Dear SunWinkers:

Reflexive Pronoun Error of the Week:

Illinois man ‘showing off’ shotgun to friends fatally shoots self in head to prove it is empty.

 

Now on to this week’s column:

 

You make them to take to the grocery store…

You make them to do your Christmas shopping…

You make them to keep tabs on your money…

What are we talking about?

Duct Tape Wallets, of course!

 

I’m kidding. We’re talking about…

 

Lists

There’s a form of poetry called list poetry, also known as the catalogue poem, that goes back many centuries. The ancient list poems served as mnemonic devices: Polynesian list poems, for example, helped the islanders remember the names of all the different Polynesian islands. What amounts to list poetry can be found in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Homer’s Iliad, and it would not be stretching the point too much to include the genealogy in Matthew 1.

As you will see in the examples, list poems can list just about anything: animals, cities, sequences of steps, logical propositions, even fishing lures. A special kind of list poem, called the blazon, lists the special qualities of a loved one.

List items don’t have to be single words, they don’t have to have exactly the same grammatical structure from item to item, and they can be interrupted by parenthetical insertions.

[Source: Ron Padgett, ed.: The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms; New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1987.]

Now here is a genre within reach of anyone, even the most die-hard self-declared non-poet! Accordingly, I am issuing a dare to all of our Writing Essential Group editors to respond to this prompt with a list poem of their own.

More on that in a bit. Let’s get to the examples.

 

The Soote Season* by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete with new repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flyes smale;
The busy bee her honey now she mings,
Winter is worn that was the flowers’ bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

*a sonnet

soote: sweet
eke: also
turtle: turtledove
make: mate
brake: thicket
flete: float
mings: mingles

 

 from Ancient History by Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943)

 

I hope the old Romans
Had painful abdomens.

I hope that the Greeks
Had toothache for weeks. […]

 

Résumé by Dorothy Parker

 

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

 

from The New Poetry Handbook by Mark Strand

 

1 If a man understands a poem,
he shall have troubles.

2 If a man lives with a poem,
he shall die lonely.

3 If a man lives with two poems,
he shall be unfaithful to one. […]

10 If a man publicly denounces poetry,
his shoes will fill with urine. […]

14 If a man craves attention because of his poems,
he shall be like a jackass in moonlight. […]

 

from Recipe for Sleep by James Tate

 

knit the mosquitoes together
beneath your pajamas
let a stranger suck on your foot
reach inside of yourself
and pull out a candle
clutch the giant shrimp tighter […]

 

How to Write a Poem in Ten Easy Steps by DW

 

1. Masturbate
2. Go outside and roll around in the snow
3. Come back inside and take all your clothes off
4. Give your wife a good long hug
5. Say to her, “I give you my naked self, and ask nothing in return”
6. Put on silk pajamas and sit at your desk
7. Scratch your cat behind the ears
8. Turn on your full-spectrum mood lamp
9. Pick up your favorite pencil
10. Write it down

 

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved.

 

The Prompt

Write a list poem. Start by making a list of something, and writing down as many items as you can think of. Then pick a not too large number of items that suits your fancy and arrange them into a poem.

Alternate Prompt

Find a real-life list. It could be a to-do list, a grocery list, a things-to-pack list, an accounting ledger, anything. Pick either a contiguous excerpt or a subset of individual items that strikes your fancy—again, not too long or too many. Fashion it into a found poem by means of 1) your item choices, 2) playing with the order, 3) giving it a title, and/or 4) playing with the placement of line breaks.

Post your response on your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. Or put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to.

Then comment to this post with the link to your response.

I reblog this at WritingEssentialGroup.com (you should be following that blog, too) and will link to your responses there. I will also comment on all responses.

Love,

Doug

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.