Skrot, skräp och resterflänsar, fjädrar, ruttna madrasserunderliga apparatersom sedan länge slutat fungera.(Andtbacka 2008, 12)(Junk, stuff, leftoversflanges, spring, rotten mattressesfantastic apparatuses that have long since stopped working.)2There are piles, heaps, and catalogues of all sorts of things, all loosely arranged for an extravagant show-and-tell. In Wunderkammer (2008), a collection of collage poems by the Finland-Swedish poet Ralf Andtbacka, lists of things are a recurring element that halts the flow of the otherwise voluminous and narrative expression. In a poem called “Thing” (“Ting”), whose name admits close affinity to Rainer Maria Rilke's Dinggedichte (Thing Poems), one such list starts by cataloguing the most mundane, everyday objects. Very soon, however, the list becomes more fantastic, opening up vistas to various countries, times, and dimensions: “arc de triomphe, big ben, den lille havfrue // klippböcker, postorderkataloger / spiralgalaxer, stoftkorn / enhörningshorn, spindelmuttrar, diverse . . . ammoniter, belemniter, hjärnmonster / en famnfull uppstoppade fåglar” (Andtbacka 2008, 12) [arc de triomphe, big ben, the little mermaid / scrapbooks, mail-order catalogues / spiral galaxies, a particle of dust / a unicorn horn, ball screws, diverse . . . ammonites, belemnites, brain monsters, an armful of taxidermied birds]. In Andtbacka's poems, the listing of things contains a promise of exhaustiveness—the hope that the act of naming carries out an ostensive function: it is this—and yet, the things seem to endlessly point toward multitudes that refuse encapsulation. Even if the list presents the things as disparate, one cannot help inquiring into the particular relations these items have with each other. In “Thing,” the listed items have either lost their use value or are things that share a strong connotation of a cultural fantasy—monuments, catalogues of purchasable items, fossils, and so on—but any attempt to ascribe metaphorical significance to the objects seems ambivalent at best. It is tempting, for instance, to read the pile of taxidermied birds as an image for the blurred boundary between the animate and the inanimate and the constructedness of the nature-culture binary, but do we lose the force of that very image—and the tangibility of the thing—if we are too quick to assign to the taxidermied animals a metaphorical significance? Aligning with postmodernist poetry's tendency to reject depth and, by consequence, interpretation, the poem asks us to dwell on surface. Could the inanimate animal represent only itself? In a manner similar to Francis Ponge, the pioneer of writing poetry on things, who in Le Parti pris des choses (Taking the Side of Things) famously expressed the need to side with things while simultaneously emptying out the possibility of knowing anything true about them (Ponge 1942), Andtbacka's poems also point toward the elusiveness of things, for they can certainly be named, but the borders between their categories remain fuzzy and fluid, and possibly interfere with the embodied experience of them.The simple yet radical refusal of relations between the objects renders listing a powerful vehicle for tapping into the question of things outside of the realm of human meaning-making. In consequence, within the recent work of new materialisms, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology, lists have gained attention as enthralling test cases through which to examine new possibilities of thinking thingness. What is striking is that the employment of lists as an inquiry into the ontology of things is a textual practice adopted by theorists as well as poets, signaling a shared preoccupation with the problematics of singularity.3 Consider, for instance, the list of things encountered by the political theorist Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. In the book, Bennett briefly describes a sunny Tuesday morning in Baltimore in a way that, in its personal approach and narrativity, is slightly unconventional but not entirely unusual for a book of political philosophy. What is unusual, however, is what follows, namely, a list of objects, both artificial and natural, typographically separated from her theoretical prose: one large men's black plastic work gloveone dense mat of oak pollenone unblemished dead ratone white plastic bottle capone smooth stick of wood(Bennett 2010, 4)In Vibrant Matter, Bennett's goal is to develop an ontology of things that does not foreground the human subject but rather addresses agency as distributed, consisting of assemblages of human and non-human actors. An essential part of her controversial and largely polemical argument entails an attempt to showcase the vibrancy of things, thereby contesting the view of matter as passive. As she proceeds to describe the affects produced by an unexpectedly striking tableau vivant of the everyday, she employs the list form. For even though the story is necessarily conditioned by her first-person point of view, any narrative framework would foreground her as the experiencing subject and elide that which is most striking about the scene, namely, the suddenly radiant—or, in Bennett's terms, vibrant—self-sufficiency of the dead rat, the bottle cap, and the stick of wood. In her view, which I will seek to trouble, what is at stake in this “speculative onto-story” and the list that conveys it, is the simple yet powerful notion that the significance, being, or function of the dead rat is entirely independent from the presence of a human witness, be it Bennett herself or an abstract experiencing subject (Bennett 2010, 4).Bennett's approach, often labeled New Vitalism, falls under the rubric of new materialisms (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 27), a common name used to describe a variety of movements that challenge anthropocentrism by focusing on the distributed, self-organizing powers of the non-human, on the grounds that it is ecologically necessary to rethink how we position ourselves conceptually in relation to matter (Connolly 2013). The ethical stakes put forth by new materialist theories present a novel and important answer to an urgent ecological call, an answer that is, however, predicated on the exclusion of human power relations, in an attempt to radically depart from any articulation that would prioritize human over non-human. In her wish to break free from decades of constructivist focus, Bennett declares a strategic bracketing of history and human subjects from her account—signaling their exclusion from the particular project at hand, but to be elaborated on other occasions—and, with an oddly hostile use of words, dismisses “Flower Power,” “Black Power,” and “Girl Power” as things concerning other theorists but not her (Bennett 2010, 6). “To attempt, as I do,” she writes, “to present human and nonhuman actants on a less vertical plane than is common is to bracket the question of the human and to elide the rich and diverse literature on subjectivity and its genesis, its conditions of possibility and its boundaries” (Bennett 2010, ix).Andtbacka's poems invite comparison to Bennett and the new materialisms. The task is taken up by the few existing studies on Andtbacka. Jonas Ingvarsson links Wunderkammer's archaeological focus to actor-network theory, which is most often attributed to Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law (Ingvarsson 2015). Similarly, Kristiina Malmio situates Andtbacka in dialogue with Timothy Morton's notion of mesh, contending that his poetry allows us to reconceptualize interconnectedness in space, making way for ecological thought (Malmio 2019). By analyzing Andtbacka's imagery of decay, Malmio compellingly suggests that “the ideas of ‘evolution’ and ‘development,’ thought of as being something logical and progressive and leading to better and more rational forms of existence, are destroyed and at times even deconstructed” (2019, 295). What I propose, however, is that not only does Andtbacka illuminate the new materialist notion of material entanglement in the ecological context, as illustrated by Malmio, but also troubles it. His poems show the limitations of excluding history in service of rethinking space in general and ecology in particular, thus providing a contribution to the discussion about a central source of contention between new materialism and other materialist traditions, such as historical materialism and social constructivism.4I will make two related claims in this article, one that has to do with historical situatedness of matter, and the other with poetic language. Lists appear at the epicenter of this query. Drawing from the modernist and postmodernist traditions of collage and use of found objects, Andtbacka's poems showcase the need to think historically through an epistemological interrogation of the material surface over depth. For what is at stake in the fascination for listing things—both in theory and in poetry—is the affect of unknowing contained in them. Listing as a philosophical device hinges on the precarious terrain of acknowledging the inexhaustibility of things to human cognition while simultaneously indulging in the fantasy of breaching that very unknowability. Andtbacka's poems tap into the question of the human quest for knowledge from a very specific historical moment, namely, the emergence of the curiosity cabinets, or Wunderkammern, as they were known in continental Europe. The cabinets were privately owned collections of the world's wonders, which emerged in the sixteenth century as a result of overseas exploration and the exporting of goods from the colonies (Peim 2019, 180). If Bennett attempts to bracket human subjectivity and history from her project, Andtbacka's lists of exported goods propose the very opposite: things cannot be separated from history. Moreover, this history is the history of colonialism. The curiosity cabinets were a direct result of the exploration and can thus, in Alexander Marr's words, be seen as the emblem of modern curiosity par excellence (Marr 2006, 4). It is clear then that in this inquiry into the historical moment of the expansive quest for knowledge, what is ultimately at stake for Andtbacka is that the history of violence toward humans—both physical and symbolic—is deeply intertwined with our practice of reading things as the other.5By reading Andtbacka's lists in juxtaposition with lists as a theoretical device, another problem emerges. However ecologically powerful Bennett's locution might be, the grounds for her confidence in breaking free from the limitedness of the human perspective—by means of lists, or any linguistic device—remain largely underarticulated, reflecting the lack of exchange between philosophical and poetic scholarship, a phenomenon that reaches beyond Bennett to a range of scholars invested in lists as a philosophical device. Object-oriented ontologist Ian Bogost is one of these scholars. He gives a theoretical analysis of the device Bennett uses poetically.6 By “turning the flowing legato of a literary account into the jarring staccato of real being,” he writes, “lists disconnect rather than unify,” hence the stubborn inexpressiveness at play in the act of cataloguing (Bogost 2012, 40). Bogost offers a useful conceptualization regarding the potency of lists, an account that, on one hand, helps shed light on both Bennett's and Andtbacka's lists. On the other hand, as I will show through Andtbacka, neither Bennett nor Bogost is capable of accommodating for the historical peaks of intensity entailed in lists in general and Andtbacka's poems in particular. I argue that Andtbacka's claim about the historicity entailed in things engages the ethical question regarding anthropocentrism far more persuasively than does new materialist theory. Furthermore, it does so by making full use of the poetic ambivalence that lists entail—ambivalence that neither Bennett nor Bogost sufficiently acknowledges.Interestingly, despite the lack of exchange between Bennett's and Bogost's philosophical accounts and literary theory, their engagements produce similar conclusions regarding the subversive potential of lists—conclusions that take narrative as their point of reference: lists, then, are seen as a way of sidestepping narrative conventions of linearity, spatial coherence, and causation of events.7 In consequence, as lists have mainly been theorized in terms of their interruptive potential within and in relation to narratives, less attention has been paid to the other kinds of functions that they might serve, such as their subversive potential in relation to the human subject.8 Moreover, the question of how to read lists of things in poetry necessarily engages a larger issue, which is how to read things in poetry in general. For although the emergence of new material theory has resulted in an increased interest in reading things literally in narratives,9 the study of reading things in poems has not been sufficiently attended to. Although certain interventions into the reading of things in narrative prose also prove useful when reading poetry, as I will contend through reading Andtbacka, poetry demands a different kind of treatment.Modernist poetry represents a shift in the Anglo-American and European traditions, where things in poetry no longer necessarily carry out the task of reflecting the subject. Here, we can think of Gertrude Stein's obstinate objects in Tender Buttons (“Suppose a man,” “Suppose an eyes,” “Suppose ear rings” [Stein 1914, 16–7]), or William Carlos Williams's expression “no ideas but in things,”10 originally a line in Paterson, later adopted as a manifesto-like call for action by following generations of poets aspiring to get to the things themselves. Although Williams's agenda was specifically concerned with imagist poetics, the catchphrase has developed a life of its own, which reflects the broader picture of poetry's engagement with similar ethical questions proposed by the new materialisms. Given the focus of my paper, it is especially noteworthy that the inquiry into things is a strong tendency of modern and contemporary poetry, as it seeks to examine and underscore the material dimension of language. My interest in the poems is informed by the understanding that, rather than mere illustration of a discussion taking place elsewhere, contemporary poetry in fact actively participates in the negotiations at stake. Andtbacka directs our attention to ways of calling the anthropocentric model of reading into question, and, perhaps, to ways of dismantling it.In Andtbacka's poems, a poetic list functions as the textual equivalent of an archive, and more specifically, a curiosity cabinet. The cabinet of wonders, as it was also known, becomes the main motif of Andtbacka's poems—as already implied in the name of the collection, Wunderkammer—as well as the structural principle behind the various assemblages of things that the poems flood upon the reader. But the flooding of things does not end on the level of readerly experience. The cataloguing of things is characterized by extreme, overdetermined excess, as if the literary curiosity cabinet were struggling to organize the numerous objects into a cohesive constellation, and in failing to do so, stacks them together for later use. However, it seems like the things in the lists are ultimately devoid of any function or use, on both allegorical and mimetic levels—an impression that recurs also on the thematic level of the poems. Wunderkammer is a serial collection of poems, all more or less centered around the theme of collecting in general and obsessive hoarding in particular. First, as a collage that pulls material from different languages, historical times, and source texts, the book is itself a collection of sorts. Second, as the name of the book hints, the poems present themselves as a textual archive. Andtbacka's poems create curiosity cabinets of their own, hoarding materials too manifold to absorb. The book repeatedly refers to itself as a curiosity cabinet in a metapoetic and autobiographical way: the speaker of the poems draws parallels between a curiosity cabinet, the actual book Wunderkammer, and finally, the study where the book was written. The poem “Wunderkammer” provides the reader with metapoetic, yet highly ambiguous directions for reading: “Ganska snart förvandlades detta rum till en förlängning av det diktmanuskript jag höll på att sammanställa. En del av de ‘strandfynd’ jag började fylla det lilla utrymmet med anknöt till nya tidens kuriosakabinett, men jag följde också andra impulser” (Andtbacka 2008, 144) [Pretty soon this room developed into an extension of the poem manuscript that I was working on. The “beach findings” that I started to fill the small space with were intertwined with the newly fashioned curiosity cabinet, but I followed also other impulses]. In the sixteenth century, curiosity cabinets were organized to represent the world, while simultaneously standing for the owner's wealth and power. Similarly, Andtbacka's lists tap into the double function of representation, even as they problematize the centrality of the human subject.Andtbacka's poems present themselves as an archive. However, against the common notion that frames art works as archives of cultural memory—as sites of situated cognition, as Terence Cave has argued (2017)—Andtbacka's poems pose a more literary and literal connection between a list and an archive: the collection of things is not an extension of human culture or a memory-vault, but rather a material machine where knowledge and conceptual hierarchies are produced and perpetuated. A cabinet of curiosities has, as I will show, a very specific role in this. Through the juxtaposition of lists and the figure of the curiosity cabinet, the individual thing is constantly contrasted with the collection as a whole, positing the material and conceptual hierarchizing practices as intertwined. Here, Malmio's notion of world-mapping proves helpful: like a map, curiosity cabinets provide an attempt to understand and create order into global imagination through material representation (Malmio 2019, 287–8). However, the subjective impulses of collecting are also repeatedly foregrounded and, in the historical context of the emergence of curiosity cabinets, the poems point to the larger question of the relationship between humans and things, as well as between subject and object. The poem “Wunderkammer” goes on with further metapoetic commentary: Wunderkammer blev ett sätt att utforska samlandet som fenomen, tinget som språk och språket som ting. Det klassiska kuriosakabinettet uppfattades ofta som en representation av samlaren, men objektet markerar som bekant en gräns mot såväl subjektet som benämningen. Att samla är att ting för ting närma sig det man inte är. (Andtbacka 2008, 144)(Wunderkammer became a way to explore collecting as a phenomenon, a thing as language and language as a thing. The classical curiosity cabinet was understood as a representation of the collector, but as is well known, the object marks the boundary to both the subject and naming. To collect means to approach that which one is not, thing by thing.)Although the self-referential archive portrays a human collecting things in order to represent itself, there is an undercurrent that complicates the gesture of self-representation. The coexistence with things is posited as both a conceptual and physical negotiation of boundaries, and in the context of curiosity cabinets, this negotiation is something that plays out in history. But if, indeed, Andtbacka's poems ask us to read things historically, what would a reading like this look like?For a book of poetry centered around collecting—both individual and cultural—it is fitting to approach the literary curiosity cabinet in a collector's manner: touching, browsing, admiring the very singularity of every little thing. A reading like this is akin to Elaine Freedgood's notion of reading as collecting. In addressing the singularity of Andtbacka's things, her method proves helpful, although not entirely sufficient, as I will show. In Freedgood's invocation of Walter Benjamin's notion of reading as bodily movement, what is at stake is an attempt to resist allegorical reading as long as possible, and, rather, to read in a way that acknowledges the specific material and historical genealogies of things (Freedgood 2006, 2). Although crafted to meet the needs of narrative prose in general, and the emergence of wordy listings of things in the Victorian novel in particular, Freedgood's methodology is one that, with certain reservations, lends itself to reading things in poetry as well. Against the background of the elusiveness of things in Andtbacka's poems, I suggest that Freedgood affords a fruitful entry point into reading Wunderkammer. In its insistence on keeping to the surface of matter and, in so doing, tracing the history of things (such as the supply chain and cultural significance of mahogany in Jane Eyre), her approach invites a reading that recognizes the simultaneously tangible and temporal elements at play in the lists.Returning to Andtbacka's list of things in “Thing,” one should follow Freedgood's suggestion to keep to the surface level and avoid the temptation of reading things immediately as representations of something else, namely, the human subject. Reading like a collector enables one to focus on the things individually, keeping to the tactile plane. One can, for instance, note that the mail-order catalogue that one encounters in this list is, in fact, a list in its own right. The list within a list displays items available for purchase, items that are, however, still mere images, as they have not yet entered the circulation of commodity goods, and thus possess only potential value. The scrapbook that is also found in the list is perhaps materially less polished than the mail-order catalogue, but retains a similar dimension of futurity, by imagining a time yet to come by way of the careful arrangement of the past. On the other hand, the list form in “Thing” also contains things from the other end of the temporal spectrum—things that have reached the endpoint of circulation, use, or affection. The flanges, rotten mattresses, and springs, or the more vaguely named junk, are all items that stand for no apparent value. Instead of the future, they point to the past: a time when they were still functional and desirable.And yet, keeping to the surface proves problematic, as things seem to persistently invite human desires and significance. As is clear to anyone who has experienced the ecstasy of hunting for something special amidst anonymous clutter, it is precisely the useless things, the “fantastic apparatuses,” that retain a very special allure. This “shadowy presence” of objects—the unnamed, the unconceptualized—is the moment of fascination for the “thing theorist” Peter Schwenger, who is invested in calling into question our ways of reading things (2006, 23). In thing theory's reliance on Heideggerian terminology, when things have lost their functional value, junk regains some of the thingness once lost in the process of being named (see Brown 2004, 4). And it is exactly that thingness that is so enthralling to a collector.Lists of things, then, pose a challenge for analysis. For what is at stake in lists is a very particular kind of elusiveness: in the literary tradition that has often read things as representations, reflections, or surrogates of the subject, the excessive listing of things strikes the reader in its superfluousness. Or, as Freedgood points out, we have learned to understand things as largely meaningless (2006, 1). Susan Howe's Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives—another recent work invested in the question of things, poetry, and archives—taps into this problem, namely, the precarious oscillation between meaninglessness and excess of meaning. Howe's poems recall Williams's Paterson by direct citation as well as allusion, and evoke things that present themselves to us in their striking, rupturing, self-sufficiency, or vibrancy, if you will.11Spontaneous Particulars is a dialogue between poetic essay fragments and passages from manuscripts by Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, among others—a dialogue that takes place within archives, and like Wunderkammer, becomes an archive of sorts itself: Things in-themselves and things-as-they are-for-us. / Often by chance, often via out-of-the-way card catalogues, or through / previous web surfing, a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object / (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of / the visible, the mystic documentary telepathy. (Howe 2014, 18)Like Andtbacka's poems, the fragments here call the tension between depth and surface into question, for in the archival emergence of thingness, it is exactly the surface that has depth; things suddenly emerging as discernible from that which is habitually ignored strike us in their startling spontaneity. In a physical archive, it is the unexpected thing that captures our attention in its particularity, like the library book we never knew existed but instantly recognize as ours, after laying eyes on it on the same shelf as the item we came for. For Howe, it is the “simple objects” in the list—“(bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace)”—that hold the capacity to break the habitual perception of things as meaningless and instead gesture toward an understanding of their singular specificity.The broader question evoked both by Howe and Andtbacka is then the question of how to read things in poetry in a way that would resist the temptation to reduce them to subject-centered analysis and would instead recognize their thingness and materiality—how to feel the delicate, thinned texture of the manuscript under our tender fingers before too quickly turning to decipher the weaving (texere) of the allegorical. Howe certainly suggests there isn't one without the other. Acknowledging the connotations of gendered division of labor that Howe's objects of craft offer, the dissonance between the abstract and the tangible speaks to the question of accepted and excluded forms of art. Exploring the specific temporalities and cultural-historical connotations behind the singular objects would, then, be one way to address this question—one chosen by Freedgood. However, Freedgood's focus on the temporal aspect of things is not sufficient to account for things in Wunderkammer, and more specifically, its demand to understand collections of things as historically unfolding. As I would like to suggest, it is not so much the things in themselves as it is the list form—the literary archive—that plays a major role in the way in which Wunderkammer inquires into the history of things.Andtbacka's poems show that what is at stake in the listing of things is exactly a fantasy of things in themselves—a fantasy contained in the very limitedness of human perspective. We have seen this in Howe's invocation of the Kantian differentiation between things as such and things as they appear to us, and correspondingly, Andtbacka's poems point toward the fluctuation that results from the testing of the limits of perception. Bogost has pointed out that lists function as a sort of interruptive provocation, rejecting any definite relationships between the individual objects and, instead, offering a disparate lot of items, divided by “the gentle comma” (2012, 38–41). According to Bogost, this is exactly the kind of philosophical work that lists do: they present objects as singular in multitude, rather than as a representation of a linguistic or conceptual category. As a device situated on the verge of literary and non-literary, lists hold the potential to disrupt the categorizing enterprise of representation, instead motioning toward the complexity of being. In Bogost's terms, Bennett's portrayal of the rat by means of naming is thus a way of envisioning its singularity.In his overdetermined listing of things, Andtbacka makes an intervention into the philosophical discussion around singularity: if a cabinet of curiosities is a way of saying “this is what the world is like,” a list of things is a way of saying that “the world does not exist,” in Levi Bryant's words, meaning that there are no concepts; there are only things (Bryant 2011, 33). There is, in consequence, a strong tension between the modes of representation at play in the poem: the classificatory practice of dividing things into categories, on one hand, and the radical nominalism, on the other. What is so striking about the juxtaposition of the mail-order catalogue, the unicorn horn, and the Arc de Triomphe is, then, exactly the oscillation between the notion of singularity and the stubbornness of the readerly practice of categorizing and attaching signification onto the objects. As noted before, the items in Andtbacka's lists are situated at junctures of human cultural desires, but ultimately, the greatest desire encapsulated in them seems to be the desire to read meaning into the meaningless mass. By entering the literary curiosity cabinet, Andtbacka suggests, the things simultaneously lose the possibility of singularity and necessarily enter the realm of the processes of signification, and yet insistently insinuate that there is a “there,” which is in fact here, constantly breaking into the literary.But if lists are seen as affording a subversive exchange between the literary and non-literary in service of reconfiguring our modes of reading matter, the question remains whether such exchange is something particular to lists or if it concerns the poetic use of language in general. The poetic particularities at play in lists are evident in Andtbacka's metapoetic collage poems, and yet the question is chiefly left aside by both Bogost and Bennett, who, in their shared confidence in the ontological work performed by lists, fai