[Note: I originally posted the following article in December, 2007. It’s holiday preparation time again and lists keep us sane. They can also keep us writing! Try the exercise I am suggesting based on writing lists poems. Try it more than once during this season of shopping lists, invitation lists and gift lists.]

You might be singing these lyrics lately:

Santa Claus is coming to town.

He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out
Who’s naughty or nice…

But Santa’s not the only one using lists. You’re sure to be writing your share of what I call the four g’s: gift lists, greeting card lists, guest lists and grocery lists. This week, consider how writers use lists as a writing tool to help dig deeply and surprisingly into almost anything: memories and evocations of people, places and events, philosophical leanings, gratitude, feelings about conflicts and the politics of our times. Employing lists helps with taking stock of one’s life, something we’re most certainly doing as we head toward the New Year.

Below are online links to poems you can use as models in challenging yourself to use lists to write poems or prose. By listing items that evoke the particulars of your life and thinking, you can use your list brain to generate writing that will help you restore your sense of a private self during this busy and very social time.

From this link, scroll way down or search for “Snyder” and you will see the poem “Things to Do Around a Lookout” by Gary Snyder. By listing activities he can engage in while on forest fire watch, Snyder evokes his view on what makes for a good life–tea, sketching, feeding wildlife, feeling the snowmelt, knowing this time is a precious oasis. Read the poem and then think about putting yourself in a place from which there seems no escape for awhile: a traffic jam, the dentist’s office waiting room, a telephone call with a telemarketer, your desk at work when you want to go home but can’t, or the house when your teenager is having a party. Write a list of things you can do from there. It’s surprising where this list can take you and how much can be going on when we are feeling trapped.

Or, go for a walk around your neighborhood and list what you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell trying to include odd, unusual items for a list about a neighborhood. Think of categories like what the realtors never see, what the children always see, what things look like when you get out of your car and walk, etc.

In “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet writes on a night train ride:

it’s 1962 March 28th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

 In this long poem, he allows himself to associate from one moment in his life to others at different times. At one point he writes:

flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky
I didn’t know I loved flowers

friends sent me three red carnations in prison

Later he says:

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below
or whether I’m flying at their side

Might this poem inspire you to write from a place and moment in your life? If you aren’t traveling in solitude as this poet is as he begins, simulate that kind of moment. You might watch the moonrise or the sunset or the sunrise and begin a poem with a line like “I just remembered how much I love the moonrise” or “If I could remember how much I love to watch the sunrise, I would…..”.

You might take a walk and stop suddenly and name whatever fills your eyes: “I never knew I loved the split-level homes in the suburbs, how they look protective as a sturdy shipping box.” “I never knew I loved the way rain water runs along the curb, the sewer grate that receives the water between clenched teeth.” Keep walking. Keep stopping. Keep writing.

In his poem “Things I Found and Left Where They Were” Robert Gregory is reporting on a “slow summer morning”:

new light through a veil of green leaves, young leaves
that vibrate and tremble. The shadows are blurred in this light—
shadows once ourselves, they say. Clouds and a girl in
green trousers, three birds on the blacktop confer, between two
buildings a vacant lot, a concrete slab for some old
vanished building surrounded by a few dry rags of grass.

And he goes on, introducing the people and images he sees and remembers, making a list of the temporal, the vanishing, the plenty and the mystery of which we are all a part.

You can do this, too. Write what you see now, about what you saw in other places, and odd things you’ve seen and don’t know why you remember them. What list might the images and the modifying phrases that you use to describe them belong to? Consider topics like: things I thought I’d forgotten, things I remember but don’t know why, things I believe you would remember, things you’d have no idea I remember, things that will never be the same, the things that remain, etc.

In “How Do I Love Thee?” the famous Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the poet counts the ways:

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints….

See what you can do by asking a question of someone you have strong feelings about, as Browning does, and write the answers: “How Do I Fool Thee?” “How Do I Tease Thee?” “How Might I Insult Thee?” This does not have to be a spoof; it can be a serious attempt to explain. Changing the “thee” to “you” can help you write meaningfully as might changing the question to a statement: “How I Fool You,” “How I Would Insult You,” “The Ways I Succeed in Teasing You,” for instance.

Here is an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs. It’s a list of what words are to him, what he does with them. A portion I especially treasure is this one:

I run after certain words…
They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem…

I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past,
I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish,
they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable,
oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives…
And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down,
I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go…
I leave them in my poem like stalactites,
like slivers of polished wood, like coals,
pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves…

Following Neruda’s example, write a passage by listing what you do with something important to you. Evoke your passion for this item by listing what it is like to you and what you do with it, claiming by way of your “list writing” a passionately active life.

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Be free, be crazy; be wild and spirited, and don’t worry if what you are saying makes sense. Just keep listing. Later, when the mania of the season has died down, look into your pieces of list writing. You will find treasures, as Neruda describes them: the “pickings from a shipwreck,” the “gifts from the waves.”