Customer Reviews

The Anthologist

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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 about who, for space reasons, he had to leave out of his anthology. He wonders whether this reluctance to exclude some deserving poets is fueling his writer's block.

If it were not for Paul's slump, he wouldn't be addressing us. He would be diligently adding page after page to his formal introduction, or he would be writing his "plums." (Paul calls non-rhyming verse "plums" and he explains more about that in his ponderings.) Instead, as Paul himself states in the opening paragraph, "...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."

One can imagine that Paul Chowder is a considerable part of Baker who may not write the same book again and again, but whose desire to investigate and discuss a myriad of topics often leads him to write works with a loose major theme and plenty of elbow room for "digressions." THE ANTHOLOGIST is perfect for unleashing that propensity. It is a wise, funny, somewhat unorthodox primer for poets and would-be-poets that arguably teaches as much or more than starchy textbooks.

This goes on my Top Books of 2009 list. I hope you'll find it as delightful as I have. Oh, and maybe write a few "plums" or rhymes of your own while you are spending time with Paul Chowder....

(4.5 stars) The sly humor of the cover, with its luscious plum, sets the tone for this rich, iconoclastic novel about poetry and the writing life. Paul Chowder, the speaker, has achieved modest success by writing "plums...That's what I call a poem that doesn't rhyme." He has just compiled an anthology of poetry, though choosing the poems for the anthology was, for him, "like [being] that blond bitch-goddess on Project Runway," and he must now write the forty-page introduction. His publisher is desperate for it, and Chowder has writer's block.

Regarding himself as "study in failure," Chowder contemplates his life. Roz, his love for the past eight years, has finally had enough of his dithering and has left him; he is in debt; his house needs repairs; and he cannot focus on anything long enough to act. As he thinks about his unwritten introduction, he skitters from perceptive comments about poetry and the creative life to mundane annoyances, juxtaposing unlikely subjects which keep the reader surprised and entertained. In two successive sentences, for example, he remarks that "You have to suffer to be a human being who can help people understand suffering. I have a mouse in my kitchen."

In a voice so "human" he sounds like an alterego for author Nicholson Baker, Chowder demystifies poetry--and plums--making often hilarious comments about the structure of language, the history of poetry, the lives of famous poets, and his own struggles. His free-flowing, not-quite-stream-of-consciousness style allows him to connect contemporary culture (and the reader) with the most serious academic subjects: "Friends," he thinks is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published."

Not satiric and not anti-academic, so much as "anti-ponderous" and "anti-pompous," Chowder is a true believer in the importance of good poetry and its ability to connect directly with our essential human nature, conveying unique visions of the world in a unique "music." His emphasis on rhyme is ironic, however, since he, himself, has had more success with free verse. He sees the rhythm of poetry as "a strolling rhythm. Or a dancing rhythm. A gavotte, a minuet, even a waltz," with inner quadruplets, the four-beat line being "the soul of English poetry." He illustrates the various meters, and he sets some poems to music, providing the musical notation. Poetry, in essence, is something that must be felt and heard as music, and the reader must join in its song if it is to be effective.

Chock full of "a-ha" moments, the novel is a treasure trove of information and observation about poetry and poets, told with robust humor and an awareness that, for many readers of this book, dead poets may be more interesting for their lives than for their writing. The novel entertains on every page, and the author is constantly aware that his audience is not a college classroom. As Paul Chowder (through Nicholson Baker) emphasizes the sounds of poetry and their parallels in music, dance, and even baby-talk, he provides an accessible "hook" for readers who may not have read poetry recently, and by demystifying it, he encourages contemporary readers to discover or rediscover its joys. n Mary Whipple

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...

Nicholson Baker's charming book is a first person monologue, a gentle diatribe by a cranky poet and dilatory anthologist who's caught in the wrong century. Otherwise unable to generate sufficient energy and enthusiasm to overcome his failures as lover, housekeeper, poet and academician, Chowder lives entirely in his head and voice, reserving all of his passionate outrage for the illogical workings of the poetry biz and his personal campaign for a return to rhyme and meter in the writing of contemporary poetry. Baker's roman sans clef names names; Chowder loves Mary Oliver, hates Billy Collins and excoriates the school of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. He has many sensible things to say about the execrable Pound and the malevolent influence of Futurism on the development of modern art. In comparison to the frequent exclamations devoted to Oliver, the incomparably greater figures of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams receive only one or two negative mentions. Nevertheless, he is no mere antideluvian loser; he is a champion of W.S. Merwin's work, and "The Fish", a free verse (!) poem by Elizabeth Bishop, is one of his favorites. He's even managed to reach the lower rungs of literary respectability, having been chosen to compile an anthology of modern and classic poetry. The book will be published if he ever can get around to completing its introductory essay, one devoted to his loopy theory of rhyme and meter. Entirely too much space in the novel is given over to the matter of four beat lines but I did enjoy Baker's take on the importance of musical "rests" acting as beats. Chowder's rants against iambic pentameter and conventional notation are of a piece with his finely-delineated character. His disgust at the need for most poets to occupy creative writing positions in academia is based on his inability to "lie" to his students and his evident unsuitability for such employment. In this regard, his noble sentiments and resignation of office are hilariously at war with his residual ambitions and the tentative feelers he puts out to determine if the university will take him back. Other than Chowder, the most vital characters in this short, swift book (I compulsively finished it in a single evening) are a crusty dog and an adventurous mouse. The book doesn't have much of a plot and the presence of other humans is significantly scanted. "The Anthologist" is like a "Wind in The Willows" set in the world of poetry and poets; given Baker's supple prose, sense of humor, and gift for gentle outrage, you are sure to enjoy it.

Funny book. Really funny.

If you:

(a) purchased two or more books of poetry in the last 10 years,
(b) regularly read The New Yorker, or
(c) ever attempted to write a book,

this one is for you.

Nominally the book is a first person account of a poet-author attempting to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry. Really though, it is a stream of conscious narration of a very funny man's observations on life: the love of his dog, the loss of a girlfriend, the sadistic design of computer cables, worries over money and health insurance (or lack of), and more, each tertiary topic commuting his self-imposed sentence to complete the book introduction. For example, dropping egg salad into the silverware drawer, then softly cursing only to drop more in while in the process of sorting out whether to clean out the first dollop is all part of the day's meandering syllabus.

Throughout the book there are references to poets and to the rhythm of poetry, but having an interest in or understanding of poetry is not a prerequisite to enjoying the book. On the other hand, the writing reflects the attention to detail of a poet in fitting just the right word in just the right place. Almost every paragraph includes an unexpected word or simile that enhance the writing.

The real strong suit is the humorous take on the literary life. Catch 22 did this for the military; reading Heller's classic novel, forever changes one's view of the strident codes of the armed services. The Anthologist will similarly change the outsider's view of the lives of authors, particularly poets who we often look up to like rare birds migrating past us at high altitudes, when in truth they live normal lives here on the ground with the rest of us.

Normally I don't write recommendations on books as taste is subjective or criticizing another's labor seems unfair. However, where a book stands out, it is worth taking the time to give it some praise. Also, to be fair five stars does not mean it rates up there with a literary classic such as Faulkner's Flags in the Dust, but the Great Ones can really only be ranked against themselves.

This book will really appeal to a particular audience: anyone that answers yes to a, b, or c above. And on that score it rates a five.

Hope this review helps you.

"You can start anywhere," as narrator Paul Chowder says in this delightful little book. (He was talking about writing poetry, or mowing the lawn.) So I'll just start right here, and write a little bit about some of the things that I really liked about this novel.

Firstly, I like Paul Chowder himself. His semi-stream of consciousness monologue about poems and plums (poems that don't rhyme - like the ones Paul writes), his feelings of ambivalence about modern poetry and the poetry culture, his sadness and hurt over the loss of Roz, his live-in girlfriend for the past nine years, and his ironic, self-effacing and (what seems genuinely) honest views of himself. He's not self-absorbed, as one reviewer I read suggested; he's just alone and lonely and fumbling around, trying to plan his next move at an emotional crossroads.

He's about my age (early 50's), I guess, and a somewhat successful poet (three published collections, past winner of a Guggenheim), but nevertheless struggling financially. He can't teach to sustain himself, because teaching makes him a professional liar - telling all those young students that their attempts at poetry are worth reading is simply lying. But he has a lot to teach, and he does so charmingly from start to finish as he rehearses in his mind the themes of the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming poems he has compiled called "Only Rhyme". He starts by saying he's going to tell us everything he knows about poetry, and though I doubt that he really does accomplish that, he does tell us a lot.

He tells us of his admiration for the great rhyming poets, and about his disillusionment when his fourth-grade teacher encourages the class to write in free verse: "It doesn't have to rhyme!" He tells us that the controversy over the importance of rhyming in poetry goes back 500 years. He acknowledges that free verse has given many more people the freedom to try their hand at poetry (natural rhymers are rare) and that his own career started with that schoolteacher - his own poems don't rhyme, they're plums. He tells us his strongly held views on meter: the natural English language meter is the four-beat line, the ballad stanza, root of great poetry and pop music. He declaims against the lauded status of the (imported from French) iambic pentameter: it's not five beats to a line he insists, it's six when you include the all important end-of-line rest; the rhythm is really a three-beat count, not six beats, like a waltz; the word iamb is itself not iambic. ("The real rhythm of poetry is a strolling rhythm. Or a dancing rhythm. A gavotte, a minuet, a waltz.") As if to emphasize the importance of rhythm, Paul is always setting famous verse to his own tunes. He warns of the dangers of "enjambment", especially in its "ultra-extreme" form. And he tells us countless anecdotes and bits of gossip about the whole population of nineteenth and twentieth century poets.

I like the fact that through it all, Paul takes the reader on quite an entertaining and informative tour and reviews his thoughts on poets and poetry, on rhyme and meter, thoroughly enough to allow him at long last to spill out his anthology introduction in a whirlwind three days - but instead of the targeted forty pages, the introduction weighs in at two hundred thirty-nine (four pages short of the length of this book!). It will need some cutting, but this book doesn't - I like all two hundred and forty-three pages.

It's not clear how much of what Paul Chowder tells us reflects Baker's own views - Paul is the narrator of a novel after all. But his nostalgia for rhyming poetry (he "always secretly want[s] it to rhyme" when he comes across a new poem in a magazine, journal or anthology, "don't you?"), sensible as it seems to philistine me, is a bit too heretical: even when lamenting the unfashionableness of rhyming, he takes careful pains to acknowledge the greatness of modern poetry and many (non-rhyming) modern poets, even Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom he deplores.

Paul starts by saying that "poetry is prose in slow motion". He notes that in poetry there is no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. And he avers "poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing." True, true and true. And by these standards, this wonderful book should be thought of prose-poetry. How's this for slow motion prose:

"Another inchworm fell on my pant leg. They germinate in quantity somewhere up in the box elder. It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices - full of the short happiness of being alive."

As mentioned, it is always unclear whether the views on poetry that Paul expresses are "nonfiction" in the sense of revealing the author's own views. And the narrative is nothing if not a controlled sob over Paul's career to-date, his poetry, his future ("Poetry is a young man's job."), and his loss of Roz. Eventually, the sobs burst out as Paul delivers a master class at the "Global Word Congress" (a conclave of "masses" of poets) in Switzerland. He even ironically throws in a bit of iambic pentameter in the first line of a chapter following the one in which he presents his unorthodox disquisition on the classic meter: "A freakish mist lies over the land. [rest]"

And like a poem, this novel demands to be read a second time - which I did immediately, for a better understanding and for the pleasure.

There's not much narrative tension here, not much in the way of building action, climax, resolution and denouement. "Oh plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself." But as Paul packs up his collection of books (anthologies) and pines for his lost Roz (whose breasts, like poetry, "don't have to rhyme, but [...] do."), he draws the reader into sympathy with his situation, with his reflections on the past and present of poetry, and (for me at least) with his optimism about its rhyming future:

"And I'm sure there will be a genuine adept who strides into our midst in five or ten years. The way Frost did. Sat up in the middle of that spring pool, with the weeds and the bugs all over him. He found the water that nobody knew was there. And that will happen again. All the dry rivulets will flow. And everyone will understand that new things were possible all along."

There's a lot to like here, and it makes me want to know more of Baker's work. But before I do that, there are a lot of poets and a lot of poetry I need to catch up with.


Paul McMahon
July 2010

The dust jacket of THE ANTHOLOGIST describes narrator Paul Chowder as a "once-in-a-while-published kind of poet" who has agreed to create a poetry anthology and to write its introduction. But for 241 pages of a 243 page novel, Paul procrastinates, busy with such make-work as straightening his office. Or, he moons over his erstwhile girlfriend, who has moved out because his ambivalent and dilatory approach to this project has driven her crazy. But as the arch and charming Paul procrastinates, he is actually considering and clarifying in the most playful possible manner the numerous issues that he will address in his introduction, as well as discussing the lives of many poets and the roles poets and poetry now play in our society. Here are two brief samples of the lyrical Paul in rumination, as his drop-dead deadline approaches.

"The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking -you light one line with the glowing ember of the last."

"Oh, plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself."

Paul has lots to say about poetry. And none of it is mind-fogging academic analysis and jargon.

Highly recommended.

When someone describes a book as a 'novel of ideas' it's almost a sure bet it's boring and lacks believable characters (think Ayn Rand), but there are a few exceptions and this is definitely one of them. The basic story line of The Anthologist is the struggle of a poet to put together an anthology of rhyming poems. The problem is he has a huge writers block as regards the introduction. Boring, right? Wrong!! This particular poet is someone you'll want to take home and make a cup of tea for, someone you'll want to sit down and have a long talk with. He's a disturbingly honest klutz who also happens to talk more interestingly about poetry than anyone you've ever known. Admittedly talking interestingly about poetry isn't something most of us have ever heard anyone do, but in this case it's fascinating, even for those of us who didn't think we gave a damn about poetry. This book makes poetry and poets as interesting as athletics and athletes or crime and criminals. It'll send you digging for those old anthologies of poems you put in the back of your closet after college. And it'll make you sound incredibly smart the next time you get caught in a discussion of literature.

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.