Inventory the Day: List Poems

One way to organize a poem is by listing elements. Sekou Sundiata opens the album Blue Oneness of Dreams with "Shout Out," a list poem. List poems often use anaphora--the repetition of an initial word or phrase--to establish a rhythm. Listen to how Sundiata uses "Here's to" as a familiar beat that draws the listener back into the poem.

In the poem below, the simple words "This" and "The" create a repetition at the beginning of several lines.

Sunday Night by Ray Carver Make use of the things around you. This light rain outside the window, for one. This cigarette between my fingers, these feet on the couch. The faint sound of rock-and-roll, the red Ferrari in my head. The woman bumping drunkenly around in the kitchen . . .  put it all in, make use.

In "Sunday Night," Ray Carver builds a poem by noticing the things around him as well as the Ferrari within him and putting at least one concrete detail on almost every line. Concrete language are the "things" around us that we can experience through the five senses. Many of Carver's concrete details can be experienced with more than one of the senses. The light rain outside could be heard, seen and perhaps even smelled.

THE EXERCISE
Let's take Carver at his word and put it all in.

• Choose a particular time: Monday morning, late Friday Morning, etc.
• Choose a particular place; Carver seems to have chosen a home;
• list at least a dozen concrete things you sense in that time & space;
• re-read your list and look for a connection between items and make an honest statement about them; use a variation of your closing line for your opening line.

THE OBJECTIVE
Taking inventory prompts a writer to notice things. Simply noticing things is an act of choice. Although we are not conscious of it, in a moment each of us perceives thousands of impressions from our surroundings. The process of making a list can make us conscious. The resulting list of apparently random choices can reveal the writer's mind, conscious and subconscious.