The Anthologist

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 nap.

"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 had 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.

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.