A Craft Essay by Erin Murphy
ALL THE THINGS: WRITING CATALOG POEMS
Whatchamacallit used to be my favorite candy bar: the perfect combination of peanut butter crisp coated in a thin layer of chocolate. Then Hershey ruined it in 1987 by adding caramel. What I liked even more than the taste was the name. Whatchamacallit. Like “doohickey,” “thingamabob,” or “hoosamajig.”
When I encountered the term “the Internet of Things,” it reminded me of those amusing placeholder words. The Internet of Things—the IoT—is an economics term that refers to the network of physical objects embedded with technology that lets them exchange data with other devices over the internet. It’s basically the way our gadgets (27 billion and counting) talk to each other. I was fascinated by the fact that the Internet of Things was capitalized—even though it sounded so generic—and that it was used so unselfconsciously yet seemed like make-believe, as if people just started randomly spouting off Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It struck me as the perfect metaphor for consumerism, encompassing everything and nothing—every thing and no thing.
Here’s the poem I wrote:
The Internet of Things
(n.): the networking capability that allows
information to be sent and received by
objects and devices
The low tide riverbed silt
……of things. The cloud-swept
distant hill of things.
……The open bedroom window
in spring of things.
……The moonlit cricket
symphony of things.
……The pitter-patter
tin roof rain of things.
……The fifty-year marriage
loose skin of things.
……The clipped winter light
of things. The stippled lymph
……node of things. The grief.
Oh—the grief. The brief
……ecstatic flight of things.
William Carlos Williams’ 1927 manifesto “no ideas but in things” urged poets to focus on objects, not concepts—what Richard Wilbur would later call “the things of this world.” But in the term the Internet of Things, we never get the thingness of the things, Kant’s ding an sich. And even if we did, they would be soulless things like cell phones, smart refrigerators, and—I’m not making this up—WiFi-connected litter boxes.
I wanted to contrast these soulless things with human things: the small, joyful experiences of daily life. I settled on the catalog form—a list poem—which can be easy to start but challenging to end. I always find reading catalog poems suspenseful, like watching Olympic gymnasts. Will they stumble or waver? Or will they stick the landing?
So how do you create a list poem that’s more than just a list? Or even worse, a listicle? I think the answer is in specificity and disruption. The images should be specific enough that there is resonance in each one, almost like a series of partial haiku. And the ending should have an unexpected turn that shifts in meaning, perspective, or syntax. Or all of the above. The surprise can also happen implicitly when the body of the poem is considered in the context of the title or epigraph.
The late comedian Woody Allen (not really dead, but dead to me) once described walking through Central Park on a warm, sunny day. People were sunbathing, playing Frisbee, and tossing balls to dogs, and he wanted to shake them and scream, “Don’t you realize we’re all going to die?!?” In a way, that’s the essence of this poem. We’re all going to die. So that was the opportunity for the turn in “The Internet of Things”: from beauty and pleasure to illness and loss and the realization that we all have one brief—and if we’re lucky, ecstatic—flight.
Sonic quality was important to me because I wanted the slant and full rhymes to suggest connections among the observations. So were rhythm, punctuation, and enjambment. Toward the end, I settled on “The grief.// Oh—the grief.” Whereas the other sentences each have six to eight words and seven to eleven syllables, here there are two words/two syllables followed by three words/three syllables, which creates a staccato quality. I wanted the reader to feel the gut-punch of grief. Yes, everyone—and everything—dies: birds, flowers, seasons, youth, people. Even candy bars (RIP, original Whatchamacallit). But maybe the anticipation of their loss makes them that much sweeter.
“The Internet of Things” went on to win the $5,000 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award. $5,000!! The irony is not lost on me that my commentary on consumerism inspired by the Internet of Things has earned me enough money to buy a lot of things connected by the Internet of Things.
Here’s an abbreviated catalog of catalog poems I admire:
1. Diane Seuss’s poem “I have slept in many places, for years on mattresses that entered” (the title of which is also the first line) lists the mattresses—and other surfaces—on which the speaker has slept, including:
“as a teen on the bed where my father ate his last
pomegranate, among crickets and chicken bones in ditches…on an amber
throne of cockroach casings…in a clubhouse circled by crab-apple trees with high-
school boys who are now members of a megachurch.”
It’s not just fruit — it’s a pomegranate. And it’s not just any pomegranate—it’s her father’s last pomegranate. And in one word—“megachurch” —she paints an entire picture of these boys cum men (pun intended).
In her poem “99 Problems,” Morgan Parker plays off the Jay-Z song of the same title (“I got ninety-nine problems but the b—- ain’t one”). Parker’s catalog of problems starts with:
- Playing house I was adopted
- or the dog
……Numbers 36-42 are “American History.”
The poem ends with:
- 94. Teacher called me Sheila
95. Sheila was the other black girl
96. Sheila hated me
97. What we mean by “come up”
98. Be strong
99. I’m tired
With just a handful of words, Parker captures generations of systemic racism and misogyny.
3. “What to Expect” by Katie Manning is a list of index entries from the pregnancy book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, from accidents and acne to yoga and zinc. It is an exhaustive and exhausting list, especially resonant in this post-Roe v. Wade world.
4. In her meta catalog poem “Lists” —a list poem about writing lists—Linda Pastan writes:
I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list.
She ends the poem with these lines:
Perhaps God
listed what to create
in a week: earth and oceans,
the armature of heaven,
with a place to fasten
every star, and finally,
Adam who rested for a day
then made a list of his own:
starling, deer, and serpent.
In the turn, God is the uber list maker who created the rest of us list-makers in his own image.
Titles can do a lot of work for you in catalog poems. Here are the title and opening lines of an example by Tresha Faye Haefner from ONE ART: a journal of poetry:
What I Loved About Finding the Man Trying to Steal My Purse Out of the Closet When I Came Home Early in the Middle of the Day
The suddenness of his surprised face, as I entered the bedroom.
The way a movie starts half-way through the action,
The hero already bleeding.
6. Beyond titles and endings, a decision needs to be made about how to link the items on the list. A common rhetorical device in catalog poems is anaphora: the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of the line. In “Because” by Ellen Bass, she links the details of a traumatic birth experience with the word “because.” Here’s the opening:
Because the night I gave birth my husband went blind.
Hysterical, I guess you’d call it.
Because there’d been too many people
and then there was no one. Only
this small creature—her tiny cry
no bigger than a sequin.
Because I’d been pushing too many hours.
And she continues the “because” construction throughout the poem.
7. Chen Chen’s poem “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” repeats the phrase “to be”:
…To be advice
for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be
no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China
for me.
The opposite of anaphora is epistrophe, in which words or phrases repeat at the end of a line. My poem “The Internet of Things” employs epistrophe through the repetition of the phrase “of things.” But I used anaphora for a poetry project at my college. In early 2021, we were still experiencing the isolation of the pandemic, with most classes being held remotely and all cultural events canceled. So as a form of community-building, I organized a college-wide collaborative poetry project titled “In My America.” Students, faculty, and staff were invited to contribute lines through an online submission system. I held a series of online workshops, visited classes, and posted a recording of a workshop to guide participants through the process. We received 127 submissions, and I arranged them into a single poem. At first, this was daunting—how to create any sense of cohesion or momentum with so many moving parts? After reading and re-reading the submissions, however, I found that the contributions could be grouped into three categories: beauty, darkness, and hope. So I arranged the poem into three movements.
The first movement includes these lines:
In my America, everyone’s perspective flashes out like a cardinal’s red feathers
against the snow.
In my America, purple crocuses pop up at night, their petals see-through.
In my America, sunlight refracts on the river water caps like the flicker of a
flame, fleeting and bright.
The repetition of “In my America” signals the transition from one movement to another. Here is part of section two:
In my America.
In my America.
In my America.
In my America, polluted water pours from kitchen faucets.
In my America, drugs cause just as much harm as guns.
In my America, the souls of the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned during
World War II have been relegated to a single sentence of a textbook on a dusty
shelf.
In my America, it’s easy to change your title from Ms. to Mrs., but changing from
“he” to “she” is unthinkable.
In my America, justice knows two faces, and the color of the skin determines the guilt.
In my America, Asians are afraid.
In my America, the expectation of black women is strength, even when handling disrespect.
In my America, debates break out at the dinner table over the validity of my rights.
In my America, we still don’t have equal pay.
In my America, children are kept in cages while we support the people who put them there.
In my America, we’re all on social media but never social in person.
In my America, healthcare is a debt sentence.
In my America, 5,500 indigenous women went missing in 2019.
In my America, prisoners should not be for profit.
In my America, immigrants should not be called aliens or illegal.
The poem ends with dozens of images of hope such as:
In my America, a Black man follows the wings of a Kentucky warbler into a tree and speaks the bird’s name, imitates his song, without fear others will do him harm.
The poem closes with these hopeful lines:
In my America, we’d rather understand than overthrow.
In my America.
In my America.
In my America.
In my America, kindness is the new reality show.
Once the poem was completed, I collaborated with our dance program and communications program, and in fall 2021, we premiered a dance concert of “In My America” featuring original choreography performed by student dancers in front of a large-screen video of individual campus community members reciting lines from the poem. Students, faculty, dining hall employees, maintenance workers, our chancellor, and deans read lines both in English and—in some cases—in their native languages. It was stunning to see how a catalog—a simple list—could be so powerful.
I led a similar collaborative poetry writing project during a presentation I gave at West Virginia University. I began by discussing the longstanding belief that hearing is the last sense to go. This was supported by a University of British Columbia study which determined that unresponsive actively dying patients continue to hear in the final hours before death. The study – “Electrophysiological evidence of preserved hearing at the end of life”—was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
I also discussed Meredith Davies Hadaway’s essay “Overtones” in which she writes about her work as a therapeutic musician. (The essay is from the anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine, which I co-edited with Dinty W. Moore and Renee Nicholson.) Here is how Hadaway describes playing her harp for patients in palliative care: “The music we play for those who are actively dying tends to be arrhythmic or very loosely metered, matching the patient’s inhalations and exhalations rather than heartbeat. At end of life, the goal is to help the patient ‘let go’ so we avoid the distraction of earthly melodies.”
With this information in mind, I asked all attendees to write a list of the final sounds they would want to hear. These could be sounds they love, sounds they find calming, a sound they miss, or words they need or want to hear. Next, I asked them to go back and choose one sound to describe in detail. I urged them to be as specific and concrete as possible. In Diane Seuss’ poem, the father didn’t eat a piece of fruit on the mattress—he ate his last pomegranate. In Ellen Bass’ poem, the baby’s cry wasn’t small or faint—it was “no bigger than a sequin.” The heavens in Linda Pastan’s poem are “a place to fasten every star.” I then collected these lines and combined them into this collaborative catalog poem that was published in ONE ART.
Catalog poems are the ideal format for collaborative poems, whether between dozens of writers or just a few, because all contributions carry equal weight. I recently attended the workshop “Two Voices, One Poem: The Art of Collaboration” by Kelli Russell Agodon and Melissa Studdard in the Weekly Muse series. (If you’re not already a Weekly Muse subscriber, I highly recommend it.) Kelli and Melissa discussed their own process of writing poems together using Google docs. Frequently, these are catalog poems that riff off of a starting line or an idea, such as “Quarantine Bingo,” a concrete catalog poem that takes the shape of a Bingo card, which each marker representing a different common activity from the peak of the pandemic (“Took COVID test in your car” and “Homeschooled your children while drinking a martini”).
Whether written individually or in groups, I see catalog poems as invitations. They welcome you into the world the poet has created and invite you to continue the list. What activities do you remember from the quarantine? What adversity could you add to Parker’s 99 problems? What is the last sound you want to hear? Most importantly, what phrase or thought (or thing!) will spark your own catalog poem?
Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Human Resources and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Mother as Conjunction, a collection of lyric essays, is forthcoming in January 2026 from Harbor Editions. Her work has appeared in Ecotone, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and in anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Visit her website.
