Vocabulary fascinates me. Individual writers often have very distinct styles that are identifiable entirely through the words they choose. Often working in longer lined forms that provide a maximum of freedom & context for the specificity of his selections, Forrest Gander unleashes his expansive vocabulary with a deep love for the sheer clutter of the polysyllabic:

       The solid given upward, hemorrhaging into air, the vista
tinged Merthiolate and twisted

Or, elsewhere in Science & Steepleflower, (New Directions, 1998) “The land arborescing,” a verb Gander has employed on multiple occasions, more I suspect than any of the rest of us could say. Gander has a naturalist’s bias toward a vocabulary not only of exacting detail, but with an ear turned towards that heritage of lush Latinisms lurking & available for a given depiction. If I read Ken Irby for his inexhaustible ear, the absolute pleasure it affords, I do Gander likewise for his word choices. They seem fabulous, in every sense of that term.

A second poet with an exact sense of which words to use and why is H.D. In her work, each word stands walled, a brick:

Think, O my soul,
of the red sand of Crete;
think of the earth; the heat
burnt fissures like the great
backs of the temple serpents;
think of the world you knew;
as the tide crept, the land
burned with a lizard-blue
where the dark sea met the sand.

In this first strophe of the poem “Phaedra,” all but four words of its fifty are built with but one sound. The four with two are placed with great care. Not one term has three or more sounds – it would push out of the line like a shock to discover one. No clutter here. But that is H.D. to the max. Count the sounds per line: 4-6-6-6-7-6-6-6-7. H.D. loved that great clean sense to her work, perhaps even too much.