here is nothing so wonderful as a list". Also, there is nothing so boring as a list. Ive jotted down some thoughts on what a list does, context, order and variation.

What a List Does

Listing started out way back in poetrys history. We see it in almost every culture, in almost every form of poetry. Its easy to imagine a storyteller recounting the fabulous things in a dragons hoard- bowls and spears and swords and shields and harps and so on. When the audience is engaged in a narrative, a well-placed list can intensify their involvement by broadening the mental "space" the poem exists in. Say, for example, we have a poem about a ship, then, somewhere along the way, we have a listing of items found on the bridge and what they might be used for. The readers technical knowledge of the storys environment is broadened (i.e. we know what "stuff" is lying around.) This is generally the way a list functions. There is a heading, or category, that all the list items or qualities somehow participate in. The list asks the reader to stop the forward thrust of reading, slow the narrative, and instead focus on the topic, heading, category, whatever, and expand their knowledge of that thing. However, if the list is not well-timed, we risk boring the reader since the reader cannot contextualize the items being presented.

Context

Some list poems try to immediately provide a context for the list in the title or first line. This can be a good strategy. For example, if I wrote a poem called "Titanic" and began with:

240 life-boat berths
150 life-boats
2000 flotation devices
400 woolen blankets
40 signal rockets
no portable medical kits
no heating devices
no emergency rations
average temperature of water: 10 degrees 

Id be relying on the readers knowledge of both what the Titanic was, and, what happened to her. However, if I titled the poem "Ship", the list would grow weaker in resonance, and, should I choose "Afternoon Thoughts" as a title, the list grows weaker still. We could keep the same list and change the title to "White Star Lines Table of Items and Equipment for the Titanics Maiden Voyage" and substitute the "average temperature" line with

and, written in red ink, "reduce life boat number to 80- save $300".

and wed recontextualize the list in a pretty radical way, removing us from thoughts of people freezing in the ocean, to thoughts of the people who designed and stocked the ship. As the point of presenting a list is to broaden the readers knowledge, we should be sure all the items in a list answer the questions of "where, what, when, why, who, and how", as best they can. If I threw a line in the Titanic poem that read:

two porcelain masks

The reader wouldnt know what was going on, and that confusion would diminish the power of the list.

Order

Another quality of a good list is its structure. Just like everything else in poetry, lists need to be considered line by line and honed for both music and sense. In the above list, there is a digression in size from large things to small. Also there is a general digression in number: the reader is given a list of things that are there, and then things that are missing. The last line of the list serves to contextualize the whole list by implying the conditions these items were put to use in. Its generally best to have some order or progression: concrete to abstract, abstract to concrete, large to small, close to far, far to immediate, etc. We can re-order a list to produce different effects.

Consider:

240 life-boat berths
150 life-boats
2000 flotation devices
400 woolen blankets
40 signal rockets
average temperature of water: 10 degrees
no portable medical kits
no heating devices
no emergency rations
average temperature of water: 10 degrees 

This is a more insistent list- it lists the things that are included on Titanic, gives a condition that contextualizes them, then it lists things that are missing, and repeats the condition for emphasis.

Variation

Of course, hand in hand with order, we must have variation. (Same concept for metrics). Any element of poetry that becomes too predictable risks boring the reader. Many lists simply go on for too long without introducing any new type of information, and just keep adding more stuff in the same category. If we stretched out our small Titanic poem to 400 lines, most readers would give up around line 80. Its best to vary a lists order in a slightly predictable way, like in the above version, where we have a countdown, a contextualizing line, another small list, then the contextualizing line. Or, if our list went from concrete to abstract, we could close the list with one concrete thing at the end. If you take a look at Joan Larkins Inventory, youll see many small lists inside the whole structure, for example the list of AIDS victims who try different countries for different cures, and another small list of those who deal with their families in various ways.

Music

Our list is pretty unmusical- numbers are hard to do well. Be careful that you lists within poems do not descend towards prosiness i.e. weak, passive, unhoned, rambling language.

© RJ McCaffery