Welcome to Day 11! As it's the weekend, today's prompt is something you can sink into, rather like sinking into a cool still pool of water. It's a type of poem: a list poem. A list poem is exactly what the name suggests: you decide what you're making a list of and each line of the poem is one of the items in that list. Both the poem and the lines can be as long or as short as you like.
I first discovered list poems, without knowing what they were called, listening to the hynpotically beautiful lists in The Pillow Book, through a Radio 4 adaptation. I didn't even know what programme it was, never mind what book was being adapted, or how to find the rest, just that sometimes they would play this thing where this woman's voice recited extraordinary lists. The names of the lists were always grand abstracts: "A list of beautiful things", "A list of rare things", "A list of things that make your heart beat fast", and so on, and then each item in the list would be so specific, so vivid and sensory, and such a lovely, surprising, disparate collection. If you fancy browsing some of Sei Shonagon's lists from The Pillow Book, there's a lovely selection here.
For an idea of what to write about, write A List of Things that Only Exist in Dreams. Actual literal dreams. List poems are wonderfully suited to drawing out that kind of strangeness with crystal precision.
For an example, here's a list poem I wrote on the 24th anniversary of my arriving in the UK:
24 things I didn’t know about the UK 24 years ago
No-one will say “What’s that?” when I ask for a tikkie-box, to phone my parents. They’ll say there isn’t one.
Mist freezes and coats, like diamonds, every leaf and discarded straw.
The Tate is overheated: I need not layers but summer clothes under a good coat.
The light really does that, on winter afternoons.
My Nevernever land is filled with grimy high streets and buses.
You can’t sit on the frozen grass to enjoy the daffodils.
The rules of rounds are subtler than chess or poetry.
Books scatter as easily as leaves.
Pounds are heavy and thick with promise.
Not all cream can be whipped.
Striding in the dark, alone, is safe, and lamplight glistens on puddles.
Seeing for miles is not, after all, very far: adjust your eyes, zoom in.
Old stone has a smell to it, rich as prayer, cold as heartbreak.
There’s this radio station that doesn’t play any music, except this one programme, which does, on Sundays. Or sometimes Fridays.
Dogger, Humber, whatchamacallit, is the secular prayer of an island folk.
Lawns grow in forests, wild, mowed by animals.
The people communicate chemically, as plants do.
Fields glow lime against a purple thunder sky.
Every field will have a single tree.
People will ignore you, to be polite, even, especially, if you’re crying.
April showers are as brief as the idiom.
At the Post Office, you can pay bills, draw money, deposit cheques – I think they can probably marry you, too.
My Nevernever land exists, in the lanes and fields and villages between high streets.
I will never leave.
The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.
