List-Poem by the Numbers

The "list-poem" is one of the oldest modes of writing. Homer made long lists in his epics, for example, and I guess poets, being human (I'll assert this for the sake of argument), simply have that list-function in their brains, a function that Evolution must have selected early on. To Do: stay alive; find water; run from large predator.

Even if one doesn't end up writing a list-poem, listing is a heck of a way to prepare to write a poem. Such a preparation-list can be composed of images, associations that spring from a topic, phrases--almost anything, really. The title-poem of the late Wendy Bishop's book of poems, My Last Door, is a list poem, a catalog-poem, in which "Let my last door . . ." is repeated throughout the poem. So a list-poem can also develop into a kind of chanting-poem, incantatory.

Here's a short list-poem paying homage to the number 2:

Fortuitous Twos

by Hans Ostrom

A pair of spats. Two herons,
early morning, bending

necks to water. Windows
on each side of a carved door.

Cells dividing in a newborn baby.
A mother and a daughter

singing two-part harmony.
Two lovers waking up near

the ocean. Two moons circling
one planet. A couple of old men

golfing in a thunderstorm
two minutes before midnight.

Horns on a moonlit skull,
two miles from the water hole.

This first appeared in Wendy Bishop's textbook, 13 Ways of Looking for a Poem, still in print from Longman.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom