Endings are hard no matter the genre.
Poetic. Romantic. Grocery-Storic.
It’s true. I have a hard time stopping myself even when food shopping, even with a list [from the Oxford English Dictionary, n6 on the list of the definitions of list: “A catalogue or roll consisting of a row or series of names, figures, words, or the like.”]
Even the lists of a list cannot halt me [list, n3: “Border, edging, strip”.]
I list after the pleasures of an unlisted list [list, v1: “To desire or wish for (something).”]
But the hardest lists to put an end to are, for me, those damn list poems.
I was thinking about both listing and endings this past weekend during a trip to the University of Washington’s site on San Juan Island where I was a guest for an intensive poetry class being taught by my friends and fellow-poets Rick Kenney and Jason Whitmarsh. One of the hallmarks of Rick’s teaching is what he calls “the forgery.” One of us chooses a lesser-known poem by a well-known poet, lops off the last few lines (usually 3 ??? 6, but it depends on the length and form of the poem), passes out the amputated poem, and sends the rest of us away to try to inhabit the poet for a stanza or so. We submit our endings via email to that round’s leader, that person compiles them all together (and includes the correct ending), and at the appointed time we gather to read and vote. You vote for the ending you think is the correct one. And then all is revealed. Sometimes the author wins. Sometimes one of us manages to best the author. Quarters are made and lost (high stakes betting this is not). Beer is drunk. It’s fun and it teaches you deeply about a particular poem and poet.
Rick and Jason had, earlier in the day, forged Robert Frost. And I was the sequel (straight to DVD with me!). Jason had asked me to send two poems along, and I did: one was narrative with a pretty clear rhyme scheme, the other was a loosey-goosey list poem.
The narrative poem was up first. I read the original up until its amputation, then we read the newly hatched options around the circle, none of us knowing whose was whose (except me; I knew something about one of them). When we reached the end, they mulled for a few minutes, and then we voted (I abstained). I was pleased that 6 out of the 14 students voted for the original.
When we came to the list poem, however, the students had done much better, and the votes were spread fairly evenly across 5 or 6 contenders. I felt lucky to garner two of them. I also felt that two of the endings were ones I would have been happy to write myself.
And all of this reminded me of why I often feel that list poems are a cop-out. There are too many ways to end. Too many points at which one could end–or go on. It’s as easy to accrue lines as it is to accrue episodes during watching a Project Runway marathon. There is no one path for the poem. It has no fate. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
If you decide to use scientific language as a metaphor for love, turn to page 4.
If you decide to break the line and thus insert a heart-wrenching double meaning, turn to page 5.
But then again, having options seems like a good thing.
Perhaps it’s related to what I was thinking about last week: ease vs. difficulty. I don’t want to do anything that is too easy in poetry, yet I love ease in every other aspect of my life. Nor do I want to be difficult for difficulty’s sake. (Stop being difficult, says the voice in my head. I want to listen to it. The first definition of list comes from listen.)
On the way to San Juan Island, my friend Johnny and I had missed the direct boat and ended up (eventually) on the inter-island ferry. There were barely 15 people on the boat, and it had the feeling of a craft well-removed from weekenders and the mainland both. This was a ferry to commute by, and almost every table (bolted down, of course) spoke of that commute by boasting a puzzle in progress. There would have been a puzzle for every one of us on the ferry, if we’d wanted to sit alone. Table after table of puzzles, like lines in a list poem. There was the vaguely Indian puzzle more important than the view:
And an underwater puzzle more important than the water we were over:
And, my personal favorite, “Cheer-Up Farms”:
The boat, as it turned the corner to arrive in Friday Harbor, enacted yet one more form of the verb to list, yet the puzzles were unmoved, just waiting for their endings of which there would be just the one right one for the each of them. And that seemed sad, too.