List Poems & The Rhetoric of Radical Futures

“I have been down into the entrails of earth—down by green pastures and still waters, by great, steep chasms—down by the gnarled and twisted fists of God to the deep, sad moan of the yellow river that did this thing of wonder,—a little winding river with death in its depth and a crown of glory in its flying hair. I have seen what eye of man was never meant to see. I have profaned the sanctuary. I have looked upon the dread disrobing of the Night, and yet I live.” - W. E. B. Du Bois. 

The penultimate essay in Du Bois’s Darkwater collection is equal parts scholarly and song-like. A renunciation of Jim Crow finds grounding in a series of pastoral metaphors. Hell is a chasm, a “white’s only”  sign, the corporeal wasteland where Black men go to die. 

Darkwater is an anomaly for Du Bois. Scholar, sociologist, historian- we remember him as a man who dealt in the technical, penning away centuries of oppression one bluntly-worded dissertation at a time. But there is space for lyricism even in the most rigid forms of activism. Poetry and protest are mediums that crave each other, perhaps because they both push us to voice all the world told us was better left unsaid. 

When you read between the lines, there’s something rhythmic about the upheaval that claimed our summer. We sang chants in verse, wrote ballads to lost ones, grasped at synecdoche in cries of “Say Her Name.” 

          Synecdoche: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole. 

I am, she is, he is the face on your T-shirt. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery. We say their names with reverence because the moment our mouths close, they are no longer martyrs. In silence, the dead become numbers that will never see the light of day. But when the streets are alive, so is the memory of your cousin, the boy you went to high school with, that woman in the newspaper, any ancestor who left this world too soon. Names have power. So we must speak them, wear them, adorn ourselves in their significance.

Breonna Taylor,

George Floyd,

Ahmaud Arbery.

Each name, a line of poetry to the loved and lost. List poems have emerged as the artistic medium of today’s racial protest movements because they lay bare our country’s “open secret” with an intensity that’s equal parts startling and accessible.  

As articulated by scholar Laurence Ralph, modern racism in America is an open secret: “nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it [exists].” Ralph, a professor at Princeton University, is the author of The Torture Letters, a collection of essays exploring the police sanctioned torture of Black suspects in Chicago from 1972 to 1991. In this 20-year time frame, at least 125 South Side residents were violently beaten, electrocuted, and otherwise abused while detained in police custody. With an additional 400 claims awaiting review, this may become the worst documented case of police torture this country has ever seen. But what is, perhaps, more insidious than the torture itself is the knowledge of this abuse across government agencies long before case details saw the light of day. From Chicago police officers to prosecutors to elected officials: many were aware, and all did nothing to stop it.

A disturbing but inevitable atrocity, this landmark case provides a glimpse into the subtleties of anti-Blackness in the modern world. In the post-civil rights era, racism has become an abstract concept, a principle wrong in theory but never condemned in practice. It feeds on the underside of the American conscience, on the quiet acts of violence lurking beneath public proclamations of tolerance. This is America’s “open secret,” the foundation on which this country was built is and a birthright its citizens are desperate to ignore. 

How, then, does one push back against an “open secret?” Racial justice leaders of recent past were lynched, beaten, and bloodied in their declarations of the simple but “un-American” truth that racism is wrong. A mere 50 years later, organizers are now also tasked with proving it even exists. Protest encounters a new set of barriers when faced with the myth of post-racialism; a change in perceptions of race necessitates a shift in protest strategy. Today’s movements present a hybrid of racial and economic causes, expansive in their reach and decentralized in their form. National coalitions have given way to grassroots organizing. Vast swaths of people are bound together under the umbrella of issues encompassed in a signal name. 

Protest in the modern era has shifted its focus to the individual; one figure becomes an entry point for systemic change. Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown. Each of these murders sparked waves of national unrest. And each of these names are memorialized in public memory. The collective, the chorus of Black Lives Matter finds meaning in the trauma of a single narrative. Their trauma is our trauma. For every story that gains traction, hundreds more lie unspoken, buried beneath many lifetimes of American apathy. In a world prone to silence, a name becomes a warning, a rally cry, a repudiation of post-racial myths and negationist histories. And above all else, a powerful display of the synecdoche that binds these stories together. 

Despite our present movement’s emphasis on singularity, the names at its forefront command the most influence when considered in tandem with each other. Out of over 1,000 documented instances of anti-Black violence this year, three stories emerged as vanguards of today’s racial protest movement, anchoring our discussions of police brutality and its wide range of intersectional relations. A jogger shot and killed in broad daylight on an afternoon run. A hip-hop artist choked to death over the alleged passing of a counterfeit bill. An E.M.T. gunned down in her sleep, still waiting for her moment of justice in the way all black women are told to wait until the rest of the table has been served. This summer, we honored their names together, painting tributes on signs, penning eulogies for protests, printing text on T-shirts. There’s something important about the written union of these names, their positioning one after another in the long list of lives snuffed out by white supremacy. From poignant murals to performative graphics, for 3 months, our lives were saturated with images like this one. The ultimate form of synecdoche - list poem obituaries to lost ones.    

List poems are a notoriously fluid medium, both ancient and rudimentary, fixed and free-form, elevated and every day. Simply put, a list poem ( or “catalog verse”) is a carefully constructed inventory of sound, song, image- anything its writer desires. A single concept emerges from an amalgamation of moving parts. Each line, a unique rendering of the vision at the narrative’s forefront. Rules of syntax are interchangeable, as long as an index of sorts manifests in the poem’s progression.

 A broad poetic category, list poems line the pages of The Iliad, as well as the walls of kindergarten classrooms. There’s something deeply American, Writer’s Digest asserts, in both its accessibility and potential for literary greatness. Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” for example, is often hailed as the quintessential American list poem (excerpted below).

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

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,

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,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

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, father of free verse, is known not only for popularizing the list form but imbuing it with a democratic tinge. This poem in particular, a standout from 1860’s Chants Democratic, is a study in national pride. Using synecdoche, Whitman crafts a celebration of the everyday men and women who breathe life into the American song. The carpenter, the wood-cutter, mothers and young wives -  each archetype embodies a distinct portrait of American life, each sings a different song. But their disunity births the melody of American nationalism. A single voice becomes a chorus, a country, an anthem.

However, the poem’s robust nationalism underscores a more sinister connection between catalog verse and the American psyche: a penchant for myth-making. Written on the eve of the Civil War, this poem spins a narrative of antebellum falsehoods; the harmony of Whitman’s dreamworld exists far away from the waves of racial strife eating away at the nation’s core. A House Divided was a relic two years in the rearview. Succession loomed on the horizon. Slave revolt simmered down south. To divorce America from this racial reckoning is to ignore the role of blackness in shaping our past present and future. If we are to examine the list poem as an American medium, we must also examine it as a racialized one. 

The list poems of today’s racial justice movements hail from a long-standing tradition of Black authors reclaiming American forms. Roughly 50 years after the publication of Whitman’s “I Hear America Sing,” Harlem birthed a golden age for the Black creative conscience, both literary and otherwise. In the wake of the Great Migration, “a spiritual coming of age” took hold of Black communities rocked by cultural shifts in the north. New developments in artistic, literary, and musical circles allowed for an uncharted exploration of Black identity and an unmatched belief in Black excellence. Poet James Weldon Johnson engineered new poetic forms at the intersection of spoken word and ragtime jazz. Claude Mckay imbued classic European sonnets with radical themes of race and resistance. Pioneer Langston Hughes explored Black life in all its technicolor wonder, from the vibrant sounds of Harlem nightlife to the everyday monotony of Jim Crow. Hughes, like Whitman, achieved creative mastery over both free verse and the list form. His own list poem, “Let America Be America Again,” takes on new severity when read as a response to “I Hear America Sing” (excerpted below). 

“Who said the free? Not me?

Surely not me? The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike?

The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we've dreamed

And all the songs we've sung

And all the hopes we've held

And all the flags we've hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay—

Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.”

Hughes subverts Whitman’s optimistic illustrations of American song. Music is now a language of low wages and lost hope. The pride of Whitman’s everyman is paid for by the sweat, blood and toil of the underclasses scrubbed clean from his nationalistic ode. America “has never been [America] yet,” Hughes claims in rhetoric eerily similar to the discussions of Trumpism dominating news cycles today. But it’s the following lines that cement his reclamation of the list form.

Not only does Hughes dispute Whitman’s idyllic vision of America, he inserts himself into the very framework of American history. “The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME.” In claiming the land and labor of his ancestors, Hughes makes the argument that he himself is the essence of American identity. With “mine,” ownership of country is established. But with “ME,” Hughes becomes an extension of the land itself. His personal narrative cannot be separated from our collective vision of America. Blackness is not an offshoot of American identity but the sole lens through which we must contextualize its founding. Here lies the synecdoche of the black experience. 

 “Let America Be America Again” is just one of many radical list poems by Black authors. Racialized list  forms have often emerged as creative responses to periods of intense racial strife- and today’s list obituaries are no different. Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” for example, reads like a lovesong to Black rebellion at the Civil Rights Movement’s heyday. Nate Marshall’s “Palindrome” is an ode to the gentler moments of his hyper-racialized childhood growing up on Chicago’s South Side. Both poems are specific to the worldviews of their respective authors. And yet, they are also infinitely relatable, establishing ties to the multitude of lived experiences across the Black diaspora. Similarly, the names that line today’s list-form obituaries are representative of both individual suffering and a need for broad systemic change.

List forms of past and present are forever intertwined in the poetic threads of their synecdoche. To be Black in America is to see yourself historically, to know the dead of a Langston Hughes poem, and the names lining today’s long list of obituaries are one and the same. Names are inheritance, gatekeepers of historical record, proof that America’s long-loved claims of post-racialism will not stand the test of time. Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery: each name dismantles the myth-making of the “open secret.” Each name memorializes the cost of expelling racism from our country’s legacy.