The Anthologist (9 page)

Samuel Daniel was a court poet. He published a book of poems with a lovely, modest title. I think it's my favorite title of a book of poetry ever. The title is
Certaine Small Poems Lately Printed.
He was a man of some humility and grace. And he won his duel with Campion. Campion changed his mind and went back to rhyming. His neoclassical hexameters were pretty in a way, but people wanted to hear him sing.

And that's the single point I want to make today. People have been struggling over this idea that rhyme is artificial and unnatural for hundreds and hundreds of years. And meanwhile poem after poem gets written that people really want to listen to. And a lot of these poems rhyme. Imagine what would have happened if Campion had succeeded in his effort to fuss and scold rhyme out of existence and banish it from English poetry. Four hundred years of pretend Greek and Latin meters is what we would have had, instead of Marvell, and Dryden, and Cole Porter, and Christina Rossetti, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hart, and Wendy Cope, and Auden, and John Lennon, and John Hiatt, and Irving Berlin, and Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein, and Charles Causley, and Keats, and Paul Simon, and et cetera, and so on. Whole floors of libraries could be filled with the poems that we would not have had. Marilyn Monroe wouldn't have been able to sing

I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there
I've stocked my heart
With icy frigid air

And think of it: you can put on the coolest, most spaced-out house trance music today--and it rhymes. "Got nervous when you looked my way, / But you knew all the words to say." That's a couplet from a trance tune by a group called iiO, in a remix by Armin Van Buuren, and nobody thinks tiptoe through the tulips when they're dancing to this, they just think, Yeah, the words work, they fit, they have that forward push of power. And they have that push because they rhyme. So it just continues. And nobody really stops to examine the need, the powerful endlessness and hunger of the need. Why? Why do we need things to rhyme so much?

W
HY DO
I, who can't make a couplet worth a roasted peanut these days, want poetry to do what I can't make it do? Mary Oliver is my favorite poet at the moment, and she almost never rhymes. W. S. Merwin's
The Vixen
is one of my favorite books of poems, and it doesn't rhyme. Not only does
The Vixen
not rhyme, not only does it not scan, it doesn't even capitalize or punctuate. And it's good. But I want these books to be in the minority. Why?

Well, of course, rhyme helps memory. But you can't allow yourself to get excited by that argument. Samuel Daniel used it, and Dryden used it, but it's not convincing. When I listen to something that rhymes well, I just like it. My memory for song lyrics isn't that strong, so the fact that the rhyme might help me remember the words is neither here nor there. First in importance is that the lines sound good. The sounding good comes before the utilitarian help of memorizability.

"Sugar, you make my soul complete. Rapture tastes so sweet." That's from the same trance tune I mentioned. It's sung by Nadia Ali, from Pakistan.

I
CALLED ROZ
and left a message asking if she'd like to come by and help me shampoo the dog. The flea shampoo is turquoise with sparkles and very thick. It's really a two-person job to put it on--one person to work in the suds and one person to hold Smacko's back and aim the shower sprayer. He keeps wanting to shake, spraying turquoise froth everywhere, and he will shake, unless one person keeps a steady, firm hand on the middle of his back.

Roz called and said she'd be by at about six-thirty. I knew she would--she misses the dog like crazy, and who can blame her? I got out some chips and salsa and was sitting in the white plastic chair by the barn door when she drove up. I watched her walk up the driveway, looking very calm and elegant in her dog-washing outfit of jeans and a loose blue shirt with a paint splash on the sleeve. She stopped and said hello to Smacko and picked up something in the sand. I heard her bracelets jingle, a sound I hadn't heard in a while. "Here's a present from the driveway," she said, and she handed it to me. It was a fragment of old china with very fine rule-lines in blue against white. Bits of old china sometimes appear in the driveway as rains wash more of its sand away. I took off my glasses to look at it and thanked her. Then I offered her a chip.

We washed the dog and didn't get too wet, and then she said she had to go. I asked her if maybe she'd like to stay and watch
Bull Durham
with me. She likes
Bull Durham.

"Is it done?" she asked, meaning the introduction.

"It is not done. Nor will it ever be done, for I am not the one to do it."

"Oh, poof," she said. "You just need to apply yourself."

She didn't leave right away, at least. She smiled at the tablecloth. On it was my paperback of Mary Oliver's
New and Selected Poems, Volume 1
--I seem to be carrying it around the house with me. "So that's what she looks like," Roz said, tilting her head to see the picture on the cover better. It's the blue-tinted photograph in which Mary is wearing some kind of wonderful ulster with a zippered hood, and she's looking off, and she looks heartstoppingly French. "She's beautiful," Roz said. "Is that a recent picture?"

She's about seventy now, I said, and living in Province-town.

"Is she lesbian?"

I said I believed she was, yes.

"It's odd that the woman I most want to look like is a lesbian," she said. Then she said a long goodbye to Smacko and we hugged ceremonially and she drove away.

I didn't want to watch
Bull Durham,
so I watched three episodes of
The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Three's about my limit for one night.

G
ENE'S NEW EMAIL
says that they're becoming "really concerned." I feel horrible about it. I don't want to disappoint him. Gene, I'm sorry. I apologize for this inexcusable slowness.

If I could just die and rot in the ground it would be okay. I wouldn't have to write anything more. Die and rot and be completely dead. No worries. Everything's good. "Paul Chowder was at work on an anthology of rhyming poetry when he died." "Ah, too bad."

The best use of the word "rot" that I can think of is from a poem by Coventry Patmore. He's sitting in a bay. He's just had some reversal, we're not sure what. The ocean and its waves are out there. He looks at them. What kind of ocean is it? It's a "purposeless, glad ocean." That's what first caught me, those two words, "purposeless" and "glad," placed together. But then comes the next stanza, which is a killer. Suddenly he raises his voice and he says, "The lie shall rot."

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

I know I'll never write anything anywhere near as good as that eight-line poem by Coventry Patmore. Which is in many, many anthologies. I've sailed past fifty and I've had my chances and it hasn't happened.

But there's still the hope that leaps. There's still the tiny possibility. You think: One more poem. You think: There will be some as yet ungathered anthology of American poetry. It will be the anthology that people will tote around with them on subways thirty-five, forty years from now. There will be many new names in its table of contents--poets who are only children now, or aren't known. And you think: Maybe this very poem I write today will somehow pry open a space in that future anthology and maybe it will drop into position and root itself there.

I guess that probably explains why I used to collect anthologies. I was hoping to find a crack in the pavement where my ailanthus of a poem could take root.

I
T WAS ABOUT MIDNIGHT
and misty after another brief rain. I wanted to sit in the white plastic chair by the driveway and admire the overboiled potato of the moon, but I knew that the basin of the chair would be filled with water. So I tipped the chair forward, in the dark, with the crickets going, and I could hear a splash as the water poured into the grass. I hesitated for an instant, wondering whether it was worth my while to sit myself down in the wet chair and get my pants wet. And my answer was immediately yes. Of course I wanted to sit in the wet chair. No sacrifice is too great. And meanwhile the mist came up the hill and a wild turkey was peeling out a great crazy screeching cry down by the creek. He's lost, or he's lost someone, or he's having an argument or an orgasm. I'm breathing the same mist that the turkey screeched into--the same mist that has boiled away the moon.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a firefly inscribe part of a curve, and I remembered W. S. Merwin's poem "To The Corner of the Eye." I thought: It is so, so good to know that W. S. Merwin exists. I even love his initials. W. and S.--ideal initials. Merwin writes poems that, fortunately, I can't remember. They would be exceedingly difficult to memorize. But imagine being the poetry editor, maybe at
The New Yorker,
getting "To the Corner of the Eye" in the mail and reading it. Imagine how thrilledly shaken up you would feel at reading it and knowing that you had the power to publish it. Although come to think of it, "To the Corner of the Eye" wasn't published in
The New Yorker.

Then, in the mist, I saw a big man walking up the street. He was wearing one shoe. He had a familiar look, so I got out of my chair and went partway down the driveway, and I waved at him. It's not usual, really, for people to walk up and down my street without two shoes on at midnight. He stopped. He put his hand on the telephone pole that's there. He looked down. And then he looked over at me. He was a big guy. Big strong bald head. Wide nose. Kind of a defiant, wild, defeated look. I said, "Ted? Ted Roethke? Is that you?" And he nodded slightly. I said, "Wow, Ted, how's it going? You look like you just got hit with a couple hundred million volts of electricity."

"No, it's hydrotherapy," he said. " 'I do not laugh, I do not cry; / I'm sweating out the will to die.'"

"Whoa, Ted," I said. "Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark. You want to come in and maybe make a phone call to a loved one?"

He shook his head no. I went back to my chair and sat down. The mist came and went. In ten minutes, a car pulled up behind him, and a man got out and led him into the car, and they drove away.

I went inside, and I got in bed next to some anthologies and W. S. Merwin's
The Vixen
and slept quite well.

W. S. M
ERWIN SAID
his mother read poetry to him. Well, mine did, too. Several times my mother read me Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." Percy Shelley, played by William Shatner, is riding in some caravan across a mental desert, and he comes to two enormous carved ankles and calves that tower above him. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," say the words carved into the pedestal, in some lost language. Carl Orff's
Carmina Burana
is playing its great hollow choral chords in the background, as it always does.

My mother came to the last line. She read, "The lone and level sands stretch far away." Present tense. An instance, there, of the necessary compression and deformation of speech: "lone" doesn't quite make sense. Shelley had in mind the isolated, the forlorn, the lonely, ruined, sandy scene--but the meter called for one syllable, and so he wrote "lone," which is perfect. Lone and level.

I have to warn you, though: There is a most painful enjambment in "Ozymandias." Because of this one enjambment, I can almost not bear to read the poem as printed on its page. Which is another good argument for memorizing-- if you memorize, you can loop through just the parts of a poem you like, without having the flawed lines flaunt themselves for your eye.

What is enjambment? Enjambment is the key to the whole conundrum. The word originally comes from an old French word,
"jambon."
"Jambon" means ham. Anytime Ronsard or one of those French troubador poets used enjambment, they flung a slice of ham at him. Ronsard learned his lesson and wrote some really nice love songs.

No, very briefly, enjambment is a word that means that you're wending your way along a line of poetry, and you're walking right out to the very end of the line, way out, and it's all going fine, and you're expecting the syntax to give you a polite tap on the shoulder to wait for a moment. Just a second, sir, or madam, while we rhyme, or come to the end of our phrasal unit, or whatever. While we rest. But instead the syntax pokes at you and says hustle it, pumpkin, keep walking, don't rest. So naturally, because you're stepping out onto nothingness, you fall. You tumble forward, gaaaah, and you end up all discombobulated at the beginning of the next line, with a banana peel on your head and some coffee grounds in your shirt pocket. In other words, you're "jammed" into the next line--that's what enjambment is. So in the case of "Ozymandias," second line, you've got "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone"--end of line, we need to pause, but no, keep moving, woopsie doodle, next line--"
Stand
in the desert." Ouch.