He got it done

We’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist over at TweetSpeak Poetry, and today we finish it.

For about two thirds of the novel, I was ready to strangle the main character, a poet and critic named Paul Chowder. Chowder is trying to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems that he’s assembled, and has either the worst case of writer’s block or the worst case of EPD (Extreme Procrastination Disorder) or both that I’ve ever heard of.

I haven’t been this aggravated with a main character since Peter Mickelsson in John Gardner’s Mickelsson’s Ghosts (published 30 years ago). Mickelsson kept using his credit card long after it was maxed out, remodeling an old home that simply wouldn’t be finished. In the case of Paul Chowder, it is an introduction that would even be started.

In these final chapters of the novel, we get another discussion of the evils of iambic pentameter, invented by the French for their language and imported into England by Geoffrey Chaucer (lesson: never trust a diplomat). Chowder is still missing his girlfriend Roz, but there seems to be some hope they will get back together. He’s preparing for a trip to Switzerland, where he will be part of a conference panel and teach a class. I am not surprised when he discovered four days before his flight leaves that his passport is expired.

But he makes it to Switzerland, he makes up (to some extent) with Roz, and he writes 23 poems on the airplane home. And – at last! – he writes the introduction – 230 pages of introduction.

I was relieved.

We don’t learn much about what’s in the introduction, only that it’s written and packed off to the editor, who accepts it with vague murmurs of “we need to cut it.”

And then I realize that I’ve been reading the introduction all along, that this novel The Anthologist is really an introduction – a rather bizarre introduction – to a collection of rhyming poems. It is, perhaps, how introductions to anthologies should be written – a reader would certainly be more apt to read introductions if they were written this way.

And it did what good introductions do – it explained why what was to follow was important. It placed the subject in a context. It gave you insights you might have missed or not understood otherwise.

It also injected the personality of the anthologist into the poems to an extraordinary degree, but isn’t that one of the things that poems, really good poems,  can do – pull you into them, pull you into another world, into the mind and heart of the poet so closely that it becomes your own mind and heart?

As much as I would have liked to chuck a rock at his head, Paul Chowder taught me a few things. And I liked his self-deprecating humor and lack of inflated self-importance. I also liked the fact that he decides (wisely) not be try to teach again but instead to help paint houses.

There is much to like in The Anthologist, and much to learn. I’m glad I hung in there for the entire ride.

To see what’s happening (and concluding) discussion about The Anthologist, check out what Lyla Lindquist has to say at TweetSpeak Poetry today.

My two previous posts on The Anthologist:

Finish the Intro, Anthologist!

We Still Don’t Have an Intro

We Still Don’t Have an Intro

Six more chapters, more than three fourths of the way in the book, and our hero Paul Chowder still hasn’t written his introduction to the volume of poems. He’s visited Longfellow’s house, laid a plank floor, cleaned up the barn, sliced his fingers a few times, and bought a bead making kit.

And he’s talked a lot about poetry.

Led by Lyla Lindquist at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’ve been reading The Anthologist by Nichloson Baker. It claims to be a novel, and I think it’s that, but it could also be that introduction that Chowder is unable to start for his anthology of poems that rhyme. Whatever it is, it’s also a fairly in-depth if idiosyncratic introduction to the poetry of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Chowder clearly thinks Walt Whitman is suspect, the French started it all by translating Poe into free verse (in French, of course), and the abominations of abominations is Ezra Pound. Still, the introduction awaits. Chowder seems to have moved beyond even feeling guilty about not doing it. My own anxiety has lessened as well; it’s amazing how anxious I was getting about a fictional character avoiding doing his work. I considered suggesting that he read Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, which is all about dealing with creative blocks (and the book we discussed at TweetSpeak before this one).

I’d been having the nagging feeling that I’d read something like this before, and I think I’ve identified it – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The Anthologist is like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Poetry, except in this case we know the answer and the question. (If you haven’t read the Hitchhiker series, the hero of the story has the answer to everything in the universe – the number 3. He simply has to find the question.)

Chowder takes down rabbit hole after rabbit hole (anything to avoid writing that introduction). But what is slowly emerging is the understanding that there is a method to what often seems like stream of consciousness madness. Something is indeed going on here, and it’s about more than the decline of poetry that rhymes and similar global disasters.

We’re on a roller coaster ride of poetry, catching glimpses of Whitman, Swinburne, Teasdale, Millay, Lindsay, Eliot, Pound (the villain), Elizabeth Bishop, and even Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. We learn where the U.S. poet laureate program came from, and how Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol. We see all the politics of poetry, and who gets cut from what anthology. And we keep reading, even if listening to Chowder is like driking water from a fire hose.

Can you tell I’m enjoying this crazy weird book?

Please visit TweetSpeak Poetry to see what Lyla Lindquist has cooked up to try to explain the chapters we’re discussing today.

Finish the Intro, Anthologist!

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist is one crazy read.

It’s a novel. I think.

It’s about poetry. I think.

I know it’s about four-beat poetic lines versus iambic pentameter, a cruel invention by the French to upend what works best in English.

And the main character, a poet and writer named Paul Chowder, has no use for haikus, either.

I’ve read the first six chapters (our assignment for the book club discussion at TweetSpeak Poetry that starts today), and I don’t know whether to laugh or throttle Chowder in exasperation. Finish the introduction to the poetry anthology, Paul! By this time, I could have written it!

And it’s Chowder’s anthology – of poems that rhyme. Or mostly rhyme.

That’s the kind of poetry that isn’t written much any more. Free verse snuck its nose under the tent back in the Victorian area, and then it moved in like some undesirable squatter. An unwashed and undesirable squatter. Chowder can name two or three poems in free verse that are good, but not much more than that.

So he hides out in the barn, doing calisthenics, drinking and eating whatever’s in the refrigerator, musing about the neighbor next door playing badminton, walking the dog, dodging threats from his editor, mourning his girlfriend Roz who’s moved out – and not writing his introduction to the anthology.

Instead, he wants to tell us all about poetry.

And sleep with his books.

And I listen. I read on. Even if Chowder is driving me crazy, I listen. And I read.

The Droning of Haikus

The iambs overcome pentameter,

the four-beat line is dethroned.

Chartreuse battalions of syllabled haikus

swarm, and smother, and drone.

Anthology or mythology,

it rhymes for a time, and then,

it sits, embarrassed, and waiting for,

as the French would say, le Fin.

We are discussing The Anthologist over at TweetSpeak Poetry today. You should take a look and see what craziness Lyla Lindquist has dreamed up for the discussion. And tell her I’m still waiting for Chowder to finish that introduction.