The Anthologist (13 page)

I fell asleep for about an hour with my bloody finger on my chest. Fortunately it was my left index finger. There were some small cuts on my right hand, but they also had stopped bleeding. I looked at the cuts for a while before I went to sleep.

W
HEN I FIRST
started reading the
Norton Anthology of Poetry
in college, I thought, There's a problem here. There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. 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. For example, take my briefcase. Is there anything about death in my briefcase? Let me reach in, with my good hand, and I'll feel around. Ah: a raisin. Will you look at that dusty raisin? Actually it may be a dried cranberry.

And what else? A yellow clamp to hold papers together. And a green clamp. Both useful. And a Cruzer USB Flash stick. And here's a crumpled receipt from a car-repair place that says CUSTOMER STATES THERE IS A RATTLE NOISE UNDER VEHICLE. It's been stamped P A I D in green ink with a woman's initials in red. And here's a small notebook with some passages from Dryden copied into it. And here's a bubble pack of Pilot G2 Rolling Ball pens, with two pens left in it. And, what else? A crumpled sleeve for an Amtrak ticket. And a visitor badge with my name on it, and on the back it says: "This visitor badge can be used as an adhesive badge or non-adhesive badge." And here's an untwisted twist tie. And here's a dime, and a penny, and a nickel. And a sixteen-pack of Duracell AA batteries. They say:

GREAT VALUE

GRANDE VALEUR

Six batteries left. And it turns out I've been carrying around a New York subway map and didn't know it.

And that's just one side pouch. So, anything about death in there? No! Well, yes. The Dryden couplet in the notebook is about death. It's in what experts call iambic pentameter:

All human things are subject to decay
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.

But 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.

On the other hand, maybe my briefcase is wrong. Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes. And we need poems to declare love, too. Which they do, over and over. I love you, or I love her, or I love him--love is behind a huge mass of poems--and that's good. Because actually those are two truths that we should keep on thinking about for ourselves. I love you, and all the people I know and depend on are going to reach the end of their lives and when they go it's completely unexpected even when part of you knew it was in the offing.

Y
OU CAN TAKE IT
a step further and say, as Herrick did, "Gather ye rosebuds." Go ahead, say it if you must. But know it's a typo. It was supposed to be "Gather your rosebuds"-- the "ye" was an abbreviation for "your" but with an "e" in place of the "r." It was corrected to "your" in the second edition. So, yes, you can say enjoy the panoply now, friends, gather your rosebuds, make the best bouquet of them you can manage, use all the sprigs of baby's breath you care to use, because time is on the march and you must, of course, "seize the day."

But here's the thing. Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diem" doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. "Carpe diem" means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.

And yet if it hadn't been wrongly translated as "seize" would we remember that line now? Probably not. "Pluck the day free"? No way. And would we have remembered "gather ye rosebuds" without the odd mistake of the "ye"? Probably not. It's their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.

9

I
WENT ON A BLUEBERRY-PICKING DATE
with Tim and Tim's new girlfriend Hannah and Hannah's friend Marie. I kind of liked Marie. She wore flowing scarflike garments and some kind of weird perfume, and she knew a lot about Dorothy Parker. She stuck her head inside one of the taller blueberry bushes and then she said, "You know, the really good ones are deep inside."

I said, "Are they?" I stuck my head in, and Marie was right. If you push your head way into the green shadow of the bush and then you look up, you'll find amazing pendular arrangements of giant almost-black berries hanging everywhere. Nobody's seen them but you. They've been there all along, growing an ever darker blue and ever more engorged with rainwater, and yet no previous pickers have found them because they did not know to push their whole head into the blueberry bush.

"You have the gift," I said. "But I don't think you're going to develop any feelings of affection for me. Am I right?"

"Let's just pick blueberries," she said. So we picked a whole lot of blueberries, and then the four of us walked to the water and smelled its mumbling muddy smell, and Tim suddenly held out his arms and said, "Look at this river!"

I said to Marie, "Can you give us a taste of some Dorothy P?"

Marie lifted both sides of her scarf and said:

Devil-gotten sinners,

Throwing back their heads,

Fiddling for their dinners,

Kissing for their beds.

We all went "Oooo." Then Tim and Hannah began to walk back up toward the porch where you weighed the blueberries and left the right amount of money in a little wooden box. I made a tiny flinch of embarrassment as I saw the two of them hold hands. Marie and I walked behind them, not knowing what to do with our arms.

"So do you, ah, blame Walt Whitman for the death of rhyme?" Marie asked, conversationally.

I said, "Just because he said rhyming was intrinsically comic, that it was for inferior writers? No, that's just Walt talking out his back hatch. Which he was wont to do. Rationalizing his own inabilities. He wrote some things of genius, and he made his own rules." I paused. "What's that odd rattling sound?"

The sun was dipping behind the trees, and a frizzle of wind had risen up from somewhere. We listened. The sound turned out to be coming from several small windmills that had begun turning. We walked up to one and looked at it.

"Looks to be made out of a beer can," said Marie.

"You are right," I said. It was a Pabst beer can, cut and fanned out to make a windmill. When it twirled, it frightened berry-eating birds away. "That was a nice stanza you said back there," I said. "Some would say that it was trochaic trimeter, but they would be wrong in my opinion because it's a four-beat line."

"Oh," she said. "Glad to know that."

When we reached the car, we smiled and waved goodbye.

I
TOOK A DIFFERENT EXIT
on the highway because I wanted to go to Roz's place. As I drove I thought, no, it really wasn't that Whitman killed rhyme, it was that Jules Laforgue translated Whitman into French. The translating exoticized him, and then one day Laforgue wrote Gustave Kahn and said, Gustave, my frere, I forgot to rhyme. Because remember, a lot of French free verse is only sort of free. It rhymes and it scans, it just doesn't follow the superstrict rules that Boileau laid down way back in the day. But we aren't really conscious of the traditionalism of the French symbolists because French vers libre in English prose translation doesn't rhyme. The death of rhyme is really all about translation. Everybody started wanting to write poetry that sounded like a careful, loving prose version of some sweet-voiced balladeer from a faraway land. Everybody read the prose in their own language, and then they imagined the glorious versificational paradise that they didn't inhabit but that was glimmering greenly there in the distant original. The imagined rhyme-world was actually better and more lyrical than if they had the original poem in the original language with the actual rhyme scheme in it in front of them.

It happened first in French with Poe's poems. Poe was the juiciest rhymer of the nineteenth century--before Swinburne, that is--but Mallarme in his wisdom translated Poe into exquisitely rhymeless French prose, and then Mallarme published his reverent prose translations in a book, with line drawings by Manet. I don't own the book, because it's valuable, but I looked at it in a library once.

So then the French prose translations of Poe fed back into English poetry--and real rhyme, as opposed to imagined rhyme in a different language, began to seem somehow too obvious, too easy.

And the main thing was, it was kind of old Tim to want me to meet Marie, but I just wasn't going to call her up and ask her out. I wasn't going to do it. For one thing, she hadn't liked me that much. Her first impression was not dazzlement, understandably. So I'd really have to huff and puff to pique her interest. And although, yes, I liked that she had written her thesis on Dorothy Parker, and although yes I thought her scarf was colorful, in a way it made no dang difference because I wanted to be in the kitchen with Roz while she picked fleas off my dog, with the dishwasher humming warmly in the background.

I
THOUGHT AGAIN
of standing in the field of blueberry bushes listening to the rattle of the Pabst beer can windmills. And then suddenly I remembered a certain photograph that is printed in Karl Shapiro's autobiography.

In Karl Shapiro's autobiography there's a picture of Shapiro sitting at a round table with some of his students, and one of his students is Ted Kooser. Ted Kooser is an agreeable-looking young man with sticky-outy ears, and he's sitting in front of two beers--Pabst beers. Pabst is what reminded me. One of the beers may belong to the person who is taking the photo--who may be Karl Shapiro's wife, or another student, it doesn't say--or it may be that the two beers were both drunk by Ted Kooser himself. They look that way, but I doubt very much that he's an overdoer of beer. He just doesn't strike me as one.

Karl Shapiro's poems were included in a very important anthology,
The Oxford Book of American Verse,
edited by F. O. Matthiessen. Matthiessen lived very near Portsmouth, in Kittery, Maine, with his lover, a painter. Several editions of
The Oxford Book of American Verse
came out, and each time Shapiro's poems were inside. And then F. O. Matthiessen jumped out a hotel room window in Boston, because he was lonely and sad and upset about the purge of former communists. This was the fifties and things had gotten crazy, and Matthiessen jumped.

So Oxford waited politely for some years, and then they hired a different anthologist, a man named Richard Ellman, who was big on James Joyce, to edit
The New Oxford Book of English Verse.
Ellman hated Shapiro, because for one thing Shapiro had sharply criticized the Pound-Eliot-Joyce axis, and so he, Ellman, dropped Shapiro's poems from the anthology. Just expunged him--blotted him right out. Shapiro was gone from the Oxford anthology. And he really never recovered. In his autobiography he said it was like dying.

Many years later, Ted Kooser, Shapiro's student, became poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, a.k.a. Poet Laureate of the United States. And another edition of the Oxford anthology came out. Now it's called
The Oxford Book of American Poetry.
"Verse" sounded too tea-tableish by that time. This new new version is edited by David Lehman, a poet--and guess what? Karl Shapiro is back in. So it all comes around. Ted Kooser isn't in it, and I'm not in it, but I never was, and I don't mind.

Roz wasn't there when I got to her apartment. I left a container of blueberries by her door. I put a really big smoky one on top, and a leaf.

T
HERE USED TO BE
a position at the Library of Congress called "poetry consultant." Which isn't a very news-worthy title. The first poetry consultant was a man named Joseph Auslander. "Auslander" means outlander. And Archie MacLeish, who became Librarian of Congress in 1939, didn't think much of Auslander's poetry. So the man was gently pushed aside. And then began a long line of poetry consultants. Louise Bogan, and Elizabeth Bishop, and Leonie Adams, and others were all poetry consultants. William Carlos Williams was going to be a poetry consultant in the early fifties, and then it came out that he had a taint of communism in his past--suddenly William Carlos Williams couldn't be the consultant.

Then, many years after that, sometime in the eighties, the library did a brilliant thing. And I don't know whose idea it was. Maybe it was Daniel Boorstin's idea. Maybe it was Billy Collins's idea. I don't know. I don't know anything really about Billy Collins except that he's Mister Bestseller. Maybe it was Robert Penn Warren's idea.

But they thought, Let's get these people in but let's give them the old fancy title, the honorary title that Tennyson had. Let's call them "poet laureates." What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now. A little headdress of leaves, a little fancy, leafy hat. Nobody does that now. But even so we're going to copy the English model, and we're going to say, Okay, Tennyson was the poet laureate, and after him there was somebody, was it Bridges? Somebody innocuous. We're going to have these people come, and the publicists are going to go wild and they're going to say Billy Collins, Poet Laureate. And before that Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate. Maybe it was Pinsky's idea. He's a pretty smooth dude. He used to be the poetry editor of
The New Republic.
Rejected some things of mine and more power to him.