The Anthologist

by Nicholson Baker

  AT THE END of the week I didn’t have the introduction. Roz looked sad and hurt, and I felt miserable. She said, “Well, are you at least making progress?” I said I was, because I was, I was making great strides. But toward what? I was having a gigantic hopeless exciting futile productive comprehensive life adventure up in the barn. I was hoarse from singing. I said I thought I’d probably have the introduction done after another week. Or at least a flying spoon poem as a fallback.

  Roz pointed out that I was going to Switzerland very soon, and that was really the drop-dead deadline: get the introduction done before Switzerland. And I agreed that it certainly was. I went to a used bookstore and bought another anthology of Elizabethan verse—my fifth—and also the W. H. Auden/Chester Kallman edition of Elizabethan songs, with a cover drawn by Edward Gorey. I was pleased to have that—it includes actual musical settings.

  And I spent some time on iTunes, where I found a song I liked by a group called The Damnwells. It’s called “I Will Keep the Bad Things from You,” and it’s sung by a songwriter named Alex Dezen. At one point you can hear him turning the page. He’s sitting there with his guitar, and he’s doing this song, and he doesn’t even know the words. He’s just written it, apparently. He’s just discovering it. And it’ll never be as real for him as at that moment. He turns the page, and you hear the schwoooeeeet, and you want to cry.

  Also I bought some software so that I could save the Flash video of Sinead O’Connor on YouTube doing her live rendition of “She Moved Through the Fair,” which is even better than the one on iTunes. So I was moving forward, in a sense.

  Roz said, But sweetie, you’re spending all this money, and we don’t have it. And that’s true, we didn’t have it. Back in the nineties I took a swoosh in the stock market, with money I got from my grandfather, and I did well for a while. That’s when I met Roz and she moved in. I bought some shares of Koss Corporation, the headphone company, and then I split the hairy root ball and bought some Canon Depository Receipts. Then I split that hairy root ball. I bought Maxtor and then sold it. I bought stock in a tiny company called BeOS, and it doubled in a day and a half. Then I bought lots of bad stocks over several years and all the money shrank away, more or less. Roz was supporting us now, except for an equity loan on my house and a chunk of money I borrowed from my sister, who is not that rich. If, or when, I handed in the introduction to Only Rhyme, I’d get seven thousand dollars, because my editor, Gene, is very generous. Apart from that there was almost nothing due, just the odd thousand in honoraria here and there from book reviews or readings or panel discussions, like the one coming up in Switzerland. I can’t teach. I tried it once at Haffner College and it practically unhinged me.

  I said to Roz, “I know it seems excessive and a little odd, but I think this is the only way to really lay it all out fresh, and sing the pain.” She nodded and she said okay, but in a very small voice. I could see she was losing faith in me and losing her love for me. And her respect for me.

  BECAUSE WHO WANTS to be forced into the role of enforcer? Roz was a writer herself, and an editor; she wasn’t a doubter and a prodder. She wasn’t some calendar-tapping scold. She actually liked my poem “Smooth Motion”—she was first attracted to me because of it, I think. At least, she wasn’t attracted to me for my looks, because I’m not smooth, in fact I’m pretty rough looking. Although I’ve lost some weight recently, and once Roz did say that I looked good in a certain subtly houndstoothed jacket that she helped me pick out.

  She hadn’t reckoned on having to be forever poking at me to get me to write one forty-page introduction to an anthology. And she didn’t want to be arguing over money. And she wanted to adopt a child and I didn’t—why? I don’t know. I see these horribly spoiled rude selfish kids and don’t want to risk being the father of one.

  But I think if I’d just written even a tiny five-line poem about an inchworm on my pant leg it would have been fine. Anything, something. Roz commuted all the way to Concord to work for an alternative newspaper, but I think it would have been all right with her to support us for a little while as long as I was getting actual work accomplished.

  But when I came down empty-handed from the barn at the end of the second week, that’s when I really wounded her. She was standing in the hall putting her keys in her purse. Beautifully made-up. Smelling clean from her shower. She looked up and said, bravely, “So can I read it?” And I felt this horrible inner sensation: my caramel clusters of self were liquefying and pooling in the warmth of their own guilt. I said, “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t have anything.”

  And that was it. My beautiful, patient, funny, short, loving girlfriend—the woman I’d been with longer than anyone else—moved out. She was right to leave me, but it felt really bad. Horrible, in fact. Plus I was broke.

  3

  I SAT IN THE BARN, thinking of the metal chin-up bar I had in my doorway when I was ten years old. The bar had gray rubber rings, and when you tightened the middle you could hear the doorjamb crack in a nice way. The tightening of the bar was the first assertion of secret strength.

  And then you did chin-ups, one, maybe two. Possibly three. There was a long unleveraged uphauling struggle, in which you tried to use your neck cords to help. I wanted to have a chin-up bar now. Before I died, I wanted to do chin-ups at a chin-up bar in my house for a year. What else did I want to accomplish before I died? I wanted to finish a good poem about the flying spoon, and I wanted to clean up my office, and I wanted to answer some letters I should have answered, and I wanted to write down what I know. Especially what I know about meter, and about how that single nonsense word “pentameter” has caused untold confusion, pain, and suffering.

  Maybe my theory of meter will be helpful to people. It turns out that helping is the main thing. If you feel that you have a use, if you think your writing furthers life or truth in some way, then you keep writing. But if that feeling stops, you have to find something else to do. Or die, I guess. Or mow the lawn, or go somewhere and do something, like visit a historic house, or clean up a room, or teach people something that you think is worth knowing.

  FREE VERSE really got rolling about a hundred years ago. It wasn’t just free in the sense of being very loose in the rhyme and meter department. Free verse was sexually free. That’s what nobody understands. Free verse meant free, naked, un-clothed, un-Victorian people scampering about in an unfettered sort of way. That’s why it was so exciting. I was trying to explain this to my next-door neighbor, Nanette. I ran into her when I was out walking my dog, Smacko. Nan was out again picking up trash with her plastic trash bag. I asked her what she’d found. She’d found some beer cans, a pair of panties, half of a meatball sandwich in a paper plate, an ice cream wrapper, and an old laceless shoe. We walked back to her house, and she asked me if I knew anything about Toro lawn-mowers. I said I knew a little, because I do. Her lawnmower was starting and then dying after about a second. I pulled off the air filter and banged the float cup with a wrench and suddenly, to my surprise, the mower worked. I went around her yard once with it.

  Then she asked—out of politeness—“So why did poems stop rhyming? Were all the rhymes just used up?” I said no, no, the rhymes weren’t used up, they can never be used up until the English language itself is used up, because rhyme-words are really just the ending sounds of whole phrases and whole lines. It doesn’t matter whether “breath” and “death” have been rhymed before, only whether the two new lines that end with “breath” and “death” are interesting and beautiful lines. Although sometimes it’s good to give certain rhymes a break for a century or two.

  She said, “So then why?” I told her about Mina Loy, the beautiful free-verse poet whose poems were published in a magazine called Others. Mina Loy had romped with the famous Futurist Filippo Marinetti, and he treated her badly, because he was an unpleasant egotist who liked war and cars and didn’t like women. He’d written a play about a man with a thirty-foot penis that he wrapped around himself when he wanted to take a na
p.

  “Golly,” said Nan.

  I told her that Mina Loy wrote a poem about sex with him, or with one of the other Futurists, in which she compared Cupid to a pig “rooting erotic garbage.” And American newspapers picked up on this phrase, and it made her famous as a free-verser.

  “Very interesting,” said Nan. We said goodbye. She began mowing her lawn, and I went into my kitchen. I opened my freezer, looked at the motionless mists in there, and then closed it.

  I STARTED A POEM that began “On Wayland Street / I talked to my neighbor Nan / She had picked up a beer can / and a pair of panties.” I wrote seven more lines, and then I got to the word “shrubbery” and I stopped, disgusted. I’ve never liked the word “shrubbery.” Then I changed the beginning to “In the fulth of Wayland Street / I talked to my neighbor Nan.” “Fulth” is a word that Thomas Hardy used in his poem on the death of Swinburne.

  Immediately I realized that this was not a change for the better, and I changed it back. And then here’s what I did. I’ll pass it on to you as a tip. I read what I’d written aloud to myself. Which is what you always do. But this time I used a foreign accent. The foreign accent is the twist that helps. I chose Charles Simic’s Serbian twang. Other foreign accents that can help you hear your own poem better are Welsh, Punjabi, and Andrei Codrescu’s Romanian. If those don’t work, try using a juicy Dorchester accent, or a Beatles Liverpool accent, or a perfectly composed Isabella Rossellini accent. Or read it as if you were Wystan Auden and you’d smoked a million cigarettes and brought a bottle of bine to wed with you every night. See if that helps. It didn’t help me much with the beginning of this poem, but it has helped me in the past and maybe it’ll help you.

  I MET MY FRIEND TIM for a drink at the Press Room, a bar, and I told him Roz was gone. He was somewhat sympathetic. “You drove her away,” he said. “You didn’t give her anything to believe in.”

  I asked him how his book was coming. Tim’s book, which he’s going to call Killer Queen, is a look at Queen Victoria’s dark, imperialistic side. Tim split up with his wife several years ago, and he took up eating. He teaches at Haffner College.

  Tim leaned forward. “I work away at this book, and I describe how the Queen oversaw this huge system of plunder and destruction that wrecked people’s lives all over the globe, and I’ve raked together all this knowledge, and I enjoy doing it because I feel I’m getting at the truth—”

  I nodded.

  “But it means so much less to me,” Tim went on, “than if I were sitting on a couch talking to a woman of grace and intelligence who was wearing an attractive sweater.”

  I made agreeing noises. “And beads over the sweater,” I said. “Roz strings the most exceptional beads.”

  Tim announced that he was going to a pick-your-own blueberry field with a woman he’d met. She had a friend. Would I like to go? I said sure. Then I asked him a question. “Is there any chance Haffner would take me back?”

  “I’ll sound out the dean if you’d like,” Tim said, but he looked doubtful. “You kind of alienated them when you quit so suddenly last time.”

  “I had a scare,” I said.

  “My advice is: get that anthology out,” said Tim. “That’s your ticket back to the classroom. Tell people why rhyme exists. Give them a big, fancy neurobiological explanation. People love fancy neurobiological explanations.” Then he slapped his legs. “I’m off.”

  When I got home there was a tax bill, and a box from Amazon that held James Fenton’s anthology, The New Faber Book of Love Poems. Fenton’s introduction is only twelve pages long, and it feels like the perfect length. He includes six of his own poems, which I must say shocked me. When Sara Teasdale edited her book of love poems by women, The Answering Voice, she didn’t include even one of her own, even though hers were better than almost all the others, except maybe Millay’s and Christina Rossetti’s. But Fenton’s right to include himself. His poem about being stuck in Paris is probably the best love lyric in the book, and we would feel cheated if it wasn’t there. I wish to gimbleflap I’d written that poem.

  Fenton also includes six quite good Wendy Cope poems. I once met Wendy Cope at a radio show in London. Her poem “The Aerial” is in my anthology. Unfortunately I see that it’s also in Fenton’s anthology. But that can happen, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it? Call it anthology rhyme—when a familiar poem tumbles around in a new setting.

  I WANT TO TELL YOU why poetry is worth thinking about—from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it’s a much better idea to think about other things.

  Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that’s about it. And that’s really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names—Andrew Marvell, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rossetti. Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selima Hill, Troy Jollimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you’ve memorized some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that’s very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: “As Selima Hill says: ‘A really good fuck makes me feel like custard.’ ”

  And after college there may be later phases as well, maybe one or two later phases where you suddenly get interested in poems again. I’ve had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I’ve been genuinely interested in poetry—interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing it is a very different activity. Writing it, it’s as if the word “poetry” is a thousand miles away. It’s inapplicable. What I’m trying to do is make some new Rowland Emmett machine that doesn’t have a name. I know of course that it’s going to end up being called a poem, but “poem” is one of those bothersome technical terms. It’s so difficult to pronounce. You either pronounce it “pome,” or “poe-im” or “poe-em.” It’s not an English word, it’s a Greek word that’s had the end chopped off it, so it doesn’t fit—it’s got that diphthongy quality.

  What I’m doing when I’m writing poetry is I’m trying to make a little side salad. Just the right amount of sprouts on the top, maybe a chickpea or two. No bacon. Maybe a slice of egg. It doesn’t feel like writing at all. If you’re writing, say, a book review or an essay, it’s sequential. You type out some notes to figure out more or less what you’re going to say. And then you find a place to start, which becomes the beginning, and you wander off in search of the end. But with a poem, you’re in the middle, and then you’re at the end, and then back at the beginning, all with your eyes. You’re always looking at the same piece of paper. One single piece of paper is stretched out there in front of you, the lyric poem, as big as the salt flats in Utah, where fearless Craig Breedlove drove his jet-powered car at six hundred miles an hour. Remember him, back in the sixties? I loved his name, Breedlove.

  Or maybe you don’t use paper at all—maybe you’re taking a walk after dinner and a few beers, like A. E. Housman, and you’re writing it in your head, to the four-beat rhythm of your footsteps: “White in the moon the long road lies.”

  If it’s a long poem, you’re using paper, of course, but I don’t count those long poems because I think most of them have very little that’s good in them. They can all be cut down to a few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage.

  So that’s writing poems. But I have had these certain few times in my life when I’ve been very interested in reading poetry. I used to read a big padded glove-leather edition of Tennyson on lunch break every day when I worked for a mutual fund. It was red, and for some reason it was padded like a Victorian settee. I think you were meant to give it as a present, maybe in the 1890s, to prove to your girlfriend that you were a thoughtful swain. Somebody had written in it “To Edie from Bart.” It ha
d the word Tennyson on the front in diagonally embossed script, and it was as heavy and soft as a catcher’s mitt. You could thump it with your fist. Hurl it at me, Alfred Lord, baby. Smack me with that fastball of a “low large moon.”

  So I read that. And when I quit my job at the mutual fund I bought The New Yorker Book of Poems—the big yellow book—and I discovered Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Moss. Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Moss. Those were my four poets, for a while. And so I would read those guys. Mainly Moss. Moss was in his lovely self-effacing way a genius. You could hear notes of Wallace Stevens in him, and sometimes Bishop, and sometimes even Auden, but he was able to give it his own sad, affectionate jostle. Moss was the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and he was a modest man, so none of his own poems were actually in the big yellow anthology—but it was his book nonetheless. And I remember reading Snodgrass’s poem about the lobster lifting its claw in the window and being tremendously excited. I had to keep peeking at it as I walked home. And even before that, in Paris, in the thirteenth arrondissement, where I lived in my junior year on the eleventh floor of a very tall, very flimsy apartment building, I read the poems in the Oscar Williams anthology, the one with the psychedelic raven on the cover. On Saturdays I’d wake up and read from the Oscar Williams anthology, and then I’d look for a long time at the eye of the psychedelic raven and listen to last night’s wine bottles come hurtling down the garbage chute. There were notices next to every apartment’s garbage chute saying “Please don’t put wine bottles down the garbage chute,” but people loved to do it. I’d hear the bottles come racketing down, and then silence. I could never hear them hit bottom, which was a little frustrating.

  And then again recently. Last year I read a ton of poetry when I was working on my anthology. I mean a ton: way too much, probably. I own an alarming number of poetry books at this point, including maybe seventy-five anthologies, possibly more. I’ve been packing some of the books up that are piled in the hall. Taking them out to the first floor of the barn. That’s one of my projects. Get them out of my life so that I can yearn for them again in a few years.