The Anthologist (6 page)

I have no one. I want someone. I don't want the summer to go by and to have no one. It is turning out to be the most beautiful, most quiet, largest, most generous, sky-vaulted summer I've ever seen or known--inordinately blue, with greener leaves and taller trees than I can remember, and the sound of the lawnmowers all over this valley is a sound I could hum to forever. I want Roz.

I
MET A MAN
named Victor at Warren's Lobster House for lunch. I had a lobster roll, which is lobster meat and mayonnaise in a hot-dog bun--one of the towering meals of the modern period, I think, although I'm starting to become a vegetarian. Moving in that direction. I had it with coleslaw.

Victor is a poet and house painter who is eager to start a reading series. "Portsmouth is a great poetry town," he said, as everyone does. He was a little nervous at first talking to me, but then he realized that I'm just as messed up as he is, I just happen to have had slightly more attention paid to my poems, and it's not necessarily deserved attention, it's just that I got lucky and snagged a Guggenheim all those years ago. People really pay attention to the Old Gugg, as we call it. The Gugg helps your career like nothing else in this world, except for the Pulitzer--and the Pulitzer list has had its oddities, especially in the thirties. Archibald MacLeish won three Pulitzer Prizes, which is at least two too many. He was a smooth operator, Archie was--writing fawning letters to Amy Lowell, and to Hemingway, and to Ezra Pound, the source of all evil. Louise Bogan had his number. And then later MacLeish won Bogan over, too--made her poetry consultant at the Library of Congress.

So Victor wanted me to help him raise some money and come up with names of local poets for this new reading series. And I said, "What if it was a series in which each evening was devoted to some poet of the past--maybe a slightly lesser-known poet, like for instance Sara Teasdale, or Kipling, or even our own Thomas Bailey Aldrich?" Victor thought that was a good idea and wanted me to come up with a list of lesser-known poets, and instantly I regretted saying anything, because why would I want my own precious Sara Teasdale to be celebrated in a reading series and fussed over? I'd lose her if that happened.

I said it all sounded like a tremendously lovely and ambitious notion but that I had a mound of obligations and I hadn't been sleeping well and it's not the kind of thing I normally do and maybe other people should get involved in a prime-mover kind of way and whatnot.

And Victor said he hadn't been sleeping well either--he had two small kids.

I said I'd give it some thought.

T
HERE'S NO EITHER-OR DIVISION
with poems. What's made up and what's not made up? What's the varnished truth, what's the unvarnished truth? We don't care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in different places in the bookstore. But we don't do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of poems go straight to the poetry section. There's no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don't exist.

For instance, I could write a poem right now about buying a big wheel of Parmesan cheese and putting it in my closet as an investment. It's not true, I haven't done that. I can't afford it. I'd love to own a wheel of really good Parmesan because the salt crystals are so delicious, but I don't. Even so, I could write that poem. And I wouldn't have to label it as a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem. It would just be a poem.

Coleridge says that Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man. Did it really do that? John Fogerty says that the old man is down the road. Is he? Longfellow says he shot an arrow into the air. Did he, or is he just saying he did? Poe said that there was a raven tapping at his chamber door. Was there?

We don't care. Why don't we care? I don't know. I don't have an answer for you today on that important question.

Actually, sometimes we do care. In Mary Oliver's
New and Selected Poems, Volume 1,
which I just bought--because it's time for me to read Mary Oliver, whom I've known only through anthologies all these years--there's a good poem about a time when she sees a woman washing out ashtrays in an airport bathroom in the Far East. The woman has black hair and she smiles at Mary. I want this poem to be the account of something that actually happened. I do care, sometimes, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

A
NTHOLOGY KNOWLEDGE
isn't real knowledge. You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.

And you have to be willing to be sad. If you go to the doctor saying that you've experienced some sleeplessness, perhaps some sitting in the sandy driveway late at night in a white plastic chair, accompanied by thoughts of mortality and aloneness--maybe some strong suspicions that none of the poetry you've published is any good--the doctor is probably going to say, Ah, you're depressed. And he's maybe going to want to give you some pills.

And as a result, you may be tempted to think: I'm one of them. I'm John Keats. Or Sara Teasdale. Or Longfellow. Or Louise Bogan. Or Ted Roethke--rhymes with "set key." Or Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or John Berryman. Berryman, who wrote funny poems and then stopped writing funny poems and launched himself off a bridge and,
flump,
that was it for him. Many suicides. Percy Shelley. Many suicides.

So you might think to yourself, Oh boy, I am one of these great depressive figures. But you're not. Just because a doctor has scribbled a half-legible prescription on a piece of paper and given you some pills, you're not depressed. Not the way a real poet is depressed. You don't even come close.

True poet's depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It's a full-body inability to function. You don't want to leave your room. Louise Bogan summed it up in two quick lines. This was back in I don't know when--nineteen-thirty-something. It was in a poem in
The New Yorker
called "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell." And the lines went: "At midnight tears / Run in your ears." She's lying there on her back, crying. Her eyes are overflowing, and the tears are cresting and coming around, and down, and they're flowing
into her ears.
There's something direct and physical and interesting about that. Because it's as if the crying leads directly to the hearing. Her grief leads to something audible--a poem. That's what it does for all these really good poets. The crying and the singing are connected.

Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping--there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you're an adult, you don't sob quite that way. But when you're a little kid, you go, "Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih." You actually cry in a duple meter.

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking--you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a
pling,
and you want a
fring.
You propose a
plong,
and you want a
frong.
You're in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.

It's not a crossword puzzle--it's better than a crossword puzzle, because you're actually trying to do something beautiful. But it's not unrelated. The addicts of crossword puzzles are also distracting themselves. They also don't want to face the world's grief head-on. They want that transient pleasure, endlessly repeated, of solving the Rubik's Cube of verbal intersection. But has anyone ever wept at the beauty of a crossword puzzle? Maybe, maybe. I have not.

Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle--when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented. But when it's good, it's great. It's no coincidence that Auden was a compulsive doer of crossword puzzles, and a rhymer, and a depressive, and a smoker, and a drinker, and a man who shuffled into Louise Bogan's memorial service in his bedroom slippers.

A
LCOHOL, COFFEE, RHYME
, murder mysteries, gambling,
Project Runway,
anything with suspense. Sending out a letter. Poets who have reached a certain point of depression are great letter writers, because they write a letter, and they send it out, and until they get a response they are in suspense about what the response will be. That helps them through those three days. Or maybe it's a week or a month before they get an answer. I never answer letters, so I keep my correspondents in a state of permanent suspense.

Coffee--cheers you up. Makes you feel like you're a big guy. Beer, wine, spiritous liquor of all kinds. Really helps for a while. It allows you to relax and slump and hang out on the wrong side of your brain. Where everybody wants to have some fun. They want to sway. They want to move. They want to sing. Singing is a desire to warble out something that is beyond words but that relies on words. So poetry and alcohol are what the responsible doctor should prescribe, and maybe letter writing, as well. And chin-ups. Time-honored substances and behaviors, plus rhyme, all those things are fine. In fact, they're necessary. They have a long, long history. You mustn't abuse them. But of course you will eventually--every poet does.

These new drugs that they want to sell you--be wary of them. I've seen them. Some of them are oval, shaped in little boat shapes. And they have beautiful saturated colors, and they're imprinted with various words, corporate trademarks. If the great poets had had pills, would we have had Johnson's
Vanity of Human Wishes
? Or Tennyson's
Princess
? Or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets? Or Longfellow's "Driftwood"? No. Poets are our designated grievers, and if they weren't allowed to be sad, we'd have none of the great moments of Auden. "Tears are round, the sea is deep: / Roll them overboard and sleep." Do you hear the four beats?

Auden is an interesting case. He believed that you should write drunk and revise sober. That was his rhythm. And it worked for him for a while. Then he mistakenly mixed in an alien chemical: speed. The poetry that he wrote on speed is no good. The poetry he wrote in the thirties, before he found speed, is good. Speed hurried him into the realm of the abstract noun. He was stuck fast on speed. Sartre took speed, too--and wrote
Being and Nothingness,
which is a gigantic smoke generator of abstraction.

So speed is a bad idea. And suffering is a good idea. You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.

I have a mouse in the kitchen.

A
UDEN SAYS
: "About suffering, they were never wrong, the eld mesters." He has a pronounced Oxford accent. The poem actually rhymes, but subtly. One line ends "forgot," and then there's "untidy spot." It's such a famous poem I almost hesitate to bring it up. But I do hope you will read it.

The famous part of the poem is about Breughel's Icarus. About the fact that there's a whole painting of a seaport, with all these people's lives intersecting, bales being loaded and unloaded onto ships, and there off to one side, shploof, is Icarus, plunging into the water with his wings all melted. Not that wax could have ever worked. It was not a good idea and anyone could have told the two flyers that they'd need something stronger than wax. But the myth is poked into this completely real and commonplace in some ways but beautifully sunlit painting of a harbor. That's the famous part of the poem.

But if you listen to Auden read it, you can't skip ahead to the Icarus part, and you realize that a lot of the poem isn't about that painting. It's about the torturer's horse, and about how the "dogs go on with their doggy life." Nobody ever put that way of talking in a poem before. That's the Christopher Isherwood note. "The dogs go on with their doggy life / And the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree." When Auden reads it, that's what you remember. You can hear his own amazement that he had been capable of that simple, completely new bit of poetic speech. Christopher Isherwood was a huge influence on Auden. That's what people don't understand. Isherwood is partly responsible for Auden's greatness. When they went their separate ways, Auden's poetry grew colder and more abstract. Isherwood was the wax on Auden's wings.