The Anthologist (19 page)

What I thought about was piecework. About the people who begin a set of beads, and then count, and are in the middle, and then they're done, and they pick up another string and start again. What kind of life would that be? Not bad as long as you weren't too rushed. I could string beads for a living. I kept thinking of the phrase "beads on a string."

The necklace got longer until finally I thought it might be long enough and I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn't look good, and it was still too short for Roz, who looks best with a medium length of beads. So I added another two quatrains, and then I started to get the feeling that I'd reached the end--a feeling I know from writing. I looped the thread through the magnet clasp, and then back through the crimping bead, and I took the pliers and crimped hard and cut off the extra thread. When they were done I put them in tissue paper and wrapped them, and I had a present ready for Roz. But I didn't know if I should give it to her.

I'
M STILL PACKING UP
my anthologies. Here's another one-- Bullen's
Shorter Elizabethan Poems.
It's blue and heavy and dusty. Anthologies should be blue, I think. Although I love the anthology by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney,
The Rattle Bag.
It's green with the "ff" of the Faber logo all over it. The
Staying Alive
anthology is brown, and it has a girl's face on the cover. It's probably the best anthology that is mostly unrhyme. In fact,
Staying Alive
may be the best poetry anthology ever.

I bought
Shorter Elizabethan Poems
for twelve dollars from a used-book store in Portsmouth. The first song--a.k.a. poem--in it is by William Byrd, the lute player, from 1588, and I think it's probably the song that Ted Roethke had turning around in his head when he wrote his villanelle, the one that starts "I wake to sleep and take my waking slow." William Byrd says: "I kiss not where I wish to kill, / I fain not love, where most I hate, / I break no sleep to win my will."

Do you notice those one-syllable words? The Elizabethans really understood short words. Each one-syllable word becomes a heavy, blunt chunk of butter that is melted and baked into the pound cake of the line. The first essay on how to write poems in English came out in 1587, by George Gascoigne. Gascoigne said that to write a delectable poem you must "thrust as few words of many syllables into your verse as may be." The more monosyllables, the better, he said. Roethke learned that lesson, as had Tennyson and Leonie Adams and lots of other people. One time Roethke danced around the room saying, "I'm the best god-damned poet in the USA!"

Here's another odd anthology I own:
The Poet's Tongue.
It's brown, not blue, and it's edited by W. H. Auden and John Garrett. It's interestingly arranged. The names of the poets don't appear with their poems. Everything's quoted anonymously. The only way you find out who wrote what is by looking up the numbers in the table of contents. At first this is slightly irritating, but then it becomes freeing.
The Poet's Tongue
was published in 1935 in England, and most of the bookstores in New York didn't have a copy for sale. But the Holiday Bookshop, on East Forty-ninth Street, did.

I know this because 1935 was the year that Louise Bogan and Ted Roethke had their long-shadowed love affair. Ted Roethke was younger than she was--very eager and ambitious. Louise Bogan was an established New York person, who'd worked at Brentano's bookstore. Who'd struggled. She didn't have a whole lot of money. She reviewed poems for
The New Yorker,
and I think she also helped them pick which poems to publish, too. She'd been married, she was no longer married, and she was prone to fits of depression, bouts of drinking, all the usual ills.

And Roethke impressed her as a poet of talent--"slight but unmistakable," she said. Moreover, they found that they really liked each other. So they had their lost weekend together, drinking quarts of liquor and doing every wild fucky thing that you can imagine that two manic-depressive poets might do. And she bloomed, as she said to her arguing-buddy Edmund Wilson, not like any old rosebush, but like a Persian rosebush.

Afterward she wrote an affectionate letter to Roethke. She was fonder of him than she wanted to allow herself to be. She knew he was too young for her, and she also knew, because she was a sensible and observant woman, that he was mentally ill, and selfish in that ambitious smart-boy way, and that he was even more of a ransacker of liquor lockers than she was, and that he was any number of things that would make him impossible to live with. But she still had fond feelings.

What she said was that she'd been paid $7.50 by
The New Yorker
for a poem that she'd written, called "Baroque Comment." Not seventy-five dollars--seven dollars and fifty cents. This is the middle of the Depression. And then she said--and this is why I love Louise Bogan--then she said exactly what she spent the money on.

She bought three things: a bar of soap, a new fountain pen, and a bottle of whiskey. And then she still had two dollars and fifty cents left over, after buying those three things-- the pen to write poems with, the bottle of whiskey to drink in order to write the poems, and the soap in order to take on the world as a newly clean, thinking, feeling poet. She weighs whether she should buy some fancy food, but no: she remembers a certain recently published anthology that she's heard good things about. An anthology edited by Auden and Garrett,
The Poet's Tongue.
So she rushes over to the Holiday Bookshop. "And I bought the damn thing," she says. And she writes some of her best poems after this point. Including the first stanza of "Roman Fountain." This is probably the best, happiest moment of her poetic life, right here, while she's writing the letter to Ted Roethke, knowing she's got new poems waiting inside her.

In fact the letter may be better than any poem she wrote, though she wrote some good ones. But we wouldn't be interested in reading the letter unless she'd written the poems. So once again it's terribly confusing. You need the art in order to love the life.

I
WOKE UP AT NOON
wondering why my face gets so flushed when I give readings. I wish it didn't. I hate my stupid grinning blushing pleading face.

A few people go to poetry readings because they like to hear poems read aloud in public. But most people go because they want to be poets themselves. In fact, most people who read poetry are reading it because they want to write it. They want to draw from you whatever you have, and once they've expeller-pressed your essence they want to move on to somebody else. They're ruthless that way. That goes on for a while and then eventually they come back around. The poets that would-be poets come back to after they've gotten through their phase of ripping and running--those are the poets that will last. The tortoises. Stanley Kunitz has a great poem about an old slow tortoise "reviewing its triumphs."

My dog was sleeping on the rug near the bed, and when he shifted I could hear his collar go clink. And I thought, So what if there are some broken veins in my cheek? So what if I look like some wind-worn fisherman, or golf caddy, from the Western Isles? So what if I stay up late eating sesame chicken and watching back-to-back episodes of
Dirty Jobs
? The rhubarb plant has grown an enormous seed stalk. It seems to want to say something to me. So what? I can't keep up with these nature lovers. It all just has to come elbowing out, and if a poem is a mistake it'll be clear that it's a mistake, and I won't collect it. There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poet. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he'd collected editions of
Festus,
the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey--that would be an achivement. But collecting your own poems? What's so great about that? And mixing and mingling them in with some new? New
and
Collected Poems? Oh, well! Good job. Nice going.

I flip a lot through the biographical notes in the anthologies, and I find out who was alive when I was in my twenties, when I could have known them. I could have known Leonie Adams, I think. I could have known Louise Bogan, almost. I could have known Ted Roethke, a little earlier. Well, no-- Roethke died when I was about ten I think. That's out. And if I had known him, what would it have mattered? Would I have become a better poet if I'd taken his class at the University of Washington and watched him climb out the window and stand on the outside ledge, working his way around the corner of the building, making crazy faces at his students through the glass? Maybe so.

The woman who was my French tutor in Paris was a great admirer of Mark Strand. She was a frayed, delicate, elegant woman, divorced. She would say her hero's name, in her gorgeous juicy accent, holding her fingers together: "Mark Strand--he is simply the top." And I would say, Okay, I'll have to check him out. Later I did check him out, and I thought he was fine but not great. But he was exceedingly good-looking, I could see that. A real Charlton Hestonian face, one of those hellishly handsome poets. James Merrill was another, and back then I lumped W. S. Merwin in with them. They were practically J. Crew models before there were J. Crew models. But that's not right, because Merwin has genius as well as looks. Merwin's late poetry gives me hope.

I feel everything breaking up inside me. I can't rhyme, and I don't believe in writing plums anymore. I don't even know the names of many common plants. What is a zinnia? I don't remember. What is pale jessamine? I don't know. Mary Oliver's got deer waking her up in the field in the early morning by licking her face. She's got grasshoppers eating sugar out of her hand. This just doesn't happen to me. I do know what a poppy looks like. It looks like a coffee filter but open and yellow-orange-red. Sometimes I think knowing the names of everything is overrated. It takes away the sense that each thing is itself and not part of some clique. But names help you see things, too, and remember them better.

I can remember her white living room, this tutor who almost taught me to talk in French, and her modern white fiberglass chair with a purple cushion. There was one lesson where we had a conversation, and she told me that I had made a distinct advance. But then I fell back. My shyness killed me in the end. I hated to speak wrong. Wrongly? I hated making simple mistakes. I hated not being able to speak quickly. One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to "faire le parachutisme." He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. I said it sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said, "I'm not a homo." I said it's not a question of whether or not you're a homo, I just don't want to jump out of a plane.

I called Roz and told her about the reading in Cambridge. She said she wished she could come, but she couldn't. I asked her how things were going. She said she was busy. I asked her if she missed me at all, at any time of the day or night. "Some, yes," she said. I thought that was a good sign.

W
HEN SHOULD
I give the beads to her? Maybe wait? Maybe give her the gift of not having to occupy her mind with my obvious wish to woo her back? Once when we were first going out she gave me a really big blue umbrella with about a hundred red cartoon monkeys on it. I left it on the train and then a man holding a cellphone ran after me and said, "I think you left this on the train." So I still have it.

What would Aphra Behn advise me to do? Aphra Behn understood love. She was the first woman in England to live by her writing. People set her love poems to music. She spied in Holland for the king, and then the king didn't pay her. She was always making love into a person: "Love in fantastic triumph sat," she wrote, "While bleeding hearts around him flowed."

Victorian women didn't like Aphra Behn. Back in the 1880s, there was a New Hampshire writer, Kate Sanborn, who published an interesting book on women's humor. She called it
The Wit of Women.
It cost me forty dollars to buy it from a dealer in Wellesley. "Aphra Behn," Sanborn said, "is remembered only to be despised for her vulgarity. She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right to fame." Why did they hate her so much--just because she wrote a quick poem about a seduction on a riverbank?

Let's pack it up. I've packed another two boxes. Here's a poetry packing tip for you. Make two load-bearing stacks or towers of books in two diagonally opposite corners of the box. The two stacks must go right up to the top edge of the box. That way it won't crumple and slump--you can pile boxes four or five high, and the weight of the top box will be transmitted down through the two stacks of the one below and the one below that.

13

I
STARTED TO GET SLEEPY
in the middle of the afternoon, so I went out and mowed half the lawn. That always wakes me up. And as I mowed, I thought, The interesting thing is that you can start mowing anywhere. The lawn will get done no matter where you start mowing. And that seemed like an important discovery.

Because so often I think when I'm writing a poem that I need to start in some specific spot. Where I begin becomes so important that I never begin. I've been trying to write a poem about a time when Roz wore a pair of white pants.

I walked upstairs behind her
Staring at her stitched seams
Normally she wore black pants
But it was the last day of the year
That she could wear the white ones
So she did

Haaaaahhhh! I'm going to oxygenate myself. Haaaaaaahhhh!

You can start anywhere. That's the thing about starting. If you start, you're in motion. If you don't start, you're nowhere. If you stop, you're nowhere. I have reached a crisis where I don't know where to start. It's arbitrary. I could start with sunlight on clapboards, because is there anything more beautiful than sunlight on clapboards? A strange word: "clapboards." It's one of those interestingly wrong words-- it sounds flabby, like clabbered milk, when it's talking about something cleanly edged.