The Anthologist

When I was in college, I used to love to read poetry. I devoured poems by Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Why am I starting a review with a look back to my own past favorite poets? Because that's what The Anthologist is REALLY all about; our personal relationship with poetry. I challenge anyone to read The Anthologist and not instantly get on the Internet and look up Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, James Fenton's The Vapour Trail, or any poem by Mary Oliver or perhaps, Selima Hill. It's nearly impossible. Anyone -- poetry reader or non poetry reader -- is in for the treat of his or her life. The conceit Nicholson Baker uses is to create a character -- Paul Chowder -- who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poem. But he's procrastinating: the muse isn't with him, the love of his life has left him, and he's beginning to wonder if he can create something new and fresh. So he ruminates and ruminates and ruminates some more -- on the various love lyrics, ballads, sea chanteys, and rhymed couplets that he has connected with through the years. Do you know what an ultra-extreme enjambment is and why it's the key to the whole poetry conundrum? You will after reading this book. Have you ever wondered why poets such as Vachel Lindsay or Ezra Pound were so depressive and in the latter case, outright crazy? Paul Chowder has his theories: "poets are our designated grievers." Do you believe that poems need to rhyme to be GOOD? See what Baker's character has to say! Are long poems better than short poems? Chowder ruminates, "They can all be cut down to a few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage." I guess that settles THAT! What poetry reader cannot swoon to a statement such as: "A Ted Roethke poem is like an empty shoe you find at the side of the road that some manic person has cast aside on a walk but Louise Bogan's poems are cared-for shoes in a closet, tight and heavy around their clacking wooden trees." What NON poetry reader won't want to read both Roethke and Bogan to find out what Paul Chowder means? And when Chowder says, "I was hoping to find a crack in the pavement where my ailanthus of a poem could take root" -- every would-be poet can relate. I am not the type of reader who underlines -- I like my books pristine. But I took out my pencil and underlined whole passages of The Anthologist. THAT'S how good it is. After reading The Anthologist, I've resolved to go back to reading poetry for the love of it once again. Maybe I'll start with Mary Oliver...

If you love poetry, you'll enjoy "The Anthologist." If you haven't read any poetry in a while, but think you'd like to read it more than you do, you'll appreciate "The Anthologist." (If you don't enjoy poetry, you won't like "The Anthologist." ) For poetry lovers, this funny and tender account of the travails of Paul Chowder, a (very) modestly successful poet with a severe case of writer's block, is full of wonderful anecdotes about all sorts of poets, from Swinburne to Roethke. Chowder also muses, from time to time, on the glories of the four beat line---and you find yourself interested---it's really quite astonishing--- in the intricacies of that usually rather dry subject, prosody (poetic meter). Okay, so it's been a while since you've read much poetry. Why would you enjoy "The Anthologist"? Well, for one thing, the novel is inhabited by real people (although the events are fictional) like "The New Yorker" poetry editors past (Alice Quinn)and present (Paul Muldoon), and living poets, like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins. There's lots of poetry gossip. Even the eminent poetry critic Helen Vendler gets a mention. Then there are Chowder's rueful and amusing observations on the contemporary poetry scene, the world of sparsely attended readings, no money, and general public indifference, to say nothing of too many poets jostling for too few interested readers. And the way Nicholson Baker catalogs Chowder's writer's tics---the things that get him writing or get him distracted from writing or block his brain entirely--is sensitive and knowing. Finally, "The Anthologist" might just tip you in the direction of something new. Chowder/Nicholson Baker loves W.S. Merwin (and Theodore Roethke and Louise Bogan, to name a few). I haven't read much Merwin, but now I'm going to.

Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator. Although recognized at one time for a few brilliant poems, he has waned from the public eye. He is given the opportunity to resurrect his name and his bank account by writing an introduction to an anthology of poems, but he dawdles and delays the project. Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz (who left him due to his dilatory ways); the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and the mundane. He provides a stunning and critical analysis of select poetry and other poets, but continually fails to write his introduction. He waxes whimsically on the suicides of depressed poets, such as Sarah Teasdale and Vachal Lindsay, and vilifies Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot for their antisemitism. He makes a tidy space near his pillow for the poetry of Mary Oliver, who he cherishes. To rhyme or not to rhyme? He probes and ponders the fine points of meter and the minutiae of quotidian distractions, and continually obstructs his own forward momentum. He resorts to lengthy rambling and self-flagellation, yet his constant need for approval is disarming. This story is narrated like a memoir written by a rueful humorist teaching us the power of verse. It is a droll and touching examination of a consummate lyric scholar who happens to be a stubborn boondoggler. I came away from this book with a renewed vigor and love for verse. Through Paul's extolling of meter and rhyme, his preoccupation with the definition of iambic pentameter, and the virtues of almost every aspect of verse, I received a revitalized education on the art and aesthetics of poetry. He contemplates the meaning of various poems without dislodging the reader's own sense of discovery. He leads you to the brink, but you get the satisfaction of plumbing the poignancy with him. It never comes off as pompous. His fertile eloquence, as he shares his shuddering love of the immediacy of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Fish," left me breathless and aroused--a poem that never had any particular effect on me before. Baker's protagonist expounds on what Horace really meant by "carpe diem." That sentiment, according to Paul, has been misinterpreted for years, yet the veneration of those two words and its permanence in our culture is dependent on its very misconception. That notable paradox, and the fecundity of Bishop's poem, typify the fetching delight of this novel. The Anthologist is brimming with poetic enchantment. The loitering, melancholy journey of Paul Chowder and his sublime salvation through meter and verse is smart, beguiling, and tenderly irresistible.

Here comes a book for those who exult in word play and delight in the beauty of phrases that trip off the tongue. Here is a volume that savors and celebrates verse as a many splendored thing. Here is a book that zestfully reminds us of the bond between poetry and music: meter, rhythm, cadence. Here is a book that delves into the fleshy history of poetry, especially the counterbalance between rhyme and free verse. Here is a novel that bursts with vignettes about Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Mina Loy, Theodore Roethke, Sara Teasdale, Edgar Allen Poe, James Wright, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and so on. In fact, the title character -- the narrator, the protagonist, the anthologist -- is so caught up in poetry and poets that he occasionally indulges in thinking/imagining he's almost rubbed shoulders with one of these deceased greats. Happily for us who relish full exercise of the creative mind, Nicholson Baker isn't one of those authors who writes the same book again and again. His questing, restless brain treats his readers to a variety of subjects using both fiction and non-fiction. I still have the paperback copy of The Mezzanine I bought years ago, and it is still one of my favorite reads. Now The Anthologist: A Novel, a book I've been eagerly awaiting, has arrived and I'm happy to report it is everything I'd hoped. Baker, the astute observer and prolific sharer of life's minutiae, sets us squarely into the summer of one Paul Chowder, a poet apparently once on the short list for the post of Poet Laureate of the United States. It seems only fitting to introduce Chowder and his predicament with a little original four-beat verse -- said form he proclaims to be "the soul of English poetry": Paul Chowder suffers writer's block; He'd rather swat a shuttlecock, or take a walk, or nail a floor, or dish some poets' tragic lore than finish his anthology and pen more free-verse poetry. Procrastinating's costing Paul -- Stopping him from scaling his wall; His pretty lady Roz is gone, his funds he's almost all withdrawn. Too aimlessly, or so it seems, His day he spends on scansion schemes And dishing Poe, Whitman, Loy, Pound, Lowell, Bishop, and more renown'd. What, we ask, will become of Paul? Like Millay, will he tumble'n fall? Or will his mundane, cautious life Do more than cut him with a knife: Lay fertile ground for fresh verse "plums"? Dispatch, too, his ling'ring doldrums? Paul Chowder is a bit of a shlub, by his own account. Actually, he comes across as a rather loveable, lumpy, middle-aged guy who's at loose ends. He putters, often displays a short attention span, gabs and gossips (at least to us, on paper) and can get a little bawdy. Since Roz, his long-time live-in girlfriend left, he's slept with his books. Professionally, he just cannot apply himself to churning out the forty-page introduction to his anthology, ONLY RHYME. And, in fact, he, sensitive soul he often is, is conflicted abou

Baker conducts a tour of English-language poetry that barely overlapped the one course I took in college, defining terms and citing examples heretofore unfamiliar, but sifted through the persona of his rambling, engaging narrator. In a way I was Baker's ideal reader for this novel. I'd appreciated his gift for minute, vivid (poetic?) observations ever since "The Mezzanine," but I feel less squeamish about his nerdiness when it's presented to me in the guise of a fictional narrator. We can condescend to Paul Chowder, a self-absorbed, isolated middle-aged poet, while enjoying his opinions on rhyme, his observations of the world around him and finally being moved by the pain of his separation from the woman known only as Roz. So having just finished the last chapter, I'm eager to find out more about poets Louise Bogan, Charles Simic and James Fenton without first needing an antidote to Baker's prissiness. At the same time I was impressed with the subtle cues Baker provides to reflect his protagonist's hurt at Roz's departure, cues the import of which even Chowder is unaware. The breezy narrator is made to betray his state of mind through small acts and thoughts, making especially poignant what might be a merely routine plot device. Thus the character becomes fully dimensional. Baker is masterly in intertwining his fictional narrative with observations on poetry that may, or may not, be strictly his. In fact I'm sure they're not 100% his own, and that gives them a freedom to be simplistic or warped or limited in a way that I'm sure Baker wouldn't have wanted to fly under his own name. But his discussion of various poets and their methods doesn't require that we agree, only that we follow his train of thought--and he makes it easy for us to do so--while engaging us with the subject. The novel is, finally, an easy and quick read, much like the short lyric poems that it particularly extols, though, like those poems, it has much more heft than its ease leads us to expect.