The (Often Obscure) Names of Things

I recently read a poem by Elaine Equi entitled "Now that I Know what Feverfew Looks Like." I won't reproduce the poem here, but I can paraphrase: the poet is depressed because she read a book by a fellow poet she admires, and found poem after poem littered with the names of flowers, rather like a catalog or a list, as if the poet wanted to say something but couldn't quite say it so she just kept listing more flowers. The title leads us to believe that we're not talking about roses and daisies here, but maybe saxifrage, foamflower, alumroot, etc. So this got me thinking...

I've heard other poets/readers complain that they want to be led more directly through a poem - that they want to be fed the sounds, scents, flavors of a thing, that its name doesn't suffice (especially if they're unfamiliar with its referent). Although I think packing a poem with unfamiliar terms can be offputting (I did this very thing in a workshop exercise on "gardens" to see where it would take me), I have always been moved by the (often obscure) names of things. Words - especially unmodified nouns - have so much power. They are in themselves small encyclopedias of time and place; they encode social relationships, to use some anthro-speak.

I picked up a used copy of Seamus Heaney's Collected Poems, 1965-1975 about a week ago. I wasn't planning on buying anything when I went into Powell's, but I came across this book and opened it to a random page. Next came the proverbial "blew the top of my head off" moment. Over the next few days, I read the whole book cover to cover. When I read words like peat, gorget, loam, demesne, maw, turf-face, fledge, coomb, I am absolutely transported. I don't know exactly what each of these words means, but they exude rural Ireland, and perhaps more important, they carry, convincingly, the voice of the narrator. If your poem's narrator is a hooker in the city trying to score smack, having her describe her syringe falling in a patch of feverfew is unconvincing. But if you have a farmer or a gardener spying a sprig of tansy growing in the loam that borders the bog, that's a different story.

I have read many poems that employ a nautical metaphor for struggles with relationships and identity, and the nautical terms they use go right over my head - bowsprit, boom, spanker, spar. And yet, I somehow get the point; in fact, I may be more moved than those readers who happen to be sailors, because the fuzzy edges allow room for multiple interpretations. (See, for example, Olena Kalytiak Davis's poem "The Unhoused Heart" from her stunning collection And her Soul Out of Nothing).

When I was doing research in Karachi, a Sindhi friend told me that people in her village enjoy reciting the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif, the brilliant poet-mystic from the middle ages who is considered the "Shakespeare" of the Sindhi language. The thing is, the language of his poetry is archaic in the same way that Shakespearean English is today - it reflects a dialect no longer spoken by the majority of Sindhi-speakers. According to my friend, her fellow villagers greatly enjoy reciting verses from Latif's "Risalo" and debating the meaning of obscure words.

So...I am not taking some stand against the movement for clarity and accessibility in poetry; I'm just saying that there is pleasure to be had in ambiguity.