The “To-Do” List Poem: Prospective Memory and a New York School Genre

In the 1960s the “to-do” list poem emerged as a popular genre and compositional method in New York School poetry. Despite its popularity with Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, and Gary Snyder, and its prominent role in creative writing workshops, little scholarly work has been done to understand the form as a future-directed expression. In the light of prospective memory, the genre can be characterized by paradoxes. What seems to emphasize the recollection and execution of future actions espouses a kind of forgetting that is essential to the poem as a site of (im)possibility rather than actualization, of wishful thinking rather than resolution, of changing one’s mind rather than seeing plans through. This very failure to “make good” on future-oriented intentions is not a mark of insincerity, but the basis on which “to-do” poems can be read as lists of prospective feelings; i.e., “to-feel” poems.