The Anthologist

The Paul Chowder Chronicles #1

by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Novels, Contemporary, Literature, Literary Fiction, Books About Books

245 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2009

About the author

Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Manhattan in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He has published sixteen books--including The Mezzanine (1988), U and I (1991), Human Smoke (2008), The Anthologist (2009), and Substitute (2016)--and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. He has received a National Book Critics Circle award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, the Herman Hesse Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano (co-author with Baker of The World on Sunday, 2005), founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save a large collection of U.S. newspapers, including a run of Joseph Pulitzer's influential daily, the New York World. In 2004 the Repository’s holdings became a gift to Duke University. Baker and Brentano have two children; they live on the Penobscot River in Maine.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, hello! Take a seat - that one, please. No, just shove that stuff on the ground somewhere, it's just books and papers. Have some tea. Well, since you ask, not too bad - not too bad at all. This? Oh yes, it looks terrible doesn't it, I should have changed my shirt. It's all from this little scratch here, see? Doesn't look like much but there was a lot of blood. Well, I picked up this lovely little cat you see, and it just kind of reached out and took a chunk out of me. Just a pretty little cat called Windows that lives next door. Now if you wished you could call that a metaphor for a great part of my experience of life, yes, ha ha. It looks so lovely and you reach towards it and then wrecks your face and leaves you howling. But no, I'm not complaining. Oh that? No, I haven't written a single word of it - and let me confess to you quite candidly _ I have no intention of doing so either! There, what do you say to that? Well, I've thought of a great new idea. This is the thing, right - I've just been sitting around with a tape recorder - this one here - and burbling out random observations about poetry and life and whatnot, and how rhyme has been evicted from modern poetry and how dismal that is. And how dismal I am. Yes, I know, that part of it is made up - I'm in character! I've assumed the character of someone I could have been if The Mezzanine hadn't been a smash hit. A relative smash hit, that is. I would have been the guy I'm pretending to be in this monologue I'm doing. I've already got a whole box of tapes of all of this rambling stuff. Ah well, you see, this is my great idea - I thought that I'd just send them all off to my editor at Simon and Schuster and say here you are - and she'll get some perky graduate to type it all up, and then voila! New novel by Nicholson Baker! Yes, all very Warhol. Well, that's true, that's true, but when they interview me I'm going to say No, this was a tough novel to write, every word, every verbal infelicity, every tedious non-sequitor was thought through with a brow furrowed by the uttermost of aesthetic necessity. No, they'll lap it up. No, no, that's unkind, it's not money for old rope, how vulgar you can be. I'm throwing in all sorts of cute and interesting stuff about poetry, so you get the idea you're learning something amidst all the guff. No, there's no story. It won't be that kind of book. It won't end up being filmed with jeff Bridges. Ha, can you imagine - starring Jeff Bridges as "The Anthologist"! Ah look - see here? This tape's coming to an end. Oh no, I'll use this one too - everything is grist to this ever-grinding mill. Yes, it'll go in the box with all the rest. No, we'll edit you out. The whole thing will be a slightly dull monologue. Yes, not exactly Shakes


click.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder's Bowl of Poetry. And I'm you host, Paul Chowder, and this is Chowder's Plumfest of Poems. Hello, and Welcome to Paul Chowder Poetry Hour. I'm your host and confidant, Paul Chowder, and I'd like to welcome you to Chowder's Flying Spoon 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.



Who's afraid of poetry? Probably most of us who where forced to learn verses by rote in school and later had to come up with something interesting and pertinent to write in an essay for our exams. Worry no more, Paul Chowder is here to explain it all to us in a spicy and unconventional format. Paul is extremely funny, which helps the reader along just nicely through what would otherwise be a fairly dry and technical presentation. He's the ringmaster of a new circus act, taming the jungle of rhyme and meter for us, an investigative jurnalist of the yellow press looking for the dirty bits hiding under the laurel crowns, an exposeur of the tricks and tricks of the magicians who lure us in with their romantic imagery and heroic odes. A whistleblower, an inside trader for rare lyrical gems and for the rising stocks of new artists on the Parnassus firmament.

Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy word that is, "divulge". Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

Paul Chodwer has both an angel and a devil sitting on his shoulders as he pens this stream of conscience novel that is actually a comprehensive study of poetry and poets through the ages. He is himself a poet, so the study is as much about himself as it is about the other (numerous) names he studies here. One of the first questions put forward is what exactly is an anthologist, and how do you become one? Tricky ... I imagine an editor putting an ad in a newspaper : " Must Love to Rhyme! , but I also imagine there's more to it than the ability to match words.

Why pick and choose from other people's art instead of working on your own poems? Since Paul Chowder is offered here as an example of an anthologist, lets take a closer look at him: Paul is about fifty, he has published several well appreciated poems in literary journals and personal collections. He's kind of burned out now, he hates teaching university kids, the muse is playing hide and seek in his barnsize den and he has a bad case of the procrastination blues. Oh, and his girlfriend Roz has just left him because he seems unable to make the slightest effort to write a louzy introduction to his soon to be published anthology of English Poetry. The dirty secret here is that Paul may have, deliberately or subconsciously, provoked this crisis. Poets, artists in general, exist in an atmosphere of conflict and pain. To misquote Tolstoy : "happiness is boring, unhappiness is a story."

Poetry is controlled refinement of sobbing. We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking - you light one line with the glowing ember of the last.

Everytime I was tempted to consider Paul Chowder a bit of a clown singing for his supper, I was pulled back by these accounts of intense anguish and pain, both personal and historical. It appears that most of the poets considered in the study have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and a fair number of them have ended in suicide or in an insane asylum. I guess it goes with the job description.

Don't chirp at me, ye birdies! I've had enough of that kind of chirpage. It cuts no grease with me.

Paul Choder is engaged in a difficult balancing act between tragedy and comedy, sending me back to my opening analogy of a circus act or to the ancient masks of Greek theatre. The two walk hand in hand, and the merit of Nicholson Baker is to make both the clown and the chorus of Fate sound equally convincing.

For a guy who professes to hate teaching, Paul is surprisingly adept at holding the reader's attention and at presenting his themes in a captivating way, using wacky analogies and slipping in almost unnoticed some powerful metaphors as the punchlines of each of his essays/chapters. Paul is also good at making poetry personal, part of everyday life, good at conveying the underlying passion for his chosen subject and for his chosen career (anthologist).

My life is necessary because I sustain the idea of poetry through thick and thin. That's my job.

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The rest of my review is a chowder of clams, crab claws and beautiful seashells - mostly random tidbits I have bookmarked in the text when I came across an elegantly expressed idea, the name of a poet I want to know more about, a fragment of verse that brings up fond memories, a funny way at looking at an established concept. As such, they are a poor substitute for the real deal, but I hope they will encourage more readers to check out this excellent anthology, fiction and non-fiction, drama and comedy walking hand in hand.

Another good quote I considered for opening my review shows Paul Chowder in his Master of Ceremonies at the circus disguise:

Let's have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spout it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is the blank white playing field at Eton.

How else can we tell it is poetry? Rhymes, of course, and Paul is one of champions of good rhyming, scolding (most of the time) the proponents of free verse. Paul chowder, like the author Nicholson, has a strong background in music, and to both of them poetry is something that should be read out loud or sung, tap-dancing to the rhythms of sounds, marking the pauses and the echoes of each word.

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 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. [...] Rhyme taught us to talk.

Rhyme is similar to the symmetry we find in plants and arhitecture, with the tonal scale in music, with the calls of birds in the forest, with the nonsense crooning of a mother putting her toddler to bed. Trying to avoid rhyme is a modern fad that Paul traces back to Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" and to the influence of Ezra Pound. I am not fully in agreement with Paul Chowder about the evils of modernism, especially since one of his targets is the popularity of 'haiku' , a form of expression I actually love, but he makes a very good argument in favor of rhyme and meter. And he is fair enough to recognize some of the best poems today are written in free verse. Paul's own poems are mostly free verse, by his own admission. He calls them flying spoon poems. I tried to translate in English one of my favorites, by Nichita Stanescu, as an example of what I like about the modern approach:

tell me, tell me true
wouldn't you,
if I were to catch you one day
and kiss the sole of your foot,
wouldn't you
stumble around for a while
afraid of crushing my kiss?

Can anybody be a poet? The easy answer is that yes, especially if you are young and you want to impress a new girl with how sensitive and romantic you truly are (or how well you can quote from your favorite poet). What about older men, disillusioned men, cynical men who have seen too much of the world and of the publishing industry in particular? Paul's writer block and prolonged procrastination may be a symptom of getting old, of having nothing especially interesting to say, of being burned out by his previous efforts. He quotes Amy Lowell:

"Poetry is a young man's job." What a frighteningly true thought. Poetry is like math or chess or music - it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kind of brains don't last.

Say you want to be a poet? How will you go about it? Start by reading a lot, of course, but sooner or later you have to get down and put some effort into it:

'You can't force it. If it isn't there you can't force it'. Then I thought: You can force it. My whole life I've been forcing it. You throw yourself against the weight of the massive sliding door to the barn, that does not want to move, and you lean and you wag your hips and you haul on the metal handle, and you strain, and you grunt, and you point your face at the sky and say bad wrds, and it starts to move and rumble, and then it moves a little more easily, and then a little more easily still, and finally, the barn door is open wide enough that you barely fit through, taking care not to scrape your back on the broken-off lock flange.

... or, if your fountain of inspiration is dry, you can at least recommend to others the things you love and the authors that deserve more praise. My favorite passage in the whole novel is such a reference, about the right priorities in life.

She bought three things: a bar of soap, a new fountain pen, and a bottle of whiskey. And then she still had two dollars and fifty cents left over, after buying these three things - the pen to write poems with, the bottle of whiskey to drink in order to write the poems, and the soap in order to take on the world as a newly clean, thinking, feeling poet. She weights whether she should buy some fancy food, but no: she remembers a certain recently published anthology that she'd heard good things about. An anthology edited by Auden and Garrett, 'The Poet's Tongue'. So she rushes over to the Holiday Bookshop. "And I bought the damn thing," she says. And she writes some of her best poems after this point. Including the first stanza of "Roman Fountain". This is probably the best, happiest moment of her poetic life, right here, while she's writing the letter to Ted Roethke, knowing she's got new poems waiting inside her.
In fact the letter may be better than any poem she wrote, though she wrote some good ones. But we wouldn't be interested in reading the letter unless she's written the poems. So once again it's terribly confusing. You need the art in order to love the life.

And you need to love life in order to create art. 'Her' name is Louise Bogan and she is one of the many names I have added to my wishlist after reading Nicholson Baker's novel. How could I not love somebody who would spend her last dollars on buying a new book? Another name to check out later is Elizabeth Bishop, an artist who can look at a fish and see the whole of existence reflected in its cold eyes. Paul Chowder is one of her champions:

You have to return reality to itself after you've struggled to make a poem out of it. Otherwise it's going to die. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long. She knew that. The fish slips away unrhymed.

Why is it easier to read poetry than prose? One argument offered by Paul, besides the one about rhyming taking us back to the first lessons in language and meaning, is this:

One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you are at a beginning.

I guess the same applies for short story collections and for those big fat science-fiction and fantasy anthologies. There's no excuse for not dipping your feet in, finding a book of poems on the library shelves and trying one or two out for size, to see if they will fit your mood. The trouble starts more often when you try to make the transition from reading to writing, and here's where Paul Chowder is the most vulnerable, the most truthful, the least sarcastic or pedantic:

You can start anywhere. That's the thing about starting. If you start, you're in motion. If you don't start, you're nowhere. If you stop you're nowhere. I have reached a crisis where I don't know where to start. It's arbitrary. [...] I wish I were happy in a disciplined way. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can.

Let's call his current status 'enjambment'. It's a technical term from poetry, one of the discoveries of those pesky modernists (although it was in use by many poets before the twentieth century, like Milton).

"enjambent" - is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. (source Wiki) Paul hates enjambment, most of the time, because it breaks the musical rhythm that he loves so much. Paul finds more appeal in the popular songs from Broadway musicals that some people call the Great American Songbook:

I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there
I've stoked my heart
With icy frigid air

He gives credit here to Marilyn Monroe, but I think she only played the tune, not wrote it. Anyway, the point was that poetry is music - it should sing. It should entertain you, like the light verse of Newman Levy:

If you stick a stock of liquor in your locker,
it is slick to stick a lock upon your stock
Or some joker who is slicker's going to trick out of your liquor
Though you snicker you'll feel sicker from the shock.


Who is the best poet to illustrate the musicality of rhyme and meter? In Romanian language, I would recommend Ion Minulescu, a Symbolist. According to Paul Chowder, we should take a closer look at Swinburne:

If you were queen of pleasure
And I were king of pain
We'd hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.

Here's a singular critical note, more like an observation than a valid complaint: Paul Chowder doesn't claim to write here a comprehensive study of poetry. He narrows down his focus to the last two centuries and to the English language. Poets writing in French, Spanish, Latin, Japanese, etc. are mostly ignored. Free verse is mostly ignored, because Paul's anthology is mostly about the rhyming of English poems and the private lives of some of these poets.

** There were thousands of beads in tiny plastic cells, and I was amazed by the choices, the profusion of possibilities. It was like being a poet in that you had indivisible units that you could string together in certain rhythms. You can't alter the nature of a given bead, or a given word, but you can change which bead you choose, and the order in which you string them on their line.

Some poets are gloomy and downbeat, some are wild and raucous, some dreamy, some fiery. You can compare poetry to music, to arhitecture, to nursery rhymes, to the thrilling of birds, even to a row of colourful plastic beads in a necklace **. It all comes down to saying that poetry is life, in all its innumerable forms. Looking at all the suicides and depressions among poets will give you the wrong impression about the art form:

Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars. [...] Spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.

Should I try to bring my review to a conclusion? I'm not sure how. I lost the thread of my thoughts many paragraphs ago, if ever there was one to follow. Maybe it's better to read my lines like an anthology or a collection of poetry - start anywhere you like, in the middle, at the end or at the beginning. Paul Chowder will be waiting there to hit you over the head with a rhyme or two. But what was the point of the exercise? Is rhyme better than free verse or not? I'll throw the ball back to you, Paul:

It was a mistake to supress rhyme so completely, a mistake to forget about the necessary tapping of the toe, but it was a useful mistake, a beautiful mistake, because it taught us new things. It loosened people up and made other discoveries possible.

This, my first novel by Nicholson Baker, did just that : showed me a lot of new, intriguing possibilities and paths though the wilderness. Here are a few names I wrote down, a rich haul: Sara Teasdale, Louise Bogan ('Roman Fountain'), Ted Roethke, James Fenton ('The Vapour Trail'), John Berryman, Mary Oliver, Bill Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop ('The Fish'), Swinburne, Newman Levy (light verse) , Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, Moss... The closing line I will also borrow from Paul, to thank the author for opening my doors of perception a little wider:

"Suddenly, there is lots to read"

... and I am at peace with the world.

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Darn! there's still one more quote from Paul that I would hate to misplace. Will I ever become a writer myself? Like any rookie I asked once an author where does he gets his ideas (in my defense of poor interview skills, I was nineteen, and I was writing short sketches and free verse in notebooks). I'll put Paul's answer in spoiler brackets, because I hope you will get to it the right way, reading from page one to page last of this novel:

Well, I'll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: "What was the best moment of your day?" The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

How true it is a poem should rhyme! For who among us prefers lemon to lime? Baker defends the rhyming verse, in prose both chaste and terse. Paul Chowder discusses meter, rests and beats—but he’s no bleater, pest or Keats. For those au fait with his minimal writings, buy this today for liminal sightings. Who says poems should be lucid? Why, that’s all froems and booshid! So: let’s go. Erudite essays on Fenton, Teasdale and Millay, so good you should buy it to-day. Can I keep this up for the whole review? I almost certainly can, but that I will not do. Baker is such fun he’s my number one (STOP IT), I love his quirky blirky fun (STOP IT NOW), and this one’s a bun of fun under the hot July sun (SHUT UP). I like Nick Baker. (He’s not a Quaker).

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very humorous exploration of the world of poetry. The narrator is such a well-crafted character that the reader must remind him- or herself occasionally that (s)he is not reading Nicholson Baker's autobiography. Instead we have the diary of a wimpy writer, Paul Chowder, who is stuck in a rut and can't seem to climb out. Faced with the task of writing an introduction to an anthology of poetry, Paul will do almost anything to avoid the chore. He helps the neighbours, whines about the fact that his girlfriend Roz (who couldn't stand all the procrastination) has left him him, or sits in his barn letting his thoughts rove hither and yon. Interlaced with all this gripping human drama are eccentric (and sometimes very astute) reflections on versifiers and their verse.

This seems to be one of those books that readers either loved or hated. Even though I'm not steeped in the world of poetry, I loved this novel.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I was good at what I did. And what I did was drive to poetry readings." Can you beat that for the ironic curve of a voice, flat-out convincing, accurate and yet a ringing subversion of one sentence by the following sentence. The narrator, Mr Chowder, has a fear of teaching similar to Elizabeth Bishop's: "No, no, no, no, no. I can't teach. It killeth me. Those nice kids stunned my brain. I'll never recover from that year... My own dear students were destroying 'I' for me."

And then, the taste, so many fine critiques, say, "Walt Whitman's preacherly ampersands.." or of Mark Strand, "exceedingly good-looking. A real Charlton Hestonian face, one of those hellishly handsome poets. James Merrill was another...J. Crew models before there were J. Crew models." Of Ashberry's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," award studded: "I'd tried to read it a few times and failed. It's arbitrary. It reads as if it's written by a cleverly programmed random-phrase generator." Or as Alan Powers puts it in his forthcoming "Parodies Lost,"

something jaunty, uncapitalized,
asyntactic at the least, the best.
For this, he knew just the voice, urbane
With insouciance, juicy and wasted,
not to be believed, a street-wise guy,
the Voice of the Village. He tried this,

“Had you noticed the primavera
as you came through the loggia? Go
back and look I say, seated. Many
have missed the cotillion. But I wish
them well from the alley or first floor.
It is never too late for the opera.
It is always too late for the Big Bang.”

His verse grew vast, urban, Ash-buried,
soot-footed, exhaustive and converted,

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take one measure of writer’s block, add an equal measure of a longtime lover lost, mix in the mind of an intelligent self-deprecating, funny, out-of-sorts and out-of-fashion poet and get one of the best books I’ve read this year. It helps if you like poetry. There are a lot of references to poets and poetry gossip. But it’s all written with such ease and grace that the nonpoetry reader can still just sail through. Sad, funny, and wonderful.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator. Although recognized at one time for a few brilliant poems, he has waned from the public eye. He is given the opportunity to resurrect his name and his bank account by writing an introduction to an anthology of poems, but he dawdles and delays the project. Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz (who left him due to his dilatory ways); the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and the mundane. He provides a stunning and critical analysis of select poetry and other poets, but continually fails to write his introduction. He waxes whimsically on the suicides of depressed poets, such as Sarah Teasdale and Vachal Lindsay, and vilifies Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot for their antisemitism. He makes a tidy space near his pillow for the poetry of Mary Oliver, who he cherishes.

To rhyme or not to rhyme? He probes and ponders the fine points of meter and the minutiae of quotidian distractions, and continually obstructs his own forward momentum. He resorts to lengthy rambling and self-flagellation, yet his constant need for approval is disarming. This story is narrated like a memoir written by a rueful humorist teaching us the power of verse. It is a droll and touching examination of a consummate lyric scholar who happens to be a stubborn boondoggler.

I came away from this book with a renewed vigor and love for verse. Through Paul's extolling of meter and rhyme, his preoccupation with the definition of iambic pentameter, and the virtues of almost every aspect of verse, I received a revitalized education on the art and aesthetics of poetry. He contemplates the meaning of various poems without dislodging the reader's own sense of discovery. He leads you to the brink, but you get the satisfaction of plumbing the poignancy with him. It never comes off as pompous. His fertile eloquence, as he shares his shuddering love of the immediacy of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Fish," left me breathless and aroused--a poem that never had any particular effect on me before.

Baker's protagonist expounds on what Horace really meant by "carpe diem." That sentiment, according to Paul, has been misinterpreted for years, yet the veneration of those two words and its permanence in our culture is dependent on its very misconception. That notable paradox, and the fecundity of Bishop's poem, typify the fetching delight of this novel. The Anthologist is brimming with poetic enchantment. The loitering, melancholy journey of Paul Chowder and his sublime salvation through meter and verse is smart, beguiling, and tenderly irresistible.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baker's deep dive into poetry analysis and history succeeds on every level except for his audiobook narration, which is uneven, ranging from blasting your ear drums out to indecipherable murmurs. The whole book is a poetic interlude about an anthologist failing to write a poetry book introduction. The minutia of his life is cast under starkly touching light in that way only Baker can capture.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this may be the most delightful book I have read this year.

Paul Chowder's life isn't going particularly well. Sometime poet and current anthologist, he is struggling to write an intro to his anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme. But his chronic procrastinating has left him without a girlfriend, without cash, and, it sometimes seems, without hope. Paul longs to win Roz back by completing the intro, but instead he seems to spend a lot of time sitting on his driveway in a plastic chair.

But Paul is not your ordinary embittered failure. In fact, he is neither embittered nor a failure - just a genuinely kind and sincere fella who still gets pretty wound up when he's talking about poetry. His first-person narrative is funny, humble, sweet, and rambling - because he can't talk long without telling you something pretty neat about poetry, about meter, about enjambment or Edgar Allen Poe or Swinburne or what a good idea it is to to dance about in waltz steps to iambic pentameter.

Nicholson Baker (really? That's really his name?) has a marvelous gift for putting words together in such a perfect way that you think they must have been born to be placed just so. I loved this: "Let's have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space...All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good."

Or this: "When I look at the lives of the poets, I understand what's wrong with me. They were willing to make the sacrifices that I'm not willing to make. They were so tortured, so messed up.

"I'm only a little messed up. I'm tortured to the point where I don't sleep very well sometimes, and I don't answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something. Also, I've run up significant credit-card debt. But that's not real self-torture."

Paul's passion for poetry keeps this narration from sinking into greyness; it stays funny, lively, and fascinating throughout, until I wanted nothing more than for Paul to win back his short, loving, generous Roz - and finish that damned intro. Plus, he healed a long-standing wound in me by pointing out that iambic pentameter is not on five beats, but six or three, WHICH I TRIED TO TELL MY ENGLISH TEACHER IN HIGH SCHOOL (but she wouldn't listen.) Lovely, lovely book. And the cover is beautiful, too.

[Marcello S · Rating 3 out of 5]

E’ andata più o meno così: qualche sera fa entro in un locale e mentre aspetto prendo da una pila di riviste un vecchio numero di Internazionale. Lo sfoglio veloce fino alla rubrica dei libri di Hornby. Parla proprio di questo libro, L’Antologista, di un autore che non avevo mai sentito nominare. E ne parla bene.
Il giorno dopo me lo procuro.

E’ la storia di Paul che viene lasciato da Roz e quindi sta proprio giù.
In passato ha provato ad insegnare, senza successo, ha pubblicato una o due raccolte di poesie - abbastanza per essere invitato a qualche congresso - e sta quasi al verde. Ora dovrebbe scrivere un’introduzione ad una antologia di poesie per foraggiare le sue casse ma è senza ispirazione.

Tra lavoretti domestici e momenti ordinari di una vita tutt’altro che memorabile inizia quindi a raccontarci tutto quello che sa sulla poesia.
Un sacco di parti sono illuminanti, semplici ed illuminanti. Altre sono complicate ma ti dice subito di dimenticarle, servono solo a creare confusione.
Ci parla di rime, versi liberi, accenti, sillabe. E richiama una bella quantità di poeti, per la maggior parte inglesi o americani. L’unico italiano del lotto è Marinetti.
Ne esce una storia strampalata della poesia degli ultimi due secoli. Una storia appassionata e poco conformista, come avrei voluto ascoltare al liceo.

Tre stelle belle abbondanti. [72/100]

[Libbie Hawker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, I admit it. I really didn't like this book at first. I found the narrative to be distracting and gimmicky with its forced "look how charming I am! Aren't I charming?" feel. (I am using charming because I hate the Q-word and avoid it at all costs.) I was fully prepared to hate this one, to rip into it when I finally finished it and got to write my review.

To my surprise, somewhere around the middle I realized the distracting gimmick was all part of a brilliant master plan, and I found myself rather reluctantly in love with this book.

The only thing that stumps me is why so many people who don't write love it. If I weren't a writer, if I didn't recognize the agonized compulsion of procrastination all throughout this book, the destructive terror of deadlines, the self-loathing and the self-loving, I would hate it. It would have continued to drive me nuts at full speed and I would have eventually set the damn thing on fire. Readers who are not also writers, what the hell is the draw to The Anthologist? It seems to me the special and awful experience of total creative stumped-ness, even when one is losing everything due to being creatively stumped, is such a unique experience to those who work in the creative field. And yet pretty much everybody on the planet loves this book. We're not all writers or painters or underwater basketweavers. What gives?

Talking purely about the charming book itself, let me say that I loved the way narrator Paul Chowder imagines these fantastical interactions with dead poets. And although I am making a conscious effort to study and write more poetry (I am convinced that poetry makes writers better at all forms of writing, from novels to essays), I don't know enough about the history of poetry to know whether some of the characterizations and facts were true or pure inventions on Nicholson Baker's part. Did some of these intense romantic relationships really happen between famous poets, or was it another fictional mirage, as in Chowder's fancy of bumping into Poe (or whoever it was) at the bead store? And I must know, was Ezra Pound really as big a prick as Baker/Chowder made him out to be? (I hope he was. Pound was a fellow native of Idaho, and we need a blush of badassery in the Gem State.)

While the book was mostly "talky" and clipped in its narrative style, contributing to my initial dislike of it, it had occasional moments of pure loveliness that left me weak in the knees. Entangled in the distraction and the avoidance of things that must be done and must be discussed were rare moments of pure sight and feeling that really showed what Nicholson Baker is capable of:

Yes, I sometimes have terrifying dreams in which a cat I've never seen before attacks a mouse and bites it and bites it, until I can hear its tiny neck make a popping sound. I pull the cat gently away and I take my shirt off and ball it up, and I prop the hurt mouse up against a balled-up shirt, and the mouse turns into a wan woman who talks to me in a laborious cheerful whisper in her brokenness. I want her to live. She says: "It's just impossible for me to live after what I've been through with that cat."

Oh, plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself. I want everything to be all right.

Beautiful. And so right, and so true to the writing/writer experience.

More that just speaks so directly to the writer's particular experience:

I wish I were happy in a disciplined way. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can. I've published poems, yes. That much is beyond question. And for a while I was pleased with the poems that I published. I felt that I understood why people write poetry. I understood the whole communal activity of writing and reviewing and extracting quotes to go on the paperback. "Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery." Being part of the interfaith blurb universe.

And now it's like I'm on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I'm clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don't know how I got here. It's a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham, I see Billy Collins, I see Ted Kooser. They're all clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel. Sara Teasdale. Herrick. Tiny figures, clambering, climbing. The wind comes over, whssssew, and it's cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to the side there's Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down, and there are many people behind me. They're hurrying up to where I am. They're twenty-three-year-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I'm trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It's freezing, and it's lonely, and there's nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just -- fffshhhooooow. Let go.

Would that be such a bad thing?

The whole book speaks so directly to all the specific fears that accompany writing. Running out of ideas. Running out of time. Running out of good words. Becoming irrelevant, obsolete. Even the setting is pitch-perfect; Chowder is trying to compile his print anthology of rhyming poetry (itself seen as an archaic form) at a time when ebooks are on the rise; as he sits in his rustic barn, avoiding writing his intro, his life is sprinkled with gadgets and technology that remind the writer-reader that the Kindle is just around the corner for Chowder and his nagging editor, that in another moment it's all going to change again and everybody will be thrown back into the agony of worrying about obsolescence and creative survival. It's a marvelously subtle book where every individual element of storycraft plays together in just the right way.

Well worth reading, if only for the fact that it reminds all of us, writer-readers and reader-readers, to notice and remember and celebrate the best moment of each day, like the branches on the windshield, like the booming rests.

[Jim Elkins]

When Fiction and Nonfiction Are Like Oil and Water

This is a combination novel and friendly teacherly essay on poetry. One comment on the book as a novel, another on the book as an essay, and a third on the two together.

1. As a novel: the implied author's sense of the offhand, the corny, the careless and carefree, the vernacular, and the informal, are too easily satisfied, and they amount to too much of his sense of what contemporary writing can be. "The Anthologist" is too easily convinced that home-town, un-ornamented, straightforward, honest description is the best way to write a novel. Or to put it the other way around: it's easy to see the kinds of writing the implied author doesn't like -- they would include consciously developed styles and manners of all sorts, which Baker indulges in other books -- but not easy to see why he is so content writing what he takes to be their opposite. I imagine he might justify it to himself as a development of the American novel after Updike, but not toward elegant prose as in "U and I" -- rather toward a minimalist, anti-modernist, firmly North American, styleless style or mannerless manner, more like DeLillo. But this book's solution is weak, unable to account for its persistent low-level fear of writing.

2. As an essay on poetry: it's good, but not on topic. The narrator, a poet, is working on an anthology of rhymed verse, and in the course of the book he tells us many times how important and interesting rhyme is. None of the reviewers of the book seems to have noticed that he doesn't actually say more than a sentence or two about rhyme itself. The entire essay on poetry is about meter. On that subject, it's fun, clear, and entertaining, and I'd recommend it if it were published by itself, without the novel accumulated around it. And it's unfortunate that the poetry essay is all about North American poets, with the usual sprinkling of Victorian predecessors in a predictable canon (Swinburne instead of Browning, shout-outs to contemporaries like Graham who might read his book, etc.). And the review in the New York Times is absolutely right about Baker's lack of connection with the real poetry world, even in North America: Baker scarcely mentions publications other than "The New Yorker," and he imagines a poetry conference in Switzerland where the room is abuzz at the appearance of Paul Muldoon. That social isolation is of a piece with Baker's advocacy of rhyme and regular meter. If he were a student, I'd shut him in a room with some books of Celan's until he saw that meter can be broken in fascinating ways -- that poetry doesn't need to be either regular or simply "free" -- and that a poet's voice, like a novelist's, can involve more than just the assiduous mimicry of daily informal speech. I wonder if Baker thinks his loyalty to regular meter and rhyme (which he fails to separate) are a sign that he is not only contemporary and postmodern, but also traditionalist: if so, that puts him nearly in the NPR - PRI - Lake Wobegon set. This is just the kind of novel that makes Horace Engdahl right.

3. As a composite essay and novel: it doesn't work. When the essayist is in the room, he talks to us, asking us to try out the sound of lines, and even to sing along. But when the novelist is speaking, it's an ordinary first-person narrative. We are asked not to notice when we, the readers, are suddenly urged to disappear for a few minutes so the novel can resume. And we're asked not to be surprised when the character in the novel we're reading abruptly turns to us and asks us a question. It's not that this couldn't work: it's that Baker doesn't notice it as a problem. And that's of a piece with his studied insouciance about voice: just say what you mean, don't gussy it up, and you're a novelist.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

A washed-up middle-aged poet who has recently lost his girlfriend through his chronic inability to finish the introduction to the poetry anthology he's meant to be assembling (which will - if he can get it out - rescue rhyming poetry from the clutches of free verse) should not be such good company.

But right from the opening line ("Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know.") I fell for Paul Chowder. Nicholson plays Chowder as both artful and artless. We are taken through his dully agonising procrastination - he frets about spending money he doesn't have on yet more poetry books (but does it anyway), he tries to bond with his neighbour, he tries to reunite with his girlfriend, he takes slipshod care of of his dog. We follow him about his property as he carts his white plastic chair around, looking at the moon at night, the creek by day.

And as he prevaricates, Chowder takes us through all his ideas and emotions about poetry. First - how do we recognise a poem? Well, if it's a poem in the New Yorker:

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That show's it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spout it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton.

He talks to us about meter - the way the words fall on the lines. Paul Chowder has a bone to pick with traditional definitions of meter. When his anthology comes out, people will understand that iambic pentameter is not the be-all and end-all of English rhythmic poetry. Instead, "the four-beat line is the soul of English poetry". English poetry, Chowder tells us, wants to dance. And it wants us to pay attention to the 'booms' at the end of the four-beat lines; that small pause before you launch into the next set of words.

English poetry demands to be chanted, Chowder states. Pentameter is a French import, and French is not English. An English haiku is an abomination -

Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn't work that way. I don't actually know any Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.

And English poetry wants to rhyme. Rhyme is a natural state - it's symmetry. Free verse is almost a cosmic joke (as is that fact that Chowder, when he can get them out, writes poems in free verse because he's not good at rhyming). There's even a de riguer neurological explanation for the satisfaction of rhyming poetry; we first learn and organise words by the similarity of their mouth feel: cat, hat, fat. It's only later that they get recategorised by meaning rather than phonological similarity. Rhyming poetry puts them back together.

Along the way we pick up all sorts of poetry gossip and personal preferences: Chowder's abjection before New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, his feelings about international poetry conferences, the love lives of twentieth century poets, his violent dislike of Ezra Pound, his fondness for Louise Bogan and Ted Roethke (and their one-off love-weekend, which Bogan wrote made her "bloom like a Persian rosebush") and lesser known poets like Sarah Teasdale. At times, Chowder mixes his theory and his gossip to lovely, rambling effect:

What's the meter of badminton? That's a hard one, friends. Poink, poink, poink. "Break, break, break, / On they cold gray stones O Sea." A monosyllabic meter. And tennis? tennis is a slow duple meter. Pa-pock, pa-pock, pa-pock. "Two roads -- diverged -- in a yel l-- ow wood." Hm, "yellow" doesn't work. Fault - thirty love. Love means nothing in tennis, as you know. Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Lawn Tennyson. Marianne Moore was a lifelong tennis player but not a good metrist. She had a pet crow, and she circled her rhyme words with different colored pencils. Mina Loy once said, Imagine a tennis player who wrote poems, "Would not his meter depend on his way of life?"

Ping-Pong - now's there's a fine rollicking meter. You can recite Macaulay's Lay of Ancient Rome to a game of Ping-Pong.

I adored Nicholson's writing - the voice he gives Chowder is one of the most enjoyable I've found in months. He he is after bashing his finger up trying to carry his computer downstairs:

And I knew that I was going to be fine, but that I might not be able to type for a while, which would give me a reprieve on writing my introduction. A great whimpery happiness passed through me like clear urine.

I still haven't figured out how seriously I'm meant to take Chowder. How much does Baker endorse these points of view? Is he teasing us, or teaching us?

I guess it doesn't matter. What I took from the book - as well as pure enjoyment - was an improved sense of how to read rhythmic poetry, and a list of poets to dip into. For the first time, I want to read Swinburne:

What he could do was rhyme better than anybody. Deaf? Didn't matter. He heard what he needed to hear. Not only did he rhyme, he danced new dance steps while he rhymed. He mixed rhythms in a way nobody had done before. He was good at a certain kind of crooning, stinging pulse, with the rhymes coming poom, pom, ching, chong. Nobody else came close to him in this. His sound was everywhere. It was trance music. It went round and round inside your brain.

I need to read Moore and Bogan and Roethke (a friend, fortuitously, lent me a copy of his collected poems a few weeks ago) and maybe some 'Shorter Elizabethan Poems'. What more can you ask of a book than that it make you want to read even more?

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I approached The Anthologist warily, not exactly being a fan of Mr. Baker, or of the idea of fiction focused on poetry. And indeed I nearly ditched the book after 30 pages, unsure if I wanted to read an entire book about a, well, kind of loser - a guy whose girlfriend has just left him because he can't make himself write a 40 page introduction to a poetry anthology, who has no income, and who seems content having a mouse live behind the control panel of his stove. Truth be told I read the book because I wanted to listen knowingly to the Slate Book Club podcast, even though these sometimes disappoint.

It's not a terrible book. If you hate poetry, or would suffer reading long passages about meter and beat, or Swinburne and Vachel Lindsay, you ought give it a pass. If you like sentences like these, have at it:

At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize 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.

If I had a ponytail, which I don't, I'd cut it off with four slow scissor cuts and bury it in the garden with the rubber band still around it.

[Mona · Rating 3 out of 5]

So-so.

This was a tough one to review.

This does not make my list of great books, although it does have a certain sort of mild charm.

Steven King famously called Nicholson Baker's fiction "nail parings".

I can see why, as he seems to focus on trivialities and commonplaces.

The hero of the novel is poet Paul Chowder. One suspects that this is pretty autobiographical, and that Paul Chowder is really a stand in for Nicholson Baker.

The book has little story or narrative arc and plods along relating the often boring day-to-day existence of Paul Chowder, who lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Chowder is a poet whose success is mainly in the past. He tried college teaching, but disliked it and quit. He currently has no regular source of income.

His beloved live in girlfriend, Roz, moved out when Paul failed to complete the introduction to a poetry anthology he was editing. I can understand why she left as Paul seems to be an inveterate procrastinator and self-sabotager.

We see him procrastinating; giving poetry readings in Cambridge; walking his dog; cutting his thumb multiple times; worrying about his credit card debt; ruminating about various past mistakes; going blueberry picking with some new and old friends; interacting with his neighbor; thinking about his true love Roz, etc. etc.

There are also didactic passages where he expounds his theories about poetry, including that it should rhyme and that Ezra Pound was the devil. Some of these are laughable, although others are interesting, as Chowder does know a great deal about poetry and poets.

There is a teensy bit of a narrative arc, as he does make some progress with things towards the end of the book.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

At a recent appearance, Nicholson Baker claimed he wasn't a poet. However, in this remarkable, graceful book, his prose at times is quite poetic (no one can write a line such as "the overboiled potato of the moon" without a touch of the poet in his soul).

This book is almost a master class on the importance poetry plays in the modern world. Paul Chowder, a blocked poet unable to jump start writing an introduction to his anthology of poetry, finds himself musing on muses and creators, the presence or absence of rhyme, the history of different fashions enjoyed by poetry. Consequently, his lover has departed, leaving him with much time on his hands to create, yet he remains stymied, moving his white plastic chair from one locale to another, suffering injuries usually to his hands, and plotting on how to inveigle his Roz's return.

So this is a love story, of poetry as well as of a woman. At times laugh out loud funny, at times heartbreaking. And as with all of Baker's works, accessible, entertaining, and informative.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you're at a beginning. p80

Poetry is worth thinking about- from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things. p59

Poetry is like math or chess or music, it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don't last. p66

One could spend an inordinate amount of time trying figure out how to react to that last quote, which made me squirm. I included it in fairness, to illustrate the range of mild outrageousness that NB covers in what I think is this novel is about, among other things but taking an exalted position: poetry, woven through a life.

I always secretly wanted to rhyme. Don't you, some of you? Admit it. p68

At times intimate, there are enough references (some of which I checked out) to give this a scholarly flair, especially if you are poetically inclined. Most of his favourite poets are not in the current Oxford edition nor in mine, but a few I have heard of and the ones I searched for turned up. I confess to a fascination with the lives of poets, and I am pleased to discover there will be a sequel. In the meantime I will be looking out for Sara Teasdale and Vachel Lindsay in particular.

She didn't marry him because she saw he was basically a lunatic. p157


Considering that I so disliked the other two of NBs books that I read before GR, that I didn't even enter, this was a great surprise. The book foisted itself on me at the library as books do when you have failed to locate the one you were looking for. Well it happens to me. I did notice I kept waiting for it to get gnarly, and because I had such a hard time trusting it, this book gets extra points for winning me over. Also, it was a pleasure that the writers block was not the angst of the novelist with which most readers are familiar but the anthologist, whose work is mostly done.

You can't force it. If it isn't there, you can't force it. Then I thought: you can force it...and you should. p98
A lifetime of fretting over pieces of paper, and this is what you get. p102

6/7

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slowly savoring this. The story of a poet putting off writing the introduction to a long-promised poetry anthology. Complete stream-of-consciousness, with all the delights of that form, the nimble, quick segues into horizontal details and parallel obsessions, allowing the reader to put the story together, challenging us to stay with him through the sizzling lighting-branches of his thoughts.

And between thoughts about his girlfriend, who recently dumped him, and his neighbor's trash collecting and light in his barn, we get his thoughts on poetry, novel and resonant ideas about iambic pentameter and the four-beat balladic line, about professional envy and the significance of rhyme, with references that give me a reading list I'll be working my way through for the next year, I 'm sure. And as a red thread throughout, the tragicomic way in which an artist's doubt about his creative vitality, his inability to do what he values most, is ruining his life.

That cruel paradox of the human mind--the more you value something, the more paralyzing it can be to approach it. This technicolor, kaleidescopic mind-portrait of how a stalled, brilliant man can be so funny and insightful and yet useless to himself, all the while doing what he claims he cannot do--charming and enlightening a reader, and introducing us to his subject.

*******************************
Ahhhhh. good to the last drop. Both a meditation on poetry AND a terrific, charming little novel. Much more straightforward than much Nicholson Baker. Lovely.

Poets he mentions include: Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver (I've already bought one, inspired by this) , Ted Koosier, Ted Roethke, Dryden, Swinburne (MUST read him now), Sara Teasdale (another surprising favorite, Sandburg, Pound (and not in a good way), ditto Eliot, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Phillip Larkin, Yeats, Keats, Rene Parker Task, Samuel Daniel, Christine Rosetti, W.S. Merwin, Auden, Coventry Patmore, Shelley, Merrill (love Merrill), Mark Strand, Rupert Brooke, Marianne Moore, Vachel Lindsay, Edna St. Vincent Millay (fell down the stairs), Robert Frost, Longfellow, Tennyson, Poe, James Fenton, Karl Shapiro, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Horace, Aphra Behn, Jorie Graham, Kay Ryan, Leonie Adams, Dorothy Parker, Ferlinghetti, Alice Meynell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mina Loy, Howard Nemerov (love him), Wallace Stevens, Snodgrass, AE Housman, Muriel Rukeyser, Wendy Cope, Selima Hill, Charles Simic... Imagine THAT anthology.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Chowder, the first-person protagonist of this breezy novel, has some significant things to say about the mechanics of poetry and its place in modern culture—you'll learn a lot here, most of it painlessly—but he is having desperate difficulty saying them in a coherent, linear fashion.

Consider this sequence, a paragraph-and-a-half, from early in the novel (p.55):

"Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping—there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you're an adult, you don't sob quite that way. But when you're a little kid, you go, "Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih." You actually cry in a duple meter.

"Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. (emphasis mine—APS) We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die."

That's good stuff, that is, evocative and observant even if debatable—and there's a lot more where that came from. The problem for Paul is that there are lots of other things, too. Digressions and hallucinations and discursions on lawn mowers and the nailing down of floors... Paul's endlessly capable of distracting himself from his task. Which is bad, because he's been commissioned to write the introduction to a poetry anthology, a forum where he pretty much has to be focused in order to get paid, and his editor is getting anxious. His writer's block has even started to affect his personal life—it's led to (or at least is the pretext for) the departure of his beloved girlfriend Roz.

The book itself, the physical object, is an entertaining package: graphically rich, with tunes and scanned lines of poetry breaking up the text. Yet it doesn't feel lightweight—there are no tricks played with the margins or font sizes. This is a full-sized, full-fledged book from a mature writer, and although I found it a quick read, 'twas a good one.

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't just like this book, I enjoyed it. Start many things, never finish? Use distraction to keep from doing what I need to do? Hands working on one task, mind totally in another location? I identified; I sympathized. I laughed.

While he procrastinates, Paul performs useful tasks (like cleaning his office, walking the dog, mowing the lawn) and holds an inner conversation on poetry and rhyme, with side meditations on the downward spiral and mundane rhythms of his daily life. Though not really working on the main task before him (the introduction to his poetry anthology "Only Rhyme") he manages to cover the material pretty thoroughly as his mind meanders back and forth, speaking of poets, and food, and lost love, and rhythm, and song, and books, and bleeding fingers, and dogs, and neighbors, and mice in the kitchen. His introduction is written!--all he needs to do is...write it.

And he has--we have just read all 240 (unedited) pages.

The reader has been both entertained and informed and picks up quite a bit of knowledge about poets and poetry along the way.

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading NB is like slapping a nicotine patch on your brain. The Anthologist follows a well-to-do poet that can’t seem to do much of anything. He recognizes his history of measly success and accepts, nervously, that that’s all the success he gets. He’s undoubtedly pathetic, but passionate about the metric modulation of English poetry, and he searches ravenously for a single word or phrase that could catapult him into mellifluous fandom. All is not lost on his journey. He comes alway with stringing beads for his ex, picking out his dog’s fleas, and cataloging the shadows of the trees cast on his windshield. The hope is not lost.

All NB’s tandem sentences-turned books parallel what I want reading to always be. It’s hard to describe, but it’s some sort of aspie-interiorization mixed with flavorful perspectives and knockout word play. It just always hits.

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

certainly a very interesting and unique book in the way only Nicholson Baker can provide. dragged a bit but still interesting and informative

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was apprehensive about Nicholson Baker’s “The Anthologist,” which consists mostly of the ruminations of a semi-failed middle-aged American poet, since I am an entirely-failed middle-aged American poet who, as can be expected, nurses a grudge or two and has, over time, become crusted over with a host of peeves and prejudices. Which is to say I’m a tough audience for this kind of book. Compounding my fear is the fact that Nicholson Baker is a wildly exuberant novelist whose fiction tends to drive me a little nuts (although he wrote one of my favorite non-fiction books “Double Fold”). But the two or three novels of Nicholson’s that I’ve read (“Mezzanine” for instance) are too noisy for my taste. Unfettered by the necessary plodding required of non-fiction, the fiction-mode Baker becomes the smartest, most annoying kid in class three days after his Ritalin prescription runs out.

But “The Anthologist” is not like this, and as far as contemporary discussions of the state (woeful) of American poetry goes, this is really quite good. The noveley part of it – the plot, that is – isn’t hard to sum up: semi-failed American poet Paul Chowder struggles with the introduction to an anthology of poems (formal poems) and angles to get back both his departed girlfriend and his eroded self-respect. Chowder is somewhere north of fifty or so (it’s never said for sure, but he was a kid in 1961) but he is fey and childlike, the way, I guess, aging American poets are supposed to be. For instance, in his efforts to win his gal back he strings a bead necklace for her and has lots of boo boos on his fingers which he needs her to come over and put Band-Aids on. Yeah, the less said about the plot – and its protagonist’s more overtly fey aspects – the better. However, this book is worth the read for Chowder’s ruminations on his art. Of course I reacted with scorn and sometimes outrage, but most of the time I found Paul Chowder to have many sensible, generous, informative and useful things to say about poetry.


***
How to Pronounce the Word “Poem”: a problem that has long vexed me but which I’ve always been too shy to ask anyone about:

“…but “poem” is one of those bothersome technical terms. It’s so difficult to pronounce. You either pronounce it “pome,” or poe-im” or “po-em.” It’s not an English word, it’s a Greek word that’s had the end chopped off…” (p. 40).

Years ago when I first started attending writers’ conferences and in general taking poetry up again seriously in my late 20s, I thought at first that the workshop leaders and teachers were kidding when they called them “poe-ims.” Then I felt intimidated, out-of-the-loop and a very stupid, like that time it took me fifteen minutes into a lecture by David Wojahn to figure out that he was saying “Rimbaud” as in the French poet and not “Rambo” as in the Sylvester Stallone movies. I still buckle a little inside when somebody utters po-em the two-syllable “Greek” way. I was so grateful to Paul Chowder for acknowledging the situation.

***
W.S. Merwin and the Problem with Enjambment: Chowder loves late-period Merwin, and goes at some length to explain why he does. Chowder’s love for Merwin, although he goes at lengths about it, is never explained to my satisfaction, although he does an excellent job describing the look of a Merwin poem:

“And all the poems in his book The Vixen have the same form, which is that one line goes along for about ten words, and then it enjambs into the next line, which is indented, and that line goes along, and it enjambs into the next line, which begins at the left margin. And then indented. And then left margin, and then indented. So each of the poems has this very consistent square-toothed edge. And there’s no punctuation, none, so you have to figure out where the long sentences begin or end. That’s part of the joy of it, in fact, that you don’t know sometimes whether a word is part of the end of one idea or the beginning of the next idea. Everything enjambs visually until you read it aloud to yourself and hear where the breaks should come…” (p. 95)

Yeah, that’s what a Merwin poem looks like, but tell me again why anyone would like this, or why anyone couldn’t crank out this sort of thing for themselves? The problem with this is that Chowder a few pages before goes at great length to explain how he dislikes enjambment. Chowder complaining about enjambment sounds a lot like Chowder praising Merwin:

“…you’re walking right out to the very end of the line, way out, and it’s all going fine and you’re expecting the syntax to give you a polite tap on the shoulder to wait for a moment. Just a second, sir, or madam, while we rhyme, or come to the end of our phrasal unit, or whatever. While we rest. But instead the syntax pokes at you and says hustle it, pumpkin, keep walking, don’t rest. So naturally, because you’re stepping out onto nothingness, you fall. You tumble forward, gaaaah, and you end up all discombobulated at the beginning of the next line, with a banana peel on your head and some coffee grounds in your shirt pocket. In other words, you’re “jammed” into the next line – that’s what enjambment is.” (p. 90)

I would add that enjambment is supposed to make some sense, even if not a strictly prosodic sense. Marianne Moore can leave “the” stranded at the end of a line for perfectly justifiable aesthetic reasons. I found the arguments muddled.

***
An Ancient Recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Here is Paul Chowder’s funniest moment:

“Thomas Edison’s people convinced Alfred Tennyson to chant the “Charge of the Light Brigade” into a microphone. You can hear it in a BBC collection, and you can hear it in a CD that comes with a book called The Voice of the Poet. Tennyson sounds like this:

pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
Hobble leg, hobble leg,
Hobble leg owhmmm!
Into the bottle of fluff, rubbed the stuff under!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!
pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff! pkkkffffffrrrffff-fff!

But under the static of the wax cylinder, did you hear what Lord Alfred was up to? He was using the regular four-beat line, but he was using triplets within each beat. One-two-three, one-two-three…” (pp. 151-152).

This passage is used to buttress Chowder’s triplets theory (read the book), but the transcription by itself is worth the cover price. I own “The Voice of the Poet” CD and, yes, this is exactly what Tennyson sounds like.

***
Baby Sounds and the Poet’s Discovery of Poetry: The only part of this book I found entirely unbearable was the bit between pages 106-112 when Chowder starts in on an extended maunder about the origins of the need for poetry. Lots of baby talk from Mom and gurglings from baby: “The mouth says, “A boo boo boo! Yes, my little fumble nuggets! A noo noo noo!”” (pp. 106-107) and “With your lips. Puh, buh, bluh….” (p. 108). I just can’t stomach this sort of thing and I have a really hard time believing it. “Fumble nuggets!” is not something a real mother would say to an infant. Rather, this is a (male) novelist’s over-energetic attempt to mimic a mother’s baby talk.

***
Sometimes Nicholson Baker the Novelist Can’t Help Himself: this passage is very much like every page of “The Mezzanine” and gives a glimpse into the enormous efforts at restraint Baker must have undergone writing this book:

“Here’s a poetry packing tip for you. Make two load-bearing stacks or towers of books in two diagonally opposite corners of the box. The two stacks must go right up to the top edge of the box. That way it won’t crumple and slump – you can pile boxes four or five high, and the weight of the top box will be transmitted down through he two stacks of the one below and the one below that.” (p. 194)

Maybe it’s just me, but I have no idea what he is talking about here, and although I tried, I cannot picture this book-moving technique beyond visualizing Canterbury Cathedral made out of playing cards. So here’s my failed poet’s advice for moving books: use small boxes. Big boxes become unmanageably heavy when filled with books. Dump the books in any which way until each small box is full. Lift and move as required. Or better yet, leave the box on the floor and make yourself an Old Crow on the rocks and turn on the TV for an hour or so. This is how poets move books.

***
John Ashbery: In one of Chowder’s many asides, he muses on the indelible fact of John Ashbery, and even goes so far to purchase a copy of his latest book at an airport bookstore. (Really? Where is this airport again? I couldn’t tell from the text where he was flying out of, although Chowder does describe it as “the best airport bookstore I’d ever been in…” I’ll bet!). His musings on Ashbery are to me just dead on perfect from the fact he is looking “a little bit witchlike” in his jacket photo to the droll observation that “even his name is coolly, absurdly, missing one of its Rs” and that Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror “reads as if it’s written by a cleverly programmed random-phrase generator. It doesn’t sing.” (pp. 232-233). But Chowder is sympathetic in a way I really wish I could be more often: “…and although the poems themselves weren’t heartbreakers, the book made me think of the sound of someone closing the door of a well-cared-for pale blue Infiniti on a late-summer evening in the gravel overflow parking lot of a beach hotel that had once been painted by Gretchen Dow Simpson.” (p. 233). That is so lovely somehow, isn’t it?

***
But he didn’t sell me on Mary Oliver: “Mary Oliver is saving my life,” writes Chowder on the flyleaf of one of her books (p. 80). Ehh. I’ll take his word for it. I’ve tried to get into Oliver’s poems but they just don’t work for me. Her at-one with nature seems so easy, almost reflexive, and I’m suspicious of that (I much prefer Woody Allen’s “I am at two with nature” approach). Later in the book Chowder makes an innocent aside about Oliver’s poetry that constitutes one of the main reasons I find her so unappealing: “Mary Oliver’s got deer waking her up in the field in the early morning by licking her face. She’s got grasshoppers eating sugar out of her hand. This just doesn’t happen to me…” (p. 192). Nope. Me neither.

***
Poets Wasting Time and Being Drunk and/or Crazy: Throughout the book Chowder agonizes over wasting time, failing to accomplish what he halfheartedly wants to accomplish and all the other ills of the at-home in the middle of the day and middle of the week writer. It’s all good, but the best is on page 140 about the days of the week, the feelings of hope inspired by Monday and the ensuing panic at the waste and sloth that hits you on Thursday when you realize you’ve accomplished nothing. It was harrowing to read. So Chowder has sloth down convincingly. Unfortunately drunk and crazy appear in the book only second-hand via biographical asides on the famously drunk and crazy: Roethke (crazy and drunk), Berryman (drunk & crazy), Bishop (just drunk), Vachel Lindsay (both), Mina Loy (just drunk), Robert Lowell (mostly crazy), etc. Chowder, unfortunately, is perfectly sane and from what I could tell a wine-sipper at best. My guess is that Nicholson Baker is a disciplined, organized, productive writer (prolific novelists have to be, don’t they?). He probably just couldn’t imagine how anyone could “be” a poet if drunk, crazy and disorganized, despite his clear-eyed awareness of poetry’s drunk and crazy heritage. There is a catastrophic lack of squalor to Paul Chowder.

***
Teaching Poetry: Chowder briefly taught poetry at a local college. He abruptly quit his job when he decided that “I was a professional teller of lies.” This because he was being paid to tell student poets, most without a jot of talent, that their poems “were interesting and powerful and sharply etched and nicely turned and worth giving collective thought to. Which they were unfortunately not.” (p. 142).

I find it hard to fathom how Chowder manages to stay plugged in to the American poetry world without being part of a university. The logistics don’t make sense to me. He is after all working on an introduction to an anthology for which he is to be paid $7,000.00 (thus the book’s title) and in reality there are far too many poets plugged in to the system for an obscure has-been to be given such a great gig. I just don’t think things work this way. In my experience, a contemporary American poet’s obscurity is absolute – a poet either gets all the gauds and baubles or none at all. Chowder inhabits a no man’s land of PoBiz that does not exist.

***
Great Poems and the Vast Wastage Inherent in a Poet’s Life and Work: Chowder essentially rehashes Randall Jarrell’s old dictum about great poets being struck by lightning half a dozen times (only), good poets being struck only once or twice, the rest….well, you know what happens to the rest. But this is a truth that needs rehashing and I am glad Chowder does it here. What Chowder does that I don’t recall Jarrell ever doing is add in the fact that the poet’s waste – all those bad or failed or mediocre poems – is perhaps necessary for the great ones. Call it the mulch theory of poetry. This is so good it deserves an extensive quote:

“What does it mean to be a great poet? It means that you wrote one or two great poems. Or great parts of poems. That’s all it means. Don’t try to picture the waste or it will alarm you. Even in a big life like Louise Bogan’s or Theodore Roethke’s. The two of them had an affair, as I said. They had a busy weekend with may cries of pleasure, and it helped their writing a lot. Or Howard Moss’s life, or Swinburn’s life, or Tennyson’s life – any poet’s life. Out of hundreds of poems two or three are really good. Maybe four or five. Six tops. All the middling poems they write are necessary to form a raised mulch bed or nest for the great poems and to prove to the world that they labored diligently and in good faith for some years at their calling. In other words, they can’t just dash off one or two great poems and then stop. That won’t work. Nobody will give them the “great poet” label if they write just two great poems and nothing else. Even if they’re the greatest poems ever. But it’s perfectly okay, in fact it’s typical, if ninety-five percent of the poems they write aren’t great. Because they never are…” (pp. 101-102).

I can go along with that except for one thing – why can’t a poet be great if she manages to dash off five or six great poems, a dozen good ones, and then stop? Isn’t this what Rimbaud did more or less? Some of our best poets have not been prolific: Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

***
In “The Anthologist,” we are given little information about Chowder’s actual poems. There are a couple of references to a big project he has been working on for years called “The Flying Spoon Poems” which sounds very unpromising indeed. But we are given the text from only one actual Chowder poem, however, and it is staggeringly bad. In addition to its intrinsic badness, it also embodies Chowder’s significant misunderstanding about the difference between formal and free verse that perhaps constitutes the novel’s one giant core failure. As Chowder explains it, there is an enormous gulf between the two types of poetry. This gulf is so vast in fact that Chowder to call free verse poems poems – he calls them “plums” and describes them disparagingly in several places: “…free verse is, as we know, merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly. So you can break the line anywhere you want…” (p. 91). This is about the most meager definition of free verse I’ve ever read, although much free verse poetry does appear to be written this way in actual practice – which is to say it is a shrewd observation, but certainly not a working definition for any serious poet. Bafflingly and despite his disdain, the big mystery at the heart of Chowder’s life as a poet is the fact that all he writes is free verse! And this despite the fact he has enormous knowledge and elaborate theories about formal verse. At one point in the book he addresses this curious fact:

“I’m not a natural rhymer. This is the great disappointment of my life. I’ve got a decent metrical ear – let me just say that right out – and some of my early dirty love poems rhymed because I still believed then that I could force them to….So I got a reputation as a bad-boy formalist. But these days when I try to write rhyming poetry it’s terrible. I mean it’s just really embarrassing – it sucks. So I write plums. Chopped garbage. I’ve gotten away with it for years. And I sometimes feel that maybe if I’d been born in a different time – say, 1883—and hadn’t been taught haiku and free verse but real poetry, my own rhyming self would have flowered more fully.

But you know, probably not. Probably my brain just isn’t arranged properly….” (p. 159).

So is Chowder even a poet at all? I ask this because the one example of his poetry the reader is given is atrocious. The poem is about some pants once worn by his departed girlfriend Roz. I am not sure if this is the whole poem, but this is all we’re given:

I walked upstairs behind her
Staring at her stitched seams
Normally she wore black pants
But it was the last day of the year
That she could wear the white ones
So she did

Chopped garbage indeed! This is Richard Brautigan at his slackest, circa 1971. There’s the dab of sex, the plaintive, disarming voice, the random line breaks, the little modest shrug towards going with the flow and just letting it be, man. That the first letter of each line is capitalized is a novelist’s mistake, since these sorts of poems typically are all in lower case, including the pronoun “i.” Although just about every poetic style is current nowadays, almost nobody writes these sorts of poems anymore – nobody over the age of 22 anyway. Its failure undermines Paul Chowder’s credibility – if this is what he thinks free verse is, he is definitely without a clue. This poem constitutes a crushing disappointment – after so much witty, informed, big-hearted talk about the beauties and terrors of poetry we are left only with this dreck. And Chowder is apparently pleased with this thing, because we are told towards the end of the book that he recites it during a reading he gives at a bookstore. Chowder is too smart to succumb to this and surely his rhyming poetry can’t “suck” as bad as this does. His white pants poem is perhaps the biggest failure in the novel.

***
But despite the ersatz poem about white pants and my other complaints, I would have to say that Nicholson Baker’s “The Anthologist” is one of the best critical pieces on contemporary American poetry I’ve read, fictional or non-fictional. My three main gripes are that I wish Chowder had been slightly less accommodating to his fate and the fate of American poetry (that is to say I wish he had been slightly grumpier, slightly less willing to say “maybe I’m wrong” or “more power to him” after making a sharp critical foray). Secondly, I also wish there had been more (and more realistic) talk about the actual compositional process. Finally, I wish the representational Paul Chowder poem, the Roz’s white pants poem, hadn’t been such a stinker. But Chowder does do a good job with the in-between times where the pain and the self-doubt and the heartbreak occur – and if these things are not the heart of the matter of poetry itself, they are the heart of the matter of what it is to try to be a poet.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

“It’s hard to hold it all in your head. All the different possible ways that you can enjoy life. Or not enjoy life.”

When Baker is on his game he can be as good as almost anyone. This isn’t a great book, and yet there are some great moments in it. Baker uses a sneaky way of teaching you a bit about poetry, so with all the talk of Iambic pentameter, triplets and enjambments it’s like being back in the classroom.

“Spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.”

Again he gets beneath the surface of things, pulling us down thought spirals, raising questions within questions allowing us to fall into his outlook on the world. This sings with optimism and all along he retains a warmth, and a childish curiosity about the world which can be highly infectious.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charming. Fun. Zany, the book reads like a bouncing trolley. I read this book a few years ago with delight. Thankfully it made me laugh again.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes it is hard to write reviews. When you can pin one thing down that you loved, hated, emoted over intensely, you can kind of push your way into something fast and messy. I am not a great reviewer. I do not write this for some mass consumption, that would be like holding a candle to the sun when compared to legitimate criticism, but as a practice it keeps me writing and it helps me remember which books I’ve read and how readily I should shove them down the throats of others.

I don’t have that here.

The only emotions I have with this book are more-or-less what book itself is: a loose bag of observations, anecdotes, and self-deprecating humor. There is nothing to hold onto there. No solid place to begin, which, as the narrator (and the author) point out, is a lot like poetry. Which is what this book is about, if it can be said to be about anything.

That is probably why for the first twenty or thirty pages I hated this book. It is centered around poetry and I know as much about poetry as a do the art of dart throwing, I may make a reasonable pass here and there, but there is an 80% that by the time I’m done someone is leaving pissed-off and bleeding. Combine my ignorance of subject with the relentlessness of the book’s scattershot narrator, Paul Chowder and you have me feeling out of the loop and slightly patronized. I couldn't quite place the reasoning for it, but the book had found me defensive. Then, the more I read, the more I let the book tumble over me, and I realized two very important things.

The first was that I was wrong, the book wasn't patronizing, it was something else, it was dialectically different from the way my mind works. It was a conversation, and that is what this book is even if you can't respond in text, there are implied gestures, those wonderful pauses that Baker and his narrator are so fond of teasing out of poetry. You can feel yourself nodding, sighing, groaning, in back channel cues. I was being introduced to someone new and they had bothered me and I had steeled myself to be annoyed, to be stuck in the conversation until it was polite to leave, and then, after doing so, scream to myself about how much of an asshole he was.

Which leads me to my second point: I am Paul Chowder. Not in the trivialities, the relentless desire to capture the common place, but in the doubt, the musing, the facts lodged between cracked pillars, being thrown out not because they are necessarily relevant but you just found them and hey isn't that a neat thing. Which is a bad thing, because if there is one son of a bitch I can’t stand it’s myself.

I’m half-kidding.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a ‘minimalist’ novel before. I feel like now I can say I have. The book has no real plot, little character-building, or pretty much anything I read books for, but it has a charm that, when not losing me in a forest of poetic didacticism I can’t even pretend to care about, kept me reading with a consistent if small smile on my face. I’m not sure I can do a lot of this type of novel, but every once and a while I can see myself returning to let out momentary freshness.

[gwayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a bit of an attitude about this book. After reading several good reviews, I put my name on the library wait list for it. As often happens these days, the book came much sooner than I'd anticipated. So, "I'll read that someday" turned into "I have three weeks to read that."

But enough about me--for the moment. Paul Chowder is an aging poet, past his prime, whose girlfriend has just broken up with him, in part because he just. can't. seem. to manage to write the introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry--back in vogue, btw!--he has put together. His procrastination techniques are often desperately amusing, and he delivers a bunch of gossipy tidbits about poets' lives (fun!). His impromptu lectures on meter and rhyme are surprisingly lucid and fresh. I actually found myself googling some of the poems he mentions: I love the Sir Thomas Wyatt line, "They flee from me that sometime did me seek." (The poem was featured in an episode of The Tudors I'd watched recently--ah, the embarrassingly roundabout ways we are exposed to the classics via pop culture!) I also found and listened to a recording of Elizabeth Bishop reading "The Fish." I even considered moving several poetry books nearer the top of my ever-optimistic "to read" list.

I probably read this novel too fast, though. It would have been better read in five or so discrete bits. To be honest, I wanted to finish it by the New Year: one of the things I realized about my reading in 2009 is that a lot of it--too much of it?--was new material. I need to mix it up more.

That said, the narrator often irritated me. He's whiny and passive, and he obviously subscribes to the great-artists-must-have-tragic-lives myth, a pet peeve of mine. Also, and I'm fully aware that this is a personal point, for every writer affecting a cute wittle tortured writerly breakdown, there's some poor editor that has to scramble and defend the writer and make excuses and waste time writing increasingly desperate and/or threatening emails. Honestly, this just ruins the entire project for the editor. Then, after all that delay, Mr. Diva turns in a 230-page draft?! for an introduction?! Boooooo.

So... I don't know. It was probably a 2.5-star read for me. I'll round up. Happy New Year.

[Roberta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book. Oh my God, this book. I'd like to say I have no words, but we all know that's a rare occasion, indeed.

I picked this up for something to read on the plane to Atlanta this weekend, kind of on the fly while replacing my copy of Vox. It was there, the cover was gorgeous, and it was Baker. Sold. I started reading it at work the day I bought it...

...and I'm pretty sure that Baker was speaking directly to me personally circa 2009 when he wrote this. (Never mind that it was already published then.) I don't know that I would have cared about this book as much had I found it in 2009, but Paul, the main character, was listening to the music I was listening to (he references Alex Dezen/The Damnwells and Ray LaMontagne specifically in the text) and grappling with writer's block and trying to find a purpose as the world slowly unravels just like I was at that point in time (Before College, so to speak).

This is one I will read over and over. It's something of a guidebook to poetry (I TOLD you guys that lyrics and poetry are essentially the same, and that part of what makes songs interesting is what they do with the line breaks, and that if you know how to listen for it, you can HEAR the line breaks and enjambment!) as well as a direct poke to the temple to get you writing again. It's a love story (Baker's stringing beads again, which took me back to Vox) and yet...it's as much a love story with writing and poetry as is with Paul's ex-girlfriend.

I just...I can't put into words how badly I needed to read this book at this juncture in my life. I finished it today and promptly signed up for NaNoWriMo because I realized what I need right now more than anything is to WRITE, and I'm not happy if I'm not writing, and quite frankly, this semester is acutely lacking on the writing front, and that's probably why I'm not happy...

...and once again, Baker has a knack for making me remember why I love what I do with a candid honesty that resonates, and he just plain makes me HAPPY even when he's being all weird and Nicholson Baker and...

Yeah, okay, I'm fangirling. I'm done now. Miss me? *LOL*

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Chowder is a published poet but not famous. He's putting together an anthology of poetry that rhymes - "Only Rhymes" - and he's having trouble writing the 40 page introduction. He's also coming to terms with the fact that he will be known as an anthologist rather than a poet, and his relationship with his girlfriend is breaking down. He might also be having a breakdown. But he's going to let us readers into his world of poetry where he will tell us about poetry and the lives of the poets while he tries to reach his goals.

This is not a dramatic book. It doesn't have a plot or strong characters, and nothing much really happens. It sounds academic and in a way it is - you will learn things about poetry as you read - but it's written in a very chatty way so it's easy to read. That said, the only thing the book really hooked me on was the way the narrator spoke about the famous poets. We get insights into the lives of Poe, Longfellow, and a whole host of poets, as the well-read Chowder pontificates on their lives and work.

What's not so great to read is everything else. Chowder's home life is very ordinary and his "crisis" with his relationship is very ordinary - she's asking for a break, some time away, but in the end they get back together. His "crisis" over the poetry introduction is ongoing until the end when he writes it. So in effect, there are a lot of mountainous molehills that make up the bulk of the book.

I like Nicholson Baker's attempts at poetry - "Today the clouds have been sprayed on the sky with a number 63 narrow-gauge titanium sprayer tip" (p.138) - and overall Chowder is a genial, amiable narrator whom you want to succeed. It's just that when you finish you wonder what it was all about - a poet struggling to write an introduction to a poetry anthology: this counts? Strange what gets published and what gets read, isn't it? Baker's latest "House of Holes" is a much more interesting book I'd point readers to. If, like me, there's limited choice in reading material, "The Anthologist" is your choice in a "that'll do, pig" kind of way.

[Joanne Clarke Gunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gem of a book and I loved reading it. Part of my enjoyment came from having read many of the poets/poems mentioned in the book and from just enjoying the book's delightful musings on reading and writing poetry, although this is not a book of poetry. The book is also laugh-out-loud funny. Nicholson Baker's writing is sly and brilliant and hooked me from the beginning.

The main character is Paul Chowder, a struggling poet, who tells us early on that "My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I'm a study in failure." Paul is having great difficulty writing the rather lengthy introduction to a soon-to-be-published anthology of poems and his girlfriend, Roz, has left him because he continually dithered every day away rather than get to work. He still dithers most every day away thinking about poems and poets and country music songs and sitting up in his barn making up tunes to Poe's "Raven" and new tunes about the fact that he is sitting up in the barn doing nothing, or dragging his white plastic chair around to sit and gaze at nature - anything except what he is supposed to be thinking and doing. Paul thinks that if he had "just written even a tiny five-line poem about an inchworm on my pant leg" everything would have been fine.

Much of the book is taken up with Paul's sometimes insightful and sometimes silly ruminations on various well-known poems and poets and on what he can do to win Roz back. Most every page is oh so funny as Paul Chowder goes about his daily life telling us about the mundane and not so mundane things he does in order to fill each day with something other than the writing he needs to be doing. He exemplifies the struggling, blocked, procrastinating writer condemned by the blank sheets of paper before him, or anyone faced with a seemingly daunting task they would rather not do. Nicholson Baker is a master at making the mundane both interesting and funny.

This book is a delicious treat and I highly recommend it.