The list poem

It is also called a catalogue poem, and catalog poem in American spelling, and it is the form most workshops open with, because it is the one that reliably works the first time somebody tries it. The letter poem is the other form that behaves like this, and between them they will get a poem out of almost any room.

What makes a list a poem rather than a list

What makes a list a poem rather than a shopping list comes down to four decisions, and none of them is about length.

• What is left out: a list of everything is an inventory, and a list of eleven things chosen from a hundred is a point of view.
• The order: items are arranged so that the poem gathers, usually by moving from the small and ordinary towards the one that costs something to say.
• The size of the detail: each item is a physical thing at about the size of a hand, such as a bus pass, a burnt pan, a key that no longer opens the front door of a home.
• The break in the pattern: one item is longer, or shorter, or in a different grammar from the rest, and that is where the poem turns.

The ending is where most list poems come apart. A list can always continue, so nothing in the form tells a listener the poem is over and the writer has to build the signal in: a final item that answers the first, an item that names the person the whole list has been about, or one short line after a run of long ones. Stopping is not ending, and an audience knows the difference immediately.

How to write a list poem in one sitting

To write a list poem in one sitting, work fast first and choose afterwards, because judgement applied too early produces a list of what a poem is supposed to contain.

1. Choose a container narrow enough to be interesting, such as things kept in one drawer, everything said in one kitchen, or every rule in a particular house.
2. Set a timer for 8 minutes and write every item that arrives, without stopping and without deciding whether any of it is good.
3. Cross out everything abstract, everything general, and everything you have heard somebody else say.
4. Reorder what is left so the smallest item comes first and the one that frightens you slightly comes last.
5. Rewrite one item so it breaks the pattern the others have made.
6. Read the whole thing aloud and cut it by a third, because a list poem is always long before it is good.

A list poem that repeats the same opening words down the page is using Anaphora, which is what turns an inventory into an incantation, and one item in the list can carry a whole Metaphor, which is usually best kept back for the last.

Where the list poem came from

The list poem comes from one of the oldest structures in poetry, which is the catalogue. Book 2 of Homer's Iliad holds the Catalogue of Ships, a long roll of the contingents and the men who led them, kept in verse because verse is how a list was remembered before it could be looked up. Christopher Smart wrote Jubilate Agno between 1759 and 1763 while confined, out of lines that nearly all begin with one of two words, Let or For, and its passage considering his cat Jeoffry is the most anthologised catalogue in English; it was not published until 1939. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, from 1855, made the catalogue the engine of a whole book.

The letter poem, and what an address can say that a description cannot

A letter poem is a poem addressed to somebody, written in the second person, and what the address buys is everything a description cannot do. Speaking to a person allows a writer to accuse, forgive, ask a question, refuse to answer one and withhold what the reader wants, none of which is available when writing about them. The audience is put in the position of somebody reading over a shoulder, and that overheard quality is why the form carries so much force with so little decoration. The verse letter is old: Ovid's Heroides is a set of letters in verse, most of them spoken by women out of Greek myth to absent lovers and husbands, with a final group written as exchanges in both voices.

The best addressees are the ones who cannot reply: a younger self, a city, a landlord, a bus route, a language somebody stopped speaking. A letter to somebody who has died belongs here too, and it asks nothing of the writer's beliefs about an afterlife. A letter to somebody who could reply is a harder poem and it is where the form goes wrong, either by becoming a diary entry with the word Dear on the front or by settling a real score with a named living person, which is the point at which the adult in the room has to say so. Write to the person and about the situation and the poem stays a poem; write at a named classmate and it stops being one.

How both forms fail, and what fixes them

Both forms fail in ways that are easy to see from the outside and hard to see from inside the draft. A list poem fails when the items are interchangeable, so the order could be shuffled without loss, or when they are abstract, so there is nothing to see. A letter poem fails when it explains the relationship instead of speaking inside it. Both fail when they run out rather than close.

The fixes are the same in each case: cut a third, make one item specific enough that nobody else could have written it, and build an ending. An acrostic, where the first letters spell a word down the page, is not a fix, because a listener cannot hear it, and any shape that exists only on the page is wasted on a form written to be said. The other moves available are on The devices a young writer actually reaches for.

Saying a list out loud

Saying a list out loud is the plainest lesson in delivery there is, because a list accelerates on its own and a room can feel it happening. Items speed up as the pattern establishes itself, the pause before the last one is the loudest thing in the poem, and a reader who takes that pause without rushing gets a response an argument would never have earned. That is one of the clearest demonstrations of what a performance poem does that a page poem cannot: a shape an audience can follow with their ears alone. That difference is the subject of What performance poetry is.