We learn from The New York Times Book Review about a "primitive" Siberian language that lacks the capacity for abstraction. I guess the reviewer missed linguistics 101. Alll languages are abstract. "Tree" is abstract and so is "birch," to a lesser extent. The poetics of the proper name, the name of the individual not the species. To understand a poem with a lot of proper names you must know or know of the actual people involved.

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When the New York school of poetry got started, there was no previous concept of being a New York school poet. For Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Joseph Ceravolo, Ted Berrigan, Tony Towle, Frank Lima, there was such a concept or model. For Anselm Berrigan...

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I remember when my father checked me out copies of Willliam Carlos Williams' complete works (Collected Earlier Poems, Later Poems, Picture from Breughel) from the University Library. I was probably 13 or 14. Before that I had mainly read in anthologies. The process of finding which poems were of value on my own was so much more rewarding than being given a preselection. Of course, there is disappointment. Most of the poems did not seem very good to me at the time. Finding new poems that were not in the anthologies, however, more than compensated for this. Our pedagogy of literature is based on the anthology. This deprives the student of the independence needed to truly be an active reader. I still know poems of Williams that few people seem to have read. "The Jungle" for example. I've done the same thing with Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems. There are many, many extremely interesting poems that are virtually unknown, lurking within those pages.