Unless my recent reading has been unrepresentative, this has begun to assume something of a familiar topos in modern lyric poetry; a recognizably Okay way of ending a poem. And while the ending of a lyric by no means has to be summational, it’s hard to avoid the sense that we are encountering some sort of diffusion of focus. So it is with Gorji’s ‘Empire of the Dandelion’, which both begins and ends with lists of names for the weed, describing in the middle the dissemination of its seeds as its clocks are blown by the wind.
Glorious as some of these names are, this, I think, is poetical listing at its most banal, the names suggesting the
plant’s wide distribution (‘Puff-Ball, pis-en-lit’), its various interpretative possibilities (‘Priest’s Halo– / Sin in the Grass’) and of course by their number its ubiquity. Oswald carries out a similar project in ‘Field’, which narrates ‘the spasm of midnight’ before disintegrating into a list of things-you-might-find-in-a-field. For both poets, these concluding lists are in some way mimetic in their dispersal of focus—Oswald, I think, wants her poem to end with a whimper after her skillfully brought-about climax. But it is hard not to read these poems and not feel a little disappointed, especially when the technique seems so frequently used. I want to read these lists as incantational, or even semi-liturgical, thinking perhaps of the long lists of dead Greeks interspersed with repeated similes on the manner of their deaths in Oswald’s own Memorial (2011). But the point there is, as I take it, ‘all of these individual names matter regardless of their number’. Here I think the point too often is their number.
Finally, I note that Gillian Allnutt describes Pippa Little’s poetry as ‘decidedly womanly’ on the back cover of Overwintering. I must admit it did occur to me fairly early on that all the poetry I was going to quote was written by women. I’m pretty much going to ignore this fact, because it wasn’t intentional, and I don’t think the characteristic I’ve been describing necessarily results from a distinctively feminine or feminist poetics. Interesting and productive questions abound when those concepts are bandied about, all of course much bigger than we here have space to compass. Perhaps next time, if I’m man enough...
Listing in Poetry
By Nick Gunderson
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