NovPoWriMo 2025: Day 5 — Inventory of What Remains

DAY 5. Inventory of What Remains

An inventory poem catalogs, lists, and tallies. Unlike the bookish errata/corrigenda, this one lives in the material world, what’s left behind when someone leaves, what survives after a season changes, what’s sitting in your pockets right now. Why are we doing this? Listing forces precision. You can’t hide in vague moods when you’re forced to name: receipts, half-burnt candle, six rice grains on the counter. The list is the poem, and its accumulations tell a story. Think of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book with its famous lists (“Hateful Things,” “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster”).

Or, Georges Perec’s obsession with inventories of objects and spaces! In 1973, Georges Perec wrote Approaches to What?, where he coined “infraordinary” to describe the unnoticed stratum of everyday life. Unlike the extraordinary (catastrophes, news), the infraordinary is the grain of habit: the crumbs on the counter, the bus timetable, the chair left askew. For Perec, writing meant refusing anaesthesia—“We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?” [and, that’s exactly what today’s inventory asks you to do: wake up to what usually disappears.] His An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, an observational inventory as art, is an hour-by-hour notes from a café which definitely trains your eye to name what we usually ignore. His Species of Spaces and Other Pieces are essays that turn rooms, lists, and addresses into literature, a catalog thinking all the way down. And finally, “Infraordinary” primer, by Jenny Odell on Perec on why noticing the ordinary is radical and how to practice it is a very useful frame for our Day 5’s ethos.

Ross Gay's “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” is a big-hearted modern catalog that shows how a list can swell into song which is great for pacing and accumulation. Poetry Foundation's article, Taking Stock with the Catalog Poem by Maggie Queeney is an amazing primer defining catalog/list poems with more such examples and teaching notes. How can we do this?

• Make a numbered list (at least 10 lines).
• Each line names a specific object or detail.
• Every 3rd line must add a sensory note (smell, sound, texture).
• Do not explain how these things connect. Let juxtaposition do the work.
• Title the poem “Inventory of What Remains.”

Optional intensifiers (choose one or more):

• Include one object that doesn’t exist in the real world (an impossible thing).
• Include one object that should not be there (out of place, dissonant).
• Strike through one item, as if deleted but still visible.
• End with a line that breaks the list format (a single declarative sentence, outside the catalog).

Even more optional craft tweaks (choose one or more):

• “Hateful / Grateful” split: Make two mini-lists (5 lines each) called Hateful Things / Grateful Things. Keep each line concrete (no abstractions). Do not explain, just let the objects indict or bless.
• Perec Hour: Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write only what you can see/hear right now (brand names, bus numbers, crumbs, the fan click). No metaphors. After the timer, add exactly two emotional words total.
• Catalog with a Tilt: Number to 10. Items 3, 6, 9 must include a sensory note (smell, texture, sound). Item 7 must be impossible. Item 10 breaks the list with a single declarative sentence.

Micro-samples [Use as a feel-check or a template!]

Two mismatched mugs stacked in the sink.

A bus ticket, date smudged into gray.

The faint sourness of rain in wool.

One photograph folded until the face disappears.

[Struck-through] keys you no longer carry.

A bottlecap still warm from your palm.

The silence that rearranges chairs.

An impossible feather, blue on both sides.

A cracked jar labeled “saffron.”

This is what you left me.

Inventory of What Remains

1. Two chipped teacups on the windowsill.

2. A bus ticket, month long expired.

3. The smell of cardamom caught in yesterday’s steam.

4. A stone I meant to return to the river.

5. The letter you never opened.

6. The echo of rain threading the balcony rails.

7. A mirror that reflects a room that isn’t here. (impossible)

8. One safety pin hooked to another.

9. The rust-taste of keys pressed to the tongue.

10. A dry jasmine string, still begging.

11. ~Your spare house key.~

12. That unbroken promise folded beneath a coin.

13. A blue feather that refuses dust.

14. A scarf that remembers more than it frays.

This is what you forgot to take with you.

~ Oizys.