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The Anthologist: A Novel
The Anthologist: A Novel
The Anthologist: A Novel
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The Anthologist: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Paul Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming verse, but he’s having a hard time getting started. The result of his fitful struggles is The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker’s brilliantly funny and exquisite love story about poetry.

* * *

A New York Times Notable Book, 2009

Favorite Fiction of 2009–Los Angeles Times

Best Books of 2009–The Christian Science Monitor

Best of 2009–Slate.com

"A Year’s Reading" Favorites, 2009–The New Yorker

 Best Books of 2009–Seattle Times



 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 8, 2009
ISBN9781416583974
Author

Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Maine with his family.

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Rating: 3.884353782312925 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read several of Nicholson Baker's books many years ago, and, to be frank, I found his stream -of-consciousness style tedious, bogged down in minutiae so that it resembled the mind-workings of the self-absorbed who feel compelled to tweet, text, e-mail and blog their every thought, every sensation.
    However, in THE ANTHOLOGIST, Nicholson Baker's style serves the story well.
    Paul Chowder, the narrator of the story, longs for the passionate, suicidal depression of the Great Poets, but his crisis is more like a low-level "funk". Paul has writer's block and cannot finish the introduction to his anthology of poetry. Roz, his long-time girlfriend, has, in exasperation, left him, and Paul is left alone with his thoughts. Paul avoids writing the introduction. He procrastinates , pursues mindless diversions, and transparently plots to win Roz back. He feels he is a failure, but in the midst of his self-reproach and self-deprecation, Paul has Great Thoughts---Great Thoughts about poetry and music and love,Great Thoughts about the creative process and how poetry makes our lives so much richer------thoughts so beautifully expressed that this is some of the finest writing about poetry I have ever read. These thoughts scintillate and take ordinary, mundane activities into the realm of the sublime.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've read Nicholson Baker's essays—they're great—but never before read his fiction. It seems that this particular bit of fiction, which is entertaining all the way through, is in essence a vehicle for non-fiction: Baker has written an introduction to poetry in the shape of a novel. And it's marvelous. If, like me, you've dipped your mental toes into the uncomfortable water of poetry a few times, only to wonder if you really like water at all, this may be the book for you. Iambic pentameter? Bah, says protagonist Paul Chowder, it's been misused and overhyped. "The four-beat line"—not the five beats of pentameter—"is the soul of English poetry."Chowder is trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology called Only Rhyme, which is ironic, because he's a poet who writes free verse (poetry without beats—meter—or rhyme). Here's what Chowder says about free verse:----Free verse is, as we know, merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly. So you can break the line anywhere you want. In fact you want tobreak against anymoments of naturalpause, not withthem, to keepeveryone on their toes and off balance. So at the end of a line, you might find a word like "the" that requires another word to go along with it.---Elsewhere, Baker riffs on the mixed joys of coming across a poem in a magazine like The New Yorker:"Let's have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spit it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton."You either like this kind of voice or you don't. I do. I think it's super smart, playful, and enjoyably provocative. This book is delightful because it tells me that my reaction to poetry is perfectly valid, and if I don't like some poems it's not because I'm stupid—they may very well be bad, or at least problematic enough to be justifiably disappointing to as many people as appreciate them. There is a novel in here, too, about Paul's struggle to complete his introduction and come to terms with the loss of his lover, Roz. These characters are well drawn, but they're not as interesting as the others we meet, namely Poe, Kipling, Hardy, Roethke, Bogan, Lindsay, Oliver, Swinburne... Baker drops some musical recommendations as well. There's a lot to learn, in the easiest and most enjoyable way. This is the funnest textbook you'll ever read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is a gorgeous piece of writing. Baker knows his way around an artfully turned phrase, and the treatise on meter in poetry embedded in the work gave me a new appreciation for verse I didn't even realize I was looking for. However, as a novel, I simply felt like an author spinning his wheels. What started as a charming portrait of the author in the midst of writer's block quickly turned into an arduous slog of navel-gazing. I found lots to admire here, but not nearly as much to enjoy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of those books that seems custom-written for me. An absolute delight, and I had NO IDEA it was about poetry when I picked it up.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Already looking forward to reading this one again with a highlighter and google close by. Just let it wash over me for this first read. A crisp book about a flaccid character. Baker is a special voice.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Like a sleepy love song laced with self-doubt, anxiety, and endless distraction, harmonized to the major poets of the last two centuries.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    About poetry anthologies: "You have to read the unchosen ones to understand the chosen." I am seriously considering writing down the poets' names and going after all the wonderful poems out there. One forgets to read poems. Prose is so much more available and digestable, and one tends to think: I have to be in a special mood for poems. Strong enough to take the life in this concentrated form, while still vulnerable and open enough to allow yourself to feel the intensity.I loved the book. It was quirky and funny and sad and had great yet undramatic things in it and my favourite were the endings of a section, where Baker suddenly changes the subject in a very "poetic" kind of way. It was a very enjoyable read, and it gave me lots and lots of new ideas which I would like to start exploring."And that's what poetry gives me. Many, many beginnings."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I guess you could say I like poetry. I don't live, eat and breathe it, but on a particularly self-reflecting day, I'll pick up Robert Frost and memorize one or two poems so that I can tumble them over in my head when I get bored later that week. Quirky, yes, but that is me. I'm also not really a fan of a reading an entire novel based on stream of consciousness. I can handle up to around 5,000 words of spouting off at the mouth by the author - but that's where I draw the line.You know how you're sitting in a class for the first time that semester, and realize that the professor is more than just an amazing teacher and you could listen to them lecture all day long? (Yeah, yeah not all of you are students so just go with it and pretend for a minute.) It doesn't matter the subject because you catch the enthusiasm of the teacher through the intensity of the words they say and the expressions on their face. Congratulations, Nicholson Baker, you've just created a new favorite professor.Well. Maybe. The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder, a sometimes published poet working on an introduction to an anthology. His girlfriend just broke up with him because he can't find the motivation to finish the introduction, his editor is hounding him for the same reason, and he has this fascination with rhyming even though it's a talent he doesn't possess. In fact, his anthology is called Only Rhyme. Paul also has a knack for self-injury. More importantly, he has a knack for stringing words together that make you literally laugh out loud.Actually, it's Baker that does that. He looks at poetry as a side salad, claims that death is his health insurance and makes a case for Friends as a legitimate representation of culture. And there's also discussions of rhyme, meter, how poetry works in French versus in English, a rant at Milton for screwing it all up.... I wouldn't mind reading a commentary by Baker on poetry at all.This is where that "maybe" comes in. I could honestly do without the plot and I really don't like Paul. He whines a lot about his ex. And about his dog. And his office. His only saving grace may be his honesty. He knows he's procrastinating and he knows he's a whiner. In reality, the plot is more of a frame for the commentary anyway. In an interview, Baker talks about buying Sharpies and growing a longer beard, just to put himself in the mindset to write this book. I can respect that.But again, I'd rather read his commentary about poetry and history than Paul's random thoughts on life.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A delightful meandering through the free associations of a procrastinator, neighbor, and passionate poet, detailing the fragility and rawness of the human heart and the multi-layered genius of poetry's ability of expose it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Probably a reader would get more out of this if s/he were more familiar with more poetry. I mean, I know the difference between Tennyson and T.S. Eliot, and I know enough to guess that the 'plum' is an allusion to William Carlos Williams' 'this is just to say.' But I'd never heard of Louise Brogan or Elizabeth Bishop before. Nonetheless, I was charmed by this homage to poets, poetry, and procrastination.

    ... Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diam" doesn't mean seize the day - it means something gentler and more sensible... pluck the day. ... pick the day, harvest the day.... Don't frreaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was."

    "This glass of water is an essay.... Dip a spoon into [it] and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot fry pan so that a few drops fall and sizzle and quickly disappear. That's a poem.""
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nicholson Baker knows how to perfectly balance facts and tidbits about a specific topic (in this book, poetry), and ruminations about ordinary life (here, the musings of a fictional poet living in New Hampshire), into his works to make them both edifying and enjoyable. The Anthologist is a great read for those who love diving into a specific topic and surfacing every once in a while to follow a linear plot. In this book, Paul Chowder, poet and anthologist, directly addresses the reader, offering insights gleaned from his years of writing poetry, while also entertaining the reader with the current state of affairs of his private life, both big (his recent break up and his inability to write an introduction to the anthology he is compiling) and small (his progress in cleaning out his barn). Overall this a solid, entertaining read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book it did reach out to meWith salted humor, on bended kneeImploring grace for poetry.Liked it a lot - a couple of chapters o'er the top with the technical woo-woo, but mostly fab.We root for Roz!
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Very sorry I made the effort and finished this. A book of semi-interesting musings and explanations of poetry, but not a coherant novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ever since The Mezzanine (best book ever written #32), Baker has been a personal god of mine. Marvelous minutiae meets a rambling overview from poems to Tetris to Sharpies. The Anthologist is simple and profound, silly and useful. It's a book about poetry for people who hate poetry. And all you poem-huggers will embrace this as well.BUY, BORROW or BURN?Buy.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book had lots of fun poetry facts and some great quotable phrases, but it read like a convoluted diary. Not much progression and it got incredibly frustrating after a while.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The audio version of this book is just plain excellent -- read by the author Nicholson Baker, it's hard to believe the bearish looking man I saw in google images, is the speaker of this impossibly intimate portrait. I also learned a whole lot about poetry, something I haven't much cared about since reading poems to my son. I loved this book and wholeheartedly recommend the audio version, even though I may now have to read it in print to make sure I didn't miss anything.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A delight. I read this when it came out a couple years ago, and it recalled the melding of the humorous and the literary I experienced in reading Vikram Seth's Golden Gate and its fore-runner Pushkin. Poetry is a pretty serious subject in modern America--to its own detriment, and to the fracture of the Chaucerian-Shakespearean-Molierian-Byronic tradition. I cannot recall another novel that dares to take as its subject a literary professional who talks prosody in his sleep. Nicholson Baker's amusing take on the Po Biz makes this a keeper--though at the moment mine is loaned out, has been for months.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this book, it's a little treasure. It doesn't matter that The Anthologist meanders along like no novel ever should and that the plot goes pretty much nowhere. Every page crackles with the joy of writing. Nicholson Baker gets inside the head of a writer and gives an entertaining masterclass in the art of rhyme while he's at it. All writers should read this, poets or otherwise.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Paul Chowder, the narrator, is a poet trying to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems he's put together. Paul's writers block is the stuff that 12-step programs are made for. His girlfriend has moved out, he keeps injuring himself and he's obsessed with cleaning his office instead of writing.In between his dryly hilarious musings on his sad sack life, Paul holds forth on poetry, explaining in a clear, entertaining manner why rhyme is often reviled, and why pentameter is just plain wrong. He quotes many poets, including Mary Oliver, who I read and enjoyed last year. Chowder made me like poetry, which I generally don't, and made me want to read more, which is unusual for me. There's not much by way of plot here, but there's plenty of Paul, who's a great character. And the ending is not only charming, but a clever way of reframing the book. This was a smart, quick, funny read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    4 stars, 5 stars. I don't really know how good the book is and why, because it was the book I needed to read at this moment to get through my own art crisis. Damn that was some luck. It's about poetry. It's about art. It's about the small parts that make up the whole, the unseeable rules, the scut work, the importance of starting, why it's called fishing and not catching. Delightful asides (the book is almost all asides) about poets great and small and how they got it done. I also enjoyed the inner essay about rhyme. My Dad's favourite rhyme was about the amatory adventures of screwy Dick and his corkscrew prick. He ended up dead because the object of his affection had a left hand thread. It was interesting to hold this next to more exalted examples cited in the book, an amazing tool and hard-wired state of being. I saved my dad's last TV Guide for the marginalia. The white plastic chair in the first half of this book is now one of my favourite call backs. Back to the salt mines.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this book. To be fair, as a co-editor of two poetry anthologies who has faced exactly the task facing poet Paul Chowder in this novel - that is, to (co-)write an an introduction to the whole shemozzle - I could scarcely be more squarely in the target audience: but even so, I easily identified with the shambling, rather hangdog narrator and enjoyed the contrast because his deep, if exasperated, knowledge of poetry and his haplessness with almost everything else. His attitude to his ex is refreshing too - rather than being bitter or angry or cynical, he just wants her back. A really fun novel that also teaches you useful stuff - what could be better?
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is a stream of consciousness novel about a poet trying to write an introduction to a poetry anthology, while dealing with the loss of his girlfriend and his own middle-aged anxieties. It sounds much better than it actually is. The main bulk of the book is essentially a thesis on poetry, and reads much more like a literary criticism textbook than a novel. I don't mind non-fiction, and in fact read a lot of it, but when I pick up a fiction work I don't anticipate a non-fiction rant about the importance of rhyme in poetry. If the author had stuck to his ruminations on the lonliness of a middle-aged man, and his difficulty trying to complete a piece of work that seems to someone not doing it like it should be an easy task, he would have had something. The endless discussion of poets works the first time, as it helps to center the character in his world, but endless chapters about iambic pentameter and three-beat vs. four beat lines is really too much. I was very disappointed in this work, and wouldn't recommend it to any of my friends, because they probably wouldn't speak to me again. Reading this did set me to musing on how, when you're slogging through a book you're not enjoying, all the other books on your shelves, all those wonderful unread books, become a siren song, especially when you've gotten to the point where you've read too far to consider just putting it down and walking away. Suddenly every other book you could be reading appears as the best possible book in the universe, and you really want to just move on and finish this mess so you can answer that call. In fact, I took an extra bath just to have reading time so I could get this book finished and not feel like I had to read it anymore.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The narrator of this book is by turns funny, vulnerable, frustrating, charming, haughty, brilliant, and pathetic. In other words, he may be the most lovable, authentic character ever to appear in American literature. This book continues to jangle around in your head for weeks after reading it, much the way a particularly catchy metered stanza might.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novel discussion of English poetry from Chaucer to Mary Oliver made me laugh, resolve to try reading Swinburne again, consider the mechanics of meter and rhyme and generally nod in agreement or pleasure. Good Read!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nicholson Baker continues to be a writer I want to read. He's a bright guy with a lot of knowledge and he's able to focus his writing talents on minutiae in a way that can make it interesting to read about pocket lint. For the Anthologist, the main character is the typical Baker construct - an off-kilter individual who has a lot of knowledge, is able to focus on minutiae and has some random weird thoughts interjected. Plus, I couldn't help but learn a little here and there and refresh my mind about some poetry. Overall, another enjoyable book from Baker.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A slight effort. Nothing he does will make me like The Mezzanine any less but this was negligible. There is almost no story here. Nor did I believe it for a second; it seemed bolted on as if Baker couldn't decide whether to write an essay or not. His musings on poetry - namely that the iambic pentameter is not the basis of the English line that in actuality its four beats and a silent rest - was fascinating and I could have used more on that. In the meantime there was a lot of gossip about poets and not all of it was uninteresting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I agree with most of the reviews below. I can't imagine a more pleasant afternoon than a visit from Paul Chowder, the anthologist. We would enjoy a cup of tea and I would listen to his rants about poetry and his complaints about his life. it would be time happily spent and this is how this book feels -- like a visit from an interesting and sometimes exasperating friend.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My response to The Anthologist is a mixed one. Baker effectively replicates through his protagonist, Paul Chowder, the way the mind--or at least my mind--tends to work, fixating on one subject--poetry here--for long stretches of time, but fairly easily distracted by other, more personal, less philosophical, and more mundane things, like 'what is the meaning behind the fact that I now have three Band-aids on the same finger? there must be a meaning in this.' As a scholar and poet myself, one who tends to put off deadlines by finding infinite distractions, I recognized my own process of "head writing": letting things circulate until they seem to fall into place. Well, it's rather charming for awhile, but I'm afraid that eventually I found all this a bit affected and tedious. And I found myself arguing back against many of Paul Chowder's claims about poetry, even as I agreed with others. It's true that the character's passion for poetry--preferably rhymed poetry with four beats per line--shines through; but I also felt that his views were rather narrow. There's some real junk being published as poetry today--but also some very fine unrhymed free verse. The kind that irks me most is poetry that just plays with sound for its own sake and to show off the poet's cleverness, poetry that has no meaning behind it and creates no images to stir the imagination or the senses. And, oddly, that is the same way that Baker's prose began to affect me. By page 160, I started to skim because I just wanted to be done with it.So I'm giving The Anthologist 3.5 stars for its originality and some moments of brilliance, as well as for making me laugh a bit, but I can't recommend it more highly than that.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I disagreed with Baker's base Poetics (rhyme is not and has never been what draws me to poetry & I actually really enjoy iambic pentameter), and I often found his prose as purple as the plum on the cover--but even so I adored this book, as I adore practically everything else Baker has written. He never writes about much--tackling the subject & love of poetry is actually quote ambitious for a novelist who usually works on the scale of the beauty of staplers and the difficulty of heating up a bottle of milk for an infant--but he does it with such verve and unabashed excitement that I am always caught up in the emotion of it all. This book is actually a bit of an anomaly if I remember correctly: it's got a sort-of plot, with actual character arc and everything. Even if it hadn't I'd probably still love it. Baker has an incredible sense of joy that is so often dampened, or lost completely, in the stuffy pretentious of modern fiction. It's glorious to see this enthusiasm keyed on poetry, a subject that I actually care about. I'd reread this in a heartbeat--it really galvanized my (at the time) flagging faith in Literature.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This the first book of Nicholson Baker's that I've read. I will definitely be reading his other works.I don't know where to begin with this review so I'm plunging in with how this novel about a poet and writer who is getting ready to write the introduction for an anthology of poetry he's editing. Some people might call that "getting ready" procrastination. It certainly looks, feels, tastes and smells like procrastination. As I've been working for nearly a year on my own manuscript for a novel, I assure you, this is not procrastinating. It's thinking. Mulling. Necessary.I like Nicholson's writing style. His language is funny, very easy to read and he's able to write extensively about a subject that I'm typically distanced from. He does so without intimidating or boring me. This is saying a lot because my attention span is brief and shrinking.I must say that reading this book taught me as much about poetry as any class I may have faked my way through in college. Baker intersperses the commentary of the main character's goofing around and living life and doing things around his house, anything other than sitting down and writing that introduction and those tangents into the everyday and familiar can be quite hilarious in a quiet way.If you read this book, do so with an anthology of poetry nearby. You're going to want to read some of these poems all the way through. Luckily, my husband used to work for a paperback warehouse where he could buy deeply discounted remainders and books with problems. I tell you that to explain how we came to own Immortal Poems of the English Language edited by Oscar Williams. Because, trust me, we don't sit around this house and read poetry. That might cut into our television time or our social networking on the computer time.One night while reading this novel in bed, I did read aloud some of the mentioned poetry to my husband. He was polite and indulgent. He even used his cell phone to look up some information about Emily Dickinson for me. We discussed the way poets focus on death or, at least, lack cheer. Then my husband reminded me that he likes to call this anthology Immoral Poems...... Poetry is doomed in our hands.

Book preview

The Anthologist - Nicholson Baker

Also by Nicholson Baker

Human Smoke

Checkpoint

A Box of Matches

Double Fold

The Everlasting Story of Nory

The Size of Thoughts

The Fermata

Vox

U and I

Room Temperature

The Mezzanine

THE ANTHOLOGIST

Nicholson Baker

Simon & Schuster

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New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or

are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or

persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Nicholson Baker

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2009

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Designed by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baker, Nicholson.

The anthologist / Nicholson Baker.

p. cm.

1. Poets—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.A4325A83 2009

813’.54—dc22

2009001205

ISBN: 978-1-4165-7244-2

eISBN 13: 978-1-4165-8397-4

To M.

THE ANTHOLOGIST

1

HELLO, THIS IS PAUL CHOWDER, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you. I’m going to divulge them. What a juicy word that is, divulge. Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

What is poetry? Poetry is prose in slow motion. Now, that isn’t true of rhymed poems. It’s not true of Sir Walter Scott. It’s not true of Longfellow, or Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Yeats. Rhymed poems are different. But the kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now—the kind that I write—is slow-motion prose.

My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I’m a study in failure. Obviously I’m up in the barn again—which sounds like a country song, except for the word obviously. I wonder how often the word obviously has been used in a country song. Probably not much, but I don’t know because I hardly listen to country, although some of the folk music I like has a strong country tincture. Check out Slaid Cleaves, who lives in Texas now but grew up right near where I live.

So I’M UP in the second floor of the barn, where it’s very empty, and I’m sitting in what’s known as a shaft of light. The light leans in from a high window. I want to adjust my seat so I can slant my face totally into the light. Just ease it into the light. That’s it. If this barn were a prison cell, this would be the moment of the day that I would look forward to. Sitting here in the long womanly arm of light, the arm that reaches down like Anne Boleyn’s arm reaching down from her spot-lit height. Not Anne Boleyn. Who am I thinking of? Margot Fonteyn, the ballet dancer. I knew there was a Y in there.

There’s one droopy-bottomed wasp diving back and forth, having some fun with what’s available. I can move my head a certain way, and I feel the sun warming up the clear flamingos that swim around in my eyeballs. My corneas are making infinity symbols under their orange-flavored lids.

I can even do eyelid wars. Do you do that? Where you try as hard as you can to look up with your eyeballs, rolling them back in your head, but with your eyes closed. Your eyelids will keep pulling your eyes back down because of the inter-lock between the two sets of muscles. Try it. It’s a good way of passing the time.

Don’t chirp at me, ye birdies! I’ve had enough of that kind of chirpage. It cuts no grease with me.

WHEN I COME across a scrap of poetry I like, I make up a tune for it. I’ve been doing this a lot lately. For instance, here’s a stanza by Sir Walter Scott. I’ll sing it for you. We heard you in our twilight caves— Try it again.

It’s written in what’s called a ballad stanza. Four lines, four beats in each line, and the third line drives toward the fourth. Notes of joy can pierce the waves, Sir Walter says. In other words, notes of joy can cut through the mufflement. Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don’t have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.

And yes, of course, there are things that should be said about iambic pentameter, and I don’t want to lose sight of that. I don’t want to slight the longer line. I hope we can get to that fairly soon. My theory—I can’t resist giving you a little glimpse of it here—my theory is that iambic pentameter is in actuality a waltz. It’s not five-beat rhythm, even though pent means five, because five beats would be totally offkilter and ridiculous and would never work and would be a complete disaster and totally unlistenable. Pentameter, so called, if you listen to it with an open ear, is a slow kind of gently swaying three-beat minuetto. Really, I mean it.

And what romanticism did was to set the pentameter minuet aside and try to recover the older, more basic ballad rhythm. Somewhere along the way, so the Romantic poets felt, the humanness and the singingness and the amblingness of lyric poetry became entangled in frippery and parasols, and that’s because we stopped hearing those four basic pacing beats. That’s what Walter Scott was bringing back when he published his border ballads, and what Coleridge was bringing back when he wrote the Kubla Khan song and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They were bringing back the ballad. Where Alph, the sacred river ran—four beats. Through caverns measureless to man—four beats. And it’s the basis of song lyrics, too, because lyric poetry is song lyrics, that’s why it’s called lyric poetry.

And you know? I’ve read too many difficult poems. I’ve postponed comprehension too many times. And I’ve written difficult poems, too. No more.

YOU’RE OUT THERE. I’m out here. I’m sitting in the sandy driveway on my white plastic chair. There’s a man somewhere in Europe who is accumulating a little flotsam heap of knowledge about the white plastic chair. He calls it the monobloc chair. A word I’ve never used. Monobloc, no K. And I’m sitting in one. Its arms are blindingly white in the sun.

His name is Jens Thiel. God, I love Europeans. Jens. Especially the ones from smaller countries. Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium. I love those places. And of course: Amsterdam. What a great name for a city. Paul Oakenfold has a piece of trance music called Amsterdam. His name is Paul, and my name is Paul. Paul: What is that crazy U doing there? Paw—U—L.

A woman is walking by on the street. Ah, it’s Nanette, my neighbor. I knew it was her. She’s carrying a garbage bag. She’s picking up trash, I guess. Nan does that. She has an early-morning stroll sometimes, and I’ve noticed she takes along an empty trash bag tucked into her back pocket. I’m going to wave to her. Hi! Hello! She waved back.

Yes, she’s picking up a beer can and shaking it out, and now she’s putting it in that trash bag. The beer can is faded to a pale violet color. I think I can almost hear the soft rustle of the bag as things fall into it. Pfft. Pfft. Sometimes maybe a clink.

Nan is or soon will be divorced from her husband, Tom— Tom, who every weekend went windsurfing in a blue-armed wetsuit. She has a son named Raymond, a good kid who plays lacrosse. And she now evidently has a new boyfriend, a curly-haired man named Chuck, annoyingly handsome.

OF COURSE YOU already understand meter. When you hear it, you understand it, you just don’t know you understand it. You, as a casual reader of poems, and as a casual listener to pop songs, understand meter better than the metrists who misdescribed it over several centuries understood it. Even they understood it better than they knew.

My neighbor Nan seems to be fully committed to her new flame, Chuck. His car is in the driveway again. I suppose that’s a good thing. She deserves to be happy with a good-looking man like Chuck.

Roz, the woman who lived with me in this house for eight years, has moved away.

My dog is shedding because it’s summer, and then the birds, that keep chirping and chirping, make nests of the dog hair. It’s good for that.

I wish I could smoke pot. What would that do? I don’t even know where I would get pot around here. Somebody said the wispy dude with the pointy sideburns who works at the pet-food store. Could I maybe offer some to Roz, as a dramatic gesture? I’ve never bought pot in my life. Maybe it’s time. No, I don’t think it is. Too involved. But I think I will step in from the driveway for a moment to get a clear glass bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. I do love a palate cleanser of pure Newcastle Brown.

Roz is kind of short. I’ve always been attracted to short women. They’re usually smarter and more interesting than tall women and yet people don’t take them as seriously. And it’s a bosomy kind of generous smartness, often. But she’s moved out, so I should stop talking about her.

I’m a little sick of all the bird chirping, frankly. They just don’t stop. I mowed the lawn yesterday so I wouldn’t have to hear their racket. Chirtle chirtle. It’s constant. And as soon as I started mowing I knew this was the best thing I could be doing. Walking behind this armful of noise, going around, turning the corner I’d already turned, circumventing the overturned canoe. I ducked under the clothesline that Roz strung last year between the barn and the box elder tree. The white rope is now a lovely dry gray color. She used to hang many beautiful tablecloths and dishtowels on that clothesline. I should use it myself, instead of the dryer, which is making a thumping noise anyway, and then if she drove by she’d see that I was being a responsible person who dried my clothes in the sun. I wish I’d taken a picture of that clothesline with her faded shirts on it. No bras that I remember, but you can’t expect bras necessarily on a clothesline. You have to go to Target to see bras hanging nobly out for the public gaze.

I got in bed last night and I closed my eyes and I lay there and then a powerful urge came over me to cross my eyes. I thought of tragic people like Don Rickles, Red Skelton, people like that. Broken professional entertainers who maybe once had been funny. And now they were in Vegas, on cruise control, using their eye-crossing to allude to their early period of genuine funniness. Or they were dead.

So I crossed my eyes with my eyes closed. And I saw something in the dark: two crescent moons on the outside of my vision, which were the new moons of strain. I could feel my corneal pleasure domes moving, too. And as my eyes reached maximum crossing I felt an interesting blind pain of wrongness. I decided that I should hold on to that.

SO NOW, you’re waiting. I’ve promised something. You’re thinking okay, he’s said he’s going to divulge. Your hope is that I, Paul Chowder, have some things that I know that you don’t know because I have been a published poet for a while. And maybe I do know a few things.

One useful tip I can pass on is: Copy poems out. Absolutely top priority. Memorize them if you want to, but the main thing is to copy them out. Get a notebook and a ballpoint pen and copy them out. You will be shocked by how much this helps you. You will see immediate results in your very next poem, I promise.

Another tip is: If you have something to say, say it. Don’t save it up. Don’t think to yourself, I’m going to build up to the truth I really want to say. Don’t think, In this poem, I’m going to be sneaky and start with this other truth over here, and then I’m going to scamper around a little bit over here, and then play with some purple Sculpey over here in the corner, and finally I’ll reach the truth at the very end. No, slam it in immediately. It won’t work if you hold it in reserve. Begin by saying what you actually care about saying, and the saying of it will guide you to the next line, and the next, and the next. If you need to arrange things differently later, you can do that.

And never think, Oh, heck, I’ll write that whole poem later. Never think, First I’ll write this poem about my old orange life jacket, so that I’ll be more ready to confront the more haunting, daunting reality of this poem here about the treehouse that was rejected by its tree. No. If you do, the bigger theme will rebel and go sour on you. It’ll hang there like a forgotten chili pepper on the stem. Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don’t get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year’s Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else’s name you’ll hate yourself.

Another tip: The term iambic pentameter isn’t good. It isn’t at all good. It’s the source of much grief and muddle and some very bad enjambments. Louise Bogan once said that somebody’s enjambments gave her the willies, and she’s right, they can do that to you. You shudder, reading them. Most iambic-pentameter enjambments are a mistake. That sounds technical but I’m talking about something real— a real problem.

And finally, the really important thing you have to know is: The four-beat line is the soul of English poetry.

PEOPLE ARE GOING to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They’re going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because pent is five in Babylonian, and five is the number of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting. They’re going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse—which is another confusing term—and all this so-called prosody they’re going to shovel at you. And sure—fine—you can handle it. You’re up to whatever mind-forged shrivelments they’re going to dish out that day. But just remember (a) that the word prosody isn’t an appealing word, and (b) that pentameter came later on. Pentameter is secondary. Pentameter is an import from France. And French is a whole different language. The real basis of English poetry is this walking rhythm right here.

Woops—dropped my Sharpie.

Right here: One—two—three—four. Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill. We think so then, we thought so still. I think that was the very first poem I heard, The Pelican Chorus, by Edward Lear. My mom read it to me. God, it was beautiful. Still is. Those singing pelicans. They slapped their feet around on those long bare islands of yellow sand, and they swapped their verb tenses so that then was still and still was then. They were the first to give me the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry—the feeling that something wasn’t right, but it was all

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