The Anthologist

by Nicholson Baker

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a firefly inscribe part of a curve, and I remembered W. S. Merwin’s poem “To The Corner of the Eye.” I thought: It is so, so good to know that W. S. Merwin exists. I even love his initials. W. and S.—ideal initials. Merwin writes poems that, fortunately, I can’t remember. They would be exceedingly difficult to memorize. But imagine being the poetry editor, maybe at The New Yorker, getting “To the Corner of the Eye” in the mail and reading it. Imagine how thrilledly shaken up you would feel at reading it and knowing that you had the power to publish it. Although come to think of it, “To the Corner of the Eye” wasn’t published in The New Yorker.

  Then, in the mist, I saw a big man walking up the street. He was wearing one shoe. He had a familiar look, so I got out of my chair and went partway down the driveway, and I waved at him. It’s not usual, really, for people to walk up and down my street without two shoes on at midnight. He stopped. He put his hand on the telephone pole that’s there. He looked down. And then he looked over at me. He was a big guy. Big strong bald head. Wide nose. Kind of a defiant, wild, defeated look. I said, “Ted? Ted Roethke? Is that you?” And he nodded slightly. I said, “Wow, Ted, how’s it going? You look like you just got hit with a couple hundred million volts of electricity.”

  “No, it’s hydrotherapy,” he said. “ ‘I do not laugh, I do not cry; / I’m sweating out the will to die.’”

  “Whoa, Ted,” I said. “Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark. You want to come in and maybe make a phone call to a loved one?”

  He shook his head no. I went back to my chair and sat down. The mist came and went. In ten minutes, a car pulled up behind him, and a man got out and led him into the car, and they drove away.

  I went inside, and I got in bed next to some anthologies and W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen and slept quite well.

  W. S. MERWIN SAID his mother read poetry to him. Well, mine did, too. Several times my mother read me Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” Percy Shelley, played by William Shatner, is riding in some caravan across a mental desert, and he comes to two enormous carved ankles and calves that tower above him. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” say the words carved into the pedestal, in some lost language. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is playing its great hollow choral chords in the background, as it always does.

  My mother came to the last line. She read, “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Present tense. An instance, there, of the necessary compression and deformation of speech: “lone” doesn’t quite make sense. Shelley had in mind the isolated, the forlorn, the lonely, ruined, sandy scene—but the meter called for one syllable, and so he wrote “lone,” which is perfect. Lone and level.

  I have to warn you, though: There is a most painful enjambment in “Ozymandias.” Because of this one enjambment, I can almost not bear to read the poem as printed on its page. Which is another good argument for memorizing— if you memorize, you can loop through just the parts of a poem you like, without having the flawed lines flaunt themselves for your eye.

  What is enjambment? Enjambment is the key to the whole conundrum. The word originally comes from an old French word, “jambon.” “Jambon” means ham. Anytime Ronsard or one of those French troubador poets used enjambment, they flung a slice of ham at him. Ronsard learned his lesson and wrote some really nice love songs.

  No, very briefly, enjambment is a word that means that you’re wending your way along a line of poetry, and you’re walking right out to the very end of the line, way out, and it’s all going fine, and you’re expecting the syntax to give you a polite tap on the shoulder to wait for a moment. Just a second, sir, or madam, while we rhyme, or come to the end of our phrasal unit, or whatever. While we rest. But instead the syntax pokes at you and says hustle it, pumpkin, keep walking, don’t rest. So naturally, because you’re stepping out onto nothingness, you fall. You tumble forward, gaaaah, and you end up all discombobulated at the beginning of the next line, with a banana peel on your head and some coffee grounds in your shirt pocket. In other words, you’re “jammed” into the next line—that’s what enjambment is. So in the case of “Ozymandias,” second line, you’ve got “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone”—end of line, we need to pause, but no, keep moving, woopsie doodle, next line—“Stand in the desert.” Ouch.

  THERE ARE TWO KINDS of enjambment. There’s regular enjambment, which is part of traditional poetry and is almost always a bad idea, but especially in sonnets—and then there’s what’s known as ultra-extreme enjambment. Ultra-extreme enjambment comes standard in free verse because free verse is, as we know, merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly. So you can break the line anywhere you want. In fact you want to

  break against any

  moments of natural

  pause, not with

  them, to keep

  everyone on their toes and off balance. So at the end of a line, you might find a word like “the” that requires another word to go along with it. That’s how you know that you’re in the middle of an ultra-extreme enjambment situation. And you know you’re in trouble if that’s not what you’re looking for. But if that is what you’re looking for, then it’s fine and you’re happy. And there are many poems that enjamb all over themselves, that I love.

  SOMEDAY, when I feel you’re ready, I will show you The Vixen, by W. S. Merwin. Here it is, in fact. Got it right here in a pile, surprise surprise. That’s a photo of a vixen in the snow on the cover—in other words, a fox. The title poem isn’t the best poem in the book. So often true.

  W. S. Merwin was one of these guys who—well, he wanted to be a poet, and he thought that Ezra Pound was the modernist man, the founder of it all. Which he was. So in the forties Merwin went and visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum, where Pound was hanging out, doing rather well. Many aspiring poets would go to St. Elizabeths, outside D.C., and visit Pound and listen to him ramble on. They’d bring him gifts of tea and cookies and tins of jellied ox tongue and whatnot. He was a celebrity, an oracle—and if you wanted to be a certain kind of poet you went to visit him in the booby hatch to say hello to the maestro. Dorothy, his wife, would be there, making sure everything went all right, steering him away from his fixed idées. Pound, who was by nature a blustering bigot—a humorless jokester—a talentless pasticheur—a confidence man—was now supported by the American state. He had a sinecure. He’d spent the war being paid by Mussolini’s press bureau to say things on shortwave radio like “the kikes have sucked out your vitals.” And bad things about Roosevelt. Pound admired Mussolini and Hitler—he’d admired them both long before the war. So when the Americans took control of Italy he was arrested and held in solitary confinement. Archibald MacLeish, who’d read the transcripts of the broadcasts, wrote letters to the attorney general to get him sprung. Eventually Pound ended up back in the United States, and MacLeish got him a good lawyer and a good shrink and saved him from being tried for treason, on the grounds that he was mentally “unsound.”

  Why? Because the modern movement was too precious to suffer that kind of public discrediting. If Pound were tried for treason, the damning transcripts of his broadcasts would be all over the papers. MacLeish himself might have to testify. Modernism would have a big black eye. The ugliness of its Futurist-fascist patrimony would be exposed. T. S. Eliot would look bad. In fact, Pound might be sentenced to death, as Lord Haw-Haw was, though not by hanging. Lord Haw-Haw was hung. No, Pound had to be packed safely away in the excelsior of St. Elizabeths, where his legend could accrete. In fact, MacLeish and Eliot and Allen Tate engineered a special new poetry prize for him, the Bollingen Prize, to clean up his image.

  So now Pound was safe, and he became the cracker-barrel philosopher of free verse. People made pilgrimages. And he loved telling them what to do. That had always been his great talent. He’d told Yeats what to do—he’d presided over Yeats’s Monday night get-togethers in London, handing out the cigarettes and the cheese doodles and telling Yeats that
his late writing was “putrid.” And he’d told T. S. Eliot what all to cut from “The Waste Land,” and he’d told Hilda Doolittle how to fix her poems, and he’d told Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, whom she should publish in her magazine—he was Poetry’s official foreign correspondent for a while, and he scolded Harriet and her colleague Alice when they went soft and published the occasional piece of Sara Teasdalian verse. He’d even told Amy Lowell what to do, until she finally got tired of his high-horsing and took herself and her cigar box elsewhere. Then Pound and Wyndham Lewis started a new movement, Vorticism, which was Futurism by a different name. It was hard, cruel, pitiless, strong. It was pre-fascist, in fact. The first poem in the first issue of BLAST, the Vorticist periodical, had a line in it, later altered. The line was: “Let us be done with Jews.” Written by: Ezra Pound. By then London hated Pound, for good reason, and he moved to Paris to tell James Joyce how to fix Ulysses. Yeats’s father said, “Hatred is the harvest he wants to gather.”

  And even decades later, after the Second World War was done, people went to Pound for advice—crazy people like Charles Olson and nice people like Bill Merwin, who in 1948 had no notion of the fierceness of Pound’s lifelong disorientations and his hatreds. Pound gave them all advice. And some of it was good advice.

  POUND’S ADVICE to Bill Merwin was: You’ve got to do translations. Sharpen your mind with translations. So Merwin did a lot of translations. He translated from the Spanish and the French and from the Russian, and rare bits from the Welsh and the Eskimo. Really worked at it, for years. And I don’t know if it was good for him or not to translate so much, but the upshot of it all was that he wrote a beautiful book of poems late in life called The Vixen. And another beautiful book called Present Company.

  Merwin is a fairly old man now. He lives in Hawaii, where he, I think, cultivates rare forms of palm tree. Or is it pineapple tree? Anyway he does something rare with botany. In Hawaii. Still sharp as anything.

  I miss my mom and dad.

  So many poets are disappointments when you hear them talk on the radio. But Merwin isn’t like that. I heard him talk once while I was on the Portsmouth rotary, and I missed my turnoff onto Route 16 and went all the way around again, and now every time I go around that rotary I think of Merwin’s voice on the radio. He’s got a wise sensibleness and a gentleness of inflection that makes you want to listen. And all the poems in his book The Vixen have the same form, which is that one line goes along for about ten words, and then it enjambs into the next line, which is indented, and that line goes along, and it enjambs into the next line, which begins at the left margin. And then indented. And then left margin, and then indented. So each of the poems has this very consistent square-toothed edge. And there’s no punctuation, none, so you have to figure out where the long sentences begin or end. That’s part of the joy of it, in fact, that you don’t know sometimes whether a word is part of the end of one idea or the beginning of the next idea. Everything enjambs visually until you read it aloud to yourself and hear where the breaks should come.

  There’s a nice one about a lizard, and one about a door with a worn threshold, and one about a woman who has a plum tree that grows a certain kind of plum called a “mirabelle.” All Merwin’s poems in this book are good, practically every one.

  7

  I HAVE TO GIVE a reading in Cambridge soon.

  Elizabeth Bishop gave her first reading in 1947 at Wellesley. “I was sick for days ahead of time,” she said. And then she gave another reading in 1949, and she was sick again beforehand, and nobody in the audience could hear her. And then she didn’t give any readings for twenty-six years after that. Isn’t that a revealing fact? And then somehow she found that she could do it—she had less stage fright.

  If you listen to those late readings, you can hear the greater confidence and authority in her voice. And the age. Her voice is lower and slower and surer. She’s probably had a drink or two to fortify herself. Whatever it is, she does very well at reading late in life. The audience loves her, and they laugh. She reads them the poem about the filling station, which appeared in The New Yorker and in the big yellow New Yorker Book of Poems.

  I went back up to the second floor of the barn and I sat in the white plastic chair and I sweated, because it’s hot, and I thought: You can’t force it. If it isn’t there you can’t force it. Then I thought: You can force it. My whole life I’ve been forcing it. You throw yourself against the weight of the massive sliding door to the barn, that does not want to move, and you lean and you wag your hips and you haul on the metal handle, and you strain, and you grunt, and you point your face at the sky and say bad words, and it starts to move and rumble, and then it moves a little more easily, and then a little more easily still, and finally, the barn door is open wide enough that you barely fit through, taking care not to scrape your back on the broken-off lock flange.

  So you can force it, and you should force it. All the time. Force it open. Push. Pull. When you think you can’t, think again. On the other hand, sometimes the wood of the door is a little rotten around the handle and you tear out the screws. My father was right. Sometimes the door is really just stuck.

  THE EMPTINESS of this floor of the barn is its greatest quality. This barn is, I guess you could say, my family barn. My parents bought this house in 1961, when I was still a kid. There’s a house, an ell, which is the connecting structure, and the barn. They put a new roof on the barn, which is really all you need to do. You need to keep the rain out. As soon as a roof starts to leak, the decay, the collapse, the inner fungosity take charge. You’ve got to have a roof on your barn. I see it over and over again, the slumping to the side. “Two more payments and it’s ours”—that postcard.

  The first floor is a chaos, and I’ve been filling it with even more boxes. It’s a madhouse of stored boxes. But the second floor is still quite empty. Well, right now it has the folding table with sections of my anthology on it. But it’s almost empty. It will be empty again. Broom clean, as they say in real estate.

  My broom is rotten. Over the winter, it became a blackened side-swerving dense stump. It was almost unrecognizable. It had literally decayed. You simply cannot leave a corn broom outside over the winter. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was distracted, I guess—by the anthology and by money and by things going wrong with Roz. Once I wiped snow off the windshield and then I just carelessly leaned it against the house and then a fallen roof drift covered it. What a mistake. It’s downright painful to try to sweep with this moist stump of a broom.

  I called Tim and I said, “I’m just very worried that they may have stopped making brooms like this, because people all seem to own little plastic brooms now.”

  Tim said that he was pretty sure that he’d seen similar classic corn brooms for sale at Target recently. So I went to Target, to the broom aisle, and Tim was absolutely right. I’d just assumed that the old style wouldn’t be there anymore, but it was. It’s made by the Libman Company, and it’s still made in the United States. I came home, and I tore off the plastic, and there was the same smocking, the same tight spiral of shiny wire. I slid aside the doormat and whistled at all the sand that had collected under there, and I swept it clean away.

  Then I drove to Roz’s place to tell her that I’d gotten a new broom. I saw her getting out of a car with a man. She was dressed up. Cripe. And yet of course she should. If you break up with someone then you go out with someone else.

  While I was gone the mouse in the kitchen found half an old cookie and tried to pull it up into the stove’s control panel, which is where he lives. But the cookie wouldn’t fit. So he just ate it where it was. Ate and shat discreetly and had quite a little party.

  I MADE AN EGG SALAD SANDWICH and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in. At first I was going to leave the bits there and then I thought, No, you have to keep on top of things, and
I dabbed them up. Then I wiped some of the night’s kinked mouse droppings from the stovetop. Then I thought of a poet named Ed Ochester. Good poet. And then I thought of another good poet, Mary Kinzie. And then I thought of another one, Matthew Rohrer. And another, Stanley Plumly. There are hundreds of poets like Ed O. And like me. And we all love the busy ferment, and we all know it’s nonsense. Getting together for conferences of international poetry. Hah! A joke. Reading our poems. Our little moment. Physical presence. In the same room with. A community. Forget it. It’s a joke.

  But then one day you open up a book to a certain page, and you read, “Up from the bronze, I saw / Water without a flaw”—Louise Bogan’s “Roman Fountain.” And you see why it’s all necessary, the whole enterprise. Water without a flaw. My life is necessary because I sustain the idea of poetry through thick and thin. That’s my job.

  What does it mean to be a great poet? It means that you wrote one or two great poems. Or great parts of poems. That’s all it means. Don’t try to picture the waste or it will alarm you. Even in a big life like Louise Bogan’s or Theodore Roethke’s. The two of them had an affair, as I said. They had a busy weekend with many cries of pleasure, and it helped their writing a lot. Or Howard Moss’s life, or Swinburne’s life, or Tennyson’s life—any poet’s life. Out of hundreds of poems two or three are really good. Maybe four or five. Six tops. All the middling poems they write are necessary to form a raised mulch bed or nest for the great poems and to prove to the world that they labored diligently and in good faith for some years at their calling. In other words, they can’t just dash off one or two great poems and then stop. That won’t work. Nobody will give them the “great poet” label if they write just two great poems and nothing else. Even if they’re the greatest poems ever. But it’s perfectly okay, in fact it’s typical, if ninety-five percent of the poems they write aren’t great. Because they never are.