Read Online Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online Page B

wince to remember. It was a poem I’d written in college. My creative writing teacher, a taciturn but fair-minded man, wrote, “I’m a bit baffled by this. To be frank, it’s boring.”
    Well, yes, it was boring. But I was undeterred, and I sent it to fifteen places, and
Bird Effort
published it, and after that I wrote much shorter poems.
    I’ve written three more poems about clouds since then. I can’t get enough of them. I am drawn to describe them even though I know it’s futile. They’re different every day. Debussy liked clouds. The first movement of his
Nocturnes
is called “Nuages.” He also liked sunken cathedrals. He died when he was fifty-five.
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    I ’M PARKED by the salt pile now. It sits here all summer, waiting for winter, when it will be dribbled out onto the roads and sometimes poison the roots of the trees.
    All systems go. Boink. I’m ready. Thanks. Good.
    Greetings, this is Chowder’s Poetry Slurp, and I’m here to welcome you to another show in which we talk about the world of freelance hydroponics. I’m Paul Chowder, your harbormaster, confidant, and co-conspirator. And I hope that you will sit back and close your eyes and just let the poetry wash over you. Just let it pass over you in a lethal tide of poetical merriment. You are the sunken cathedral, my friend. This is PRI, Public Radio International.
    â€œThe Sunken Cathedral” is the name of a piece for solo piano by Claude Debussy. The experts say that it is based on a Breton folktale about the lost cathedral city of Ys—rhymes with “cease”—which allegedly sank beneath the waves one day when a woman stole the key to the seawall and the floodgates opened. But the experts don’t know what they’re talking about in this case. They’re making it up. I’ve found this to be true over and over—the experts often don’t know anything useful, really. First all women should have breast X-rays once a year and then, no, that’s bad. First women should take hormone pills after menopause, then no. First we should eat eggs. Then, no, eggs are bad because they have cholesterol. Then, no, eggs are good because they give you good cholesterol. And the advice is offered with such arrogant assurance. Roz’s radio show is undermining some of that arrogance, and that’s a good thing.
    I talked to Gene, my editor, today, and when he asked I told him that I was making steady progress on my book of prosaic plums and that I now had a title for it:
Misery Hat
. I’ve sat on that poem all these years. It hurt that Peter Davison rejected it, and I turned against it and forgot about it. But I read it recently and thought it had some reasonably good turns, S-turns. Dryden has a nice passage about the French way of praising the turns in Virgil and Ovid: “
Delicat et bien tourné
are the highest commendation which they bestow on somewhat which they think a masterpiece.”
    Forget it, never mind, it doesn’t matter.
    â€œMisery Hat,”
said my editor. “Interesting title.” I knew he didn’t like it. I could hear that slight catch in his voice. But he’s happy with me right now because
Only Rhyme
is still selling.
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    Y OU THINK this is all a game, don’t you? Well, it isn’t. It’s serious. I helped my dog Smacko into the car—he resists getting in the back seat and he’s a little stiff these days—and I drove to Fort McClary with my music on shuffle. The Gap Band came on, singing “Early in the Morning.” I hadn’t really listened to the words before. For years, bizarrely, I paid almost no attention to the words in pop songs, even in Beatles songs. I heard them, and I could sometimes recite them, but I didn’t care what they were about—they were just semi-random vocalizations over a chordal groove