The Anthologist - Nicholson Baker

My negligence of this new blog only proves that I was undeserving of cindyhong.com. In the past few weeks I’ve been called away from the blog by my moving into a new apartment and by some LSAT shenanigans. Despite the lsat’s – (and a two day addiction to Top Law School forums) - I was able to read Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist.

This book is a work of fiction. But beyond that, it’s very hard to classify. Told from the perspective of a poet, Paul Chowder, The Anthologist contains background rather than a conventional plot. Paul is a known, but not star, poet who is anthologizing a book of poems, Only Rhymes. His failure to write his overdue introduction causes his long-time girlfriend, Roz, to leave him. Paul has no recourse but to write in his journal.

Readers are quickly treated to Paul’s stream-of-conscious thoughts, jumping from one topic to a tangentially related one. He writes like your ADD friend, only with more knowledge of poetry. In an especially introspective moment, he thinks, “God, I wish I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn’t because I’m still on the tree.”

As for the poetry, that is the real purpose of this book. It’s literary criticism for the layman, disguised as a novel. Paul seems to work out his thoughts just as an eccentric humanist might in real life. On the one hand, you get the feeling that Baker wanted to write a serious book on poetry, and—having trouble uniting his thoughts together in a coherent way—decided to transmit the disjointed bits through the voice of Paul Chowder. On the other hand, Paul’s voice is so earnest, so singular, that you feel like his ideas are truly original and worthy of your attention. Better yet, once you understand his points, you feel smarter too.

Paul’s key insights are that rhyme is good and that iambic pentameter is overrated. Instead, English poetry naturally consists of a four-beat rhythm where the last one is a rest. Paul entertainlingly opines:

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

A mouthful, yes. But a provocative and illuminating one.