The proper nouns in the poem “Poem of the Proper Nouns” function as differential filters. Almost noone could know all of them. Some readers will recognize the majority of them. Vast numbers of people will be almost completely in the dark. If I didn’t know who any of these people were, I would find the poem utterly inert. As it is, I associate each name with a discrete emotion. I also appreciate certain poetic devices in the names: alliteration (Dick Detective/Clark Coolidge); pseudonyms (Mark Twain); reversibility (I used to think Elmore Leonard was Leonard Elmore); ambiguity (Ben Heller could be one of two people, in my mind); gender ambiguity (drummer Shelly Manne is male, not female); alternation between fiction and reality, different linguistic worlds, etc...


We might try to get inside of the mind of the person who put this list together. What was I thinking? I was trying to get at the poetics of the proper name: how does the proper name function in poetry? I wrote this text in order to try to find out something about this. In Ashbery’s and Brainard’s “The Vermont Notebook” there is list of poets that inspired me, in part. I make no claims for the poetic value of the list. Could such a thing have any aesthetic value at all? I was guided by certain principles, however. There had to be an air of mystery. I wasn’t going to include William Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, or John Coltrane.

My interest in this topic dates back to my intensive readings of Frank O’Hara many years ago. To use your friends’ names in poems seemed a wonderful thing to me. But it also depended on your friends’ being identifiable figures, poets and painters, which my friends in High School obviously were not. So my poem includes some “anonymous” friends along with New York School poets and painters, and miscellaneous names that occured to me along the way. Bill Berkson is famous, in part, because he appears in so many F O’H poems.

I know I shouldn’t have to explain it! In some way, however, the explanation IS the point, since I wrote it in order to reflect on a specific poetic problem. That is how literature should be taught. Dick Detective, by the way, is a name that appears in several of Gilbert Sorrentino’s novels.