The Anthologist (2 page)

Nan is or soon will be divorced from her husband, Tom-- Tom, who every weekend went windsurfing in a blue-armed wetsuit. She has a son named Raymond, a good kid who plays lacrosse. And she now evidently has a new boyfriend, a curly-haired man named Chuck, annoyingly handsome.

O
F COURSE YOU
already understand meter. When you hear it, you understand it, you just don't know you understand it. You, as a casual reader of poems, and as a casual listener to pop songs, understand meter better than the metrists who misdescribed it over several centuries understood it. Even they understood it better than they knew.

My neighbor Nan seems to be fully committed to her new flame, Chuck. His car is in the driveway again. I suppose that's a good thing. She deserves to be happy with a good-looking man like Chuck.

Roz, the woman who lived with me in this house for eight years, has moved away.

My dog is shedding because it's summer, and then the birds, that keep chirping and chirping, make nests of the dog hair. It's good for that.

I wish I could smoke pot. What would that do? I don't even know where I would get pot around here. Somebody said the wispy dude with the pointy sideburns who works at the pet-food store. Could I maybe offer some to Roz, as a dramatic gesture? I've never bought pot in my life. Maybe it's time. No, I don't think it is. Too involved. But I think I will step in from the driveway for a moment to get a clear glass bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. I do love a palate cleanser of pure Newcastle Brown.

Roz is kind of short. I've always been attracted to short women. They're usually smarter and more interesting than tall women and yet people don't take them as seriously. And it's a bosomy kind of generous smartness, often. But she's moved out, so I should stop talking about her.

I'm a little sick of all the bird chirping, frankly. They just don't stop. I mowed the lawn yesterday so I wouldn't have to hear their racket. "Chirtle chirtle." It's constant. And as soon as I started mowing I knew this was the best thing I could be doing. Walking behind this armful of noise, going around, turning the corner I'd already turned, circumventing the overturned canoe. I ducked under the clothesline that Roz strung last year between the barn and the box elder tree. The white rope is now a lovely dry gray color. She used to hang many beautiful tablecloths and dishtowels on that clothesline. I should use it myself, instead of the dryer, which is making a thumping noise anyway, and then if she drove by she'd see that I was being a responsible person who dried my clothes in the sun. I wish I'd taken a picture of that clothesline with her faded shirts on it. No bras that I remember, but you can't expect bras necessarily on a clothesline. You have to go to Target to see bras hanging nobly out for the public gaze.

I got in bed last night and I closed my eyes and I lay there and then a powerful urge came over me to cross my eyes. I thought of tragic people like Don Rickles, Red Skelton, people like that. Broken professional entertainers who maybe once had been funny. And now they were in Vegas, on cruise control, using their eye-crossing to allude to their early period of genuine funniness. Or they were dead.

So I crossed my eyes with my eyes closed. And I saw something in the dark: two crescent moons on the outside of my vision, which were the new moons of strain. I could feel my corneal pleasure domes moving, too. And as my eyes reached maximum crossing I felt an interesting blind pain of wrongness. I decided that I should hold on to that.

S
O NOW
, you're waiting. I've promised something. You're thinking okay, he's said he's going to divulge. Your hope is that I, Paul Chowder, have some things that I know that you don't know because I have been a published poet for a while. And maybe I do know a few things.

One useful tip I can pass on is: Copy poems out. Absolutely top priority. Memorize them if you want to, but the main thing is to copy them out. Get a notebook and a ballpoint pen and copy them out. You will be shocked by how much this helps you. You will see immediate results in your very next poem, I promise.

Another tip is: If you have something to say, say it. Don't save it up. Don't think to yourself, I'm going to build up to the truth I really want to say. Don't think, In this poem, I'm going to be sneaky and start with this other truth over here, and then I'm going to scamper around a little bit over here, and then play with some purple Sculpey over here in the corner, and finally I'll reach the truth at the very end. No, slam it in immediately. It won't work if you hold it in reserve. Begin by saying what you actually care about saying, and the saying of it will guide you to the next line, and the next, and the next. If you need to arrange things differently later, you can do that.

And never think, Oh, heck, I'll write that whole poem later. Never think, First I'll write this poem about my old orange life jacket, so that I'll be more ready to confront the more haunting, daunting reality of this poem here about the treehouse that was rejected by its tree. No. If you do, the bigger theme will rebel and go sour on you. It'll hang there like a forgotten chili pepper on the stem. Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's
Best American Poetry
and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.

Another tip: The term "iambic pentameter" isn't good. It isn't at all good. It's the source of much grief and muddle and some very bad enjambments. Louise Bogan once said that somebody's enjambments gave her the willies, and she's right, they can do that to you. You shudder, reading them. Most iambic-pentameter enjambments are a mistake. That sounds technical but I'm talking about something real-- a real problem.

And finally, the really important thing you have to know is: The four-beat line is the soul of English poetry.

P
EOPLE ARE GOING
to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They're going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because "pent" is five in Babylonian, and five is the number of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting. They're going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse--which is another confusing term--and all this so-called prosody they're going to shovel at you. And sure--fine--you can handle it. You're up to whatever mind-forged shrivelments they're going to dish out that day. But just remember (a) that the word "prosody" isn't an appealing word, and (b) that pentameter came
later on.
Pentameter is secondary. Pentameter is an import from France. And French is a whole different language. The real basis of English poetry is this walking rhythm right here.

Woops--dropped my Sharpie.

Right here: One--two--three--four. "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 mom read it to me. God, it was beautiful. Still is. Those singing pelicans. They slapped their feet around on those long bare islands 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 the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy 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.

In the middle of the night

Miss Clavel turns on the light

Hear that? Another four-beat line. My mother read that one to me, too. And "Johnny Crow's Garden." And A. A. Milne and his snail and his brick. Milne was a metrical genius. And Dr. Seuss, of course, the great Ted Geisel. Who probably was, if I really want to be truthful and honest--and I do, of course--the poet most important to me until I was about twelve. You remember the little intense guy with the hat on, who's on his stool in the Plexiglas dome, counting the people all over the world who are going to sleep?

And it scans. "Two Biffer-Baum birds are now building their nest." It rhymes--it relies a fair amount on silly proper names, but it rhymes--and it scans perfectly. Dr. Seuss was a stickler for scansion. He was part of a lineage that runs back through
Punch
and Lear and Gilbert and Sullivan and Lewis Carroll and Barham's
Ingoldsby Legends.
He uses the four-beat line in the great old way. In fact, I'd say almost all the poems that I heard as a child were classic four-beat lines.

Hell, let's get into it. Where's my Sharpie again? Okay:

See those four numbers? Those are the four beats. Four stresses, as we say in the meter business. Tetrameter. Four. "Tetra" is four. Like Tetris, that computer game where the squares come down relentlessly and overwhelm your mind with their crude geometry and make you peck at the arrow keys like some mindless experimental chicken and hurry and panic and finally you turn your computer off. And you sit there thinking, Why have I just spent an hour watching squares drop down a computer screen?

And his
aunt
Jo
bis
ka
made
him
drink
La
vender
wa
ter
tinged
with
pink
.

That's Lear again. Hear it? You can't help but hear it. Four beats in each line. That's the classic rhythm in poetry, and in songs, four beats. Don't let anyone tell you different.

And what is Art whereto we press

Through paint and prose and rhyme--

When Nature in her nakedness

Defeats us every time?

You've got to admit that's good. That's Kipling. Did you hear what he did? "When Nature in her nakedness defeats us every time." Do you hear how he just drills that line right through your heart muscle? The "nay" of Nature and the "nay" of nakedness just push right through and screw you to the back of your chair. Oh, Rudyard, you were good in the 1890s. You were a nineties man.

But notice there that Kipling's second and fourth lines have a rest. A rest on the fourth beat. Listen for the booms now.

And here's kind of a curious historical fact. Nobody, for years and years and years, centuries even, was able to say that poetry had those obvious booms. Nobody paid attention to the rests. Well, not nobody. There was a poet named Sidney Lanier, a flute player who was dying of consumption. He gave some lectures at Johns Hopkins on the musical basis of verse, but he had a fever, and he would get tired out and have to sit beside the podium and cough horribly and catch his breath and then continue--and his way of scoring rhythms was unfortunately wrong and only added further confusion. But he did understand that poems could have rests at the ends of lines.

Besides Lanier there was really nobody of any significance talking about rests in the straightforward musical sense of a place where you tap your toe without speaking. Poets had to be hearing these rests in their heads, because they wrote a million poems with them, poems of great comeliness that you can prance around to--but they didn't know that's what they were doing.

Finally came Derek Attridge, a man with a sensitive ear who taught at Rutgers. In 1982 he introduced the idea of what he called "unrealized beats" or "virtual beats." Quote unquote. In other words, rests. They're rests. How hard is that?

I almost had forgotten (rest)

That words were made for rhyme: (rest)

And yet how well I knew it-- (rest)

Once upon a time! (rest)

That's Christopher Morley. A light verser. Four beats in the line, the fourth beat being a rest. I hope you can hear it.

A good way you can scan something, by the way, is by saying it softly to yourself while counting with your fingers. Don't look at the line. Memorize the line and look away from it and say it to yourself. Start with all your fingers in the air, and when you hear a beat, bring down your thumb, then your index finger, then the next finger, then the next. "I almost had forgotten, rest." Like that. That's how to do scansion like a pro. I don't recommend the accent marks that some people use over syllables--they look so pedagogical. If you want to mark a line, use underlines.