Not long ago I wrote a blog where I
talked about Walt Whitman’s celebrated poem, “I Hear America Singing.” In
discussing this poem, I realized that it’s actually part of a category of poems
that I would call “basket poems.”
In a basket poem, a writer comes up
with a container that many different events or things can be gathered in. For
example, in Whitman’s poem, he collects incidents where he hears or imagines
Americans singing while they work. In the first line, Whitman describes the
basket that he’s going to use to assemble all these images:
I hear America
singing, the varied carols I hear
Then he proceeds to put one incident
after another into his basket:
Those of
mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter
singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing
his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman
singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck…
All in all, Whitman describes
eleven different types of workers, each with a different task, each with a
different song.
I can imagine Whitman getting the
idea for this poem by hearing two or three of these singers during a stroll
around his neighborhood in Brooklyn. He then either stayed attentive to others
who sing while they work, or invented or remembered the rest. Whitman’s basket
for this poem is: American worker singing.
The poem becomes an assortment of these different carolers, each one
representing the dignity and joy of honest, democratic labor. It’s a sort of
innocent socialist realism, before there was actually such a thing as socialist
realism. Maybe we could call it “socialist lyricism.”
Interestingly, the poem does not
arbitrarily list these workers and their songs. It begins with the heavier
sorts of labor: mechanic, carpenter, mason, boatman. It then becomes somewhat
more domestic and rural, and the time of day changes to a later hour, the end
of the workday:
The shoemaker
singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s
song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at
sundown…
Then the singer/workers become
distinctively female:
The delicious singing
of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing…
Finally Whitman ends the poem not
with daytime labor but with the fun and leisure of the nighttime after work is
done:
Each singing what
belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what
belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open
mouths their strong melodious songs.
Whitman’s poem is an excellent
template for a basket poem:
1) Choose a category of images,
incidents, objects, or phrases.
2) Collect a satisfyingly diverse
assortment of like objects or phrases in your basket.
3) Sort the objects in the basket
so they form a sort of order.
4) Begin and/or end with an object
or phrase or image that doesn’t quite match the others, that provides some
closure, some break in the list.
You might ask, “What’s the
difference between a basket poem and a list poem?” Well, a list poem could also
be a basket poem. But a basket poem doesn’t have to be a list. I wouldn’t
exactly call “I Hear America Singing” a list, though it has list-like
qualities. In fact, a basket poem doesn’t have to be a list at all.
I’m thinking about Mary Ruefle’s
poem, “Merengue.”
After the first three introductory lines, the whole poem is a series of
questions.
 |
| Mary Ruefle |
You could hardly call this poem a list. But I would call it a basket poem, since Mary Ruefle collected questions
that interested her, put them in her poetic basket, and formed a poem out of
them. Here is the middle section of the poem:
Did you learn how
to cut a pineapple,
open a coconut?
Did you carry a
body once it had died?
For how long and
how far?
Did you do the
merengue?
Did you wave at
the train?
Did you finish the
puzzle, or save it for morning?
All these experiences seem like
possibilities for fairly simple activities that we could know in a lifetime.
The poem’s implicit question is, to my mind, “Have you lived life to its
fullest, or have you failed to experience many wonderful things?” What’s lovely
about the poem is that this most important question is left unasked. Was it
Alice Notley who said, “What you want to say in a poem is what you should leave
out”? “Merengue” is a fine example of that.
Like Whitman, Mary Ruefle begins
and ends her poems with lines that don’t fit in the same category as her
basket, which is questions about simple actions. She starts and ends the poem
with declarations, allowing for both an introduction to her list at the
beginning, and closure at the end. She also prepares us for the ending by
tackling bigger issues in the last two questions:
Have you been
born?
What book will you be reading when you die?
What book will you be reading when you die?
Although the last question might
seem somewhat random, it does continue the subject of life and death that the
previous, ambiguous question broaches.
Basket poems can take a
surprisingly long to time write. It may happen that the category you choose to
put into your basket is a fairly obscure one. The more esoteric the basket, the
longer it will probably take to fill. Remember to sort the objects—they can’t
all be equal or have the same resonance, or you will have nothing more than a
shopping list. Once you have collected all your
objects or phrases in the basket, you might also have to add or subtract in
order to form the pattern that the objects seem to want to be part of.
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
Other recent posts about writing topics:
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
