where we live

For years I’ve encouraged my writing students not to be afraid to use proper nouns in their work: the names of friends, family members, and especially places, such as streets, towns, cafés, stores, and so on. Not only do these words ground the reader in a specific time and place, but they give pleasure to the reader.

I suspect that the reluctance to use proper nouns arises from an impulse to attempt to craft poems that seem poem-y enough. Certainly I was once governed by such impulses, but then I read Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, including such name-dropping poems as “The Day Lady Died” and “A Step Away from Them”—poems in which the narrator walking around midtown Manhattan at lunchtime comes into vivid and sorrowful awareness of mortality. Or, to take another even more extreme example, there is “To My Old Addresses” (subscription required for access) by Kenneth Koch, which is (as the title might suggest) mostly a list of addresses where the narrator once lived and concludes with a yearning so intense I just about weep every time I read the poem: “I am all right but I think I will never find / Sustenance as I found in you, oh old addresses, / Numbers that sink into my soul / Forty-eight, nineteen, twenty-three, o worlds in which I was alive!”

We may have good reasons not to name names—for example, to avoid betraying yourself, your family, or your friends. But otherwise, I say name everything and everyone. After all, we don’t live in a mystical realm; all of our sorrow and yearning manifests right here in the everyday, which for me is in central Brooklyn, where the scent of the linden trees has now faded and the neighbors set off fireworks every night.

Anyway, after making many of these points in response to a question from a student in the class I taught on Tuesday, I sat in bed with the poems of Pierre Reverdy, which I’ve been reading slowly over the past couple months, and which exemplifies a counterargument to my general rule favoring proper nouns. (How ironic, then, that it is Frank O’Hara’s famous lines, “My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy,” that introduced me to his work.) As Mary Ann Caws writes in the preface to the NYRB edition of Reverdy’s poems, “The landscape of his poetry is both instantly recognizable and, devoid of local specificity, imbued with an otherworldly strangeness.” My favorite of his poems (so far), “Under the Stars,” begins:

Maybe I had lost the key, and everyone around me laughs and shows me an enormous key hanging from his neck.

I am the only one who has no way to get in somewhere. They have all disappeared and the closed doors leave the street sadder. No one. I’ll knock on every door.

Where is this place where the narrator is isolated, locked out? It is a dreamscape, it is nowhere—a place both real and not real, infused with sorrow and yearning. . . . I don’t yet understand what makes Reverdy’s poems work, except that the dreamscape of his poems had to have been something very real to him—not thought up or planned—for it to be so full of feeling as it is.

I’ve written

For the Ploughshares blog in June I wrote about the “third space” and Housekeeping and about authorship, betrayal, and reading Kate Zambreno.

I’ve read

“Afternoon” by Pierre Reverdy, translated by Lydia Davis

Recipe for writing a New York School poem, which I have often shared with my writing students—see items 2 & 3 on the list

Kaveh Akbar’s interview of Morgan Parker at Divedapper (have I linked to this interview here before?), which I have also shared with my writing students, and which includes a discussion of “The Day Lady Died”