Short, Sweet, Easy to Eat

Nicholson Baker has long been one of my favorite writers, every since I read his weirdly wonderful novel The Mezzanine years ago. In his latest novel, The Anthologist, Baker's protagonist is Paul Chowder, an anthologist charged with writing the introduction to a collection of poems. Chowder, however, has a severe case of writer's block, and can't seem to manage to eke out the 10-12 pages he needs to write. Instead, he finds himself explaining poetry--what it is, how it works, why it's wonderful.

Why it's wonderful is because Nicholson Baker is writing about it, and he has a gift for language unsurpassed by any living writer, in my opinion. Even non-poetry lovers will appreciate his humor and insight, and they'll learn some things about poems in the process, and a great deal about the art of writing, too. This is one of those books where I found myself sticky-noting passages to return to later (of course, half those sticky notes fell off when I was reading in bed and got stuck in my hair while I slept, but nevertheless).

The irony, of course, in Paul Chowder's life, is that for all the time he spends explicating the art of poetry, he could have easily finished his assignment (not unlike some high school students I know who spend more time complaining than researching). Thank god he doesn't, because his observations are much more interesting. One of my favorites is his criticism of haiku, a poetic form that I've never really liked. And here it is, the reason why, perfectly articulated: "This is the kind of poetry that makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense whatsoever in English. That's what [the teacher] should have told us. This form is completely out of step with the English language. Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on, how does English poetry actually work. It doesn't work that way. I don't know Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation."

My nephew, Thomas, is just a month shy of his fourth birthday, and has become fascinated by rhymes in recent months, making Paul Chowder's commentary on rhyming especially poignant in a kind of an "a-ha! so that's why rhymes are so much fun!" kind of way. "The tongue is a rhyming fool," Baker writes. "It wants to rhyme because that's how it stores what it knows. It's got a detailed checklist for every consonant and vowel...and somewhere in there, on some neural net in your underconsciousness, stored away, all these checklists, or neuromuscular profiles, or call them sound curves, are stored away, like the parts of car bodies, or spoons, with similar shapes nested near each other...what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain..." Well, that's probably more complicated than anything Thomas understands, but it works for me. Chances are, it works for you, too.