Why do poets love/use lists?
* It's an easy way to organize material. I've written a lot of abecedaries, most notably My Marriage A to Z. I couldn't manage to write a coherent essay from many bits of information and theory, so the alphabet format was ideal.
* Lists go back to the earliest poetry, when bards used lists as aides-memoire to reciting a long epic.
* A name, a place, a date can signify so much more, the way we know what Woodstock and Pearl Harbor and January 6 mean without going into long explanation. You can tell a story incredibly efficiently.
* Abundance can be beautiful. One tulip is lovely, but tulips, roses, azaleas, dogwood, rhododendron, dandelion, stonecrop, rain lily, and pasque add up to a tremendous jumble of size and color. Spare can be great, but sometimes you want a fully stocked yard.
* We can learn a lot about a character by learning what they own or value or even know about. Is it carpet or is it a Turkish carpet? Are those books on the shelves or leather-bound first editions of late 20th-century science fiction writers?
* I definitely got in the habit of list-making during my days as a health journalist. I broke up complicated sentence full of semicolons into readable bullet points.
Oh! Look at this essay I just found: Why Literature Loves Lists, From Rabelais to Didion, an Incomplete List of Listmakers in LitHub. Let Brian Dillon do the thinking!