FOREWORD
by David Lehman
Over the years I’ve read novels centering on lawyers, doctors, diplomats, teachers, financiers, even car salesmen and dentists, but not until 2009 did I come across one about the travails of the editor of a poetry anthology. When word of The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker’s new novel, reached me last September, I couldn’t wait to read it. Baker’s novels defy convention and reveal an obsessive nature, and I wondered what he would make of American poetry, for surely his novel would reflect a strenuous engagement with the art. The title character here, Paul Chowder by unfortunate name, has put together an anthology of poems he is calling Only Rhyme. The phrase describes the notional book’s contents and indicates the editor’s conception of poetic virtue. Paul has chosen the contents of his anthology but is now, on the eve of a deadline, afflicted with writer’s block. He needs to write a foreword but cannot. “How many people read introductions to poetry anthologies, anyway?” he wonders, then volunteers, “I do, but I’m not normal.”
Having asked myself that same question and given a similar answer, I can appreciate the speaker’s troubling awareness of the many poets who have to be left out of his book—and the relatively few people who will bother to read his introductory essay. The task of writing a prefatory note becomes no less difficult when it is an annual requirement, though Nicholson Baker may have made my job a little easier this time around. Every editor has the impulse to use the introductory space to open the door, welcome the guest, and disappear without further ado. But some things are worth saying, and one such is Baker’s defense of anthologies. For a poet facing all the perils that lurk in a poet’s path—a poet very like the novel’s Paul Chowder—anthologies represent the possibility of a belated second chance. And it is that possibility, however slim, that spurs the poet to stick to a vocation that offers so much resistance and promises so few rewards. The “you” in these sentences refers to the American poet—and perhaps to American poetry itself, an oddity in an age that worships celebrity. “You think: One more poem. You think: There will be some as yet ungathered anthology of American poetry. It will be the anthology that people tote around with them on subways thirty-five, forty years from now.” The poet’s conception of fame exists within modest limits, but it is persistent: “And you think: Maybe the very poem I write today will somehow pry open a space in that future anthology and maybe it will drop into position and root itself there.”
Baker’s skeptical distance from the fray makes his take on things particularly compelling. The opinions he puts forth are provocative and entertaining. A proponent of the sit-com as the great American art form, Baker’s anthologist believes that “any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.” That is quite a statement, even allowing for the complexity of irony. (After all, to be “uplifting for the human spirit” may not be the ideal criterion by which to judge poetry or history.) The speaker establishes his credentials as an American poet with his realism for self-pity’s sake. He suspects that poets form a “community” only in the realm of piety: “We all love the busy ferment, and we all know it’s nonsense. Getting together for conferences of international poetry. Hah! A joke. Reading our poems. Our little moment. Physical presence. In the same room with. A community. Forget it. It’s a joke.”
Baker (or his mouthpiece) likes Swinburne, Poe, Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, and the contemporary British poets Wendy Cope and James Fenton. He disapproves of free verse, distrusts the “ultra-extreme enjambment” that you find in William Carlos Williams or Charles Olson, and argues that “iambic pentameter” is something of a hoax. As for the unrhymed poems that dominate literary magazines and university workshops, he feels it would be more accurate to call them “plums” and their authors “plummets” or “plummers.” How did we get to this state of affairs? In Baker’s account, the chief villain is Ezra Pound, “a blustering bigot—a humorless jokester—a talentless pasticheur—a confidence man.” Pound advocated modernism in verse with the same bullying arrogance that went into his radio broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini, and that is no accident, because the impulse that led to fascism also gave rise to modern poetry. Modernism as Pound preached it and T. S. Eliot practiced it—in The Waste Land, “a hodge-podge of flummery and borrowed paste”—was, in short, probably as ruinous for the art of verse as fascism was for Europe. The popularity of translations, especially prose versions of exotic foreign verse rendered from a language that the translator doesn’t know, also did its part to hasten the “death of rhyme.”
The views articulated in The Anthologist are antithetical to contemporary practice in ways that recall Philip Larkin’s conviction that Pound ruined poetry, Picasso ruined painting, and Charlie Parker ruined jazz: the dissenting position, pushed to an amusing extreme, and stated with uncompromising intelligence. The narrator can sound a sour note. To teach creative writing to college students is to be “a professional teller of lies,” he maintains, gleefully quoting Elizabeth Bishop on the subject: “I think one of the worst things I know about modern education is this ‘Creative Writing’ business.” Nevertheless Baker’s opinions are worth pondering, especially when the “difficulty versus accessibility” question becomes the subject of debate. And his advice to the aspiring poet is astute. Don’t postpone writing the poem, he says. “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.”
The Anthologist was well received and prominently reviewed in book supplements that rarely notice poetry books, let alone anthologies of them, except with a certain contempt, which was a mild irony but an old story. Some laudatory articles went so far as to declare that “you” will enjoy the work “even if you generally couldn’t care less about verse.” But then, when poetry or the teaching of poetry is discussed, commentators have a hard time avoiding a note of condescension. Poetry is called a “lost art.” It is thought to be something young people go through, a phase; something you have to apologize for, as when a poet at a reading reassures the audience that only three more poems remain on the docket. And yet poetry retains its prestige. The term exists as a sort of benchmark in fields ranging from politics to athletics. Columnists enjoy reminding newly elected officials that “you campaign in poetry but govern in prose”—an axiom that aligns poetry on the side of idealism and eloquence against the bureaucratic details and inconveniences of prosaic administration. In the Financial Times, the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý, who spied on women with his homemade viewfinder, “stealing their likenesses as they giggled, gossiped and dreamed,” is described as “a peeping Tom with a poet’s eye.” Of Nancy Pelosi, readers of Time learned that, to the Speaker’s credit, when a colleague’s mother dies, she “encloses a poem written by her own mother with her condolence.” In the same issue of the magazine, a flattering profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, appeared. During the Iraq war, McChrystal sent copies of “The Second Coming” to his special operators, challenging them to flip the meaning of Yeats’s lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Has there ever been a really good movie about a poet as opposed to the many excellent movies in which poetry is quoted to smart effect? Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about the ill-starred romance of John Keats and the barely legal Fanny Brawne, came out in 2009 and showed there is life left in the familiar stereotype of the consumptive poet burning a fever for love. Campion won over Quentin Tarantino. “The movie made me think about taking a writing class,” the director of Pulp Fiction said. “One of the best things that can happen from a movie about an author is that you actually want to read their work.” On television, poetry continues to put in regular appearances on The PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and sometimes sneaks into scripted shows. When an advertising copywriter on Mad Men loses his job, he doesn’t take it well. He “did not go gentle into that good night,” an ex-associate observes. The critic Stephen Burt believes that Project Runway holds some useful lessons for poetry critics: “Project Runway even recalls the famous exercises in ‘practical criticism’ performed at the University of Cambridge in the 1920s, in which professor I. A. Richards asked his students to make snap judgments about unfamiliar poems.” I have commented on the inspired way that quotations from poems turn up in classic Hollywood movies, and if you’re lucky enough to catch It’s Always Fair Weather the next time Robert Osborne shows it on TCM, you’ll see a ...
