List Full: Reviews & Reprints
Maps are to travelers & fingerprints are to forensic investigators what lists can be for the inquisitive reader, fulfilling a haunting need to hold data & mind steady in times of uncertainty. LIST FULL features everyday lists as Household Haikus of Necessary Orderliness that reign in our cluttered, chaotic lives of hyper-exposed data, over-purposed texts, hyperbolic narratives & serve as portals into our secret selves where the mundane & the glorious commingle.
Ambitious, autobiographical, & amusing, plantenga’s new book exalts the humble list as ersatz literature. At once personal & universal, wry & triste, entertaining & banal, scholarly & flip, this book is bound to become the exemplar of list poems – authentic, honest, & compelling.
• Jeffrey Cypher Wright, Live Mag!, critic, eco-activist, artist & author |
LIST FULL is at turns funny, poignant, confusing & strange. It’s many things all at once, & it is most often great poetry.
• David Tighe, Gut Bucket Research There’s so much in these lists that I found them to be a veritable inspirational gold mine for poets & writers.
• Bryan Monte, Amsterdam Quarterly |
List Full creates poetry without resorting to any of the usual spectacles upon which most poetry depends. List Full attempts to take the list & transform it from statistic, survey, or commodity, even, into something of much more human stature & quality. Eschewing the standard poetic qualities of meter, metaphor, mellifluous language, lush imagery, etc., it creates poetry without resorting to any of the usual spectacles upon which most poetry depends.
• Jose Padua, Vox Populi |
With List Full, plantenga manages an amazing feat, somehow constructing a surprisingly deep, thoroughly engaging autobiographical tract from a collection of lists—found texts, archived material, random flotsam, & carefully crafted essays.
• Gil Reavill, author of This Land is No Stranger plantenga has taken the list into history to compose an adventurous, fragmentary autobiography in which much is hidden but also much discovered.
• Jim Feast, Sensitive Skin It’s like a magic trick – an autobiography told in tiny time capsules. Bart Plantenga turns all kinds of lists into something so addictive, so intriguing, you frequently stop, look up and say “How come no one did this before? " List Full is full of bite-size ephemera that are alternately startling, poignant and funny. You’ll go back and forth and crease your favorite pages. Read some aloud to others. But most of all, you’ll want to keep it nearby.
• Gail Offen has co-written books on Midwest history, including Grand River Avenue and Michigan Haunts |
By turns profound, hilarious & miraculously present in the simplicity of his obsession, plantenga has created a tome for temporal awareness.
• Edwin Torres, author & noted spoken word performer His new book LIST FULL: List Poems of Necessary Orderliness, forges order upon a messy world. Wait, not sure that’s correct. Possibly it satirizes the attempt to forges order on the wobbly world of things. Each poem is a well-ordered list of some sort. Sometimes just the existence of a list — that Plantenga kept such a list at all — seems outlandish. “The Importance of Noticing Phenomena Through Lists” seems like a not-so-interesting list. It’s just a series of dates. But what do they signify?
“Ten years ago, after the holidays, after the Xmas tree had come down, I began to notice while vacuuming in January, February, March, April … that I was still finding unvacuumed pine needles from the tree in less than obvious spots. I decided to note the date when I spotted the last needle.” Never have I read of such a list. It is pure list-for-list’s sake. It mocks the very idea of organization. Like Julian Montague’s photo book Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: a Guide to Field Identification, it creates its own obsessive taxonomy ... • Peter Bates, photographer-writer, read his full review here |
List Full’s notes come together to make this whole brilliant kraftwerk. This beautiful thing. It’s anarchy for your writer’s block. You turn the page and don’t know what you’re going to read next. It’s a surprise that inspires, makes you think, gives you a beret and says you can join in. List Full says, try anything, go anywhere in your mind, pick up a pen, see what YOUR list tells you – SO helpful!
• Daisy Wake chronicles punk rock in London & published The Curse In List Full, plantenga lays his life bare with a gargantuan compendium of lists. These lists comprise a veritable Encyclopedia Plantenga. These lists are as ephemeral as it gets. Trivial, too! And that’s the point. It’s all about the quotidian quagmire. Transitory life. The bright flashes of insight and idiocy that mark our daybooks until the last page is blank. That’s life, folks. Blink and you’ll miss it. But Plantenga keeps his eyes open. You can’t help but wonder. Where does Plantenga stash these lists? A myriad of storage bins in attics, garages, and closets? Or does he pin them to walls, stuff them in trouser pockets, cram them in the back of drawers?
• Su Byron is a poet-freelance writer- editor living in Sarasota, Florida. |
It’s an autobiography incorporating ideas, ideology, guides to beliefs & personal psychology. Lists reveal personality, social commentary & beefs; there are lists of deep importance & lists of the trivia of daily life. The variety of formal devices used in these lists is extraordinary.
• John M. Bennett, poet-artist-editor-founder of Luna Bisonte Prods.
• John M. Bennett, poet-artist-editor-founder of Luna Bisonte Prods.
•Sweatshirt Haiku, The Disappointed Housewife, 12.19, some originally appeared in Paris Passion, 1990.
• List From A Lost Surrealist, No Hot Water/Heat [Kew Garden Hills, NY - 1979-80], map [color, 1978], Live #17. • List of Things Noticed in One Day, Rx, 01.20 • 2 List Poems, TL;DR [Truly Living; Documented Relentlessly], 1.20 • List Poems in Corona Times, Otoliths 6.20 • List of Candies, Daily Drunk, 08.20 • List Living on East 13th Street 1981, Bones 21, 10.20 pdf download |
Lists Not Included in LIST FULL
LIST OF REJECTIONS SLIPS, Rx, 05.21, Outlier & chance-taking Amsterdam literary zine
The Beer Coaster Haiku 1, Daily Drunk, 11.20
The Beer Coaster Haiku 1, Daily Drunk, 11.20