary lists as “adaptable containers that hold information selected from the mind-deep pool of possibility.” Let's dive in!

Literary lists span everything imaginable, from the human to the inanimate. As Italian novelist Umberto Eco explains in his book The Infinity of Lists:

The history of literature is full of obsessive collections of objects. Sometimes these are fantastic . . . . Sometimes they are disturbing, such as the list of malign substances used by the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Sometimes they are ecstasies of perfumes, such as the collection of flowers that Marion describes in his Adonis. Sometimes they are poor and essential, such as the collection of flotsam that enables Robinson Crusoe to survive on his island, or the poor little treasure that Mark Twain tells us Tom Sawyer put together. Sometimes they are dizzyingly normal, such as the huge collection of insignificant objects in the drawer of Leopold Bloom’s kitchen sideboard in Joyce’s Ulysses. . . .Sometimes they are poignant, despite a museal, almost funereal immobility, such as the collection of musical instruments described by Mann in Doctor Faustus.

Using Lists Within Poems

As we go through the lessons in this workshop, we’ll examine the different ways in which lists in poetry can be arranged. But before we get to list poems as separate poetic forms unto themselves, let’s take a quick look at literary lists that are embedded within poems. 

Why would a poet insert a list into an otherwise conventionally structured, lineated poem? There are a couple of reasons. For one thing, literary lists help break up the text of a long poem by changing its rhythm and tone. Also, lists help a writer convey multitudes of information in a compressed, economical, efficient manner. Finally, lists help readers remember what they have read because they present details succinctly.

It’s Epic!  As you know, an epic is a lengthy narrative poem that tells the story of a hero and his or her extraordinary feats. One important convention of an epic is the list. (Don’t worry, you won’t have to write an epic in this workshop!!) Since epics belong to the oral tradition, it makes sense that the list functioned as an important mnemonic device to help listeners follow the thread of a complex text.

More Interior Lists 

The epic, of course, isn’t the only form of poetry where lists appear. In the 19th century, English poet Christina Rossetti included a list of sixteen “goblin” fruits in the first stanza of her well-known long narrative poem “Goblin Market.” This sumptuous array of fruits from different lands and climates—according to the lit crit analyses—represents sexual temptation and alludes to Adam and Eve’s nibbling of the forbidden fruit in the Bible. While this list might evoke for contemporary readers the produce aisle at Whole Foods, it reminds me of shopping for fruits and vegetables at Boston’s outdoor Haymarket. Those farmers really knew how to hawk their wares! Here’s a snippet of Rossetti’s list:

From “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-head mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

In summer weather,—

Meanwhile, across the pond the American 19th-century poet Walt Whitman perfected the art of lists, using them to reflect the scope and scale of life in the United States. His long, sweeping lines crammed with detail after detail are meant to convey America’s limitlessness, its energetic productivity, and its rich diversity. In Leaves of Grass, for example, Whitman catalogues an impressive array of people and their activities in section 15 of “Song of Myself." You can read a bit of his list here.

Heavily influenced by Whitman, the 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg also used long, looping lines and powerful litanies in his controversial masterpiece “Howl.” Take a look at an excerpt from “Howl” here.

These are just a couple of examples of how poets from different generations and backgrounds embraced the literary list—embedding them within their long poems—to illustrate what a powerful tool the list can be. 

In their introduction to Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function, Roman Alexander Barton and his co-authors write: “When lists are included in literary texts, the list form undergoes a change: the everyday device is creatively transformed for aesthetic, narrative, and rhetorical purposes.” I hope you’ll enjoy this alchemical transformation as we now, finally, turn to the list form itself.

Making a List Poem

Like other literary forms, list poems possess certain recognizable elements and structures. Yet the form is quite flexible—a list poem can be written in variable lengths, from short to very long. It can be written in free verse or in a fixed form, or it can be written as a narrative or lyric poem. And it can be written about just about any subject, including people, places, things, and ideas.

In this workshop, we'll be looking a several distinct ways to structure a list poem. But no matter how you organize a list poem, you’ll use one or more of these rhetorical devices:

• accumulation or accretion: arranging lists of words or phrases that gradually build one upon the other to create or emphasize meaning 

• enumeration: the listing of details one by one, including people, places, things, actions and ideas

• parallelism: repeating the same or similar grammatical structures 

• repetition: repeating the same word or phrase over and over

The list poem is one of those deceptively simple forms that finds its way into elementary school classrooms in the same way that haiku, acrostics, or cinquains do. I get it. This form does not rely on a complicated meter or necessarily complex patterns of repetition. On the other hand, I find the list poem is more nuanced than it appears on first glance. You have to make judicious decisions about which items or phrases to list—and in what order—to create maximum impact.

I agree with French experimental writer George Perec who said: “Nothing seems simpler than making a list, but in fact it’s much more complicated than it seems: you always leave something out, you’re tempted to write etc., but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc.” A random stream-of-consciousness list that masquerades as a poem likely won’t cut it. How do you decide which details and images to include and in what order? Which to leave out? This is one aspect of list poems that you’ll experiment with as you progress through each of the four lessons in this workshop.

Another aspect of the list poem that you’ll be examining is the range of stylistic variations that are possible. How do you arrange items on a list to create a unified whole, to make the whole thing cohere? The first kind of list poem we’ll look at incorporates sequential numerals into the body of the poem. The numbered list poem leaves no doubt about what kind of poem it is. By starting each line of a poem with a numeral, you announce to the reader in a direct way what form you are using. The numbered list poem practically shouts from the page, “Hey, look at this list!"