Where the streets have no name

A whole bunch of people answered the challenge about one-word poems. The list of poems (re-ordered to make it slightly more interesting) is:

Motherless

Moist

Horsefeathers

Humbug!!!

Conundrum

Lighght

And the winner is... James Joyce, and the word "Yes".

There's a story that James Joyce was invited to dinner and spent most of the time very quiet and looking pensive. Eventually, he said:

'I'm sorry I've been so quiet, I was looking for the right word for something I'm writing, and I've finally found it.'

'Oh, please tell us, what's the word?' said the host, expecting to hear some wonderful new invented word. (Remember, this is the man that wrote Finnegan's Wake, a novel stuffed with so many invented words that it has been often described as being written in its own invented language.)

'The word is "yes".'

And if you turn to the last page of Ulysses, Joyce's masterpiece, there it is. Of all the real and invented words, that's the one he chose to finish it off.

"Yes" is also the love poem that sparkled one of the most famous and least likely marriages of the history of rock&roll: John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John first met Yoko when she was doing an art exhibition in London. Because John was a superstar at the time, he got to see it before the official opening. One of the exhibits was a ladder, and at the top of it, a spyglass he was supposed to look through to see something. He went up, looked through the spyglass, and he saw this tiny placard saying "Yes". Afterwards, John would always say that if it had said something rebellious or negative, he wouldn't have been interested, but "yes" was something he could connect with.

After single words, let's talk a little about names. Hurricane Irene has just passed over New York, and I was reminded of the lyrics of Where the streets have no name by U2:

The city's aflood

And our love turns to rust

We're beaten and blown by the wind

Trampled in dust

I'll show you a place

High on a desert plain

Where the streets have no name

Many streets in Manhattan have no name, but a number. But U2 say the song is actually about Belfast, about people not daring to say their street name because it could identify them as Catholic or Protestant. And some people note that Northern Ireland isn't known for their deserts or dust, and suspect the song was written in Ethiopia, a place they visited after Live Aid, where a lot of streets actually don't have a name.

It doesn't really matter which place U2 really meant. One of the things that make this song work is that "where the streets have no name" sounds like a magical place that doesn't really exist. We are so attached to the names we put on things that the idea of taking the name off immediately transports us to another plane. I wrote once a poem about this, and if you are really good, I may even post it later.

What are your favourite place names?