Nicholson
Baker is a word nut, in a good way. In The Anthologist his narrator and
perhaps alter ego, poet Paul Chowder, muses on “divulge” in the very
first paragraph — “What a juicy word. Truth opening its petals. Truth
smells like Chinese food and sweat” — and you’re off on a tear through
Paul’s passionate beliefs about rhyme in poetry: “The tongue is a
rhyming fool”; the truth about iambic pentameter, “in its deepest
essence a six-beat line”; and long poems that should be “cut down to a
few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage.” Surprise, this is a
laugh-out-loud funny book.
Paul is blogging to you, the reader, to keep
from writing an introduction to his poetry anthology, now at the
publisher’s. He’s blocked on that, and he’s got another problem. Roz,
who lived with him for eight years, has moved out. She comes back when
he really needs her — to de-flea the dog, for instance — or when he
cuts his finger, but she doesn’t stay. He buys a clothes line to put up
in memory of the one she strung, and he washes a tablecloth to hang on
it so she’ll know, passing by, that he’s cleanly. Meanwhile, this
blocked writer contemplates a weekly podcast — “Welcome to Chowder’s
Flying Spoonful of Rhyme. This is Chowder’s Poetry Cheatsheet,
Chowder’s Thimblesquirt of Verse” — but decides he could never keep it
up. He does, however, throw off more opinions than an op-ed writer. Why
haiku “makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense
whatsoever in English,” is one. Does Paul write the introduction? Does
Roz come back? The answer to one of these questions is “sort of” and to
the other is “yes,” but I’ll not say which is which. It’s too much fun
getting there to spoil it for you. Grade: A
