Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

First, spend some time answering this question:

What is something you notice often, either in your life or the world around you? How does that thing manifest itself in different ways? Is it a concept that recurs, or a physical presence in different settings?

Then:

Write a catalog of that thing for 8-10 minutes. List where it recurs in your life. Interpret that how you like.

Poem: “6 Erasures of Yelp Reviews of the Taco Bell on Santa Rosa Street in San Luis Obispo, CA” by Caleb Nichols

Retrieved from Fruit Journal. Reproduced as images to preserve formatting.

Divinations

Poets are often obsessives. Obsédé’s, even, to quote Susan Sontag. Maybe the poet catalogs cruelty, or has a lot to say about blackbirds. Maybe the poet is closely attentive to Taco Bell reviews.

I love this poem. Its genius is generated from the fact that insights can be discovered in the most mundane texts. The source material is undoubtedly absurd, and there’s a sort of Postmodern irony ringing through these poems, but that makes the unexpected wisdom all the more interesting.

The list poem, or catalog poem, is a form probably made most famous from Wallace Stevens’ poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird“. In it, the poet relegates to listed items different forms or observations on a topic or theme. This is one way of allowing a poet to put down their many thoughts on that topic, which emerges from a poem as a multifaceted jewel, something containing multitudes.

In this erasure poem, the multitudes are revealed simply by offering six different erasures of six different Taco Bell reviews. If you pay close attention, you can see how these erasures are repurposing the source material: “order” likely refers to ordering food, “dinning” may have been a misspell of “dining,” and “shredded pieces” is almost certainly referring to lettuce or cheese. So to take these reviews and discover insights like “you want like you need” or “this is honesty: order order order ruin”—that’s nothing short of genius.

The point is that each discrete item in a list should be both independent and interrelated with the other listed items. Think of it as writing a series of mini-poems, whose collective presents a totality not approximated by any individual poem. List poems are gestalts of ideas and observations, made fuller by their arrangements in the body of the poem itself.

List Poetry Prompt

Write a list or catalog poem! Take inspiration from a topic of obsession or interest for you, and find as many doorways into the topic as you can—each doorway being its own potential item in the list. Feel free to take inspiration from Caleb Nichols’ poem if you want to generate a list poem out of something wacky or unexpected.