Is a poet still a poet if he spends most of his time sitting in a white plastic chair in his driveway? If he promises to write an introduction to a poetry anthology but avoids writing and instead riffs on poetry and poems, digressing to the point of absurdity? That's the set-up for Nicholson Baker's latest novel,
The Anthologist, and it's not only quite funny, but psychologically true-to-life.
You may not realize that authors are often asked by their publicists to make up a Q&A sheet of their own. In this post, I'd like to share a bit about Baker's writing process that I gleaned from just such a pre-written interview.
First of all, reading The Anthologist, threaded throughout with mini-lectures on poets and poetry, you have to wonder if Baker is a hidden poet himself or whether he researched those parts. He only had one poem published, he admits, in The New Yorker more than a decade ago. He claims that he's gone through several bursts of poetry reading in his life and also long periods where he didn't read any at all. "I always think better when I read poetry," he claims. He used to carry around The New Yorker Book of Poems and read it on his lunch hours. He says he's always been curious about why rhyme largely died out for a while in the 20th century.
IS HE SERIOUS?
When I shared the novel with my husband Stephen (a New Yorker-published poet himself), we discussed how much Baker agrees with his narrator, Paul Chowder. Stephen laughed a lot as he read, less for Chowder's preferring rhyme and more for the crazy scansion. I believed Baker was utterly serious when he wrote about poetry, in spite of the comical and unexpected digressions and details. So how much does Baker agree with his narrator?
Chowder is confused and conflicted about many things, as I am. I've always basically wanted poems to rhyme, and to have a recognizable metrical thump to them. When I look at a poem in a magazine I do a quick check to see whether it's a rhymer or not by skimming down the ragged right edge. I grew up on A.A. Milne, Edward Lear, the Beatles, and Dr. Seuss, and they were all tremendous jinglers, and I was scandalized in fourth grade when our very nice teacher said "It doesn't have to rhyme." Of course it does! And yet there's no question that a lot of the writing that really helps us to see the strange beauties of the world is unrhyming poetry. When it's good, a rhyme is a miracle. When it's bad it's really bad.
In the novel, Paul Chowder also says: "One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you're at a beginning.... And that's what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth." Baker says his narrative style, with its multiple digressions and affection for the minutiae of the world, attempts to achieve this quality in prose form. And he also loves
the "Chapter One" sensation of starting a novel -- the drop capital of the first letter, the non-indented first line, the sensation of late breakfast in a sunny foreign cafe. When I'm fifty pages or eighty pages in I begin to miss the beginningness.
The last book Baker published, Human Smoke, is a nonfiction work about the roots of the Second World War. As to whether he prefers writing fiction to nonfiction, he says, "It's good to go back and forth -- one kind of writing feeds your head and one empties it."
Finally, as to what Baker is really trying to do with all his writing, he has this to say:
I have the basic writerly urge to tell the truth. I want it to be really big truth but I'm a realist. Some of the biggest truths have already been said -- for instance, "Life is short" -- and so you have to take circuitous routes. You have enter the heart via the leg artery, the way surgeons do.
- Hear Baker talk about The Anthologist in a 46-minute podcast.
