Enumeration

Enumeration Litany Inventory

Enumeration Litany Inventory

The Enumeration / Litany / Catalog / Inventory Poem

In this poem, we allow syntactical structure to establish the rhythm, often but not always with the use of anaphora, as in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."  A poem of enumeration can be short, as Gunter Eich's inventory of what belonged to him in the prisoner-of-war camp, (a poem that ends with "this is my thread").  Or it can be sweeping, and nearly epic, as in Whitman.  My most enumerative poem is "Museum of Stones" which makes use of a list of the names of various rocks (you can find this on the web on the New Yorker site).  I find my notebooks to be an incredible resource for this, a treasure chest of things that might enter a list.  I'm giving you two things to help you: the sample poems which follow, and a link to a pdf I created from Umberto Eco's wonderful book, The Infinity of Lists.  Now you will write your own, on whatever subject and of whatever length.  Happy writing!

The List, or Catalogue Poem: Litanies, Incantations, Inventories.

Bible

To everything there is a season.

And a time to every purpose under the heaven

A time to be born, and time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time of war, and a time of peace.

Tymoteusz Karpowicz

Ecclesiastes

There is a time of opening the eyes and closing the bed

time for donning a shirt and shedding sleep

time for drowsy soap and half-awakened skin

time for the hair-brush and of the sparks in the hair

time for trouser-legs of shoe-laces time of buttons

for laddered stockings for the slipper’s blindness

time for the fork and for the knife time for sausages and spoiled eggs

time for tram time for the conductress time for the policeman

time for good morning and time for goodbye

time for carrots peas and parsley

for tomato soup and shepherd’s pie

time for trussing chicken and releasing forbidden speeds for thought

time for cinema ticket or a ticket to nowhere

to a river perhaps perhaps a cloud

there is finally a time for close eyelids and the open bed

time for past present and future

praesens historicum and plusquamperfectum

time perfect and imperfect

time from wall to wall

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Your Shoulders Hold Up the World

A time come when you can no longer say:

-- my God.

A time of total cleaning up.

A time when you no longer can say: my love.

Because love proved useless.

And the eyes don't cry. And the hand do only rough work.

And the heart is dry.

Women knock at your door in vain, you won't open.

You remain alone, the light turned off,

and your enormous eyes shine in the dark.

It is obvious you no longer know how to suffer.

And you want nothing from your friends.

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?

Your shoulders are holding up the world

and it's lighter than a child's hand.

Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings

prove only that life goes on

and not everybody has freed himself yet.

Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectale cruel

will prefer to die.

A time comes when death doesn't help

A time comes when life is an order.

Just life, without any escapes.

Translated from the Portuguese by Mark Strand)

Paul Celan

Corona

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends

From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:

then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it’s Sunday,

in dream there is room for sleeping,

our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:

we look at each other,

we exchange dark words,

we love each other like poppy and recollection,

we sleep like wine in the conches,

like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from

    the street:

it is time they knew!

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

It is time.

Yehuda Amichai

A Man in His Life

A man in his life has no time to have

Time for everything.

He has no room to have room

For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.

A man has to hate and love all at once,

With the same eyes to cry and to laugh

With the same hands to throw stones

And to gather them,

Make love in war and war in love.

And hate and forgive and remember and forget

And order and confuse and eat and digest

What long history does

in so many years.

A man in his life has no time.

When he loses he seeks

When he finds he forgets

When he forgets he loves

When he loves he begins forgetting.

And his soul is knowing

And very professional,

Only his body remains an amateur

Always. It tries and fumbles.

He doesn’t learn and gets confused,

Drunk and blind in his pleasures and pains.

In autumn, he will die like a fig,

Shriveled, sweet, full of himself.

The leaves dry out on the ground,

And the naked branches point

To the place where there is time for everything 

Jorge de Lima

Distribution of Poetry

I took wild honey from the plants,

I took salt from the waters, I took light from the sky.

Listen, my brothers: I took poetry from everything

To offer it to the Lord.

I did not dig gold from the earth

Or leech blood from my brothers.

Inn-keepers: let me alone.

Peddlers and bankers:

I can fabricate distances

To keep you away from me.

Life is a failure,

I believe in the magic of God.

The roosters are not crowing,

The day has not dawned.

I saw the ships go and return.

I saw misery go and return.

I saw the fat man in the fire. I saw zig-zags in the darkness.

Captain, where is the Congo?

Where is the Isle of Saint Brandon?

Captain, what a black night!

Mastiffs howl in the darkness.

O Untouchables, which is the country.

Which is the country that you desire?

I took wild honey from the plants.

I took salt from the waters. I took light from the sky.

I have only poetry to give you.

Sit down, my brothers.

Translated from the Portuguese by John Nist

André Breton

Free Union

My wife whose hair is a brush fire

Whose thoughts are summer lightning

Whose waist is an hourglass

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger

Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first

         magnitude

Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow

Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass

Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer

The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut

Whose tongue is incredible stone

My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child

Whose eyebrows are nests of swallow

My wide whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs

With steam on the windows

My wife whose shoulders are champagne

Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins under the ice

My wife whose wrists are matches

Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts

Whose fingers are fresh cut hay

My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit

And Midsummer night

That are hedges of privet and nesting places for sea snails

Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea

And a fusion of wheat and a mill

Whose legs are spindles

In the delicate movements of watches and despair

My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders

Whose feet are carved initials

Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks who drink

My wife whose neck is fine milled barley

Whose throat contains the Valley of Gold

And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom

My wife whose breasts are of the night

And are undersea molehills

And crucibles of rubies

my wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses

Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight

Is a giant talon

My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight

With a back of quicksilver

And bright lights

My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and wet chalk

And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk

My wife with the thighs of a skiff

That are lustrous and feathered like arrows

Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock

And imperceptible balance

My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax

Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring

My wife with the sex of an iris

A mine and a platypus

With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candies

My wife with the sex of a mirror

My wife with the eyes full of tears

With eyes that are purple armor and a magnetized needle

With eyes of savannahs

With eyes full of water to drink in prisons

My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the ax

My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire

Translated from the French by David Antin

 [Editor’s note: André Breton 1931 reading of “L’Union Libre”: http://youtu.be/0HTX4_KkhWk ]

Union libre

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur

A la taille de sablier

Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre

Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de

dernière grandeur

Aux dents d'empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche

A la langue d'ambre et de verre frottés

Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée

A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux

A la langue de pierre incroyable

Ma femme aux cils de bâtons d'écriture d'enfant

Aux sourcils de bord de nid d'hirondelle

Ma femme aux tempes d'ardoise de toit de serre

Et de buée aux vitres

Ma femme aux épaules de champagne

Et de fontaine à têtes de dauphins sous la glace

Ma femme aux poignets d'allumettes

Ma femme aux doigts de hasard et d'as de coeur

Aux doigts de foin coupé

Ma femme aux aisselles de martre et de fênes

De nuit de la Saint-Jean

De troène et de nid de scalares

Aux bras d'écume de mer et d'écluse

Et de mélange du blé et du moulin

Ma femme aux jambes de fusée

Aux mouvements d'horlogerie et de désespoir

Ma femme aux mollets de moelle de sureau

Ma femme aux pieds d'initiales

Aux pieds de trousseaux de clés aux pieds de calfats qui boivent

Ma femme au cou d'orge imperlé

Ma femme à la gorge de Val d'or

De rendez-vous dans le lit même du torrent

Aux seins de nuit

Ma femme aux seins de taupinière marine

Ma femme aux seins de creuset du rubis

Aux seins de spectre de la rose sous la rosée

Ma femme au ventre de dépliement d'éventail des jours

Au ventre de griffe géante

Ma femme au dos d'oiseau qui fuit vertical

Au dos de vif-argent

Au dos de lumière

A la nuque de pierre roulée et de craie mouillée

Et de chute d'un verre dans lequel on vient de boire

Ma femme aux hanches de nacelle

Aux hanches de lustre et de pennes de flèche

Et de tiges de plumes de paon blanc

De balance insensible

Ma femme aux fesses de grès et d'amiante

Ma femme aux fesses de dos de cygne

Ma femme aux fesses de printemps

Au sexe de glaïeul

Ma femme au sexe de placer et d'ornithorynque

Ma femme au sexe d'algue et de bonbons anciens

Ma femme au sexe de miroir

Ma femme aux yeux pleins de larmes

Aux yeux de panoplie violette et d'aiguille aimantée

Ma femme aux yeux de savane

Ma femme aux yeux d'eau pour boire en prison

Ma femme aux yeux de bois toujours sous la hache

Aux yeux de niveau d'eau de niveau d'air de terre et de feu.

Attila Jószef

To sit, to stand, to kill, to die

To shove this chair away from me,

to squat in front of a speeding train,

to climb a mountain carefully

or tip my bag out on the plain;

to feed a bee to my pet bug

or with some granny, snuggle close;

to have a tasty soup to sup,

to sneak through mud on tippytoes;

to place my hat on the railway line

or skirt the lake shore in a rush,

or sit on the bottom, looking fine—

or with the breakers, in a flush;

to bloom with the flowers of the sun

or merely to let out a lovely sigh

to drive away a fly—just one—

or dust my book of grit and grime;

to clean a mirror with my spit,

to make a truce with deadly foes—

or knife them all and from the slit,

study the blood as it overflows;

to watch a young girl as she turns

or sit around and twiddle my thumbs;

to light up Budapest so it burns,

to wait for a bird to take my crumbs;

o life, that's writing now this verse,

you tie me up, you let me loose,

you make me laugh, you make me curse—

o life, you make me choose!

Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki

The Seventh

If you set foot on this earth,

You must go through seven births.

Once, in a house that’s burning,

once, among ice floes churning,

once, amidst madmen raving,

once, in a field of wheat swaying,

once, in a cloister, bells ringing,

once, in a pigsty a-squealing.

Six babes crying, not enough, son.

Let yourself be the seventh one!

If foes confront you, that is when

Your enemies must see seven men.

One, who’s off on a holiday,

one, who goes to work on Monday,

one, who teaches unpaid on a whim,

one, who has learned to sink or swim,

one, who will seed a whole forest,

one, whom wild forefathers protect.

But all their tricks are not enough, son.

Let yourself be the seventh one!

If you want to find a lover,

Let seven men go look for her.

One, whose words contain his heart,

one, who can pay his part,

one, pretending to be a dreamer,

one, who will be a skirt-peeler,

one, who knows the snaps and hooks,

one who can put down his foot –

buzz like flies around her, son.

And you yourself be the seventh one.

Be a poet if you can afford it,

but seven men make up one poet.

One, a marble-village builder,

one, who was born a sleeper,

one, an adept sky-charter,

one, whom words befriend and favor,

one, who is his own soul-maker,

and one who dissects a rat’s liver.

Two are brave and four are wise, son –

let yourself be the seventh one.

And if all went as was written,

You will be buried as seven men.

One, nursed on a soft milky breast,

one, who likes tough titties best,

one, who flips empty plates in the bin,

one, who helps the poor to win,

one, who labors, falling apart,

one, who stares at the Moon all night.

The world will be your tombstone, son:

if you yourself are the seventh one.

Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki

Günter Eich

Inventory

This is my cap,

this is my coat,

here's my shaving gear

in a linen sack.

A can of rations:

my plate, my cup,

I've scratched my name

in the tin.

Scratched it with this

valuable nail

which I hide

from avid eyes.

In the foodsack is

a pair of wool socks

and something else that I

show to no one,

it all serves as a pillow

for my head at night.

The cardboard here lies

between me and the earth.

The lead in my pencil

I love most of all:

in the daytime it writes down

the verses I make at night.

This is my notebook,

this is my tarpaulin,

this is my towel,

this is my thread.

Translated from the German by David Young