What I'm doing when I'm writing poetry is I'm trying to make a little side salad. Just the right amount of sprouts on the top, maybe a chickpea or two. No bacon. Maybe a slice of egg. It doesn't feel like writing at all. If you're writing, say, a book review or an essay, it's sequential. You type out some notes to figure out more or less what you're going to say. And then you find a place to start, which becomes the beginning, and you wander off in search of the end. But with a poem, you're in the middle, and then you're at the end, and then back at the beginning, all with your eyes. You're always looking at the same piece of paper. One single piece of paper is stretched out there in front of you, the lyric poem, as big as the salt flats in Utah, where fearless Craig Breedlove drove his jet-powered car at six hundred miles an hour. Remember him, back in the sixties? I loved his name, Breedlove.
Or maybe you don't use paper at all-maybe you're taking a walk after dinner and a few beers, like A. E. Housman, and you're writing it in your head, to the four-beat rhythm of your footsteps: "White in the moon the long road lies."
If it's a long poem, you're using paper, of course, but I don't count those long poems because I think most of them have very little that's good in them. They can all be cut down to a few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage.
So that's writing poems. But I have had these certain few times in my life when I've been very interested in reading poetry. I used to read a big padded glove-leather edition of Tennyson on lunch break every day when I worked for a mutual fund. It was red, and for some reason it was padded like a Victorian settee. I think you were meant to give it as a present, maybe in the 1890s, to prove to your girlfriend that you were a thoughtful swain. Somebody had written in it "To Edie from Bart." It had the word Tennyson on the front in diagonally embossed script, and it was as heavy and soft as a catcher's mitt. You could thump it with your fist. Hurl it at me, Alfred Lord, baby. Smack me with that fastball of a "low large moon."
So I read that. And when I quit my job at the mutual fund I bought The New Yorker Book of Poems-the big yellow book-and I discovered Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Moss. Snodgrass, Kunitz, Nemerov, and Moss. Those were my four poets, for a while. And so I would read those guys. Mainly Moss. Moss was in his lovely self-effacing way a genius. You could hear notes of Wallace Stevens in him, and sometimes Bishop, and sometimes even Auden, but he was able to give it his own sad, affectionate jostle. Moss was the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and he was a modest man, so none of his own poems were actually in the big yellow anthology-but it was his book nonetheless. And I remember reading Snodgrass's poem about the lobster lifting its claw in the window and being tremendously excited. I had to keep peeking at it as I walked home. And even before that, in Paris, in the thirteenth arrondissement, where I lived in my junior year on the eleventh floor of a very tall, very flimsy apartment building, I read the poems in the Oscar Williams anthology, the one with the psychedelic raven on the cover. On Saturdays I'd wake up and read from the Oscar Williams anthology, and then I'd look for a long time at the eye of the psychedelic raven and listen to last night's wine bottles come hurtling down the garbage chute. There were notices next to every apartment's garbage chute saying "Please don't put wine bottles down the garbage chute," but people loved to do it. I'd hear the bottles come racketing down, and then silence. I could never hear them hit bottom, which was a little frustrating.
And then again recently. Last year I read a ton of poetry when I was working on my anthology. I mean a ton: way too much, probably. I own an alarming number of poetry books at this point, including maybe seventy-five anthologies, possibly more. I've been packing some of the books up that are piled in the hall. Taking them out to the first floor of the barn. That's one of my projects. Get them out of my life so that I can yearn for them again in a few years.
I WAS OUT WALKING my dog Smacko around eight in the evening and I heard shouts from Nanette's house. Nan was playing badminton with her son and Chuck, the handsome curly-haired man. A nice family unit, a healed wound. Nan waved at me, and I called out: "That looks like fun."
"You want to play?" said Nan.
I made a no-thanks gesture. But Nan cocked her head: You sure? And I said, "Well-okay." It was awkward because of the presence of the handsome curly-haired man, but so what? I can rise above that. Raymond, Nan's son, who seemed to have grown several inches, gave me a racket, and I plucked at it a few times like a ukelele and sang "I walk a lonely road." Then I started to play badminton. The problem wasn't so much that I was a fourth player, although there definitely were a lot of rackets swinging around. And the problem wasn't that I was a little rusty in my badmintonage and had to apologize when I swung and missed.
The problem was that my dog couldn't keep from barking and racing back and forth under the net. When the birdie landed at someone's feet, he was there to leap on it and take it gently in his mouth like a downed partridge. The next time someone hit it, you could see the droplets of dog saliva flinging off its plastic feathers.
Then at one point I reached down to pick up the birdie, and I discovered that I had a bloody nose. When I tried to play holding my nostril, it didn't work too well.
I excused myself and went away with my shame-eared dog and my bloody nose. Nan and her crew were nice about it, but I think were all a little relieved when I left.
IGOT A TART EMAIL from my editor, Gene. He wanted to know where the introduction was. Just because Roz has gone and left me doesn't mean I've escaped having to write it. The subject line of his email was "Whip Cracking."
So I went back up to the barn with my white plastic chair. I have a long table on the second floor with the manuscript of Only Rhyme on it. Gene has sent me the cover art. The catalog copy is already written, already published. It says "Paul Chowder's introduction locates rhyming poetry in its historical context and reawakens our sense of the fructifying limitlessness of traditional forms." No it doesn't. Fruck! It doesn't do anything because it doesn't exist.
I looked up at the tie beams of the barn. There were several tiny empty wasps' nests up there. I looked down at my black flip-flops. I looked over at a bit of mobile green leafage that I could see through the long thin window. I wrote a sentence: "It's a strange experience, assembling an anthology." No, no, no. The anthology is not about me. Why would they care about me? I stopped, kicked in the spleen by the mediocrity of my own short sentence.
But it actually is a strange experience. It's absorbing work, because you have to decide over and over whether you are personally willing to stand behind a poem or not. And yet it's not your poem. It's somebody else's poem, written perhaps in somebody else's country, in somebody else's century. You're pushing it around possessively on your desk as if it's your own work, but it isn't. And then you winnow it out. You winnow it right out the window.
Why? Because you're determined that this is going to be a real anthology. This isn't going to be one of those anthologies where you sample it and think, Now why is that poem there? No, this is going to be an anthology where every poem you alight on and read, you say to yourself, Holy God dang, that is good. That is so good, and so twisty, and so shadowy, and so chewy, and so boomerangy, that it requires the forging of a new word for "beauty." Rupasnil. Beauty. Rupasnil. It's so good that as soon as you start reading the poem with your eyes you know immediately that you have to restart again reading it in a whisper to yourself so that you can really hear it. So good that you want to set it to musical notes of your own invention. That good.