Names

“What’s in a name?” asks Juliet in her famed soliloquy.  “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Yet, the name of a person is a thing.

Some people stuff their name in their pocket and shuffle away quietly.  Some wave their name about as if an honored flag.  Other’s feel a need to change their name for recognition.  In this scenario Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner becomes “Sting.”  Dwayne Douglas Johnson becomes “The Rock.”    Prince Rogers Nelson, after proudly strumming his guitar under the singular banner of “Prince,” transforms his name into a weird symbol.  Equally notable is Arnold George Dorsey assuming “Engelbert Humperdinck.”

Just as there is big infinity of space all around us, there exists a small and ever declining infinity of fractions between the numbers one and two.  And, I suppose, there similarly exists an infinity of names we might choose because, after all, we are free to choose numbers for names.

While I often pluck a collection of Sylvia Plath poems from my library and raptly read poems of bees or troubled women; while T.S. Eliot dragged me in amazement through The Waste Land ; and even though Wallace Stevens gave me Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, my favored book of poems is a thin and unheralded collection written by children.  The book is titled I Feel like Touching Something That’s Not There.  It is a collection of poems written by elementary and secondary school students from all across Montana between 1975 and 1976.

I love the book and the poems within it.  The smallest poems are most amazing.  One poem, written by “Susan” from Whittier Elementary in Bozeman is this:

BURYING MY NAME

Sue

Uses her

Shovel

And Nickname

Whenever I hear the word “poetry,” that poem is the first thing to enter my mind.

—Mitchell Hegman