From Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” — Photo by Vic Burkhammer
I’m always making lists. How about you? Things to do, maybe what to buy at the store, items I want to make sure I pack for a trip or a day at work, perhaps parts of a video to tie together.
The list poem is related to that desire to hold things together, glue the kaleidoscope. It’s an ancient form of poetry and one you might find anywhere (even as in “found poem”). You’ll see examples of it in the Old Testament and in recent work by Jorie Graham. A beginning writer might write one in school. Whitman and Borges were masters at it. My university poetry teacher Winston Fuller sometimes gave us brilliant examples of it.
You’ll find list poems in every language, every era. You’ll see them on cave walls, in the world’s earliest paper archive, in Indo-Pacific literature, Icelandic, Norwegian and Anglo-Saxon rune poems, in the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Maxine Kumin, Frances Ponge, Henry Miller, Shakespeare, Pushkin, from rap to country music to the structure of symphonies. The list poem can be one of the easiest kinds of poems to write and one of the most powerful, but just the same — perhaps most difficult. It relies on the list being just right. When the poem’s apt, it takes off magically.
On Facebook, Ted Webb points out a powerful list poem by West Virginia poet Doug Van Gundy — “West Virginia vs. Extractive Industry”…. The poem is made from several things layered together about how “extractive industry” has compromised our beautiful state. Read it here in storySouth.
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