The Anthologist

Last week, Nicholson Baker's new book The Anthologist came my way and has managed to get me interested in poetry again - and one or two poetry books are back on my bedside table. I'm not alone in finding that The Anthologist has this effect - The Guardian books blog had a similar experience and described this book as "an elegant and surprisingly emotional book; one of the finest of the year"Nicholson Baker is a interesting author. He writes slightly quirky novels like The Anthologist, or A Box of Matches, but was also responsible for the substantial pacifist tract against World War II, Human Smoke. He is a keen evangelist for Wikipedia and has recently published just about the most useful article I have read about the Kindle e-reader, in The New Yorker magazine.The Anthologist is a strange book. On the one hand its a first person account by the fictional poet Paul Chowder of a period of his life in which he was charged with writing the introduction to a new poetry anthology. Paul describes his approach to poetry and spends quite a bit of time discussing poetic forms, great poets of the past and their lives and why some poems "work" and others don't. But mixed in with this is a personal story of how Paul has lost his girlfriend Roz. She seems to have given up on him, finally finding his chaotic and disorganised approach to life just too difficult to deal with. Paul misses her greatly and throughout the book launches various half-baked schemes to win her back.The remarkable thing from the reader's perspective is how Paul's personal difficulties impact on what he says about poetry, and in a way, almost form a new poem about the inner life of a middle aged man going through a difficult time. The book is very funny, for we get highly involved with the minutiae of Paul's life - we hear about the de-fleaing of a dog, the making of a bead necklace as a gift to Roz, the practical difficulties of laying a wooden floor and the best way to pick blueberries while on a walk.I found this a beguiling read. There was something about it which showed that in the midst of immense difficulties, the small details of life can carry you through. The buying of a loaf of good bread with some olives and taking time to savour them can do you good. Going to bed surrounded by books - "I never make the bed - its like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. Its a Campbells Chunky Soup of books". Or going out to the garden at midnight to sit in a chair and listen to the night. Baker's writing has the Zen-like quality which brings you to a halt in your hurried life and says "take your time" - a quality which must be essential if you're going to make any sense out of a new poem.I understand that its worth getting hold of the audio book of The Anthologist because the author reads it himself.

This inoffensive book grabbed me strangely as I went further into it.I learned some things about poetry,The love story is in the style of Mr. Baker, sad and quiet.

"Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill. We think so then, we thought so still". I think that was the very first poem I heard, "The Pelican Chorus" by Edward Lear. My mum read it to me. God it was beautiful. Still is. Those singing Pelicans. They slapped their feet around on those long bars of yellow sand, and they swapped their verb tenses so that then was still and still was then. They were the first to give me a shudder, the shiver the grieving of true poetry--- the feeling that something wasn't right, but it was all right that it wasn't right. In fact it was better than if it had been right."If you love poetry, you will love this book, no prevarication, You Will Love This Book. If poetry was a joy, a love that you put aside as childish whimsy, this will re-introduce you to that love, will spark a curiosity, that will combust to no mere bonfire in your heart.[...]

We ordered this as it was mentioned as very funny in a review of the Author's books in the Saturday paper… and the reviews on Amazon seemed intriguing. Sadly, it is not, in my husband's opinion (and he has a degree in English, for what that's worth..) funny at all….

If you're a novel junkie who has more or less neglected poetry since University, this book will get you back in the groove. The narrator, Paul Chowder, is intimately engaged in poetry and poetics and peppers his rambling soliloquay with very entertaining facts and observations about poems and the folk who write them.Otherwise, Paul is a hilariously infuriating, self-effacing ditherer, whose inability to get stuff done and knack of undermining himself at every turn is genuinely laugh out loud funny (I made a complete fool of myself in a café the other day reading this book).On the strength of this book, Nicholson Baker is one hell of a writer. His language is beautifully precise, both rich and sparing, and the subtle structuring of links between Paul's day-to-day inadequacies and observations and his thoughts on poetry, language and rhyme are quite marvellously executed.

Before I begin reviewing this book I will say this, there is no doubt about it, Nicholson Baker is a brilliant writer.The book pulled me in from the very first line, I was hooked. I even got my pencil out and started underlining parts that I enjoyed reading or lines that I found memorable. I am not usually a huge fan of poetry, and to be completely honest, the last time I engaged myself this deeply in the study of poetry was back when I was doing my IGCSE's.As far as the plot and story goes, it's quite ordinary. Paul Chowder is a published poet, but he is not famous. He has been asked to compile an anthology of poetry that rhymes, and to write a 40 page introduction. But Paul has a problem, he can't seem to write this introduction. Paul has writer's block. Scratch that, Paul has two problems. Paul's girlfriend Roz left him, mainly due to his inadequacy in writing this introduction.So we spend this time intimately getting to know Paul and his many eccentricities, while he educates us on poets and the art of poetry.There is absolutely nothing exciting happening, in fact, it comes off as very academic but written in a very personable way. I enjoyed reading this book until about three-quarters of the way through, where I felt it began to drag. My favourite parts however were when he would go on about a certain poet, and when he would create scenarios that involved him and several dead poets - such as Poe.Overall, what this book is, is a really good, well-written study in poetry.

Perfect product, well packed. Excellent value. Was advised of the shipping time being longer - but well worth waiting for. Excellent seller. Recommended without reservation.

Excellent!

Der Protagonist und mittelmäßige Dichter Paul Chowder fristet momentan eher ein tristes Dasein: Seine Freundin hat ihn verlassen, da er seit Wochen in einer Schreibblockade zu seiner geplanten Gedichtsanthologie feststeckt, und dies zum Anlass nimmt, auch ansonsten nur noch sehr sehr wenig im Alltag zu tun. So schüttet er dem Leser in Ich-Manier sein ganzes Herz aus, leidet und versucht seine Freundin wieder zurück zu gewinnen. Trost und Erbauliches findet er nur in Gedichten und in den Biographien ihrer Verfasser. So bekommt der Leser auf 250 Seiten nebenbei eine theoretische Einführung in die amerikanische Lyrikhistorie, mit teils herrlich skurrilen Anekdoten und subjektiven Empfindungen des Erzählers.Dank einer hervorragenden Übersetzung äußerst amüsant, kurzweilig und - ja - lehrreich :)

Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist is an utterly delightful novel, one that will appeal to poetry fans and English majors all over. The story concerns Paul Chowder, a poet who has put together an anthology of rhyming poems, but who cannot seem to get the introduction to his anthology written. His girlfriend has left him and he blames his inability to draft the introduction as the reason why. He ruminates on his relationship at times, but his main focus is poetry and whether rhyme in poetry is a good thing. So, if you are looking for a novel with a lot of plot, keep moving, you won't like this one. The poetry discussions are delightful and amusing, told with a deadpan humor that makes the narrative so entertaining. The discussions are so engaging, you'll have a strong urge to seek out poetry. Chowder is a wonderful narrator, confused, but in an endearing way, about his relationship to real people, his own poetry and the poetry of others. If a quick-moving plot is not essential for you, if poetry sparks some curiousity for you, I urge you to pick up The Anthologist. It is a treasure trove of delight, compelling in its uniqueness. Enjoy!

"You can start anywhere," as narrator Paul Chowder says in this delightful little book. (He was talking about writing poetry, or mowing the lawn.) So I'll just start right here, and write a little bit about some of the things that I really liked about this novel.Firstly, I like Paul Chowder himself. His semi-stream of consciousness monologue about poems and plums (poems that don't rhyme - like the ones Paul writes), his feelings of ambivalence about modern poetry and the poetry culture, his sadness and hurt over the loss of Roz, his live-in girlfriend for the past nine years, and his ironic, self-effacing and (what seems genuinely) honest views of himself. He's not self-absorbed, as one reviewer I read suggested; he's just alone and lonely and fumbling around, trying to plan his next move at an emotional crossroads.He's about my age (early 50's), I guess, and a somewhat successful poet (three published collections, past winner of a Guggenheim), but nevertheless struggling financially. He can't teach to sustain himself, because teaching makes him a professional liar - telling all those young students that their attempts at poetry are worth reading is simply lying. But he has a lot to teach, and he does so charmingly from start to finish as he rehearses in his mind the themes of the introduction to a new anthology of rhyming poems he has compiled called "Only Rhyme". He starts by saying he's going to tell us everything he knows about poetry, and though I doubt that he really does accomplish that, he does tell us a lot.He tells us of his admiration for the great rhyming poets, and about his disillusionment when his fourth-grade teacher encourages the class to write in free verse: "It doesn't have to rhyme!" He tells us that the controversy over the importance of rhyming in poetry goes back 500 years. He acknowledges that free verse has given many more people the freedom to try their hand at poetry (natural rhymers are rare) and that his own career started with that schoolteacher - his own poems don't rhyme, they're plums. He tells us his strongly held views on meter: the natural English language meter is the four-beat line, the ballad stanza, root of great poetry and pop music. He declaims against the lauded status of the (imported from French) iambic pentameter: it's not five beats to a line he insists, it's six when you include the all important end-of-line rest; the rhythm is really a three-beat count, not six beats, like a waltz; the word iamb is itself not iambic. ("The real rhythm of poetry is a strolling rhythm. Or a dancing rhythm. A gavotte, a minuet, a waltz.") As if to emphasize the importance of rhythm, Paul is always setting famous verse to his own tunes. He warns of the dangers of "enjambment", especially in its "ultra-extreme" form. And he tells us countless anecdotes and bits of gossip about the whole population of nineteenth and twentieth century poets.I like the fact that through it all, Paul takes the reader on quite an entertaining and informative tour and reviews his thoughts on poets and poetry, on rhyme and meter, thoroughly enough to allow him at long last to spill out his anthology introduction in a whirlwind three days - but instead of the targeted forty pages, the introduction weighs in at two hundred thirty-nine (four pages short of the length of this book!). It will need some cutting, but this book doesn't - I like all two hundred and forty-three pages.It's not clear how much of what Paul Chowder tells us reflects Baker's own views - Paul is the narrator of a novel after all. But his nostalgia for rhyming poetry (he "always secretly want[s] it to rhyme" when he comes across a new poem in a magazine, journal or anthology, "don't you?"), sensible as it seems to philistine me, is a bit too heretical: even when lamenting the unfashionableness of rhyming, he takes careful pains to acknowledge the greatness of modern poetry and many (non-rhyming) modern poets, even Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom he deplores.Paul starts by saying that "poetry is prose in slow motion". He notes that in poetry there is no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. And he avers "poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing." True, true and true. And by these standards, this wonderful book should be thought of prose-poetry. How's this for slow motion prose:"Another inchworm fell on my pant leg. They germinate in quantity somewhere up in the box elder. It was still for a moment, recovering from the fall, and then its head went up and it began looping, groping for something to climb onto. It looked comfortably full of metamorphosive juices - full of the short happiness of being alive."As mentioned, it is always unclear whether the views on poetry that Paul expresses are "nonfiction" in the sense of revealing the author's own views. And the narrative is nothing if not a controlled sob over Paul's career to-date, his poetry, his future ("Poetry is a young man's job."), and his loss of Roz. Eventually, the sobs burst out as Paul delivers a master class at the "Global Word Congress" (a conclave of "masses" of poets) in Switzerland. He even ironically throws in a bit of iambic pentameter in the first line of a chapter following the one in which he presents his unorthodox disquisition on the classic meter: "A freakish mist lies over the land. [rest]"And like a poem, this novel demands to be read a second time - which I did immediately, for a better understanding and for the pleasure.There's not much narrative tension here, not much in the way of building action, climax, resolution and denouement. "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." But as Paul packs up his collection of books (anthologies) and pines for his lost Roz (whose breasts, like poetry, "don't have to rhyme, but [...] do."), he draws the reader into sympathy with his situation, with his reflections on the past and present of poetry, and (for me at least) with his optimism about its rhyming future:"And I'm sure there will be a genuine adept who strides into our midst in five or ten years. The way Frost did. Sat up in the middle of that spring pool, with the weeds and the bugs all over him. He found the water that nobody knew was there. And that will happen again. All the dry rivulets will flow. And everyone will understand that new things were possible all along."There's a lot to like here, and it makes me want to know more of Baker's work. But before I do that, there are a lot of poets and a lot of poetry I need to catch up with.Paul McMahonJuly 2010

Funny book. Really funny.If you: (a) purchased two or more books of poetry in the last 10 years, (b) regularly read The New Yorker, or (c) ever attempted to write a book,this one is for you.Nominally the book is a first person account of a poet-author attempting to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry. Really though, it is a stream of conscious narration of a very funny man's observations on life: the love of his dog, the loss of a girlfriend, the sadistic design of computer cables, worries over money and health insurance (or lack of), and more, each tertiary topic commuting his self-imposed sentence to complete the book introduction. For example, dropping egg salad into the silverware drawer, then softly cursing only to drop more in while in the process of sorting out whether to clean out the first dollop is all part of the day's meandering syllabus.Throughout the book there are references to poets and to the rhythm of poetry, but having an interest in or understanding of poetry is not a prerequisite to enjoying the book. On the other hand, the writing reflects the attention to detail of a poet in fitting just the right word in just the right place. Almost every paragraph includes an unexpected word or simile that enhance the writing.The real strong suit is the humorous take on the literary life. Catch 22 did this for the military; reading Heller's classic novel, forever changes one's view of the strident codes of the armed services. The Anthologist will similarly change the outsider's view of the lives of authors, particularly poets who we often look up to like rare birds migrating past us at high altitudes, when in truth they live normal lives here on the ground with the rest of us.Normally I don't write recommendations on books as taste is subjective or criticizing another's labor seems unfair. However, where a book stands out, it is worth taking the time to give it some praise. Also, to be fair five stars does not mean it rates up there with a literary classic such as Faulkner's Flags in the Dust, but the Great Ones can really only be ranked against themselves.This book will really appeal to a particular audience: anyone that answers yes to a, b, or c above. And on that score it rates a five.Hope this review helps you.

Paul Chowder is a poet, once somewhat well-known, but now going through a dry spell. Right now, he is living on a farm in New England, doing just about anything he can to avoid writing the introduction to the anthology of verse he has been commissioned to assemble, entitled "Only Rhyme." Exasperated, his girlfriend of six years has left him, though he loves her hopelessly still. So now he potters around the house, takes books to bed and never reads them, makes a half-hearted attempt to clean out his study, mows his lawn until the mower breaks, does odd jobs for friends, gives bookstore poetry readings attended by thirteen people -- anything to avoid having to set his artistic credo down on paper.Yet set it down he does. This witty, self-deprecating narrative contains more insight about poetry than most textbooks. Indeed, Chowder has ideas about rhyme and meter that you probably won't find in any textbook, though they make perfect sense. Clearly he is in love with verse -- so deeply in love with it that his own talent pales in comparison -- hence his writer's block. Poets, well-known or obscure, from Elizabethan times to the present, are his friends; he meets Edgar Allen Poe in a laundromat, or Theodore Roethke limping at twilight down his lane. Some poems he mentions only with a glance of passing wonder; some, like Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," he analyses in detail. He illustrates his theories with diagrams and typographical tricks; he even scribbles snatches of song in musical notation to show how a poem should go. It is a book to make you rush to the web to learn more about the poets mentioned. You want to read it at least twice: once for the story, and once to follow up all the references in it. It really ought to be published with an accompanying anthology, although copyright considerations would presumably prohibit it.Nonetheless, the book is labeled a novel, and not a memoir or poetry textbook. As such, it is unique, or almost so. The nearest things I can think of are  FLAUBERT'S PARROT  by Julian Barnes, in which an offbeat disquisition on the French novelist covers a story about the modern scholar writing about him. Or perhaps the book I have most recently been reading,  THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG  by Muriel Barbery, which hides a touching personal story behind a series of essays on French culture. Chowder's story falls somewhere in between the two; he is more engaging than Barnes' character, but he does less than Barbery's. I found myself reading (avidly) for Chowder's insights, but losing patience with his flippant avoidance of the job at hand -- though fortunately the author does not leave you hanging at the end. All the same, three stars at most for Baker's book as a novel, though five for his infections delight in poetry and what it can do. FLAUBERT'S PARROTTHE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG