Poetic Listing

A much-celebrated poem that amounts to a list– a luminous list– is Robert Pinsky’s “The Shirt.”

How to make a list into something poetic? It helps to be attentive to and creative with diction drops and spikes, repetition, scansion, and alliteration. I’ve already posted on diction and on repetition; in future months look for posts on scansion and alliteration.

Herewith, taken from a few favorite works, are some examples of poetic listing– and to get the most of this, to really hear the poetry, I would suggest that you read these aloud:

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“During the first days she kept busy thinking about changes in the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wall-paper put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes.” 
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home.” 
Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory

“Tonight he wished for little things, the chance to take a hot bath, a reasonable suit of clothing, a gift to bring, at the very least some flowers, but then the room tilted slightly in the other direction and he opened up his hands and all of that fell away from him and he wanted nothing.” 
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“The carriage was crammed: waves of silk, ribs of three crinolines, billowed, clashed, entwined almost to the heights of their heads; beneath was a tight press of stockings, girls silken slippers, the Princess’s bronze-colored shoes, the Prince’s patent-leather pumps; each suffered from the others feet and could find nowhere to put his own.” 
Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

And an example I also used in the post on repetition (money, money, money):

“Tancredi, he considered, had a great future; he would be the standard-bearer of a counter-attack which the nobility, under new trappings, could launch against the social State. To do this he lacked only one thing: money; this Tancredi did not have; none at all. And to get on in politics, now that a name counted less, would require a lot of money: money to buy votes, money to do the electors favors, money for a dazzling style of living…”  
Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

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To take this further, as you are reading whatever you happen to be reading, note in your notebook whenever you find, in your view, any especially apt use of poetic listing. (>>More on reading as a writer here.)

P.S. Help yourself to many more resources for writers on my workshop page.

Poetic Repetition

Grokking Plot: The Elegant Example of Bread and Jam for Frances

Q & A: Amy Hale Auker, Author of Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


Guest-Blogger Short Story Maestro Clifford Garstang on 5 Favorite Novels About a Dangerous World

Guest-blogger Clifford Garstang is the author of In an Uncharted Country and What the Zhang Boys Know (Winner of the 2013 Library of Virginia Award for Fiction) and editor of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, an anthology of 20 stories set in 20 countries by 20 well-travelled writers. Here’s the description:

“Assembled from over six hundred submissions, this collection reminds us that our world is dangerous: a man disappears in Argentina, despair reigns in post-Katrina New Orleans, teen bandits attack in Costa Rica, wild boars swarm in a German forest, biker gangs battle in New Zealand, security guards overreact in Beijing, rogue militias run wild in Africa, and more. These are not ordinary travel stories by or about tourists; the contributors are award-winning authors who know their way around—former Peace Corps Volunteers, international aid workers, expatriates—and dig deep beneath the surface. “

FIVE FAVORITE NOVELS
ABOUT A DANGEROUS WORLD
by Clifford Garstang

Some of my favorite American writers create dark stories set abroad. That’s what I like to read and it inevitably informs my own writing and my selections for the book. Here are 5 of the best:

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder
I also liked Patchett’s earlier novel set in South America, Bel Canto, but this book, set in Brazil, really grabbed me—it has mystery, a heroic structure, and explores fascinating, credible science. One researcher has gone missing and another goes searching for him in the heart of darkness—classic. 

Russell Banks’s The Darling
Set in Liberia, Banks’s novel (which is said to be based loosely on The Tempest) explores failures of both American and Liberian governments. A former member of the Weather Underground faces exposure back home, but also faces a near-constant civil war in her adopted home.

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna
Kingsolver’s agenda-driven fiction isn’t for everyone, but I was drawn to this novel, set mostly in Mexico. Having grown close to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico City, the protagonist settles in the U.S. and attracts the scrutiny of the Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committees.

Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate
This is a sprawling book that explores the history of Israel and the forces that would destroy it. The book is a fascinating look at one of the Middle East’s most dangerous flashpoints.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried 
Like O’Brien’s fantastic Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award, The Things They Carried explores the horror of the Vietnam War and the intense personal toll it takes on all. 

— Clifford Garstang

Q & A: Clifford Garstang, Author of The Shaman of Turtle Valley

“What Happened to the Dog?” A Story About a Typewriter, Actually, Typed on a 1967 Hermes 3000

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico’s Secret Book