Review of List Full by bart plantenga in Gut Bucket Research #9

bart plantenga -­‐ LIST FULL: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) • David Tighe, Gut Bucket Research #9 I don’t know if “the list is the origin of culture”, as Umberto Eco has suggested, but the list poems presented here by bart plantenga reflect cultural clusters and preoccupa?ons directly parallel to my own.

He gives us lists about yodeling (List: Odd Yodelers Have Weird Nicknames, List During Wri?ng of Yodel in HiFi), references to Yoko Ono in his books, WFMU and pirate radio (List of Ar?sts Un/der-­‐represented in WFMU Library, 1987, Selec?on of Radio Patapoe Program Names, Abbreviated Song List: DrinkDrankDrunk), and of course lists of books; books read, books to read.

There are also delighYul lists that seem random-­‐1960s Man’s Adventure Magazine Story Titles (“Swas?ka Slave Girls in Argen?na’s No-­‐Escape Brothel Camp!”, “Joy Girl Squad in the Honeycomb Caves of Mindano’) and SWEATSHIRT HAIKU (Abridged List) – but could maybe more accurately be seen as documenta?on of the detritus of culture. The 60s adventure stories originate in a stash of magazines from Bart’s dad (which put me in mind of nothing so much as Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana).

Much of the book is like that; random but not completely random. Order imposed on the chao?c flux of our quo?dian existence (“Necessary Orderliness”) or a glimpse of the secret organizing principle that underlies everything? Neither? Both? My own childhood explora?on of my parents’ copy of The Book of Lists (1977) prepared me for this book as much as my much later reading of Borges. Or vice versa. As plantenga points out “we all make lists”, but I didn’t write this book and neither did you — even if some of the snippets of autobiography included in LIST FULL, could just as easily be mine or anyone’s as plantenga’s. We have all worked banal jobs, had bad roommates, bad breakups. In fact, some of these poems are found lists; they could be snippets of your life. What has been accomplished here is to find the poetry in moments of life (beau?ful, tragic, banal) captured in the necessary orderliness of lists.

Lautréamont told us that everyone must make poetry, and LIST FULL points to the (tragic) fact that this has not been accomplished by a long shot-­‐most of us just make lists.

Other gems in the book include: The Crazy Corona Cures Offered By Humans Who Claim To Be Sen?ent Beings of Some Evolu?on In The Informa?on-­‐Is-­‐Power Era, List of Near Death Experiences, and Boatspomng List. This last is a list of hundreds of boat names that bart observed out the window of his legalized squat in Amsterdam in 1996. Pure poetry. One item that jumped out at me from the COVID cures list was the promo?on by the President of Turkmenistan of the inhala?on of the smoke from burnt Peganuma harmala. This plant is both a source for the red dye used in Turkey to make fezes, and also contains DMT. Another entheogenic plant on the list is wormwood, promoted as a tea by the President of Madagascar.

LIST FULL is at turns funny, poignant, confusing and strange. One of the back cover blurb writers (Daisy Wake) reported that it induced vivid dreaming. It is many things, ooen all at once, and it is most ooen great poetry.