Read Online The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online
Authors: Nicholson Baker
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Humorous, Fiction - General, Man-Woman Relationships, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), General & Literary Fiction, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Poets
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and vapidity of it will stun you. "The shades of summer's bosky hue, o'erlie thy modest floobie doo." The editors of The Century didn't expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling-- peer! peer!
And yet we still want more. There's still that craving. Give us more, give us new. The hope. The hope that really does: it springs eternal. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." That's clean crisp iambic pentameter. And I have some tips to pass on to you about iambic pentameter, how it's all a misnomer, as I said. But that's for later.
"Dear Paul Muldoon, Here's some new work, I hope you like it, all the best, Paul." Boy, I wish he didn't have my own name.
I USED TO SIT there in class, breathing, wondering, What's the teacher going to think of next? What's she going to teach us? Anything? I don't know. I'm just sitting here. I have no idea what's coming next.
And one time, she said, Today we're going to learn something new, and this thing is called "haiku." She wrote it on the board. And I thought, Interesting word, "haiku." Nice K.
Somebody discovered haiku way back about a hundred years ago. Obviously it existed for a very long time in Japan, but he discovered it in English. What was his name, that poet? Not Edwin Arlington Robinson. One of those guys who is known now for discovering haiku. And he called it: HOKKU. Hokku. He decided that hokku was a powerful force for order in English.
And he was wrong.
But I didn't know that. We're all sitting in the class, at these new desks. This was the sixties, and there were new desks that had recently come in, which had nice metal casters. They moved very smoothly over the linoleum of the floor. They didn't make the elephant trumpeting sounds that the wooden chairs made. They slid. And we were sitting at these smooth-sliding desks. Sun was pouring in. And they did have a groove to put your pencil in. Although I never put the pencil there.
In some cases they had an under area. Where you looked under, and there were months of your spelling worksheets crushed in. When the teacher told you to clean out your desk you just reached your hand in and you were like an excavator and you grabbed the crumpled paper and you just pulled it out and let it fall directly into the trash can.
So the teacher said: we're going to learn something new today. A new way of writing poetry. It's called haiku. And it's going to allow you --to make art.
And it has a couple of different lines, three lines, and one line has some arbitrary number of syllables, and another line has another arbitrary number of syllables, et cetera. And I heard her describing this, and I knew, even then. I knew even then that it was bogus.
This, children, is a kind of poetry that makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense whatsoever in English. That's what she should have told us. This form is completely out of step with the English language. And the person who foisted it on us--that person was a demon. Even at the time I knew that it wasn't right. Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn't work that way. I don't actually know Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.
And yet Basho was good--even in translation he is still good. And I've read haiku poems in English that have an interesting tripartite squashedness to them. A few years ago Roz and her best friend from college wrote emails back and forth to each other in haiku. They had a fun time doing
And yet we still want more. There's still that craving. Give us more, give us new. The hope. The hope that really does: it springs eternal. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." That's clean crisp iambic pentameter. And I have some tips to pass on to you about iambic pentameter, how it's all a misnomer, as I said. But that's for later.
"Dear Paul Muldoon, Here's some new work, I hope you like it, all the best, Paul." Boy, I wish he didn't have my own name.
I USED TO SIT there in class, breathing, wondering, What's the teacher going to think of next? What's she going to teach us? Anything? I don't know. I'm just sitting here. I have no idea what's coming next.
And one time, she said, Today we're going to learn something new, and this thing is called "haiku." She wrote it on the board. And I thought, Interesting word, "haiku." Nice K.
Somebody discovered haiku way back about a hundred years ago. Obviously it existed for a very long time in Japan, but he discovered it in English. What was his name, that poet? Not Edwin Arlington Robinson. One of those guys who is known now for discovering haiku. And he called it: HOKKU. Hokku. He decided that hokku was a powerful force for order in English.
And he was wrong.
But I didn't know that. We're all sitting in the class, at these new desks. This was the sixties, and there were new desks that had recently come in, which had nice metal casters. They moved very smoothly over the linoleum of the floor. They didn't make the elephant trumpeting sounds that the wooden chairs made. They slid. And we were sitting at these smooth-sliding desks. Sun was pouring in. And they did have a groove to put your pencil in. Although I never put the pencil there.
In some cases they had an under area. Where you looked under, and there were months of your spelling worksheets crushed in. When the teacher told you to clean out your desk you just reached your hand in and you were like an excavator and you grabbed the crumpled paper and you just pulled it out and let it fall directly into the trash can.
So the teacher said: we're going to learn something new today. A new way of writing poetry. It's called haiku. And it's going to allow you --to make art.
And it has a couple of different lines, three lines, and one line has some arbitrary number of syllables, and another line has another arbitrary number of syllables, et cetera. And I heard her describing this, and I knew, even then. I knew even then that it was bogus.
This, children, is a kind of poetry that makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense whatsoever in English. That's what she should have told us. This form is completely out of step with the English language. And the person who foisted it on us--that person was a demon. Even at the time I knew that it wasn't right. Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn't work that way. I don't actually know Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.
And yet Basho was good--even in translation he is still good. And I've read haiku poems in English that have an interesting tripartite squashedness to them. A few years ago Roz and her best friend from college wrote emails back and forth to each other in haiku. They had a fun time doing
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