The Anthologist or, The Poet as Doofus

The Anthologist Nicholson Baker Simon and Schuster, 2009

One of the many questions raised by Nicholson Baker’s sometimes delightful, but mostly haphazard, novel is how much does its view of poetry belong to its neurotic anthologist, Paul Chowder, and how much to the author himself? Baker – or Baker’s character – promotes a pantheon of tired, mid-century, all-white American poetry that’s straight out of another anthology. I’m thinking of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, but also Hall, Pack and Simpson’s New Poets of America and Britain. Yet Baker abuses the device, no, the privilege, of free indirect discourse by overring Chowder’s subjectivity with his inane notions of what American poetry is. It’s a clever, often amusing, performance, but finally an exercise in bad faith. When Baker writes from Chowder’s perspective the novel takes flight. When he ascends the bully pulpit to hector the reader about his antiquated ideas about poetry, it sinks like a stone.

The kind of poets and poetry The Anthologist endorses (Louise Bogan, Howard Nemerov, Howard Moss), with a great deal of nostalgic fanfare, are the kind the editors of “The New Yorker” have made safe for consumption. ("The New Yorker" itself gets frequent mention as a part of a prestige name-checking schtick that seems half-put on, half homage, while its former poetry editor, Alice Quinn, the doyenne of the soporific, is praised as “the magnificent Alice!” with no apparent trace of irony). Charles Bernstein coined the term Official Verse Culture to describe the ossified, inoffensive poetry that denied “the ideological nature of its practice while maintaining hegemony in terms of major media exposure and academic legitimation and funding.” This is precisely what Baker’s novel celebrates.

Conspicuously absent from The Anthologist is any kind of poetry associated with the avant-garde or the New American Poetry. The sole exception has been Mina Loy. A brief list of poets mentioned include: Sir Walter Scott, Shelley, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Roethke, Berryman, Millay, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Auden, Bishop, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, and James Wright. Pound and Marinetti are mentioned only to pour scorn on them.

It’s not that I have a personal quarrel to pick with any of these poets. Or that many of them haven’t given me enormous pleasure. Shelley and Yeats especially, and Berryman to a lesser extent. But to have no Blake, no Whitman? There’s no room at all for such radical poets as Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Tolson, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, or John Ashbery. And surprisingly, no Robert Creeley, who was a master of the four-beat line which Chowder goes on and on about. In other words, nothing smacking of linguistic complexity or heterodoxy; nothing partaking of the mystic, the mythic, the transpersonal; nothing to detract from the notion that a poem is simply a tidy container of concisely reported minor personal experience (some observations capped by an epiphany) anchored in a fixed point of view; that it’s about, to use an absurd example Chowder offers, an inchworm, or a flying spoon. The idea here is that a poem is really a story, (“prose in slow motion”) with some of the narrative links left out. Baker obviously has no idea what a poem is or how poetry works.

It would take someone far more churlish than I to denounce the beauty of Housman’s “white in the moon the long road lies,” a line of surpassing grace and simplicity which Chowder quotes with approval. But Michael Palmer’s “you can bring down a house with sound” is beautiful, too. One difference is that Housman’s delicate song is about the longing for an absent love, whereas Palmer is writing an elegy that takes apart some pre-conceived notions of how language works, doing it in a way that rejects the patient building of one line on top of another in perfect sequence, accruing power through juxtaposition rather than hypotactical jointure. The ancient power of the single great line endures, yes, because metrical language endures. But Chowder – sorry, I mean the ever-intrusive Baker – turns it into the kind of fetish the New Critics once smoked their vulgar cigars to.

Yes, the beat is the message, as Fanny Howe writes in her elegy for Creeley. Chowder gets it wrong when he chidingly relates his anecdote about Ginsberg at Naropa denouncing traditional metrics in favor of a liberated, Olsonian model in which “the rhythm of poetry is the rhythm of the body.” As one character advises Chowder, who’s struggling with his introduction to the anthology: “People love neurobiological explanations.” The line comes off as an amusing put-down of trendiness. Yet this is exactly what the bedeviled narrator ends up doing over the course of the novel, passionately explaining how rhyme is a form of poetic dopamine (his riff on sobbing reminds me of Donald Hall’s classic essay, “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird”).

This argument is not without merit, but it ends up pathologizing rhyme rather than identifying how its power derives from a principle of symmetry and correspondence, how their music provides a cognitive patterning that may be part of our DNA but whose larger meaning is to be found in its semiotic playfulness. What starts off as a promising account of rhyme’s primal satisfactions ends up strained and pedestrian. The better analogy here would be to music, not the crossword.

Even the creakiest prosody manuals advance some form of a neurobiological account of meter and rhyme that is ultimately rooted in the body. Chowder/Baker’s view of rhyme and the four-stress line wants to be restorative, yet its very narrowness constricts the potential for how a poem can resist and subvert these models in powerful ways to produce a surprising music. Bizarrely ignored, is Olson’s 1950 radical breakthrough in “Projective Verse,” where he proposes that a poem should enact a dynamic of breath and pulse, a vital incursion into stultified meter. As Pound put it: “to break the pentameter, that was the first heave.” Baker is having none of it. His Chowder is not merely retrograde, but scared of the real potential of modernist and late modernist poetry. So he retreats into the dull narcotizing comforts of Bogan and Moss (both of whom – surprise – served as poetry editors at The New Yorker).

The other problem with the novel, alluded to above, is a familiar one: trying to determine the reliability of its man-child, doofus narrator. What do we know about him? He’s been published in “The New Yorker.” He’s won a “Gugg,” as he calls it. He’s been anthologized himself. By his own admission he’s a lousy teacher. And he goes through a lot of the inane half-ass rituals all writers perform in the daily grind of finding a way into language. This is where most of the comedy comes in. Baker’s feel, his ear I almost want to say, for the obsessive rituals of the writing life is hilarious.

But here’s where narrative confusion comes in: Baker achieves many of his daffy moments by having Chowder ramble amiably on about poetry in a semi-daft, semi-serious way the upshot of which is that nothing is at stake spiritually or culturally. The closest he gets is to compare poetry to some kind of advanced crossword puzzle. It should be said that part of the pathos, though that's probably too strong a word, comes from Chowder's defense, not just of rhyme, but of poets like Bogan and Moss whom Baker surely knows are not only out-of-fashion but soporific exemplars of a timid, bloodless formalism. Or does he?

Nowhere do we read about poetry as negation, about its tremendous power of disruption. About dissonance and radical form. Modernism appears to have not taken place at all, except as some minor wayward backwater exercise of a few kooks like Pound, Olson and Ginsberg. For Chowder, and presumably Baker as well, the Great Tradition in poetry is Apollonian; unyieldingly affirmative of such shibboleths as the eternal human spirit. And flying spoons.

Baker set out to write a comic novel about a lost but harmless and endearing soul. What he produced is an axe-grinding polemic that’s clueless about poetry. As a spoof of the writing life and an homage to the sonorous music of the Grand Tradition Itself, The Anthologist proves charming and seductive. (Did I mention there's also a plot? Something to do with getting back with an old girlfriend). As an apologia for the conservative virtues of meter, it makes an embarrassing and naively reductive case for timeless, essential values in “verse.” Or worse.