Read: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

February 2, 2010

So The Anthologist is a book about poetry. Then again it’s not really either. Ok, let me start over. Paul Chowder is a poet. A semi-successful one who’s been tasked to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry.  Oh I’ll let him tell you himself:

“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 a 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 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.”

Chowder is a procrastinator, an overthinker – and most of us can relate to that. Instead of writing his introduction, he goes to the bookstore and picks up an anthology of Elizabethan verse, spends time on iTunes, buys some software. And at the end of two weeks, comes up empty. His girlfriend Roz has given up on him, and he is heartbroken.

Why should you read this book? Because of Paul Chowder. He’s  vulnerable, he’s likable, he’s funny, he’s kinda odd. He’s human. He sleeps with his books:

“Some of the books are thick and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it’s like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It’s a Campbell Chunky Soup of books. The bed you can eat with a fork.

I’m hoping that someday I’ll have to clean them out and that somebody will return. But for now, this is what I’ve got.”

I love how he muses on all kinds of things, so much so that there seems to be so much happening although in actual fact nothing much is going on as he procrastinates his time away.

“One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokeness of it will perish and go black and crumbly-maybe-and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now:  Surprisingly very little is known of Monica Mcgowan Johnson and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the ‘hair bump’ episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Or: Surprisingly little can be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the greatness of Larry Sanders.

And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won’t perish.”

And of course, he talks about poetry, about the iambic pentameter, the invisible rest and so on. He makes up tunes for verses he likes. And tells us things like “poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.”

I haven’t read anything from Nicholson Baker previously but after thoroughly enjoying The Anthologist, I feel like I ought to check out his other works. I’d have to say that this was one of my favourite reads of January 2010 (yeah, this review is a bit belated).

Book provided by – my library

Written by olduvai Posted in Reading