Rhyme time

In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker
gets inside the mind of a poet

by JULIET WATERS

I don’t usually review poetry because it always feels like I’m treating people to descriptions of my dreams. Poetry doesn’t promise the same reliable things to latch on to as fiction or non-fiction, like plot, characters or explicit theories. So the storyline of Nicholson Baker’s latest novel, The Anthologist—while recovering from a break-up, a man discusses his relationship with modern poetry—is not one I would normally be drawn to. But Baker is the only writer I could imagine making a personal obsession with modern poetry into a readable, engaging and funny story.

Baker has a particular kind of literary perversity that I’ve been enjoying ever since The Fermata. In that novel, he invented a narrator who was suddenly given the power to stop time and freeze people in their tracks, but used it only to stare up women’s skirts. One of Baker’s great talents is the ability to humanize obsession, slow it down and allow the reader’s natural compassion to fill in the gaps. He can take the worst, most unpromising characters, and make them, if not lovable, at least poignant.

Paul Chowder, however, is very lovable. An American poet who has fallen on hard times, financially, emotionally and intellectually, Chowder was once promising enough to have received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. But the creative stage of his career seems to be over. For the last few years, he’s been working on an anthology called “Only Rhyme.” He has only the introduction to do, but has become excruciatingly blocked trying to explain why, in this age dominated by free verse, he would want to put together an anthology of rhyming poetry. So blocked, his girlfriend of many years has left him.

Chowder, like Baker, lives in Maine, and there’s something about this project that is allegorical to Baker’s career. Though Baker’s literary talents are undisputed, he has occasionally been accused of triviality. If Chowder has any hopes of being taken seriously, an essay defending rhyme, and the basic four beat line, over blank verse and iambic pentameter, is something of a career suicide note.

But Chowder really, truly, believes in the power of rhyming poetry and the four beat line. And he has a point. The transition to free verse in modern poetry was supposed to be a transition to a form of poetry that mimics the way people really speak and think. It was supposed to liberate poetry so that anyone would compose it. Yet it’s never seemed to produce an art form that most people really want. It’s impossible to make a living writing free verse. But pick up a guitar, or a beat box, and with some genuine talent, you have a shot at an actual following. There’s something about the human soul that loves rhyme, and why should poets feel ashamed of creating something people love?

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing to love in modern poetry. Much of Chowder’s meditation involves discussion of some of his favourite free verse poets, W.H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Sara Teasdale and Mary Oliver. And one of the great pleasures of this book is that he really transmits his craving for the intellectual and emotional pleasures of both the rhyming and non-rhyming poetry he loves. But for a largely gentle, ruminative soul, Chowder is more than capable of harsh dismissal. On Ezra Pound: “a blustering bigot—a humourless joker—a talentless pasticheur—a confidence man.” On Billy Collins: “Charming, chirping, crack whore.”

I’ve heard some critics shrug Baker off as “David Foster Wallace Light,” and from what I’ve been reading recently of David Foster Wallace’s last years, it seemed that he was actually moving towards the more meditative, but still provocative and entertaining fiction that Baker writes so well. After reading The Anthologist, I’m convinced that Wallace would have liked it as much as I did. It’s such a quiet joy to read from beginning to end. And I challenge anyone to read it and not feel compelled to search for some poetry to read afterwards.

THE ANTHOLOGIST BY NICHOLSON
BAKER, SIMON & SCHUSTER,
HC, 243 PP., $35.99