The Anthologist (18 page)

My finger bothered me a little bit when I was getting a nail started, till I learned to hold it a different way, the way somebody--maybe William Holden--smoked a cigarette. Raymond turned out to have a knack for carpentry. As did Nan, in fact. The three of us stapled down a layer of blue sheeting over the subfloor, and Nan cut around the edge with a retractable knife as if cutting off the excess of a piecrust. Then the planks started going in. We nailed all afternoon. We drank lemonade and talked about zombie movies, and zombie novels, and zombies in video games, and then we nailed some more. Raymond got his music player going, and we sang "Zombie Jamboree." I pointed out the off-rhyme in the song: "belly to belly" and "stone dead already." They were mildly interested. I also made a few mistakes of measurement that Nan saved me from. She had a good spatial sense, which carried us successfully through the tricky area around the bathroom door.

Chuck, Nan's boyfriend, appeared late in the afternoon, and I got him a hammer and a cupful of nails and he nailed, too, for a while. He was a perfectly decent guy. He is an engineer who works at the Navy Yard in Kittery caring for nuclear-powered submarines. He and his friends pull the nuclear engines out and change their spark plugs and bang their carburetors with wrenches and then slide the engines back in place. With Chuck there we talked about fractions of an inch and acceptable degrees of gap between boards, and we politely debated which length of board to use next.

When we were almost done I paused, sprawled on my elbow on the floor, thinking about the song of the nails. There were four hammers going now, each with a different speed of hammering. A nail starts by sounding low because there's more length of nail to vibrate, but as more and more of it disappears into the wood, its pitch gets higher and more strained. It goes
bong, bang, bing, bink.
And then, at the very end, just after the highest-pitched note, there are two or three confident wide low smacks when the nailhead has touched down and you're hitting the whole floorboard--
whang, whang, whang.
We all wanted to sound like good nailers, and we all did sound like good nailers--and I think we were content in the midst of that happy racket.

Just before I left, Chuck asked me why I was publishing an anthology of rhyming poems.

"It seemed like it would help somehow," I said.

Chuck said, "Are you making a statement? Are you saying that free verse is a bad thing?"

I said no, I didn't think I was, not really. My own poems were free verse, after all. But then again my own poems sickened me, so I was confused.

"Are you editing the anthology out of self-hatred?" Chuck pursued.

I smiled. "Yes, Chuck, I think that's it."

"What's the best poem ever written?" asked Nan.

I told her I couldn't answer that. "One poem I liked recently was James Fenton's 'The Vapour Trail.' "

" 'The Vapour Trail,' " said Chuck. "I'll check it out."

Nan walked me out to the deck and wrote out a check. What a nice sound it was to hear her tearing it out of her checkbook, while the frogs chirred away.

"I hear you singing in the barn sometimes," she said.

"Oh, sorry," I said.

"Roz told me she was at her wits' end because you were up in that barn for weeks singing away, not writing."

"Yes, but I'm doing better now. I'd like her to come back. If you talk to her, will you let her know that?"

"Sure," said Nan. "Thanks for the floor."

I
WOKE UP
after a nap. It was dark and very late. I found a pen and turned to the back of Mary Oliver's book of poems, and I wrote: "People I'm jealous of." I wrote:

--James Fenton

--Sinead O'Connor

--Lorenz Hart

--Jon Stewart

--Billy Collins.

"Billy" Collins, indeed. Charming chirping crack whore that he is. No, that's incorrect--I know nothing about him. I know only my own jealousy. I'm not jealous of Merwin, though, and I'm not jealous of Mary Oliver. And I'm not jealous of Howard Moss. And I'm not jealous of Elizabeth Bishop. They're beyond all jealousy.

Yes, I wish I were a different person. Yes, I'm attacked by my embarrassments that are like those flying antibodies in
Fantastic Voyage
that glue themselves to the bad man's face when he swims out of the arterial spaceship. 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.

What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn't that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability--and I get to hold them? That's simply insane. Inconceivable.

12

S
OMETIMES
I'
LL SPEND
an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

Swinburne didn't have that problem with email. Swinburne was remarkably prolific. In fact, he glutted the world with verse. He died in 1909, which is really the crucial year in the war between rhyme and unrhyme. Rhyme won each engagement before then. 1909 was the year, as we know, that Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto on the front page of
Le Figaro.
Futurism became all the thing in London, among the sophisticates. A little splinter group of tough-talking converts began meeting. They called themselves the Secession Club. Some of them wrote for a certain magazine,
The New Age,
whose editor was a man named Alfred Orage. Orage believed that rhyme and meter were the ruff collars and doublet jackets of poetry--mere fashions, superfluities. In the Secession Club there was a man named Flint and a man named Hulme and a man named Storer. And a man named Ezra Pound.

Swinburne was the greatest rhymer who ever lived, and Futurism was the breaking open and desecrating and graffitiing of Swinburne's tomb.

How much do you know about Swinburne? Probably not that much. Tiny little guy. Nervous. Brilliant. Red hair. Loved babies, loved peering into perambulators. Wrote some exceptionally mawkish verse about babies. Deaf for the last twenty years of his life, and still writing poetry in the silence. Nobody had much to say about him when I was in college. He was like Vachel Lindsay, out of fashion. Browning? Sure. Meredith? Sure. Hardy? Sure. Dickinson? Sure. But Swinburne was not part of the big sweep.

And even now--take a look at this book. I'll block off the title so you have to guess what it is. Familiar design, I daresay. The little dude at the chalkboard? Yes, it's
Poetry for Dummies.
And it isn't a bad book. Do you know how hard it is to write a book like this? It's so hard. It's a terrible struggle; you fight with the Balrog through flame and waste and worry and incontinence and tedium. The Balrog of too-much-to-say. I've always liked the dummies books. I've got
Photoshop for Dummies,
and I learned a lot from it. The dummies' day may be passing, though. Too much yellow all over Barnes & Noble.

But now let's try something. Let's look up Algernon Charles Swinburne in the index of
Poetry for Dummies,
shall we? I've already done this so I know what's going to happen. But let's try it.

See that? Swinburne's not in the index. Algernon Charles Swinburne has been left out of
Poetry for Dummies.
And that's what I mean. Swinburne, the nineteenth century's King of Pain, the greatest rhymer in the history of human literature, has been lost to casual view. Without Swinburne, Lorenz Hart and Gershwin and Dorothy Field and the Great American Songbook would not sound the way they sound. And modernism would not have had the thrilling negative energy it had. You can't understand what all those early modern Futurist poets were in revolt against if you don't know about him. Swinburne says:

If you were queen of pleasure
And I were king of pain

Doesn't that give you a strange shudder? "If you were queen of pleasure (rest), and I were king of pain (rest),"

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.

Pretty good, eh? What is it? It's a four-beat line--three beats and a rest. Good with an inevitable step-slide of goodness to it.

Swinburne loved the old playwrights, where everyone ends up sprawled in a bloody heap. Once when he was drunk at the British Museum, he had some sort of seizure and cut his head and had to be carried out unconscious and bleeding by the guards. He had a decent shot at the poet laureateship, since he was far and away the most gifted living poet, but he didn't make it. Tennyson died and he, Swinburne, was quietly not chosen. Tennyson was morbid and strange, but Queen Victoria had been able to straighten his collar. And Tennyson had obliged by flipping on all the spigots and filling tankards with blank verse about King Arthur and the Round Table. But Swinburne couldn't be cleaned up. His collar couldn't be straightened. He was too strange, too sexually unaligned. One of his poems had to be printed with asterisks in place of half a stanza. All about "large loins."

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, singing 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 around and around in your brain.

A land that is lonelier than ruin,
A sea that is stranger than death
Far fields that a rose never blew in,
Wan waste where the winds lack breath

Try writing your own couplets or rondeaus or what-you-wills after you've spent a day reading Swinburne. It's not easy. Louise Bogan was swimming in Swinburne's music when she began. Archibald MacLeish said in a letter that he'd gotten Swinburne in his head and couldn't get rid of him. Sara Teas-dale said Swinburne had invented a new kind of melody. John Masefield said he was possessed by Swinburne and by Swinburne's teacher, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Even Ezra Pound started off by writing Swinburne imitations--till he turned on him. A. E. Housman said that Swinburne's rhyming facility was unparalleled: "He seemed to have ransacked all the treasuries of the language and melted down the whole plunder into a new and gorgeous amalgam." You can hear Swinburne muttering behind the curtain in Dylan Thomas--"Altarwise by Owl Light" is a drunken version of Swinburne.

And Swinburne's big problem was that he wrote way, way, way too much. Any selection from his poetry is just a hint of the fluently tumbled profusion. Every song, every poem that he wrote was fully five times as long as it should have been. The rhymes and chimes kept coming. Internal, external. That's why he's so important to the twentieth century. Swinburne was like the application of too much fertilizer to a very green lawn.

T
HAT HAPPENED
to one of my neighbors, Alan. Alan lives on the far side of Nan. His lawn glowed--it was a perfect malachite green. No weeds, uniform blade density, always mowed to the right height. He thought a lot about it. He tolerated my lawn, but I suspect that it made him unhappy. My lawn has weedy areas, pussy clover, dandelions. Roz told me that's what it's called, pussy clover. She knows the names of many plants. I let some of it grow tall because I like it. But Alan wanted his grass pure.

About five summers ago, Alan applied some kind of special very expensive fertilizer. He thought: This is going to take my lawn to the next level of lushness. But it must have been a bad bag, because a week after he applied it you could see big brownish yellow patches where something had gone wrong. The patches spread. They merged. Alan's lawn died. For two years after he applied it, the turf glinted like gold Brillo pads. There was no green left in it, and when you walked on its edge, it made a crunching sound of death. I don't think even the earthworms were alive underneath.

This isn't exactly what happened to poetry. Poetry didn't die. But Swinburne did drive his two-wheeled rhyme-spreader wagon all over the nineteenth century, and by the end of it he had gone back and forth and back and forth with his stanzas and his quatrains and his couplets and his lyrics and his parodies and everything else. It seemed like every word in English that could be rhymed in some melodious way he had rhymed. Some of the words, like "sea" and "rain," he'd rhymed hundreds of times. Rhyme words can't be used up, but even so, this was too much.

It took Alan years to get his grass back. Only this year is it again looking green and almost perfect. Poetry is still recovering from Swinburne.

I
SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE
with a tray that came from an order of Chinese food in front of me--clean--on which tiny beads rolled around. I tied a knot in the jeweler's wire. It's made of very fine wire threads woven together somehow so that it doesn't kink the way real wire does, but it's very strong.

I started to bead. The verb made sense. I was beading. What you do is pick up a bead and turn it for a while between the huge clumsy pillows of your good finger and your thumb, looking for the hole. You turn it until the shadow of the hole, or the light appearing through the hole, comes into view, and then you know where to insert the end of the wire. As soon as it's on, you lose interest in it and let it slip down and away, and you're on to the next one. Revising is difficult.