hummingbirds are birds but birds are not necessarily hummingbirds.

Yesterday, Iris Vitiello was showing me Will it Blend videos & we saw a ruby-throated hummingbird outside the window.

I said "Hummingbird!"
Iris said "Oh, it's a ruby-throated one."
Oh yes, of course (it is the duty of 8 1/2 year olds to know these kinds of things).
Which brings me to the subject of specificity.

While at Naropa studying poetry, some of my teachers like Andrew Shelling or Anne Waldman (yes, I dared to write their names next to each other) always liked to harp on the necessity of SPECIFICITY in poetry. It seemed that it was a crime in poetry to not name the particular type of tree or flower. That somehow their Linnaean taxonomic names created depth or maybe helped the audience see more exactly what you were seeing, making it more successful, interesting etc.

However, as someone who does not know the difference between say a dahlia & a gladioli, a maple & an elm, a lhasa apso & a bijon frise, I find these things completely annoying, and frankly, kind of alienating, when I am reading a poem.

Of course, I do have a tendency to avoid specificity entirely in my own work. Someone reading would (& should not) know anything exactly when reading a poem of mine. If they did, that would be creepy. BC says I have a fear of nouns. And it's true, but why? To me, they are too nouny. And by that I mean, they have a cloying feeling. They feel too particular. Too particular to themselves or to my experience, I am not sure. I just know I get a sickening kind of feeling like when I read something that is overly sentimental. Of course, for many years I wrote very, very ridiculous, sentimental, overly poetic lyrical poetry, which makes me cringe just thinking of it. Ick.

But I wonder if this lack of interest in the particularness of the world's objects is weird. I remember a conversation I had with Tim who was amazed that I couldn't immediately tell you what was a Chrysler & what was a Buick (god, I almost want to check to make sure they are not the same thing) or a Toyota, etc. He had worked for a car dealership, so he could tell the car & model by the shape of the headlight & sometimes the sound of the motor. He could not get over the fact that when I had a dream with a car in it, it was just a "car" not a Ford Taurus or whatever. I remember him telling the story of getting rear-ended by a SUV & seeing it coming in the rear-view mirror he thought "Oh no! This red Jeep Grand Cherokee is going to hit me!" I don't know what kind it actually was, & I actually had to look that one up, because the only kind of SUV I could think of was an Escalade.

Anyway, which is weirder? To see the world in alarming detail, to be able to name everything down to its particular variety ("Oh, that's a cirrocumulus stratiformis undulatus cloud.") or as less differentiated ("That bird landed on a tree.")? Is one better? More engaged in the world?