The Anthologist

by Nicholson Baker

  After that class I went to the dean and told her I wasn’t coming back in September. And that was the end of my teaching career.

  ELIZABETH BISHOP was a short woman. She wanted to be taller. She had amazing up-floofing hair with a streak of white. And she didn’t like the idea of teaching creative writing. She wrote May Swenson: “I think one of the worst things I know about modern education is this ‘Creative Writing’ business.” But she did it anyway. She didn’t want to be a drunk, but she was. Sometimes, she said, she drank like a fish. Lota, her Brazilian lover, wanted her to take antabuse and she didn’t want to, and she left Brazil. Then Lota went into a gloom and killed herself.

  Today I was punching down the garbage with my fist in the tall kitchen can, to make more room before I had to take it out to the barn—going, Yah, yah, punch it down!—and my right thumb caught on the wavy edge of the lid of a tunafish can and I sliced it. Not too badly. Not off. I rinsed the cut in the sink, and I thought, What’s with all these minor finger injuries? What’s happening to me? I’m wearing three Band-Aids now. I’m a three Band-Aid man.

  Everyone always wanted Elizabeth Bishop to read aloud “The Fish,” because it’s good, and she grew to hate it and to dread reading it. She wrote to Robert Lowell that she was thinking of rewriting it as a sonnet. Its prosiness made her unhappy. She’d moved on and forgotten why the poem is so good.

  The poem is in this book here. Look at this paperback. Just white and yellow and blue, simple as can be. Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems. Don’t look at my Band-Aids, just look at the book. It’s a Farrar, Straus and Giroux book and they always, in this era, had the most beautiful cover designs. Six dollars and ninety-five cents is what it cost me. Bob Giroux was her editor.

  And here is the original bookmark, from the bookstore where I bought the book. The Grolier book shop in Cambridge. Little poetry shop on a side street off Harvard Square. It’s had some tough times recently.

  “The Fish” takes up three pages. It’s long. It starts here, and it goes over here, and then it goes over to here. And every word on these three pages is worth reading. In her letter to I think it’s Marianne Moore, she says that she feels very adventurous because she’s not capitalizing the first letter of each line.

  The way to read the poem is not to read it in the book, but to listen to her read it on a CD. She has a such a marvelously simple way of delivering it. She just seems to shrug it off her. It’s of no interest to her that it’s poetry. There’s no fancy emphasis. It’s almost flat, the way she reports it, and she has a slight midwesternness to her voice. It’s so lovely, and she sounds very young and surprised that she’s been asked to read it.

  You know what “The Fish” is? “The Fish” is sort of like a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker if the Talk of the Town had died and gone to heaven. That’s what it is, a perfect Talk of the Town piece. Except that it doesn’t use the “we.” And it didn’t appear in The New Yorker—it appeared in Partisan Review. And I don’t even care whether it’s called a poem or not. It doesn’t scan. She was a woman who was very capable of rhyming. Who liked rhyming. But this one is not a rhyming poem.

  The Fish! The fish. “I caught a tremendous fish.” Here’s the situation. Elizabeth Bishop is in a boat, on her own, it seems, and she’s caught a tremendous fish, that’s come out of the ocean. What does the fish want to do? The fish wants to get back to the water. But she doesn’t let it. She examines it very closely. She looks at its peeling skin and compares it to old wallpaper. She repeats the word “wallpaper” twice in two lines of a poem—an unheard-of prosiness. And then she bends closer, and she looks right into the fish’s eye. She says it’s larger than her eye but shallower. And that’s true—we all know those shallow fish eyes. “The irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil.” She’s really peering at that fish’s eye now. And then, whoa: the eye shifts. The fish eye moves. Terror. We know right then for sure that it’s alive.

  All that careful slow description suddenly has a kind of near panic in it, because we know that the fish is out of its element, breathing in the terrible oxygen. The fish doesn’t want to be described. That’s what gives the poem its pull. The fish resists description because it just wants to be back in the water, and not to be seen, but she’s insisting on looking at it and coming up with one simile after another. All these wonderful similes take time, and meanwhile the fish is starting to suffocate.

  So we look at his skin, at his scales, at his swim bladder, which is like a peony, and his eyes. And then, we get to “the mechanism of his jaw.” And here’s where we learn about the fish’s history—the five pieces of broken-off fishing line. And she describes each kind of fishing line. One line is green, and the others are black, and we hear all about them. And those lines are allegorical. They’re lines of what? Of poetry. Because we know that other people—other anglers, other hopeful poets—have caught this very same ancient, real fish. Their lines are there, hooked into the fish’s jaw, all the many other attempts to rhyme this old fish into poetry. Rupert Brooke has a beautiful poem about this very same fish. But Elizabeth Bishop’s hooked it now, and she’s not going to rhyme it, she’s just going to tell us about it.

  And that’s what leads her to her last line, when she’s there in the boat, and the fish is gasping and—ploosh—“I let the fish go.” Because that’s what you have to do. You take the moment, you do your best to describe it, it fascinates you, and then when you’ve done your best to give it to people on some printed page, then you have to let it go.

  For the rest of her life, when she was asked to give a reading, they wanted her to read that poem. Till she completely lost track of the reality behind it and didn’t want anything to do with it and wished the anthologists would pick something else.

  And if you listen to her reading it, you’ll notice that there’s a tiny moment just after she says “And I let the fish go” before the tape hiss stops. In these old poetry recordings, the audio engineer always pulled the level down too soon, immediately after the last word, without any mental reverb time, and oddly enough it works beautifully. You hear “Ffff, and I let the the fish go, ffff—” and then silence. You’re in the empty blankness before the next poem. The black water. The fish is already gone, out of hearing. Even the hiss of the tape, the water in which the fish swam, is gone. You have to return reality to itself after you’ve struggled to make a poem out of it. Otherwise it’s going to die. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long. She knew that. The fish slips away unrhymed.

  I think I’m going to go to RiverRun Books and look at the poetry shelves. When I see new books for sale there that I already own, it makes me happy. It makes me feel that there’s part of the world that I really understand.

  10

  Thomas Edison’s people convinced Alfred Tennyson to chant the “Charge of the Light Brigade” into a microphone. You can hear it in a BBC collection, and you can hear it in a CD that comes with a book called The Voice of the Poet. Tennyson sounds like this:

  pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!

  pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!

  Hobble leg, hobble leg,

  hobble leg owhmmm!

  Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under!

  pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!

  pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!

  But under the static of the wax cylinder, did you hear what Lord Alfred was up to? He was using the regular four-beat line, but he was using triplets within each beat. One-two-three, one-two-three:

  That’s how he reads it, with the triplets. Triplets are called dactyls or anapests in the official lingo, depending on whether they start with an upbeat or not. But those words are bits of twisted dead scholarship, and you should forget them immediately. Put them right out of your head. Wave them away. The poetry here is made up of triplets.

  Triplets are good for all kinds of emotions. People think they’re funny—and they are.
They work in light verse and in limericks. “There was a young man from North Feany—rest. Who sprinkled some gin on his weenie—rest.” Dr. Seuss uses them: “A yawn is quite catching, you see, like a cough.” Ya-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, tum. Light.

  Or you can use them for a love scene:

  That’s by Mary Louise Ritter, a forgotten poet, out of an old anthology called Everybody’s Book of Short Poems, which once sold thousands of copies.

  Or you can use triplets to dispense advice:

  That’s a poem by Alice Carey that was very big a century ago. If you read it aloud, you might feel yourself declaiming it too bouncily. But if you sing it, you’ll find that you slow down and you begin to hear the wisdom in what she’s saying:

  James Fenton—who is the best living love poet—uses this same triplet rhythm, with the same end-rest on a four-beat line and the same warningness: “It’s something you say at your peril (rest) / It’s something you shouldn’t contain (rest).”

  And you can mix triplets together with duplets. Swinburne was the great rhythmic mixmaster, and before him Christina Rossetti. And Vachel Lindsay was good at it, too. Vachel Lindsay was a chanter and drumbeater. In the twenties, for a short time, he was probably the most famous poet in the U.S.A. Listen to what he does.

  Now what has he got going there? He’s got triplets in the first part of the line—“factory windows are”—and doublets in the second part—“always broken.”

  Bumpada, bumpada, bumpum, bumpum

  Bumpada, bumpada, bumpum, bumpum

  Factory windows are always broken

  Diddle a diddle America

  We want to live in America.

  It’s everywhere.

  And sometimes the rhythm isn’t a double or a triple, it’s a quadruple rhythm. In other words, sixteenth notes, not eighth notes. And sometimes, often in fact, it’s a quadruple rhythm made up of an eighth note plus two sixteenth notes that lead you into the next eighth note. That sounds complicated, but when you hear it you’ll recognize it as obvious and familiar—something you’ve been listening to for your whole life. “Death comes with a crawl, or he comes with a pounce,” as Edmund Vance Cooke said.

  I’m dancing around the barn with my new broom. Dum deem, deedledeem, deedledeem, deedledeem!

  WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE nobody mentioned Vachel Lindsay. Not even a whisper of his name. I heard a lot about Pound and Eliot. We had to read “Prufrock,” which is a lovely poem, and “The Waste Land,” which is a hodgepodge of glummery and borrowed paste. And I heard about the Spoon River Anthology, and the Black Mountain poets, and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, of course, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and end of story.

  But Vachel Lindsay, in his day, was big. He went around doing a kind of vaudeville act using poetry. A one-man minstrel show. He was famous for it.

  And one day on one of his tours he came to St. Louis, and there he met Sara Teasdale.

  Sara Teasdale was a much better poet than Vachel Lindsay was, and he recognized that, and he fell in love with her and chanted his poems to her and beat his drum for her, and later he dedicated a book to her. And eventually he proposed to her.

  She didn’t marry him, because basically she saw that he was a lunatic. Very unstable and he had seizures from time to time. But they corresponded for years. And as his fame dimmed and people forgot about him, he got crazier, and he began to threaten his wife—he’d married a young teacher— and he began to have paranoid thoughts that her father was after him. His wife became terrified of him. They had very little money. And when he would go onstage at some provincial women’s club, they always wanted him to do his old stuff. “Do the stuff where you bang the drum and sing about Bryant and the Big Black Bucks. Not the new stuff. We don’t want the new stuff.” And one night back at home he had a fit of rage, and then he calmed down and went down to the basement. His wife called down, “Are you all right, darling?” And he said, “Yes, honey, I’m quite well, thank you—I’ll be up shortly.”

  And then in a little while she heard a sound, blump. And she sat up: something is not right. She rushed downstairs and there was Vachel staggering up from the basement, going erp orp erp. Obviously in extremis. And she said, “Darling, what’s happening?”

  And he said, “I drank a bottle of Lysol.”

  Seriously. He died of it, in agony. And it was good that he died because he could feel that he was getting violent. His time was over. He had contributed what he had to contribute. He could sense that. His kind of poetry, which was so performable and so immediately graspable, had fallen out of favor. People like Ezra Pound—who was even crazier than Vachel Lindsay was, and who also, by the way, beat a drum sometimes when he gave readings—were laughing at him. They thought he was a joke. Modernism was winning its battle with rhyme, and he didn’t want to be around when Pound and Williams did their victory dance. So he left the scene.

  WELL, WHEN SARA TEASDALE found out that Vachel Lindsay had died, she was unhappy, as you can imagine, because in some ways she’d always loved him. She was one of those love-at-a-distance kind of people. She’d loved several men at a distance. And women, too. His death hit her hard, and she was not a healthy woman—she was very very touchy and moody, and sensitive, and hypochondriacal, and a really fine practitioner of the four-beat line.

  O shaken flowers, o shimmering trees,

  O sunlit white and blue,

  Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,

  May bear the scar of you.

  But she also wrote dirty limericks and then destroyed them. People who read them said they were some of the most incredible dirty limericks they’d ever encountered. Why, why, why did she destroy them? Why? I can hardly bear to think of this loss. Sometimes she suffered from what she called “imeros”—a word from Sappho that meant a kind of almost sexual craving for romance. A lust for love.

  One day she hit her head on the ceiling of a taxi while it was driving over a pothole in New York, and afterward she said her brain hurt and she dropped into a funk and eventually she took morphine in the bath and died. And not long after that her friend Orrick Johns—who was also from St. Louis and also a poet, who wrote about the whiteness of plum blossoms at night—he killed himself, too. And later Edna St. Vincent Millay fell down the stairs. So the rhymers all began dying out. All except for Robert Frost. Two vast and trunkless legs of Robert Frost stood in the desert.

  I’M NOT A NATURAL RHYMER. This is the great disappointment of my life. I’ve got a decent metrical ear—let me just say that right out—and some of my early dirty love poems rhymed because I still believed then that I could force them to, and some of those poems were anthologized in a few places. So I got a reputation as a bad-boy formalist. But these days when I try to write rhyming poetry it’s terrible. I mean it’s just really embarrassing—it sucks. So I write plums. Chopped garbage. I’ve gotten away with it for years. And I sometimes feel that maybe if I’d been born in a different time—say, 1883—and hadn’t been taught haiku and free verse but real poetry, my own rhyming self would have flowered more fully.

  But you know, probably not. Probably my brain just isn’t arranged properly. Because think: right now we’re in a time in which rhyming is going on constantly. All the rhyming in pop music. There’s a lust for it. Kids have hundreds of lines of four-stress verses memorized, they just don’t call it four-stress verse. They call it “the words to the songs.” They call it Coldplay or Green Day or Rickie Lee Jones or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Now in the morning I sleep alone, / Sweep the streets I used to own,” says Coldplay. “California rest in peace / Simultaneous release,” say the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Four-beat lines. Sometimes the rhymes are trite and sometimes not, and it doesn’t matter because the music is the main thing. And I’m sure there will be a geniune adept who strides into our midst in five or ten years. The way Frost did. Sat up in the middle of that spring pool, with the weeds and the bugs all over him. He found the water that nobody knew was there. And that will happen again. All the dry rivulet
s will flow, and everyone will understand that new things were possible all along. And we’ll forget almost all of the unrhymers that have been so big a part of the last fifty years. We’ll forget about the wacky Charles Olson, for instance, who was once so big. My poems will definitely be forgotten. They are forgettable. They’re simply not memorable. Except maybe for one or two. Maybe people will remember part of “How I Keep from Laughing.” People seem to remember that one, sometimes. Garrison Keillor read it on the radio once.

  NEVER MIND THAT. I soaked my skin graft in saltwater, which wasn’t a good idea, but now it’s healing nicely. And here’s what amazes me. Howard Moss was writing poems at the same time that Allen Ginsberg was. They’re so different. Sometimes it’s very hard to recapture simultaneity—because even to the people living at the time it didn’t feel simultaneous. At the time it felt as if Ginsberg was over here, going “first thought best thought, first thought best thought,” and Howard Moss was over here, quietly watching the sun go down through his ice cubes after a day at the office writing a letter accepting a poem sent in by Elizabeth Bishop.

  Ginsberg had a poem in The New Yorker, too. In the sixties, Moss accepted one of Ginsberg’s poems. It’s a good one, too. Very long. It spreads out over parts of two pages. It begins ambitiously: “When I Die.” Ginsberg’s father, Louis Ginsberg, also had poems in The New Yorker. His poems rhymed and scanned in the old-fashioned way. But his son Allen was smitten by Walt Whitman’s preacherly ampersands and he never recovered.