The Anthologist

  Oh, plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don’t want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself. I want everything to be all right.

  What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn’t that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability—and I get to hold them? That’s simply insane. Inconceivable.

  12

  SOMETIMES I’LL SPEND an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I’ve created the illusion that I’ve dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it’ll look more casual. I don’t know why.

  Swinburne didn’t have that problem with email. Swinburne was remarkably prolific. In fact, he glutted the world with verse. He died in 1909, which is really the crucial year in the war between rhyme and unrhyme. Rhyme won each engagement before then. 1909 was the year, as we know, that Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. Futurism became all the thing in London, among the sophisticates. A little splinter group of tough-talking converts began meeting. They called themselves the Secession Club. Some of them wrote for a certain magazine, The New Age, whose editor was a man named Alfred Orage. Orage believed that rhyme and meter were the ruff collars and doublet jackets of poetry—mere fashions, superfluities. In the Secession Club there was a man named Flint and a man named Hulme and a man named Storer. And a man named Ezra Pound.

  Swinburne was the greatest rhymer who ever lived, and Futurism was the breaking open and desecrating and graffitiing of Swinburne’s tomb.

  How much do you know about Swinburne? Probably not that much. Tiny little guy. Nervous. Brilliant. Red hair. Loved babies, loved peering into perambulators. Wrote some exceptionally mawkish verse about babies. Deaf for the last twenty years of his life, and still writing poetry in the silence. Nobody had much to say about him when I was in college. He was like Vachel Lindsay, out of fashion. Browning? Sure. Meredith? Sure. Hardy? Sure. Dickinson? Sure. But Swinburne was not part of the big sweep.

  And even now—take a look at this book. I’ll block off the title so you have to guess what it is. Familiar design, I daresay. The little dude at the chalkboard? Yes, it’s Poetry for Dummies. And it isn’t a bad book. Do you know how hard it is to write a book like this? It’s so hard. It’s a terrible struggle; you fight with the Balrog through flame and waste and worry and incontinence and tedium. The Balrog of too-much-to-say. I’ve always liked the dummies books. I’ve got Photoshop for Dummies, and I learned a lot from it. The dummies’ day may be passing, though. Too much yellow all over Barnes & Noble.

  But now let’s try something. Let’s look up Algernon Charles Swinburne in the index of Poetry for Dummies, shall we? I’ve already done this so I know what’s going to happen. But let’s try it.

  See that? Swinburne’s not in the index. Algernon Charles Swinburne has been left out of Poetry for Dummies. And that’s what I mean. Swinburne, the nineteenth century’s King of Pain, the greatest rhymer in the history of human literature, has been lost to casual view. Without Swinburne, Lorenz Hart and Gershwin and Dorothy Field and the Great American Songbook would not sound the way they sound. And modernism would not have had the thrilling negative energy it had. You can’t understand what all those early modern Futurist poets were in revolt against if you don’t know about him. Swinburne says:

  If you were queen of pleasure

  And I were king of pain

  Doesn’t that give you a strange shudder? “If you were queen of pleasure (rest), and I were king of pain (rest),”

  We’d hunt down love together,

  Pluck out his flying-feather,

  And teach his feet a measure,

  And find his mouth a rein;

  If you were queen of pleasure,

  And I were king of pain.

  Pretty good, eh? What is it? It’s a four-beat line—three beats and a rest. Good with an inevitable step-slide of goodness to it.

  Swinburne loved the old playwrights, where everyone ends up sprawled in a bloody heap. Once when he was drunk at the British Museum, he had some sort of seizure and cut his head and had to be carried out unconscious and bleeding by the guards. He had a decent shot at the poet laureateship, since he was far and away the most gifted living poet, but he didn’t make it. Tennyson died and he, Swinburne, was quietly not chosen. Tennyson was morbid and strange, but Queen Victoria had been able to straighten his collar. And Tennyson had obliged by flipping on all the spigots and filling tankards with blank verse about King Arthur and the Round Table. But Swinburne couldn’t be cleaned up. His collar couldn’t be straightened. He was too strange, too sexually unaligned. One of his poems had to be printed with asterisks in place of half a stanza. All about “large loins.”

  What he could do was rhyme better than anybody. Deaf? Didn’t matter. He heard what he needed to hear. Not only did he rhyme, he danced new dance steps while he rhymed. He mixed rhythms in a way nobody had done before. He was good at a certain kind of crooning, singing pulse, with the rhymes coming poom, pom, ching, chong. Nobody else came close to him in this. His sound was everywhere. It was trance music. It went around and around in your brain.

  A land that is lonelier than ruin,

  A sea that is stranger than death

  Far fields that a rose never blew in,

  Wan waste where the winds lack breath

  Try writing your own couplets or rondeaus or what-you-wills after you’ve spent a day reading Swinburne. It’s not easy. Louise Bogan was swimming in Swinburne’s music when she began. Archibald MacLeish said in a letter that he’d gotten Swinburne in his head and couldn’t get rid of him. Sara Teas-dale said Swinburne had invented a new kind of melody. John Masefield said he was possessed by Swinburne and by Swinburne’s teacher, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Even Ezra Pound started off by writing Swinburne imitations—till he turned on him. A. E. Housman said that Swinburne’s rhyming facility was unparalleled: “He seemed to have ransacked all the treasuries of the language and melted down the whole plunder into a new and gorgeous amalgam.” You can hear Swinburne muttering behind the curtain in Dylan Thomas—“Altarwise by Owl Light” is a drunken version of Swinburne.

  And Swinburne’s big problem was that he wrote way, way, way too much. Any selection from his poetry is just a hint of the fluently tumbled profusion. Every song, every poem that he wrote was fully five times as long as it should have been. The rhymes and chimes kept coming. Internal, external. That’s why he’s so important to the twentieth century. Swinburne was like the application of too much fertilizer to a very green lawn.

  THAT HAPPENED to one of my neighbors, Alan. Alan lives on the far side of Nan. His lawn glowed—it was a perfect malachite green. No weeds, uniform blade density, always mowed to the right height. He thought a lot about it. He tolerated my lawn, but I suspect that it made him unhappy. My lawn has weedy areas, pussy clover, dandelions. Roz told me that’s what it’s called, pussy clover. She knows the names of many plants. I let some of it grow tall because I like it. But Alan wanted his grass pure.

  About five summers ago, Alan applied some kind of special very expensive fertilizer. He thought: This is going to take my lawn to the next level of lushness. But it must have been a bad bag, because a week after he applied it you could see big brownish yellow patches where something had gone wrong. The patches spread. They merged. Alan’s lawn died. For two years after he applied it, the turf glinted like gold Brillo pads. There was no green left in it, and when you walked on its edge, it made a crunching sound of death. I don’t think even the earthworms were alive underneath.

  This isn’t exactly what happened to poetry. Poetry didn’t die. But Swinburne did drive his two-wheeled rhyme-spreader wagon all over the nineteenth century, and by the end of it he had gone back and forth and back and forth with his stanzas and his quatrains and his couplets and his lyrics and his parodies a
nd everything else. It seemed like every word in English that could be rhymed in some melodious way he had rhymed. Some of the words, like “sea” and “rain,” he’d rhymed hundreds of times. Rhyme words can’t be used up, but even so, this was too much.

  It took Alan years to get his grass back. Only this year is it again looking green and almost perfect. Poetry is still recovering from Swinburne.

  I SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE with a tray that came from an order of Chinese food in front of me—clean—on which tiny beads rolled around. I tied a knot in the jeweler’s wire. It’s made of very fine wire threads woven together somehow so that it doesn’t kink the way real wire does, but it’s very strong.

  I started to bead. The verb made sense. I was beading. What you do is pick up a bead and turn it for a while between the huge clumsy pillows of your good finger and your thumb, looking for the hole. You turn it until the shadow of the hole, or the light appearing through the hole, comes into view, and then you know where to insert the end of the wire. As soon as it’s on, you lose interest in it and let it slip down and away, and you’re on to the next one. Revising is difficult.

  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 Léonie 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 Léonie 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.