Read Online The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online Page A
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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it. So what am I fussing about?
A FTER WE ALL LEARNED how to do haiku, the teacher said, And now children, today we're going to write a poem in something called free verse. It can be a poem about bumblebees, or a poem about shadows. It can be a poem about making muffins. Brownies. An egg hatching. The woodpecker's eye. In fact, it can be a poem about anything fun and beautiful and deep and sad and wondrous and strange and interesting and true and perfect and maybe even a little bit frightening. And you have to write it. I'm assigning it to you. And here's the one thing I'm going to tell you.
One thing. Here's my so very important piece of wisdom, that I'm going to impart to you now. This is the wisdom. Are you ready, children?
It--Doesn't--Have--To--Rhyme. No, it doesn't have to rhyme! Don't trammel yourself, don't crib and confine yourself, by rhyme. It doesn't have to rhyme. Because you want your poem to burble up. You want it to flow out, as a newborn self. Like a little sprout of a tulip bud, just busting out of the earth.
Now, of course, I think: tulips rhyme. One tulip leaf goes this way, and the other tulip leaf goes that way. Their forms talk to each other. There's symmetry. There's a central stalk, and there's mirroring. Most definitely the tulip rhymes. Nature is full of rhymes.
But never mind, this was the axiom that she was passing on to us, because she'd learned it from the culture at large. "It doesn't have to rhyme." And in imparting this she was promising us that all the pantries of art, all the breakfast nooks of art, were going to be opened up to us hencefor-ward. She was flinging open the window for us, and those gingham curtains were just billowing and we could smell the pies cooling there on the sunny windowsills of child-hood.
What did she really mean by "It doesn't have to rhyme?" Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant Don't rhyme. She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote "FREE VERSE" on the board.
And I sat there on my chair with the very smooth casters and I thought, What does she mean it doesn't have to rhyme? It does have to rhyme! It's got to rhyme, because rhyme is poetry. Where did Little Miss Muffet sit? Did she sit on a cushion? Did she sit on a love seat? No, she sat on a tuffet. And if it doesn't rhyme it's just guano. "Guano" was one of my favorite words back then--I'd learned it from Tintin.
But I said nothing, like the craven fourth-grader I was. I went ahead and wrote a poem. It was free verse, but it had one rhyme at the end. It was about a droplet of water quivering gracefully at the end of the tap before falling into "the land they call / Disposal." It was a terrible poem. But my mother liked it, and it was remarkably easy to write. And that was the beginning of my career.
M Y FATHER WORKED in the legal department of a company that made industrial mirrors. He was a good explainer and a soapbox-derby enthusiast. He explained to me how lasers worked, and when I started reading poems in college he often looked over my shoulder and said, "What are you reading--a poem?" He knew John Masefield's "Cargoes" by heart, and E. E. Cummings's poem about the watersmooth silver stallion, and he would recite them with his fists clenched if we asked him to. His motto was: "Don't force it." He died only a year after my mother did. I miss them both every day.
Tennyson's father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems. Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all?
A FTER WE ALL LEARNED how to do haiku, the teacher said, And now children, today we're going to write a poem in something called free verse. It can be a poem about bumblebees, or a poem about shadows. It can be a poem about making muffins. Brownies. An egg hatching. The woodpecker's eye. In fact, it can be a poem about anything fun and beautiful and deep and sad and wondrous and strange and interesting and true and perfect and maybe even a little bit frightening. And you have to write it. I'm assigning it to you. And here's the one thing I'm going to tell you.
One thing. Here's my so very important piece of wisdom, that I'm going to impart to you now. This is the wisdom. Are you ready, children?
It--Doesn't--Have--To--Rhyme. No, it doesn't have to rhyme! Don't trammel yourself, don't crib and confine yourself, by rhyme. It doesn't have to rhyme. Because you want your poem to burble up. You want it to flow out, as a newborn self. Like a little sprout of a tulip bud, just busting out of the earth.
Now, of course, I think: tulips rhyme. One tulip leaf goes this way, and the other tulip leaf goes that way. Their forms talk to each other. There's symmetry. There's a central stalk, and there's mirroring. Most definitely the tulip rhymes. Nature is full of rhymes.
But never mind, this was the axiom that she was passing on to us, because she'd learned it from the culture at large. "It doesn't have to rhyme." And in imparting this she was promising us that all the pantries of art, all the breakfast nooks of art, were going to be opened up to us hencefor-ward. She was flinging open the window for us, and those gingham curtains were just billowing and we could smell the pies cooling there on the sunny windowsills of child-hood.
What did she really mean by "It doesn't have to rhyme?" Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant Don't rhyme. She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote "FREE VERSE" on the board.
And I sat there on my chair with the very smooth casters and I thought, What does she mean it doesn't have to rhyme? It does have to rhyme! It's got to rhyme, because rhyme is poetry. Where did Little Miss Muffet sit? Did she sit on a cushion? Did she sit on a love seat? No, she sat on a tuffet. And if it doesn't rhyme it's just guano. "Guano" was one of my favorite words back then--I'd learned it from Tintin.
But I said nothing, like the craven fourth-grader I was. I went ahead and wrote a poem. It was free verse, but it had one rhyme at the end. It was about a droplet of water quivering gracefully at the end of the tap before falling into "the land they call / Disposal." It was a terrible poem. But my mother liked it, and it was remarkably easy to write. And that was the beginning of my career.
M Y FATHER WORKED in the legal department of a company that made industrial mirrors. He was a good explainer and a soapbox-derby enthusiast. He explained to me how lasers worked, and when I started reading poems in college he often looked over my shoulder and said, "What are you reading--a poem?" He knew John Masefield's "Cargoes" by heart, and E. E. Cummings's poem about the watersmooth silver stallion, and he would recite them with his fists clenched if we asked him to. His motto was: "Don't force it." He died only a year after my mother did. I miss them both every day.
Tennyson's father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems. Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all?
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