The Anthologist (12 page)

Rhyme taught us to talk.

I
RANG NAN'S DOORBELL
and told her how good the chicken was, and she said she was glad to hear it. But she seemed a little preoccupied, maybe even a little down. She said that she'd just gotten two very high estimates to put in a wide plank floor in her guest room--both more than twenty-eight hundred dollars.

"To nail in a pine plank floor?" I said, exaggerating my incredulity. "Well, blow me down. I'll do it for you at cost."

She said no, no, that was impossible--and anyway did I know how to install floors? Which was a legitimate question in the circumstances. I said that yes, I did know how to install floors, if by "floors" you didn't mean hardwood floors. I'd installed the plank floor in my ell with my dad a few decades ago. And I've done a little light cabinetwork over the years, I added modestly. "You have to allow a little space at the ends for expansion, that's all."

She considered. "I'd have to pay you, otherwise it's awkward."

"Pay me fifteen dollars an hour. I'm not a real carpenter. We can do it together. Your son can help."

She looked at me for a while and then she smiled. Would I like to come over later and measure the room?

I said I would.

8

M
AYBE
I
COULD DO
a weekly podcast. Play some theme music, maybe Root Boy Slim singing "Put a Quarter in the Juke," and then: Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder's Bowl of Poetry. And I'm your host, Paul Chowder, and this is Chowder's Plumfest of Poems. Hello, and welcome to the Paul Chowder Poetry Hour. I'm your host and confidant, Paul Chowder, and I'd like to welcome you to Chowder's Flying Spoonful 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.

I could never keep it up. You have to hand it to those pod-casters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody's listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.

Let's begin today, however, by talking about the history of rhyme. If you're prepared, I'm prepared. Actually I'm not all that prepared, because when I'm prepared that's when I fail. I learn too much and it crowds out what I actually know. There's crammer's knowledge and then there's knowledge that is semipermanent.

So the first thing about the history of rhyme, and the all-important Rhymesters' Rebellion of 1697, 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.

L
ET'S TRY AGAIN
. The history of poetry began, quite possibly, in the year 1883. Let me write that date for you with my Sharpie, so you can have it for your convenience. 1883. That's when it all began. Or maybe not. Could be any year. The year doesn't matter. Forget the year! The important thing is that there's something called the nineteenth century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That's what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech. New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world. There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883. Those clothespins went out to England, to France, to Spain, to practically every country in the world. Clothes in every country were stretched out on rope to dry in the sun and held in place by New England clothespins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably used New England clothespins. I'm not kidding.

And the way that we write the nineteenth century on a piece of paper is we go "19" and then we do a special little thing on top. A nifty little thing that's sort of like a little bug flying around the nineteenth century. And that's called the "th." It means "nineteenth" century. And that's how we abbreviate the enormity of what happened.

But here's a tip. If you say "nineteen hundreds" when you mean "nineteenth century," you're going to get in trouble with your dates. Because the nineteenth century is the eighteen hundreds. But! Don't say "the eighteen hundreds." People who say "the eighteen hundreds" are looked at in a special way by the people who say "the nineteenth century." The people who use eighteen hundreds don't know that. They don't know that the people who say "nineteenth century" are looking askance at them. So please consider not saying "eighteen hundreds," because the people who say "nineteenth century" will dismiss what you have to say. You can refer very knowingly to a specific decade
of
the nineteenth century-- you can say, for instance, "the eighteen-eighties," or even, extra-knowingly, "the eighties"--but never "the eighteen hundreds."

So it's the nineteenth century we're talking about today. And on a timeline, it goes all the way from here--to here. Exactly one hundred years of pure poetry. And in that space of time, a lot happened. And after that time, in what is called the twentieth century, events became quite confused and nobody knew what they were doing. Rhyme went all to hell, and everything became a jumble.

And that's why we like to talk about the nineteenth century, because it's more fun, and everybody knows names like Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge--and Swinburne. And Tennyson. And Mr. Browning. And Mrs. Browning. And Arnold. And Emily Dickinson, of course. And Longfellow. And a bunch of other poets. The names just go on and on, because the nineteenth century was the century of English poetry. Coterminous with the flowering of the British empire was the flowering of the empire of English verse. And that is not what we will be talking about today.

Today we will just be talking about this moment right here. Right at the very end of the nineteenth century. The ends of centuries have a special meaning, as everybody who moves slowly toward them knows. Who was alive at the very end of the nineteenth cenury, at this last fleeting moment? Well, Swinburne was still alive. He was deaf, but he was still alive.

And there were some younger people chiming in. There were some people like Kipling. And Henley. And Patmore. And Alice Meynell. And Edmund Gosse. Gosse had met Tennyson and Swinburne, and he visited Walt Whitman before he died. He found Whitman sitting in an upstairs room in New Jersey. Clippings from various articles about himself were scattered on the floor. Every so often Whitman would fish up an article about himself and read a bit of it aloud.

So there was a lot going on there in the nineteenth century. And they lived their lives, and they wrote some poems, and then suddenly they bumped into the end of it. And they blasted through into 1901. That was the big moment, because then there they were in the twentieth century. When you're in the twentieth century, it's a whole different ball game. There are huge tropical plants dripping raw latex. There are giant pieces of diesel-powered earth-moving equipment. Turbines, huge hydroelectric projects. There's dynamite blowing up over there. There are exotic shores that are lapped at by alien warm pale-blue crinkled Saran Wrap sheets of ocean. There's neon, of course. Italy is a mess. Switzerland--who knows? France is a question mark. As is Austro-Hungary. It's all up for grabs! And who conquers the twentieth century? Who takes it from here on in and says, I've got it, folks? I'll take care of it, you don't have to worry about it now. Who takes care of it? I'll tell you who. The worst possible person, unfortunately. His name was Marinetti. The leader of the Futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Manic Phil, who marinated the twentieth century in his influence. Marinetti was aggressive, he wanted to change things, and he wanted to break things. He wanted old buildings leveled. He wanted Venice blown up. He was a great writer of manifestos. Or manifesti.

And one morning in 1909, Marinetti's Futurist manifesto was published in Paris. The intellectuals opened the
Figaro
that morning, and there was this full page of authoritative promulgations. That said that the past was to be jettisoned. That Europe needed a new way of thinking. It was time to embrace steam and speed and power and war. The old ways were no good. Marinetti didn't use the word "fascism," but that's what it led to. Futurism led directly to Mussolini and Hitler. It also led to modern poetry. The two roads diverged, but not so much. There was in Marinetti's modernism a desire to stomp around heedlessly and a wish to sweep the counter clean. The ambitious guy poets really liked Marinetti.

And some of the girl poets liked the guy poets. Mina Loy, for example--that brilliant strange juxtaposer. She had her affair with Marinetti. As I've mentioned. And what happened then was that the gentleness, and the sharp eye, and the kind of lovely sexy anarchy of Mina Loy was conjoined with the machine-admiring bullying mechanistic destructiveness and manicness of Marinetti. And out of these two forces, Marinetti and Mina Loy, was begotten a young bully who talked loudly and sneered in public. His name was Ezra Pound. Sara Teasdale disliked Ezra Pound, and Ezra Pound disliked Sara Teasdale, so it was mutual.

And that's what I want to talk to you about. I want to clarify the sweep of it all. And the grandeur of it all. And the tragic waste of it all. The perversion of talents. The discouragement of gifts. The misapplication of energies. And even so, the flowering of some really nice poems along the way.

L
ITTLE INJURY TODAY
, actually. I was carrying my computer downstairs in order to continue the cleanup of my office, which is progressing well, although slowly. I thought if I get my computer out of there--my big old computer, not my laptop--I'll be able to reach the next phase of cleaning. So I unhooked all the little machines that are connected to the big machine. I unhooked the power cord and the two external drives that I have, and the optical mouse with the little red eye in its belly, and the speakers, and the monitor, and the scanner, and the printer, and the keyboard, and I guess that's it. I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next.

So there I was. My computer was as if amputated--all of its ways of connecting to the world were gone, and it was just a black obelisk with a rich man's name on it. It couldn't reason, it couldn't speak, it was imprisoned in its frozen memories, its self was in a state of suspension. It could not add anything to what it had done, or remember anything that it had done.

I lifted it carefully and I said aloud in the room, "Man, this sucker's heavy." When you think that there are plenty of laptops for sale that do most of what this thing does. But it's still a good computer even now three years after I bought it.

So I carried it through various rooms, past various piles of books, and then I began walking down the stairs. And these stairs have something about them that makes me misjudge. Not for the first time I believed that my foot had reached the final stair when it hadn't. I thought I was stepping down onto the floor but really I had one step to go. So my foot came down twice as hard as it should have and eight inches lower than it should have, very heavily, and I was thrown forward by my out-of-balance, almost toppling, landing. I was really falling. If I dropped the computer I could catch my fall. But I didn't want to drop the computer. So I did a strange low dance of clutching the computer and running forward. I was like a mother chimp fleeing with her baby. I ran three forward-falling steps, and then my hand, holding the corner of the computer, collided with the edge of a doorjamb. I set the computer down hard. But I hadn't let it fall.

Immediately I thought I'd broken my finger, which was bleeding and had no sensation. I went into the kitchen and stood at the sink, and then I started to faint, so I went to the couch with some paper towels and lay down to bleed.

I held my hand in the air, and I kept testing my finger, wondering whether the bone in it was broken. I really didn't want to go to a doctor and have them say, Ah-hah, we'll X-ray it and give you a bone scan and a barium enema, just to be sure. No thank you. I have no health insurance. Death is my health insurance. So I lay there and breathed steadily, and after a while my finger stopped bleeding, and the feeling of mild shock passed, and my knuckle turned gray and then a bruised blue. 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
COULDN'T THINK
of who to call, so I called Roz's cellphone and told her I'd stumbled on the stairs, and she arrived amazingly quickly and pulled up a chair and took the bunched-up paper towels away and looked at my finger. She is very good at taking care of a person who has hurt his finger. She had brought some bandages, and she bandaged me up. She said, "You probably need stitches. I can take you to the hospital." I said no, no, I'll just let the skin do what skin does.

Then I said I thought I would take a nap. Roz patted my shoulder, which felt good. Then she walked Smack and left.

I lay there wondering why I had fallen. Why am I in such a rush? Why can't I just feel my way carefully down the last several steps? I've had problems with those steps before. You think the flat plane of the floor is there and your whole balance system has already compensated for the landing on the floor, and then it's not there, and you fall. It's a short fall, only eight inches, but it's a forward fall.

And what if I'd hit my head? I thought, Poor Edna. That was how Edna St. Vincent Millay died, falling down the stairs alone. She'd written that embarrassingly bad propaganda poetry during the war, and she knew her singing days were done. She was drunk, and I wasn't really. I'd just had two New-castles. Not drunk but not in a state of tip-top balance either. It's not good to live alone when you fall down the stairs.

Vachel Lindsay died on the stairs, too, more or less. After drinking poison, Vachel Lindsay staggered up the basement stairs. His wife called, Is everything all right? He said no. And when Vachel Lindsay died Sara Teasdale was heartsick, and she drugged herself one night in the bathtub.