137 Writers and the Words They're Best Known For
Kaveh Akbar Presents a Crowdsourced List of Signature Literary Words
I was recently talking with Rachel Zucker about how, after writing Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, the word “gratitude” now belongs to Ross Gay, how we can’t hear the word and not think of Ross the way we can’t hear “purple” and not think of Prince. This got me thinking about other writers with signature words, and so I asked Twitter—who else has them? This is (the best of) what we came up with.
Maya Angelou: “phenomenal”
John Ashbery: “convex,” “forsythia”
Margaret Atwood: “handmaid”
Charles Baudelaire: “fleurs,” “flâneur”
John Berryman: “bored”
Beyoncé: “lemonade”
Frank Bidart: “desire”
Jorge Luis Borges: “labyrinth”
Ray Bradbury: “Fahrenheit”
Jericho Brown: “please”
Elizabeth Bishop: “disaster,” “isinglass,” “armadillo”
William Blake: “tyger,” “auguries”
David Bowie: “glitter”
Gwendolyn Brooks: “cool”
Anne Carson: “red”
Raymond Carver: “cathedral”
Victoria Chang: “boss”
Heather Christle: “heliopause”
Lucille Clifton: “hips,” “celebrate”
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “plunder”
Samuel Coleridge: “albatross”
Billy Collins: “lanyard”
Eduardo C. Corral: “lightning”
Hart Crane: “bridge”
Robert Creeley: “sd”
Dante: “inferno”
Mahmoud Darwish: “exile,” “almond”
Emily Dickinson: “fly,” “buzz,” “slant,” “nobody”
John Donne: “batter,” “flea”
T.S. Eliot: “spoons,” “whimper,” “etherized”
Ralph Ellison: “invisible”
Martín Espada: “alabanza”
Shira Erlichman: “lithium”
Tarfia Faizullah: “seam”
Nick Flynn: “bullshit”
Carolyn Forché: “witness”
Vievee Francis: “primeval”
Aretha Franklin: “respect”
Daisy Fried: “poetess”
Robert Frost: “snowy”
Ross Gay: “gratitude”
Kahlil Gibran: “prophet”
William Gibson: “neuromancer”
Jack Gilbert: “Pittsburgh”
Allen Ginsberg: “howl,” “holy,” “moloch,” “kaddish”
Louise Glück: “iris”
Rigoberto González: “pillowbook”
Robert Hass: “blackberry”
Robert Hayden: “austere,” “offices,” “blueblack”
Terrance Hayes: “lighthead”
Seamus Heaney: “bog”
Frank Herbert: “dune”
Zbigniew Herbert: “cogito”
Homer: “odyssey”
Gerard Manley Hopkins: “dappled,” “pied”
Langston Hughes: “rivers”
Zora Neale Hurston: “dialect”
Michael Jackson: “sh’mon”
Saeed Jones: “bootblack”
John Keats: “nightingale,” “urn”
Jack Kerouac: “road”
Brigit Pegeen Kelly: “goat”
Stephen King: “misery”
Yusef Komunyakaa: “facing”
Kendrick Lamar: “humble”
Li-Young Lee: “persimmons”
John Lennon: “imagine”
Phillip Levine: “work”
Larry Levis: “vortex”
Layli Long Soldier: “grasses,” “whereas”
Federico García Lorca: “duende,” “verde”
Audre Lorde: “sister”
Robert Lowell: “skunk”
Michael Martone: “four”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “solitude”
Nate Marshall: “Chicago”
David Tomas Martinez: “hustle”
Andrew Marvell: “green”
Karl Marx: “kapital”
Adrian Matejka: “mixology”
Rachel McKibbens: “blud”
W.S. Merwin: “vixen,” “lice”
John Milton: “paradise”
Marianne Moore: “pangolin”
Toni Morrison: “beloved”
Angel Nafis: “woo-woo”
Maggie Nelson: “bluet”
Pablo Neruda: “topaz”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil: “oceanic”
Alice Notley: “owls”
Frank O’Hara: “lunch”
Sharon Olds: “hymen”
Mary Oliver: “geese”
Charles Olson: “projective”
Octavio Paz: “sunstone”
Morgan Parker: “Beyoncé”
Carl Phillips: “cortege”
Sylvia Plath: “daddy,” “blackberrying”
Edgar Allan Poe: “raven,” “nevermore”
D.A. Powell: “cocktails,” “repast”
Ezra Pound: “canto”
Prince: “purple”
Marcel Proust: “madeleine”
Queen Latifah: “unity”
Adrienne Rich: “wreck”
Rainer Maria Rilke: “angel,” “archaic”
Claudia Rankine: “citizen”
Arthur Rimbaud: “drunken,” “boat,” “illuminations”
Max Ritvo: “reincarnation”
Theodore Roethke: “greenhouse”
Patrick Rosal: “kundiman”
Anne Sexton: “masturbator”
Don Share: “squandermania”
William Shakespeare: “impediments,” “wherefore”
Danez Smith: “boy”
Patricia Smith: “dazzler”
Rebecca Solnit: “mansplain”
Gertrude Stein: “buttons”
John Steinbeck: “wrath”
Gerald Stern: “grapefruit”
Wallace Stevens: “imagination,” “peignoir”w
Mark Strand: “missing”
Mary Szybist: “incarnadine”
Dylan Thomas: “herons”
Hunter S. Thompson: “loathing”
Ocean Vuong: “ocean”
David Foster Wallace: “jest”
Walt Whitman: “grass,” “multitudes”
Tennessee Williams: “mendacity”
William Carlos Williams: “plums,” “wheelbarrow”
Tom Wolfe: “vanities”
William Wordsworth: “leech,” “daffodils”
Franz Wright: “ill”
James Wright: “hammock”
W.B. Yeats: “gyre”
Jake Adam York: “murmuration”
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. His novel, Martyr! was shortlisted for the National Book Award. He lives in Iowa City.
