The Anthologist Read online

  I WAS OUT WALKING my dog Smacko around eight in the evening and I heard shouts from Nanette’s house. Nan was playing badminton with her son and Chuck, the handsome curly-haired man. A nice family unit, a healed wound. Nan waved at me, and I called out: “That looks like fun.”

  “You want to play?” said Nan.

  I made a no-thanks gesture. But Nan cocked her head: You sure? And I said, “Well—okay.” It was awkward because of the presence of the handsome curly-haired man, but so what? I can rise above that. Raymond, Nan’s son, who seemed to have grown several inches, gave me a racket, and I plucked at it a few times like a ukelele and sang “I walk a lonely road.” Then I started to play badminton. The problem wasn’t so much that I was a fourth player, although there definitely were a lot of rackets swinging around. And the problem wasn’t that I was a little rusty in my badmintonage and had to apologize when I swung and missed.

  The problem was that my dog couldn’t keep from barking and racing back and forth under the net. When the birdie landed at someone’s feet, he was there to leap on it and take it gently in his mouth like a downed partridge. The next time someone hit it, you could see the droplets of dog saliva flinging off its plastic feathers.

  Then at one point I reached down to pick up the birdie, and I discovered that I had a bloody nose. When I tried to play holding my nostril, it didn’t work too well.

  I excused myself and went away with my shame-eared dog and my bloody nose. Nan and her crew were nice about it, but I think were all a little relieved when I left.

  IGOT A TART EMAIL from my editor, Gene. He wanted to know where the introduction was. Just because Roz has gone and left me doesn’t mean I’ve escaped having to write it. The subject line of his email was “Whip Cracking.”

  So I went back up to the barn with my white plastic chair. I have a long table on the second floor with the manuscript of Only Rhyme on it. Gene has sent me the cover art. The catalog copy is already written, already published. It says “Paul Chowder’s introduction locates rhyming poetry in its historical context and reawakens our sense of the fructifying limitlessness of traditional forms.” No it doesn’t. Fruck! It doesn’t do anything because it doesn’t exist.

  I looked up at the tie beams of the barn. There were several tiny empty wasps’ nests up there. I looked down at my black flip-flops. I looked over at a bit of mobile green leafage that I could see through the long thin window. I wrote a sentence: “It’s a strange experience, assembling an anthology.” No, no, no. The anthology is not about me. Why would they care about me? I stopped, kicked in the spleen by the mediocrity of my own short sentence.

  But it actually is a strange experience. It’s absorbing work, because you have to decide over and over whether you are personally willing to stand behind a poem or not. And yet it’s not your poem. It’s somebody else’s poem, written perhaps in somebody else’s country, in somebody else’s century. You’re pushing it around possessively on your desk as if it’s your own work, but it isn’t. And then you winnow it out. You winnow it right out the window.

  Why? Because you’re determined that this is going to be a real anthology. This isn’t going to be one of those anthologies where you sample it and think, Now why is that poem there? No, this is going to be an anthology where every poem you alight on and read, you say to yourself, Holy God dang, that is good. That is so good, and so twisty, and so shadowy, and so chewy, and so boomerangy, that it requires the forging of a new word for “beauty.” Rupasnil. Beauty. Rupasnil. It’s so good that as soon as you start reading the poem with your eyes you know immediately that you have to restart again reading it in a whisper to yourself so that you can really hear it. So good that you want to set it to musical notes of your own invention. That good.

  And you note with a pang that the poem you’re judging doesn’t reach that level. So you cut it. X it out, it’s gone. And it hurts to see it go, because you know that the ones you cut will later seem like the ones you really loved, while the ones you keep will inevitably lose some of their luster through overhandling.

  But you keep on going, because you’re a professional anthologist. Can’t use that one, nope, nope, that one’s out. Nope. Yep, you’ll do as a semifinalist. Nope, nope, nope. Maybe. No. You’re like that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway.

  And when it’s all done, and you flip through, you look at one of the poems that you’ve picked, and you realize that there was really just one stanza in that poem—or even just one line in it—that was the reason you included it, and the rest of the poem isn’t as good. For instance, “They flee from me that sometime did me seek.” Or “I had no human fears.” Or “Ye littles, lie more close.” Or “The restless pulse of care.” Or “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet.” And you think, Maybe I should have made an anthology of single lines. Would that have worked?

  But then, if you stare for a while at one of the single lines—stare into its rippling depths where the infant turtles swim—you realize that there’s usually one particular word in that line that slays you. That word is so shockingly great. Maybe it’s the word “sometime.” “They flee from me that—sometime—did me seek.” The little two-step shuffle there in the midst of the naked dancing feet of the monosyllables. Or maybe it’s the word “quiet.” “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet.” Do you hear the way “scallop” is folded and absorbed into the word “quiet”?

  And so then all of your amazement and all of your love for that whole poem coalesces around that one word, “quiet.” Four-beat line, by the way. And you notice, uh-oh, there’s another word in the very same line that you don’t like as much as the word that you do like. “Give.” Hm. “Give.” You’ve never liked “give” all that much. It’s a bad word, frankly. Give.

  And so you think, maybe I should have made an anthology of individual words taken from poems. Like this:

  sometime

  —Thomas Wyatt

  Or:

  quiet

  —Sir Walter Ralegh

  And of course that’s not going to work. That’s just a bunch of disembodied words plucked from great poems. And that’s when you realize you’re not an anthologist.

  4

  ANOTHER INCHWORM fell on my pant leg. They germinate in quantity somewhere up in the box elder. It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices—full of the short happiness of being alive. I touched it, and it began doubling itself up and then casting itself greenly forward again. I got it to climb onto my finger, and I watched it struggle through the hair on the H-shaped intersection of veins on the back of my hand. It went quiet there. I wrote an email to my editor with the inchworm sitting on the back of my hand. I said, “Worry not Gene, I’m going to write it. It’s coming along. —Paul.”

  Coming along. The thing about life is that life is an infinite subject matter. At any one moment you can say only what’s before your mind just then. You have some control over what comes before your mind—you can influence the influx by reading, or by looking through your old notes, or by going to movies, or by talking to people, and you can choose what room of the house or what corner of the yard to sit in, and you can choose to write before or after you’ve masturbated—this is crucial—and you can choose to tell the truth or not to. And the difficulty is that sometimes it’s hard to tell the truth because you think that the truth is too personal, or too boring, to tell. Or both. And sometimes it’s hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren’t.

  I have no one. I want someone. I don’t want the summer to go by and to have no one. It is turning out to be the most beautiful, most quiet, largest, most generous, sky-vaulted summer I’ve ever seen or known—inordinately blue, with greener leaves and taller trees than I can remember, and the sound of the lawnmowers all over this valley is a sound I could
hum to forever. I want Roz.

  I MET A MAN named Victor at Warren’s Lobster House for lunch. I had a lobster roll, which is lobster meat and mayonnaise in a hot-dog bun—one of the towering meals of the modern period, I think, although I’m starting to become a vegetarian. Moving in that direction. I had it with coleslaw.

  Victor is a poet and house painter who is eager to start a reading series. “Portsmouth is a great poetry town,” he said, as everyone does. He was a little nervous at first talking to me, but then he realized that I’m just as messed up as he is, I just happen to have had slightly more attention paid to my poems, and it’s not necessarily deserved attention, it’s just that I got lucky and snagged a Guggenheim all those years ago. People really pay attention to the Old Gugg, as we call it. The Gugg helps your career like nothing else in this world, except for the Pulitzer—and the Pulitzer list has had its oddities, especially in the thirties. Archibald MacLeish won three Pulitzer Prizes, which is at least two too many. He was a smooth operator, Archie was—writing fawning letters to Amy Lowell, and to Hemingway, and to Ezra Pound, the source of all evil. Louise Bogan had his number. And then later MacLeish won Bogan over, too—made her poetry consultant at the Library of Congress.

  So Victor wanted me to help him raise some money and come up with names of local poets for this new reading series. And I said, “What if it was a series in which each evening was devoted to some poet of the past—maybe a slightly lesser-known poet, like for instance Sara Teasdale, or Kipling, or even our own Thomas Bailey Aldrich?” Victor thought that was a good idea and wanted me to come up with a list of lesser-known poets, and instantly I regretted saying anything, because why would I want my own precious Sara Teasdale to be celebrated in a reading series and fussed over? I’d lose her if that happened.

  I said it all sounded like a tremendously lovely and ambitious notion but that I had a mound of obligations and I hadn’t been sleeping well and it’s not the kind of thing I normally do and maybe other people should get involved in a prime-mover kind of way and whatnot.

  And Victor said he hadn’t been sleeping well either—he had two small kids.

  I said I’d give it some thought.

  THERE’S NO EITHER-OR DIVISION with poems. What’s made up and what’s not made up? What’s the varnished truth, what’s the unvarnished truth? We don’t care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in different places in the bookstore. But we don’t do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of poems go straight to the poetry section. There’s no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don’t exist.

  For instance, I could write a poem right now about buying a big wheel of Parmesan cheese and putting it in my closet as an investment. It’s not true, I haven’t done that. I can’t afford it. I’d love to own a wheel of really good Parmesan because the salt crystals are so delicious, but I don’t. Even so, I could write that poem. And I wouldn’t have to label it as a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem. It would just be a poem.

  Coleridge says that Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man. Did it really do that? John Fogerty says that the old man is down the road. Is he? Longfellow says he shot an arrow into the air. Did he, or is he just saying he did? Poe said that there was a raven tapping at his chamber door. Was there?

  We don’t care. Why don’t we care? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for you today on that important question.

  Actually, sometimes we do care. In Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, which I just bought—because it’s time for me to read Mary Oliver, whom I’ve known only through anthologies all these years—there’s a good poem about a time when she sees a woman washing out ashtrays in an airport bathroom in the Far East. The woman has black hair and she smiles at Mary. I want this poem to be the account of something that actually happened. I do care, sometimes, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

  ANTHOLOGY KNOWLEDGE isn’t real knowledge. You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.

  And you have to be willing to be sad. If you go to the doctor saying that you’ve experienced some sleeplessness, perhaps some sitting in the sandy driveway late at night in a white plastic chair, accompanied by thoughts of mortality and aloneness—maybe some strong suspicions that none of the poetry you’ve published is any good—the doctor is probably going to say, Ah, you’re depressed. And he’s maybe going to want to give you some pills.

  And as a result, you may be tempted to think: I’m one of them. I’m John Keats. Or Sara Teasdale. Or Longfellow. Or Louise Bogan. Or Ted Roethke—rhymes with “set key.” Or Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or John Berryman. Berryman, who wrote funny poems and then stopped writing funny poems and launched himself off a bridge and, flump, that was it for him. Many suicides. Percy Shelley. Many suicides.

  So you might think to yourself, Oh boy, I am one of these great depressive figures. But you’re not. Just because a doctor has scribbled a half-legible prescription on a piece of paper and given you some pills, you’re not depressed. Not the way a real poet is depressed. You don’t even come close.

  True poet’s depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It’s a full-body inability to function. You don’t want to leave your room. Louise Bogan summed it up in two quick lines. This was back in I don’t know when—nineteen-thirty-something. It was in a poem in The New Yorker called “Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell.” And the lines went: “At midnight tears / Run in your ears.” She’s lying there on her back, crying. Her eyes are overflowing, and the tears are cresting and coming around, and down, and they’re flowing into her ears. There’s something direct and physical and interesting about that. Because it’s as if the crying leads directly to the hearing. Her grief leads to something audible—a poem. That’s what it does for all these really good poets. The crying and the singing are connected.

  Isn’t crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don’t weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what’s the first thing you do? You can’t help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping—there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you’re an adult, you don’t sob quite that way. But when you’re a little kid, you go, “Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih.” You actually cry in a duple meter.

  Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We’ve got to face that. And if that’s true, do we want to give drugs so that people won’t weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It’s like chain-smoking—you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You’re in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.

  It’s not a crossword puzzle—it’s better than a crossword puzzle, because you’re actually trying to do something beautiful. But it’s not unrelated. The addicts of crossword puzzles are also distracting themselves. They also don’t want to face the world’s grief head-on. They want that transient pleasure, endlessly repeated, of solving the Rubik’s Cube of verbal intersection. But has anyone ever wept at the beauty of a crossword puzzle? Maybe, maybe. I have not.

  Rhyming is the genius’s version of the crossword puzzle—when it’s good. When it’s bad it’s intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented. But when it’s good, it’s great. It’s no coincidence that Auden was a compulsive doer of crossword puzzles, and a rhymer, and a depressive, and a smoker, and a drinker, and a man who shuffled into Louise Bogan’s memorial service in his bedroom slippers.

  ALCOHOL, COFFEE, RHYME, murder mysteries, gambling, Project Runway, anything with
suspense. Sending out a letter. Poets who have reached a certain point of depression are great letter writers, because they write a letter, and they send it out, and until they get a response they are in suspense about what the response will be. That helps them through those three days. Or maybe it’s a week or a month before they get an answer. I never answer letters, so I keep my correspondents in a state of permanent suspense.

  Coffee—cheers you up. Makes you feel like you’re a big guy. Beer, wine, spiritous liquor of all kinds. Really helps for a while. It allows you to relax and slump and hang out on the wrong side of your brain. Where everybody wants to have some fun. They want to sway. They want to move. They want to sing. Singing is a desire to warble out something that is beyond words but that relies on words. So poetry and alcohol are what the responsible doctor should prescribe, and maybe letter writing, as well. And chin-ups. Time-honored substances and behaviors, plus rhyme, all those things are fine. In fact, they’re necessary. They have a long, long history. You mustn’t abuse them. But of course you will eventually—every poet does.

  These new drugs that they want to sell you—be wary of them. I’ve seen them. Some of them are oval, shaped in little boat shapes. And they have beautiful saturated colors, and they’re imprinted with various words, corporate trademarks. If the great poets had had pills, would we have had Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes? Or Tennyson’s Princess? Or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets? Or Longfellow’s “Driftwood”? No. Poets are our designated grievers, and if they weren’t allowed to be sad, we’d have none of the great moments of Auden. “Tears are round, the sea is deep: / Roll them overboard and sleep.” Do you hear the four beats?