The Anthologist

by Nicholson Baker

  A lifetime of fretting over pieces of paper and this is what you’ve got. And yet it’s worth it, isn’t it? That’s what you have to think. All the chewing of salad, the eating of pickled beets and the little marinated ears of corn, those flexible baby corn ears, and the waitress coming by saying, “Folks, how is everything?” You nod and smile gratefully, chewing. “Can I get you another Smuttynose?” Sure, I’ll take another.

  TENNYSON’S AT THE SALAD BAR, making his way around, holding the chilled plastic plate, fumbling in his beard. Poet laureate of the British empire. Staring for a long time at the tub of bean salad. Corn salad or bean salad, which will it be today? “Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred!” Plop—beans. Pope’s there. Alexander Pope, the magpie trick-ster rockpolisher. Malevolently ladling the blue cheese at eye level. Taking care not to spill. Hey, Alex! You don’t want to talk to me? That’s fine.

  And what each of them comes up with is a couple of pages’ worth of poems in an anthology. All of that rhythmic chewing and swallowing and digesting, all the conversational nodding—“Yes, yes, true, true, mm-hm”—results in something called Collected Poems, and out of those collected poems grow a few sprouts, a couple of pages in a paperback.

  That’s the way it works. Long ago there was an article in Commentary. The article was called “Why We Need More Waste, Fraud, and Mismanagement in the Pentagon.” The idea was that in order to build a magnificent weapon of deterrence, you need to tolerate twenty-dollar screws and five-hundred-dollar screwdrivers. Well, it’s not really true of the Pentagon. But it’s true of poetry.

  We honestly don’t need more fraud and waste in the Pentagon. We need to retrain some of the weapons engineers, so that they can teach high school. Some of them might write light verse. We might have a sudden upwelling of light verse. I mean, God, what has happened that we have no good light verse? Practically none. It’s shocking. It’s tragic. The New Yorker used to publish light verse in every issue. Newman Levy’s verse. Newman Levy, the lawyer poet. And of course Ogden Nash. Roethke published some light verse. So did Up-dike. Now nothing. Hip-hop is our light verse, I guess. Some of it’s quick and clever, and some of it isn’t.

  An American man wrote up his memories of Tennyson a hundred years ago in The Century magazine. Tennyson told him that one of the best lines he wrote was about the French Revolution: “Freedom free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.” Which is a good line.

  Tennyson also said, to this man, that he didn’t want any biography of him written: “I don’t want to be ripped up like a hog when I’m dead.”

  I DECIDED TO TAKE the white plastic chair down to the creek. There’s a creek at the bottom of the hill of sand on which my house sits. I had the chair in my hand, and I had my gear and my Sharpies and my presentation easel for practicing, and I looked as if I was prepared for an expedition up the Orinoco. I was about to turn down the hill when I heard tires on my driveway. It was my neighbor Nan’s yellow Subaru. I peered toward her car and thought I could see her face and through the branchy reflection a wave, maybe a nervous wave, I don’t know, and then her window came down. She said, “Are you off somewhere with your white chair?”

  I said that I was going down to the creek to think over the origins of rhyme.

  “Would you be interested in a chicken leg?” Nan asked. She said that she did Meals on Wheels once a week, and she had an extra meal because someone had been away at a doctor’s appointment. She got it out of the box in the back seat and showed it to me. It was an orange piece of chicken in a segmented tray with a sheet of plastic glued over it. There were secondary pockets, each shaped like lungs, one of which had yellow pieces of corn pointing in all directions, and one of which had beans pointing in all directions.

  “Mmmm,” I said. “Don’t you want it?”

  Nan said she didn’t want it. “Would you care for the slice of bread and the carton of milk, too?”

  I said yes indeed I would.

  She got in her car and began backing away. “Enjoy yourself!”

  I waved and stuck the Meals on Wheels meal into my equipment bag, at an angle, and tucked the bag of milk and a roll in another place. Then I carried my white plastic chair down through the patch of skunk cabbage to the creek and put it right in the water and sat down on it. Immediately the rear chair legs worked their way down through the mud, and I sank an inch.

  The spring floods have changed everything, as they generally do, and so I’m sitting now at the base of carved-away banks that are about five feet high, looking up at the under-sides of ferns. There are innumerable ferns.

  Why is rhyme so important to speech?

  I think I’m going to give this chicken a try.

  Wow, it’s fantastic. Meals on Wheels chicken. Fantastically good. Fleshy as hell, though. The flight muscles of a bird. Think of it. Wash it down with a little milk, strange as that may seem. Mmm. Excuse me.

  And there’s a piece of bread in waxed paper, with a pat of margarine, dyed very yellow. Not bad. Honestly, the chicken and the bread are so good that I wonder how the corn and the beans can top them. But maybe they will.

  Beans are good. Corn is good. My first Meals on Wheels meal. What does that mean? Is Nan worried about me? Does she feel sorry for me? Does she think I’m an old guy?

  There’s an incredible amount of pollen blowing sideways past my face. I can see it sometimes. Hundreds of thousands of little grains on their way somewhere.

  QUITE QUICKLY after you’re born you begin to suck. The sucking teaches you some lessons. First, that if you pull your tongue back a certain way, a warm delicious liquid that is not your own saliva flows into your mouth. And second, that your tongue is an unusually important muscle.

  So you exercise your tongue, and it gets stronger and more aware of what it can do. That’s the first order of business. And then when you plop off the nipple, you look up, and what’s waiting for you there? Two huge amazing wonderful shiny things. Your mother’s eyes. And below that is a strange item with two nostril holes, and then there’s a single large flexible opening at the bottom, which moves around a lot in an interesting way, and out of it issues all this marvelous taffylike goopy stuff that you can’t see but that goes into your ears. It’s impossible to make sense of it, but it’s nice, and you like it. Something deep in you tells you to listen to it. It’s speech. And when your mom’s mouth smiles you learn the color white.

  The mouth says, “A boo boo boo! Yes, my little fumble nuggets! A noo noo noo!” Aiming the sound at you. Talking to you, in other words, in a particular tone of voice. And thoughtful people have studied this tone of voice, and they understand that this is not something to be lightly dismissed. This talk is the crucial ingredient. This is the way that the genetic memory of speech is being imprinted on a new practitioner.

  Baby talk, which is full of rhyme, is really the way you learn to figure out what’s like and what’s not like, and what is a discrete word, or an utterance, and what is just a transition between two words.

  How does it happen? Well, it happens gradually, and it happens by matching. Matching within and matching without. First you have to learn that a certain feeling in one part of your body, your tongue, matches with a certain feeling in your brain, which is a sound. A slightly different feeling in your tongue matches with a different sound coming out of your mouth and a different sensation of muscular control registering in your brain. Each subtle difference of sound feels different. And this is all very difficult and takes lots of trial and error and babbling and drooling and lip popping and laughing.

  Of course, you’re doing a lot of random sudden things at that point. Your eyes dart left. Your fist suddenly goes boing! Sticks out. Head swivels. Whoa. Back arch. Leg. Sudden diaper squirt. Things are happening everywhere. And each one of the things that happen, the random little twitchy things, sends a message to central control that feels a certain way. So you begin to correlate. And your mouth turns out to be probably the most important piece of the pie. Whe
n you cry you get results, and when you suck you get milk, and when you go “Nnnnnng!” the face above you smiles and goes “ ‘Nnnnng,’ what do you mean ‘Nnng,’ you funny little baby?” Reflecting it back.

  And you start to see that all these sounds that you can make—ngo, merk, plort—that you begin to hear, can be classified in certain ways. You’re a newborn brain, you’ve only recently come out of solitary confinement in the uterus, and you’re already a cryptanalyst in Bletchley Park. You’re already parsing through, looking for similarities and differences, looking for patterns, looking for beginnings and endings and hints of meaning.

  ESPECIALLY BEGINNINGS. The beginning of a sound is usually a moment where you forbid the sound to be produced. With your lips. Puh, buh, bluh. Or you attempt to dissuade it gently: nnn, mmmm. You put some sort of barrier or seawall there, and then you remove it to allow the sound to unfold itself briskly into a vowel. Unfold the vowel towel and floom it out and let it settle on the sand. Flume, broom, room, spume, gloom, doom.

  So you’ve got the beginning, which is generally a consonant, and then you’ve got the middle of the sound, which is often a vowelly region. And then you’ve got the end of the sound. And all these things are difficult to make out. We know from speech-recognition software how hard it is for a computer to figure out where things begin and end. It’s like looking at the horizon and thinking, Is that lump Mount Monadnock or is Mount Monadnock that lump there? Actually Mount Monadnock is pretty distinctive. But sometimes when you look at a mountain range it’s very difficult to know what’s what.

  Do you care how things are spelled? Obviously not. Spelling? What’s that? That’s absurdity. That’s a whole different layer of opacity—the layer of squirming black shapes on a page. That’s years in the future. What you’re doing, inside your head, is classing things by sound shape. And by detachable head. And that’s where rhyme comes in.

  Think of what happens when you say the word “moon.” What does the speech part of your brain do? It says, Okay, assignment: moon. Jaw down a bit, lips together. And flatten. Good. Then commence huffing out some sound. Constrict the vocal cords. Mm. Now open and flute the lips into an O shape. Ooo. Moo. And then terminate by flipping up the bottom of the tongue and lightly caressing the roof of the mouth. Airtight seal. And out the nose. Moon—ah. And you’re done.

  That’s all your mouth control center knows. It knows a series of muscular commands. It does not know spelling or meaning. And because it’s an efficient mouth control center, it classes that series of muscular commands as being very similar to one next door to it: rune. The end is the same, and it’s going to store that near “moon,” but it’s going to give you a different beginning. It’s going to say, Okay, go back in the back of your mouth, I want you to do something kind of difficult with the back of your tongue. And then I want you to flip your tongue up. Rrr. Don’t roll it! Don’t roll the R, don’t trill it, because you are not Sarah Bernhardt. You’re not William Butler Yeats. You’re just going to say “rune.”

  The tongue is a rhyming fool. It wants to rhyme because that’s how it stores what it knows. It’s got a detailed checklist of muscle moves for every consonant and vowel and diphthong and fricative and flap and plosive. Pull, relax, twitch, curl, touch. And somewhere in there, on some neural net in your underconsciousness, stored away, all these checklists, or neuromuscular profiles, or call them sound curves, are stored away, like the parts of car bodies, or spoons, with similar shapes nested near each other. Broom and loom and tomb and spume and womb and whom are all lying there on the table in one spot. And you figured all that out by yourself. They rhyme.

  And what’s different about them? The all-important beginning. The removable hair. Or the wig. The sound has a body, a sort of a snaky thing, with a little bell on its tail. And then when you get up to the head, the head can have a bunch of puffy P kind of hair on its head, poom, or a fluffy FL kind of hair, or a dark black M hairdo, or big blowsy bastardizing hair. You can have all kinds of hair preceding that oom sound.

  Buh. Hoo. Huh. Hay. And once you’ve got them classed and labeled, you can start taking off and putting on the sound-wigs. You pick up “plume” and you carefully, patiently, take off the PL and you put it aside. Don’t drop it! And you pick up the BL, put that on. Get it properly adjusted. Brrrrrr. Brrrroooom.

  So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in your mind because they refer to different notions, but they’re cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that’s what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. They’re saying, That way that you first learned language, right at the beginning, by hearing what was similar and what was different, and figuring it all out all by yourself, that way is still important. You’re going to hear it, and you’re going to like it. It’s going to pull you back to the beginning of speech.

  And that’s why we like puns, too. Some puns. A few puns. Orange you glad. Puns and plays and near-misses and alliterations. Fair and foul. Fee fie fo fum. Liquor locker. The Quicker Picker Upper. Road rage. Boxtop. Pickpocket. Smile and dial. Drink and drive. Lip-smacking, whip-cracking Cracker Jacks.

  Or: Sir, isn’t that a steering wheel sticking out of your zipper? Yes, it’s driving me nuts.

  We like to visit the parallel sound-studio universe with all these mixing boards and XLR patch cables going here and there, independent of the other part of our head, which is the conscious part that has spent a long time sweating the books and trying to make sense of objects and ideas and meanings. Trying to be a responsible citizen.

  Rhyme taught us to talk.

  I RANG NAN’S DOORBELL and told her how good the chicken was, and she said she was glad to hear it. But she seemed a little preoccupied, maybe even a little down. She said that she’d just gotten two very high estimates to put in a wide plank floor in her guest room—both more than twenty-eight hundred dollars.

  “To nail in a pine plank floor?” I said, exaggerating my incredulity. “Well, blow me down. I’ll do it for you at cost.”

  She said no, no, that was impossible—and anyway did I know how to install floors? Which was a legitimate question in the circumstances. I said that yes, I did know how to install floors, if by “floors” you didn’t mean hardwood floors. I’d installed the plank floor in my ell with my dad a few decades ago. And I’ve done a little light cabinetwork over the years, I added modestly. “You have to allow a little space at the ends for expansion, that’s all.”

  She considered. “I’d have to pay you, otherwise it’s awkward.”

  “Pay me fifteen dollars an hour. I’m not a real carpenter. We can do it together. Your son can help.”

  She looked at me for a while and then she smiled. Would I like to come over later and measure the room?

  I said I would.

  8

  MAYBE I COULD DO a weekly podcast. Play some theme music, maybe Root Boy Slim singing “Put a Quarter in the Juke,” and then: Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder’s Bowl of Poetry. And I’m your host, Paul Chowder, and this is Chowder’s Plumfest of Poems. Hello, and welcome to the Paul Chowder Poetry Hour. I’m your host and confidant, Paul Chowder, and I’d like to welcome you to Chowder’s Flying Spoonful of Rhyme. And this is Chowder’s Poetry Cheatsheet, and I’m your host, Paul Chowder, from hell and gone, welcoming you to Chowder’s Thimblesquirt of Verse.

  I could never keep it up. You have to hand it to those pod-casters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody’s listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.

  Let’s begin today, however, by talking about the history of rhyme. If you’re prepared, I’m prepared. Actually I’m not all that prepared, because when I’m prepared that’s when I fail. I
learn too much and it crowds out what I actually know. There’s crammer’s knowledge and then there’s knowledge that is semipermanent.

  So the first thing about the history of rhyme, and the all-important Rhymesters’ Rebellion of 1697, is that it’s all happened before. It’s all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can’t stand it and let’s stop and do something else.

  LET’S TRY AGAIN. The history of poetry began, quite possibly, in the year 1883. Let me write that date for you with my Sharpie, so you can have it for your convenience. 1883. That’s when it all began. Or maybe not. Could be any year. The year doesn’t matter. Forget the year! The important thing is that there’s something called the nineteenth century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That’s what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech. New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world. There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883. Those clothespins went out to England, to France, to Spain, to practically every country in the world. Clothes in every country were stretched out on rope to dry in the sun and held in place by New England clothespins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably used New England clothespins. I’m not kidding.