And yesterday I took it off the refrigerator and I made two copies of it. One I mailed to Nan with a Post-it saying, "This is the poem I mentioned." And one I mailed to Roz, saying, "This is a good one. Miss you, hope you're feeling better -P."
And as I mailed the Fenton poems out I thought: See that? It's happening. The transformation, the rediscovery, the renewal. It's happening already. It's so exciting. It's all cycling around. Fenton's been doing it. My little attempts to write poems that rhyme-unnecessary. My whole career- unnecessary. Because this Fenton poem is out. Good for him. Good for good old Jamesie. I thought of writing him a letter, and I thought, Well, you know, then he'll have to write me a letter, and it'll be one of those replies where he'll be compelled to say, "Coming from you, that's high praise indeed." Or not-and if he doesn't say "coming from you" I'll be hurt-feelinged, so I thought, Forget it. But I also thought: My life has been in vain and yet not in vain because I've had the pleasure of seeing the whole movement come full circle. I've lived through the thirty-year ascendancy of chaos and tunelessness, and things are moving back now. It was a mistake to suppress rhyme so completely, a mistake to forget about the necessary tapping of the toe, but it was a useful mistake, a beautiful mistake, because it taught us new things. It loosened people up and made other discoveries possible.
I don't have to say any of that in the introduction, though. The introduction can be quite short. Forty pages? Forget forty pages. How many people read introductions to poetry anthologies, anyway? Hardly anyone. I do, but I'm not normal. It doesn't actually matter what I say. Short is best. It should just read: "Welcome to this anthology of rhymed poetry by dead and living poets. I hope you find some things here you like. Thanks so much for your attention. And now-on with the show."
Only Rhyme would of course define me as an anthologist-i.e., as a lost soul who turned in despair to the publishing of other people's work-like old Oscar Williams. Old Father Oscar. Sure, Williams got a friendly blurb from Dylan Thomas, but everybody knew his warbling days were done. Still, I think I could live with that.
The real problem is that I've had to leave known poets out. Some of them are alive and old. A few of them I've met and like. They have strophed and sonneted and upheld the traditional ideals. All that's missing from their work is greatness-the elusive rupasnil. They're clumsy rhymers. They're over-enjambers. Their lines are clotted with wrongness of several kinds. They're following the old rules on paper, but they don't hear them-they don't understand the body-logic behind them. Some of them, when they discover that I've left them out, will be wounded. And I don't want to wound them.
If I don't write the introduction, then the anthology can't come out, and then the inept but well-meaning recent rhymers won't have their feelings hurt. Which would be better all around.
Tim called and said that he'd sent Killer Queen off to the publisher.
I WENT OVER to Roz's apartment with Smacko, because she was going to be taking care of him while I was in Switzerland. She was getting out of her car in the shade of a maple tree. She'd just come back from Red Leaf, a vegetable store out near Exeter. She lowered her head to the grocery bag she held and she breathed in. She said, "Don't you love the smell of brown paper bags filled with raw vegetables?"
I leaned and smelled inside the bag. "Yes, I like it very much," I said. Trying to stay on an even keel but feeling a lot of love for her and wanting to lie down on the sidewalk as a result.
She stood, smiling, waiting for me to say something more. I handed her the beads, wrapped droopily in tissue. "Just something I strung for you, don't open it now."
She thanked me, and then she tilted her face up and I kissed her quickly, pretend-perfunctorily. "Good luck in Switzerland," she said.
16
THE ADDRESS of the Tip O'Neill building is 10 Causeway Street. It may be torn down soon, because it is one of the most wonderfully unsightly buildings ever constructed. In the eighties they blew up a grand hotel that had gone seedy, and in its place they built this shrine to Congressman Tip O'Neill. It houses all the federal offices-the office of Social Security, and the Firearms Legitimization Bureau, the Bioshock Informant Management Corps, and the Soy Protein Tax Credit Administration, and the Federal Security Corn Slab Ektachrome Mediocrity Desk, plus another twelve important outposts of American impotence. And it has wireless Internet.
There was a guard dog inside who was leading around a man with a flat-top haircut. The man's job was to help the dog sniff out suspicious things. I sent my suitcase through the theft detector and emptied my pockets of everything, and they passed the wand over my genitalia, and then the guard said: "Pull your pants legs up, please, so I can see your socks." So I did. They were Thorlos, and they wicked away foot sweat like nobody's tomorrow. Roz gave them to me for Christmas two years ago.
There was Plexiglas an inch thick at the passport office on the second floor. A man in a neat blue State Department blazer asked me some polite questions, and then he clipped my papers together with a comically large paper clip and told me to wait till I heard my number. So I waited. An English mother and her four-year-old girl were there, and the girl had a stuffed baby tiger that, when she squeezed it, meowed. "Did you hear that animal noise?" said a woman. Another woman said: "I think it was the tiger." And the first woman nodded, reassured.
Then my number came up, and a wide man said I would get my passport at three o'clock. So I went up to the sixth floor and bought a tuna sub. The man who sold it to me leaned very close to the keys when he was ringing up my order. His seeing-eye dog sat with very good dog posture behind him on a Polartec blanket. I thanked him and thought the world was an okay place.
Then I went down to the atrium, and I sat and ate the sandwich, looking at a mural of huge blowups of Tip O'Neill smiling with presidents and senators.
After a while I called Roz and told her I was eating a very good submarine sandwich in the Tip O'Neill building and that I'd grown fond of the building and I didn't want to leave it and fly to Switzerland and give a master class on being a poet or be in a panel discussion on the meters of love, because I had nothing to tell them.
"Just tell them why you like poetry," Roz said.
"I'm not at all sure I do like poetry," I said.
"Yes, you do. I know you. You just need some sleep, that's all."
I was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Is Todd being helpful and nice?" I asked. Rather maliciously. Todd was the man whom she'd gone out with a few times. He was an ex-software person who now owned an art gallery in Exeter and wore soft expensive corduroy shirts.
"He's not particularly nice, but he is helpful," she said.
"Oh," I said.
I asked her if I should consider having an affair with a poet in Switzerland, assuming I could find a poet to have an affair with. Trying to be carelessly flirtatious, blowing it.
She sounded surprised. "Do you want to?"
"There would be pain and suffering after," I said. "Probably not. I'm just asking."
Roz hesitated. She said: "I would say-don't."
"Okay," I said. "Thanks for your advice."
"You know of course that I love you," she said.
I SHOWED the airport guards my stiff blue passport and they didn't say, Sir, this document is laughably new-this document didn't even exist a few hours ago. No, they waved me on. I popped into the airport bookstore, which was clean with blond wood going way up to the ceiling. It was the best airport bookstore I'd ever been in, and I liked it so much that I bought John Ashbery's latest book of poems, even though I don't need more books of poetry and can't afford them. Ashbery's photo was on the back, and I saw that he was looking older and even a little bit witchlike now with a downturned mouth. He was born in 1927. He has won every poetry prize known to man or beast, and he was part of that whole ultracool inhuman unreal absurdist fluorescent world of the sixties and seventies in New York. Once he'd edited an art magazine, Art News. Even his name is coolly, absurdly, missing one of its Rs.