Mark Strand's twenty-first book, Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More, is an elegant collection of one-liners organized in loose lists by repeated key words. While reading it, I am itching to quote this or that line to a friend, to insert new lines into the book, or to write my own lists in the same spirit. I found out that I am not alone in this ridiculous itch for co-authorship: readers of Strand's lists, who have not attempted to write poetry even during their first-love years, are telling me they feel like generating a few more one-liners in Strand fashion. Whence this desire to put ourselves into the author's slippers? Is there a deeper meaning in Strand's suggestion (on the wing of the dust-jacket) that his lists are “as easy to read upon falling asleep as they are upon waking”? Asked “Why lists?,” the poet replies, “Because it is easy to write them.” No one who is familiar with Mark Strand's Dark Harbor (1993) and Blizzard of One (1998) would take such an answer literally. Then what kind of luring ease is this that makes the reader so involved in the creation of poetry?

Before I propose an answer to this question, let me catalogue some of my favorite lines, one per key-word (italics mine):

Shadow me, and tell me where I've been
Paradise is a secondary necessity
The wind that roars is only practicing
The throat's favorite food is sausage
The sun is the night's pornographer
A peacock lives on the moon when it can
When sleep awakes, it forgets what it was
The hour when mice run in the walls
The hand of nothingness reaching for something
Kissing the foot is like learning a language
When my dog stares at me, I fall to my knees
The island of golden tedium
Long live the chicken with its head
A journey with fog must be a pastel
A chair's secret is not to breathe
Sorrow is the soul's candy
An empty glass is nakedness inverted
A night in July, your hair, and you
To count the lake's two colors
The paintings of S seemed to shrink as they were looked at

A bit like automatic writing, a bit like a warming-up exercise. Some lines sound aphoristic, others look like fragments of sentences. In fact, the lists in the book read easier than the sample I have extracted because of the uniting key-word in each of them and the occasional lighter lines which let us breathe. Without even noticing it, we have submitted ourselves to a double seduction: into poetry in general, and into Mark Strand's poetry in particular.

The principal seduction into poetry is ensured by the very nature of the list as a trope. Since Darker (1970), Mark Strand has been exploring the artistic potential of this ancient device. Three poems in Darker are essentially lists: “Giving Myself Up,” “From a Litany,” and “The New Poetry Handbook.” One of the most moving poems Strand has ever written, “Elegy for My Father,” published in The Story of Our Lives (1973), consists of several accumulative lists. “Some Last Words” from his recent book, Blizzard of One, is a collection of seven almost sinister propositions, followed by the dismissing refrain, “Just go to the graveyard and ask around.” In the same collection we find “The Delirium Waltz,” a list of dancing friends' names that mimics the waltz steps. Strand's only collection of essays on poetry, The Weather of Words (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), opens with “A Poet's Alphabet,” a list of inspirations and influences. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by one word, which creates the illusion of an exhaustive catalogue. Randomness has put on the mask of completeness. Words like Canada, garden, Hades, immortality, joy, lake, Neruda, oblivion, tedium, Utah, why, zenith, co-exist on equal basis. Some of them (e.g., absence, Kafka, Rilke, Vergil) are accompanied by an insightful essay, others, by a brief sketch of feelings and associations.

Despite their variety—from a catalogue of the body to a catalogue of inspirations, from elegy to sarcasm, from a litany in praise of existence to a writing manual—Mark Strand's older lists (to some extent with the exception of “A Poet's Alphabet”) do not seem to evoke a desire for joining the game. The reader, who is aware of the elaborate designs of these lists and perceives them as closure-driven works, remains a more or less empathetic observer. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More, in turn, contains no hierarchies and displays simpler patterns. The twenty lists in the book have random beginnings and endings; they are not chains of one-liners; rather, they are handfuls of rings that occasionally hook to one another. Lured by this confession of incompleteness, the reader enters a creation in statu nascendi, a world of countless possibilities before the fiat of choice has occurred. Perhaps this is what Mark Strand means when he talks about the ease of writing and reading his new lists: that the author is relieved of the demand to create an illusion of completeness, and the reader is relieved of the obligation to grasp the work in its wholeness. Metafiction might seem to be doing something similar, but it remains far from producing the impression of easiness. With its cunning calculations how to be both complete and open, with its notorious self-awareness and self-criticism, metafiction actually builds a transparent but impenetrable wall between the work and the reader.

“What's wrong with the walls?” you may ask, “Stone, brick or glass walls—don't they all quicken the reader's appetite for fiction? The removal of the obstacle means the end of desire.” True. And if so, why does Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More intensify the reader's appetite for Strand's poetry, instead of calming it down? Perhaps the lists remove the obstacles only partially. The wall opens, we are let into the garden of creation and can clearly see a man sitting on a chair, thinking about a poem. We know what is going to be in the poem; we see it: chair, green grass, wall. We can almost see how the poem fills up these three simple concepts. What escapes us is the more. The poem emerges within the chair, green grass, wall & more. Surely the blending of familiarity and mystery is a well-tried enticement in art. Strand's list book seems to let the reader a step or two closer to the secret of this combination than his poetry usually does.

“As a poet develops, he develops a predisposition to use certain words—which create or suggest certain landscapes, or interiors, or certain attitudes. Those, in fact, become his identity as a poet,” Strand says in an interview with Wallace Shawn (Paris Review, 1998). Those who know Strand's poetry will add about a dozen more identity words to the tokens of Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More: dark, snow, nothing, night, cold, room, angel, tree, wind, sky. (Actually, most of these “missing” words appear here and there within the lists.) In the same interview, Mark Strand also talks about the limitations of such simple-word identity and mentions his long poem Dark Harbor as a step toward adopting words with a distinct or exotic aura. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More seems to be a return to Strand's earlier vocabular minimalism. The key-words are simple and most common. So common that they appear to be emptied of meaning. But Strand needs them precisely as transparent containers of possibilities.

A paradigmatic example of such container is the word “cloud,” so capacious that it has accommodated eighty-nine one-liners, published along with Wendy Mark's two dozens of plates representing clouds. 89 Clouds (New York: ACA Galleries, 1999) is a self-commentary of Strand's poetic language. From afar, clouds appear to be material objects like everything else around. Yet the wind, which is just moving air, reshapes them so easily. Clouds always seem to envelop some mystery, but when entering a cloud, we are amazed that its matter offers no resistance and that we can be inside the mystery—indeed, a part of the mystery—without really comprehending it. Just what the words are to a poet, “clouds of unknowing.” In 89 Clouds, Strand departs from “A cloud is never a mirror” and “Words about clouds are clouds themselves” and shapes and reshapes his clouds just like the April wind, beheld by a child, would play with them.

As Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More shows, however, to Mark Strand objects with quite obvious density—for example, a chair—are not much different from clouds:

The secret wish of a chair is to be a horse
And yet, if a chair had arms it would play the viola
The sculptor thought he made a giraffe; it was a chair
A chair is the ultimate defense against chaos
A nude in a glass chair is a little like champagne
Musical chairs is not a game but a delusion
A chair carved of a carrot can be eaten
No one expects a chair to smile

We all have collected some rare pebbles throughout our lives. While reading Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More we are anxious to make something of our unique experiences, to put them into Mark Strand's transparent word containers. But what if, unlike Strand's filling, they look just like ordinary pebbles? Perhaps, despite the anticipated easiness of the experiment, we should do better to limit our involvement to contemplation of the indefinable more in Strand's list book and press the pebbles deep into our pockets. We may be surprised how easy it is to warm them.