The Anthologist (22 page)

Looks like an air-balloon festival, does it not? But I hope it shows that what we call iambic pentameter is really, if you count the rest the way you must count it, a kind of slow waltz rhythm. You can leap around the room reciting so-called iambic pentameter to yourself and your leaps will fall in threes. You cannot make your leaps fall into fives. You need to add the rest. I'm telling you that this is true. No amount of reading and underlining any textbook about meter and seeing them go on and on about five beats is going to make that necessary sixth rest beat go away. It's there, and it's been there for centuries. And when poets forget that it's there, it hurts their poems.

15

M
ISTY AGAIN TODAY
. A freakish mist lies over the land. My clothes are out on the clothesline, and they have been there for two days and they've started to get that wet-too-long smell.

Now, if I were a nineteenth-century poet, I would say that the freakish mist lay "o'er" the land. And that's one of those words, "o'er," that makes a modern reader feel ill. So what I do, to make the old poems feel true again--the good old poems--is very simple. This is another little tip for you, so get ready. I just pronounce "o'er" as "over," but I do it very fast, so you're gliding o'er the V, not really adding another syllable. Because that's really what it was, I think: it was a crude, printed representation of a subtle spoken elision that might well have had some of the vocal ghost of the V left in it.

There are rare times when it's absolutely necessary to say "o'er" without any V--as when, say, Macaulay rhymes it with "yore." But a lot of the time you can fudge it.

This trick will also work for "'tis" and "ne'er"--the other painful bits of poetic diction. When I'm reading a poem to myself, I just mentally change all the instances of "'tis" to "it's." And I give "ne'er" the "o'er" treatment--I just barely graze my teeth with my lower lip, while thinking V. It's like waving the vermouth bottle over the glass of gin. Try it, it may work for you.

After all, we don't want some mere convention of spelling to block our connection with the oldies. We want to hear them now as if they're being said now. And that tailcoated diction can really get in the way. It's bad. Not to mention the exclamation points everywhere. Lo! Great God! Just ignore them. If you say the poem aloud, they disappear.

The mouse climbed up the curtain again, and this time I got him to drop into the plastic pitcher. I took him out to the lilac bush and let him go in the mist.

I
CALLED UP
R
OZ
to ask her if there was anything she wanted from Switzerland. She told me she had the flu and wasn't thinking straight because she had a fever. I asked her if I could bring over some chicken soup and crackers and ginger ale, because I knew that's what she'd want. And she said, "That would be nice. Also some chewable Motrin, the junior kind, and a trashy magazine." So I went over to her apartment, which she'd painted five careful colors--and I helped her sit up. She really had been quite sick, very feverish, hot, confused. "I'm here to take care of you," I said, and I gave her the chewable Motrin and a spoonful of soup, and she ate a corner of a cracker.

"Let me think of cold things to cool you down," I said. "Do you remember how you used to make that marvelously cold potato salad and we'd have it outside on the metal table?"

She nodded. "On cool tin plates," she said. "That was fun." Then she said she was going to sleep, and she thanked me for coming by.

I
MOWED
more of the lawn. But first I cut away the thorny brambles so that they wouldn't attack me as I mowed near them. What I found was that grapevines were kinking their spirals around the long, reaching, hooky bramble suckers. The two plants had a little gentlemen's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard. I pulled some of their tanglement out of an old, beleaguered lilac bush, and I got pricked a lot but I felt I'd accomplished something. Then I mowed for an hour and chanted a stanza of Kipling as I mowed, from his poem about the undersea cables.

The wrecks dissolve about us; (rest)

Their rust drops down from afar-- (rest)

Down to the dark, to the utter dark,

Where the blind white sea-snakes are. (rest)

When I was done mowing I drank a glass of iced coffee with some baking soda mixed into it to soften the burn. And I went up to my now half-empty bookcases in the hall and found Theodore Roethke's prose collection,
On the Poet and His Craft.
It's a small white book. On the cover is a picture of Roethke looking sad, as he always looked, sitting against a wall with a mysterious white graffiti hand-painted on it. The dustjacket is very soft on the top and the bottom edges because it has slid out of place and crunched into things. Holding this book always affects me strangely. It was put together by one of Roethke's colleagues, and it came out only a year or two after Roethke died. It's like standing in some little cemetery somewhere, staring at a small white gravestone in the grass.

In it was Roethke's review of his old flame, Louise Bogan. He adopts a formal tone--he keeps calling her Miss Bogan. And he quotes nice things from her poems--for instance he quotes "Roman Fountain." And he says, rightly, that the first stanza is good and the rest he doesn't care for as much. Bogan herself thought that. She said the poem was minor except for the first stanza. He includes some criticisms to show that he's a dispassionate reader and that he's not going to let their long-ago lost weekend influence what he says.

And then he says the Big Thing. He says that Louise Bogan's poetry will last "as long as the language survives." There it is. This was in one of the last reviews he wrote. It was what he hoped would be true of his own poetry.

Her poems will last as long as the language--ah, yes. That used to be, in the nineteenth century, a much-employed piece of literary praise. Macaulay used it several times. He said, for example, that Byron's poetry "can only perish with the English language." Mark Twain said that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
would "live as long as the English tongue shall live." Many lesser nineteenth-century reviewers used it. And it's a fearful phrase--it's an Ozymandian phrase. Because you have to ask: How long, in fact, will the English language last? Not that long maybe. Another three hundred years?

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly-- maybe--and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of
Larry Sanders
and
Friends
and
Will & Grace
and
Ellen
and
Designing Women
and
Mary Tyler Moore,
and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now: Surprisingly very little is known of Monica Mcgowan Johnson and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the "hair bump" episode of
Mary Tyler Moore.
Or: Surprisingly little can be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the greatness of
Larry Sanders.

And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won't perish.

I
SAT IN THE DRIVEWAY
and read my old poems for about an hour in the morning. As I read them I had some driveway sand between my toes, and I felt the faceted grains rolling. And I had a combinatorial feeling. I was embarrassed but also impressed. I'd written a lot of poems, frankly. When you turn the page there is another poem. And there's another. And another. And they keep going. Somehow I have accumulated a whole bunch of poems. Each one had its itinerary--each had gone to a particular editor and gotten published somewhere, except for some that I kept back that I didn't want any editor to have, and some that no editor wanted, and then I'd collected them in a book.

I put the book down on the metal table, and I went inside and I tried to write about how a tablecloth catches the ottoman of the air as it settles down on a metal table. And now I'm back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bite me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They're just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.

M
Y ANTHOLOGY
has to have the right thickness. I do know that. It has to have that I'm-not-really-a-textbook textbook-ishness. It has to have a lot of love poems in it because in the end love poems are the best kind of poems. If it had a whole lot of love poems and was the right thickness, it might be adopted in college classes. September comes, and sleepy undergraduates all over the country are walking their diagonal paths to writing classes with
Only Rhyme
zipped away in their backpacks. I would have power and influence--maybe even a trickle of money. That's a motivator. Power and influence, baby. And maybe some of the poems I chose would make people happy. That would be my contribution. I want to include a Charles Causley poem, and a Wendy Cope poem, and a James Fenton poem. I haven't heard back from Fenton's publisher yet so I don't know if I'll get permission. I hope so.

The Fenton poem is "The Vapour Trail." I was going through a pile of old
New York Review of Books
's last year and I saw the title and immediately my heart leapt up, because I always want to read a poem about a vapor trail. So I approached it with that kind of high hope. That feeling of maybe this will be the definitive vapor-trail poem. And it was. It was good, and it was sad, and it was exactly, precisely what you wanted a poem about a vapor trail to be. Exactly, precisely what you wanted a poem about anything to be, in fact. It was moving, and it sang, and it had love in it, and it got you. It grabbed at your love-and-fame vitals. I tore out the whole page from the
New York Review,
and I clamped it to the refrigerator with a magnet.

And yesterday I took it off the refrigerator and I made two copies of it. One I mailed to Nan with a Post-it saying, "This is the poem I mentioned." And one I mailed to Roz, saying, "This is a good one. Miss you, hope you're feeling better --P."

And as I mailed the Fenton poems out I thought: See that? It's happening. The transformation, the rediscovery, the renewal. It's happening already. It's so exciting. It's all cycling around. Fenton's been doing it. My little attempts to write poems that rhyme--unnecessary. My whole career-- unnecessary. Because this Fenton poem is out. Good for him. Good for good old Jamesie. I thought of writing him a letter, and I thought, Well, you know, then he'll have to write me a letter, and it'll be one of those replies where he'll be compelled to say, "Coming from you, that's high praise indeed." Or not--and if he doesn't say "coming from you" I'll be hurt-feelinged, so I thought, Forget it. But I also thought: My life has been in vain and yet not in vain because I've had the pleasure of seeing the whole movement come full circle. I've lived through the thirty-year ascendancy of chaos and tunelessness, and things are moving back now. It was a mistake to suppress rhyme so completely, a mistake to forget about the necessary tapping of the toe, but it was a useful mistake, a beautiful mistake, because it taught us new things. It loosened people up and made other discoveries possible.

I don't have to say any of that in the introduction, though. The introduction can be quite short. Forty pages? Forget forty pages. How many people read introductions to poetry anthologies, anyway? Hardly anyone. I do, but I'm not normal. It doesn't actually matter what I say. Short is best. It should just read: "Welcome to this anthology of rhymed poetry by dead and living poets. I hope you find some things here you like. Thanks so much for your attention. And now--on with the show."

Only Rhyme
would of course define me as an anthologist--i.e., as a lost soul who turned in despair to the publishing of other people's work--like old Oscar Williams. Old Father Oscar. Sure, Williams got a friendly blurb from Dylan Thomas, but everybody knew his warbling days were done. Still, I think I could live with that.

The real problem is that I've had to leave known poets out. Some of them are alive and old. A few of them I've met and like. They have strophed and sonneted and upheld the traditional ideals. All that's missing from their work is greatness--the elusive
rupasnil.
They're clumsy rhymers. They're over-enjambers. Their lines are clotted with wrongness of several kinds. They're following the old rules on paper, but they don't hear them--they don't understand the body-logic behind them. Some of them, when they discover that I've left them out, will be wounded. And I don't want to wound them.

If I don't write the introduction, then the anthology can't come out, and then the inept but well-meaning recent rhymers won't have their feelings hurt. Which would be better all around.

Tim called and said that he'd sent
Killer Queen
off to the publisher.

I
WENT OVER
to Roz's apartment with Smacko, because she was going to be taking care of him while I was in Switzerland. She was getting out of her car in the shade of a maple tree. She'd just come back from Red Leaf, a vegetable store out near Exeter. She lowered her head to the grocery bag she held and she breathed in. She said, "Don't you love the smell of brown paper bags filled with raw vegetables?"

I leaned and smelled inside the bag. "Yes, I like it very much," I said. Trying to stay on an even keel but feeling a lot of love for her and wanting to lie down on the sidewalk as a result.

She stood, smiling, waiting for me to say something more. I handed her the beads, wrapped droopily in tissue. "Just something I strung for you, don't open it now."