Dear SunWinkers!

I would sure love to see some of you so-called non-poets, especially my fellow editors, take a crack at a list poem before we leave the topic. If you can make out a grocery list, you can write a list poem. It’s fun! You’ll be the envy of your friends! You can add “Poet” to your business card!

Review the examples in last week’s column. You can see the possibilities are endless, and there’s no way to “get it wrong.” Bottom line: if you say it’s a poem, it’s a poem. If there’s a list involved, it’s a list poem!

• The list doesn’t have to be the whole poem
• The list items don’t have to be single words
• The list items don’t have to be all in the same form
• And if that weren’t enough,
• The list items can be interrupted with parenthetical phrases

So I expect to see lots of list poems next week. There’s just no excuse!

Here are two more list poems from the Doug Westberg archives. They couldn’t be any more different, but they’re both list poems! The first one might have been inspired by Mark Strand’s “The New Poetry Handbook”, and probably was. The second is an Ogden Nash-y sort of romp.

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.