I have to admit, I read Patty Nash‘s “Central Oregon” while I was reading Laynie Browne’s book, Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists, so I was attuned to lists. I was aware that a list doesn’t just have to be items, but it can be playing with items. Like in Browne’s book, where the items are sometimes tasks, and sometimes just observations, and sometimes reflections, but they all take place in a day. Or there’s this sense that each of the poems is a single day’s accumulation of items arranged so they feel like a poem about doing stuff, or what it means that someone would be reading a list thinking the poet should be doing something, and maybe she is. Maybe she’s not.
But that’s not the list for Nash. And if you’re like me, this is exciting news. Not that there haven’t been plenty of list poems that do fun and interesting things with items. Or sequences. And I’ve enjoyed them, or been curious, or skeptical. There are lots of ways to be critical. Nash’s list is a little bit like a population of Central Oregon. What you can find there. Her great-grandfather was from there. Her grandfather who may or may not be “legitimately” born from her great-grandfather. Owls. A truly majestic manmade dam. Some might say a poem like this contains multitudes. Lists the multitudes. And that’s one of the significant parts of it. That the list is establishing a poetics of place, and the place is where Nash’s family is from. Which makes it something much bigger.
Like when Eleni Sikelianos wrote that giant The California Poem, and she was from California, and the encyclopedic nature of the work feels like a statement about how large the idea of finitude can really be (meaning finitude might always be smaller than infinity, but there are lots of things short of infinity that would fit into a finite count of objects). And it also feels like a statement about sentimental attachment, and how it amplifies what it means to look at the place where you’re from, and to see your family in all these places, even family that you don’t even know.
So, then, Nash’s list and its aesthetic explores and exploits sentiments and physical facts together. Birds of prey. And realty. And the nature of realtors who have a passion for what they’re selling you. What if I imprinted upon all these listed items a sequentiality? Like they all happened in this order. One thing happened, then the next thing. Which is, of course, what this list implies. Or at least certain moments seem to follow from the moments before. But, overall, the sense of causal movement that might be used to connect one item to the next isn’t really explained. Meaning, the poem isn’t going to just slip into that style of reading.
Nash lets the presumption of sequentiality do a lot for the poem, though. And she takes liberty, then, with levels of discontinuity. I like the effect. It contrasts so much with the lists in Browne’s book, too. Where Browne’s lists involve a day, a day’s set of “todo” items kind of, or what it feels like to keep a list of todo’s for a day, so the poem is a list of impressions those tasks put on the poet. And what I appreciate is how both Nash and Browne play with these kinds of expectations!