My first memory of the alphabet is seeing the letters—they
were about the size of a mug—printed on one of those long pieces of posterboard
that is meant to rest above the blackboard. I think there were apples and worms
next to the letters, and the worms may have even had glasses. What fascinated
me were the shapes of the letters, especially those that had tails facing this
way or that. And I can’t forget the serious, attentive looking capitals standing
next to the miniscules so that the whole picture looked like a silhouette of
the Alps or a train of parents and children waiting outside a store the morning
after Thanksgiving.
I’ve always wanted to write an
abecedarian, to use the structure of my favorite mountain range to order my
thoughts in the way those giants Czeslaw Milosz and Ezra Pound once did, but I
could never decide on what would be worth sharing. The last year or so as I’ve
been happily answering the smart, probing questions of interviewers, I’ve been
anxiously hoping no one would ask the dreaded question: “Who are your
influences?” It would be like a geneticist walking up to someone on the street
and saying,
“Here’s a pencil and paper. Now sketch your genome.” It would be
impossible to remember every distant cousin and great-great grandparent on
someone’s side twice removed, much less to whom you owe your odd-shaped toes or
your long eyelashs. The same is true for literary influence. What’s more, I
object to a literary family being shaped like a tree because it implies that
Homer or the writer of Gilgamesh is the old, hidden root to our twigs when
nothing could be further from the truth because I just saw Homer in a
bookstore; he was lounging on a whole shelf in fact, and looked as vibrant and
full of fire as any debut author.
What follows is an attempt to head
off that question of forebears. Some purists will see my alphabet as messy or
even sacrilegious since I’ve opened the doors and let in the digraphs, those
crazy uncles that never get invited to family reunions. If I made this list
tomorrow, it would surely be different. Happily so, indeed.
a – Anna Akhmatova
b – Elizabeth Bishop
c – Amy Clampitt
ch – Charles M. Schultz
d – Annie Dillard
e – Ralph Waldo Emerson
f – Flannery O’Connor
ph – Philip Levine
g – Gerald Stern
h – Seamus Heaney
i – Isaac Babel
j – Jorie Graham
k – Franz Kafka
l – Stan Lee
m – Czeslaw Milosz
mc – Cormac McCarthy
n – Pablo Neruda
o – Sharon Olds
p – “Papa” Hemingway
q – David Quammen
r – Robert Frost
s – Mark Strand
sh – Sam Shepard
t – Leo Tolstoy
th – Henry David Thoreau
u – Du Fu
v – Vasko Popa
w – William Carlos Williams
wh – Walt Whitman
x – is for the anonymous author of “Tom O’Bedlam”
y – W.B. Yeats
z – Zbigniew Herbert
& – is for Jack Gilbert who is not last but first on my
list when I start over tomorrow.