This is the third in a series of articles about different types of poetry. Like it’s predecessors, it begins with an introduction to the poetic form and its effects, including giving you some well-known examples and some websites you can look up for further information. It then moves on to showcase some of my own published poems in this form, and ends with a suggested writing activity for you to try yourself if you wish.
There is a scene in
the sequel to the beloved US comedy-drama The Gilmore Girls, where Emily
visits a museum on Martha’s Vineyard and is given a long lecture about the
whaling industry which lists all the things that can be made out of a whale.
The list of products that different parts of a whale have been used for is
astonishingly long, and as it goes on it becomes both increasingly fascinating
and also increasingly macabre to modern sensibilities. It seems to emphasise the
brutality of whaling, the commodification of these magnificent creatures, the
way they have been (and still are) exploited – but also how the killing of
whales has been, historically, so closely interwoven with human existence. The
list is at once dull, banal, comic, unexpected and horrifying. The list in fact
takes on the properties of a poem.
I love list-poems. Some of my
favourite poems from my own work are based on lists of various kinds. Lists
are surprisingly versatile and can convey complex and profound emotion; they
can be mysterious, thrilling, passionate, trivial, exciting. Even the most
mundane of lists can reveal a great deal: imagine a detective story conveyed by
means of a shopping list, or a list of chores. What could be revealed by a list of romantic
partners, or a list of jobs, or a list of Christmas presents bought by a
husband for his wife during all the years of their marriage?
The effect depends very much on the type of list you use, however. Some lists are just intrinsically tedious, or give too little information to have any genuine significance. A list of random names of people who attended a meeting, or types of trees in a forest, or months in the year, probably wouldn’t in themselves be sufficiently interesting to produce a successful poem (though maybe someone with great skill and imagination could make even that kind of list work). Because lists can be intriguing and can provide insights into different worlds. Consider Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, poring over the list she finds in the old chest with the concentration of an archaeologist uncovering an ancient mystery - the list seems heavy with portentous meaning, only for our expectations to be dashed by the comic bathos of discovering it is merely a laundry list.
The items on the list need to be made compelling in some way, of course, or
their sheer abundance needs to make a point of some sort; the way the items are
ordered and arranged should be deliberate and manipulated to create whatever
effect is required. Experimentation can give rise to unexpected resonances. Sometimes
the list itself becomes the focus of the poem, and sometimes the list has a
metaphorical meaning, or is intended to make the reader think about specific issues
and ideas.
And if you think you can't get deep emotion from a list, you
need only read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How do I love thee: Let me count
the ways’ (immortalized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) to see how effective a
love poem written as a list can be. And if you struggle to believe that philosophical ideas can be conveyed by a list, consider Jacques ‘seven ages of man’ speech in As
You Like It , which is a type of list, and shows how, while each item in a list can have its
own individual charm, the whole thing can say more than the sum of its
parts.
Find out more about
different kinds of list poems and see examples from other poets on the
following sites:
https://www.writersdigest.com/personal-updates/list-poem-a-surprisingly-american-poem
https://whenyouwrite.com/what-is-a-list-poem/
https://flyingwords.com/list-poetry.html
The following poem is one I wrote recently. I’d been reading about the statues pulled down by people who objected to the unsavoury associations of the people depicted, such as the statue of Colson in Liverpool who was involved in the slave trade. This led me to think about public art, both in its establishment persona (statues of famous people or mythological creatures, etc) and in its subversive form (graffiti, Banksy, etc). I was already writing a poem about a mysterious street-artist who transforms a town and then vanishes without trace, and I decided to bring these two things together. The poem was published early in 2022 by New Verse News, an online magazine that specializes in publishing poems that are a response to current news stories [apologies for the double line-spacing - it is what happens when you cut and paste from Word onto the blog]:
The Artist
She painted Love on a garage roof,
in throbbing streaks of purple-red, the convolutions of a colon.
Sprayed Birth inside a canal bridge arch – metallic mist of bronze and copper,
cream and jungle green – its colours glowing loud as we moved
closer. Joy on a fire-damaged caravan, in orange streaks, fading
at their edge to silver fairy-dust against a woodland midnight.
Paintings drifted off around the town – first drafts, discarded
– or maybe gifts, or threats. A wisp
of air, she moved
about the streets, unseen save for the spores that trailed behind,
hand-prints on lamp-posts, splashes on a fence, office windows
and abandoned cars. Tragedy in a bus shelter, thick brown strokes
with an uneven brush; Bliss rolled up a shutter’s sides in jolting
yellow
stripes; the turquoise-blue of Hope rubbed on the bricks of an abandoned
warehouse – and Innocence, black as a crow’s wing, sprawling, smug, along
a dry-stone wall.
On the beech-tree avenue in the park, she painted the stretch of Life,
from gold to god, each stage a different tree. Her colours startled
like a kestrel’s swoop, on bollards, awnings, road signs, multi-storey
concrete car-parks. On a crossing, she painted the white stripes
shocking
pink. She filled the holes of letters with tiny dots like grains inside
an hour-glass;
scrawled a Nightmare on an underpass, a Daydream on a council refuse
bin;
Ambition on the tall side of a Tesco van, Destruction on the shovel of a
JCB.
Peace, soft as sand, perched on picnic tables. She spread her peacock
tail
so the hues that churned inside her could escape, Tenderness like a
swirl
of oil on a puddle, blood-red Anger, bile-green Envy, the pewter-grey
of Misery, and the sharp vermilion ache of Fear, vinegar shiny as a
magpie
feather. Shades and shadows, grit and silk and dust and grease, stirred
and shifted, blended and erased.
Until one day, she drenched with the fishbone-white of Death,
a statue of a man whose alchemy created gold from blood and bone.
This man of stone had swaggered in that square for a hundred and fifty
years.
Her colours now were spent. She hiccuped out a final few beige coughs,
a gentle sneeze that left a cloud of baby-pink dancing in the sun – and
then,
with a flap of her wings, she left.
First published in New Verse News, Spring
2022
The next poem was written some time ago, when I was feeling very jaded and quite angry about all sorts of things. It is definitely a stream-of-consciousness poem, with one idea suggesting another, and all of them tumbling out apparently randomly. I found myself unconsciously shaping the list of ideas that emerged, and the final poem, published in Snakeskin Magazine in 2020, actually surprised me by being very close to the way the ideas had poured out in the first place. Apologies for the first three lines being awkwardly-spaced - when I cut and pasted this poem onto the blog, its format changed a little.
Hell
War’s hell, they say –
but so is love
-
and
growing old - and tax.
And so is nature red in tooth in claw.
And politics – and school – and learning facts.
And so is family, famine, flood and fire
(well, fire’s a given, hell’s own living flesh);
And flesh itself is hell when first it grows
then shrinks, stretched loose on twisted bones,
and wired with bunged-up veins. Yes, flesh is hell.
Skin’s hell, and brains, and maddening sounds,
the voices, wheezes, coughs and grunts,
and all the living huffs and farts and groans and sighs
and creaks and clicks and squeaks and moans
and squelches, hisses, whistles, bumps and burps,
the soft detritus of the human mound.
And wasps. They’re hell. And flies and worms and bees,
and rotting plants and dusty rooms and dread.
Yes, dread is hell. And smells, both vomit and Chanel.
And pus and poo, of course, and blood and wee.
And porn, and trains, and Kim Kardashian,
and news read by impassive speaking heads,
and fashion shows - the paparazzi press -
pulp fiction and reality TV.
Kalashnikovs. And cold. And hot, of course -
yes, hot is hell. And
death and birth. Belonging
and belief. And culture. O, and race.
And graceless people claiming they have grace.
And gunmen shooting children in a school,
or bathers on a beach, or praying men in mosques.
Closer to God are we, when hell goes off in our hand
or sidles up and shoots us in the face.
And synagogues and saints and sand and sun
and brigadiers and cherry trees and Fun,
and vicars, tarts and teachers. Everyone.
And beards and burkas; Jimmy Choos and jeans.
And some being rich while others starve.
And some being safe while others die.
And jobs that should be done by now,
or will be never done.
First published in Snakeskin, August 2020
The following poem is one of my personal favourites. I
have little idea myself what it is about or where the idea came from. I woke up
one morning with the first two lines in my head, and then I built a kind of
narrative from that. I really enjoyed thinking up all the different wooden
objects, selecting appropriate ones and putting them together in a way that
sounded right to me. I don’t know whether it works for other people, but I find
it weirdly satisfying. It was published in The New Writer, a long time ago, and
I have received some very positive feedback on it over the years.
The Woodpile
I was a
lollygagging lout of a lord. I kinged
and kinged and
kinged - till, finally, one day,
I said
enough’s enough. I left the mansion,
divvied up
the real estate, and moved
into the
folly on the island.
I’d all I
needed there: a hammock, bench,
a chair. I
rescued a few books but all
the other
wood was chopped for kindling,
piled beside
my door: the antique frame
of my
kingsized bed, the boards from
the bathroom
floor, the dining table - solid teak - ,
the picture
frames and pencil casings,
joists and
beams. Each night I’d bonfire
with my
friends, roast game I’d poached
from land now
theirs. I grew my hair
and took to
prayer. And day by day
my woodpile
shrank. I burned the willow
cricket bats,
the windowsills and mantelpiece,
the plywood
coving and the dado rails.
My friends
built walls around their strips of land,
used looted
bricks from the mansion house,
topped with
spikes of glass. Some bought
or sold, some
gave or took, and boundaries
changed. I
burned the cherry bookcase
from the
study, the old oak parlour door,
the mango
fretwork screen, the inlaid
knick-knack
box. I took to meditating
by the lake.
My bonfires blazed less brightly
and my
friends grew fewer. The woodpile
dwindled, as
I burned the skirting
and the
sideboard, pantry shelves and coat
hooks, toilet
seats, the cedar ottoman and pine
apothecaries’
chest. I couldn’t keep the winter
out. I burned
the window frames, the psaltery
and piano,
the lectern from the chapel,
the statue of
Our Lady carved from rosewood.
But still the
woodpile waned. I ate wild
berries,
fished the lake - until my friends
brought
documents to prove they owned
the land
beneath. The water penned me in.
I burned the
sweetpea canes, the maple
shutters from
the window sconces,
chestnut
flower tubs, clothes pegs, croquet
hoops, the
washing prop, the hogshead
from the
cellar, door stops, light pulls,
boot box,
balsa spitfires, and the grips of garden
forks. My
friends said I was poaching
on their
land. I burned the summons.
Winter
swaggered in, licking its icy lips.
The last
embroidery ring shivered into ash.
First published in The New Writer, 2008
The final list-poem I am including here, from my own
work, is ‘Sleepless’, a poem which was published in Confluence in 2017. It
began as a very self-conscious attempt to recapture the buzz I’d felt while
writing ‘The Woodpile’, but it quickly went in a different direction. I suffer
from insomnia myself, and I also wanted to combine this with a narrative I had
in my head of a young girl sleeping above her stepfather’s pub.
Sleepless
She was a fleet,
unprepossessing girl
who used her anger like a
bed of nails.
It corkscrewed open
sleep’s somnolent ease
until she found she
couldn’t sleep at all.
She tried to count the
wood-knots in the beams.
She tried to count the stitches
in the knitted
quilt her aunt had made,
the dust-motes
in the firelight, and the
flames themselves.
There were no sheep to
count. She felt the eggshell
smoothness of the sheets on
which she lay,
worn glib by years of
slumber that she could not find
again. Her hot cheek was
a counter to the pillow’s
cool refrain. She tried
to number voices from below,
the muffled calls for
beer, the stranger’s laugh.
She tried remembering the
sore-toothed
pain until the anger
flared - imagined
it would peak and spill,
relieve the frozen hours
- but still the crowbar
night crept in,
jimmying open her dreams.
All torpor fled.
She felt the mattress button
at her thigh,
a finger jab - the seam where the sheet
was turned, a bully’s strap. She heard the bed
creak with her fidgets, like the sail-groan,
timber-mewling of a ship. She listened
to the hectic wind that
spiralled round the house;
goose-gossip overhead, signifying things would change,
though nothing did; two owls exchanging hoots;
the morning drill-bit twitter of a robin; far off,
the sea against some
shore, whispering of things
long gone and best
forgotten. She felt the white moon rise
- and then the sun, in
red and gold, to blue the sky.
But sleep was dead. Each day the morning sneered
her up and out of bed,
laughed at her reddened eyes,
her corpse-pale skin, the
stiffness in her limbs.
Each night edged closer. But
all sleep was dead.
First published in Confluence, Nov 2017
Writing Task:
I’ve started several other list poems over the years, but I haven’t
finished them yet. Some are barely started, just undeveloped ideas really. Here are their working titles, which you might like to use
as inspiration for your own lists – or you might even wish to try out your own
versions of these actual lists:
Ten things I love about you…
Things I found under the bed…
My new house contains…
Things you didn’t say…
Places I will never go…
The ingredients of old age…
The lessons I’ve not learned…
A list of my enemies…
Colours I've painted my bedroom…
TV programmes I watched during lockdown…
Wildflowers on the path beside the lake…
You remind me of…
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