Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

poetry to no purpose! all this garbage! all

these words: we may replace our mountains with

trash: leachments may be our creeks flowing

from the distilling bottoms of corruption …

But some of the dross-dressing is, on its bewildering syntactical spree, good, and aptly self-critical:

my

poetry is strawbags full of fleas the dogs won’t

sleep on or rats rummage: I am the abstract inexact’s

chickenfeed: I am borderlines splintered down

into hedgerows: I am the fernbrake ditches

winter brown, the shaggy down springs’ flows

accrue: but think what it would be like to get every word in

And at one point the grandly spatted old Wordsworthian commonplace of renewal gets suddenly reshod, made new by a kicker at the end about poetry’s post-transfigurational residue: the poem, Ammons writes,

reaches down into the dead pit

and cool oil of stale recognition and words and

brings up hauls of stringy gook which it arrays

with light and strings with shiny syllables and

gets the mind back into vital relationship with

communication channels:

1

but, of course, there

is some untransformed material, namely the poem itself

Ammon’s National-Book-Awarded Garbage is in fact the latest of many books of poetry and collections of essays or stories that, in low-mimetic contrast to Renaissance fardle-words like jewels or flowers or garland , point proudly to the unpromising material that will be remade in the trash-compaction of the book they entitle.

How might we find some of the others? One way is to begin with the second (1853) edition of the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (by Peter Mark Roget, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., F.G.S, “Author of the ‘Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology,’ etc.”), which gives several lumber groups. Under INUTILITY it has

Litter, rubbish, lumber, trash, orts, weeds.

And under UNIMPORTANCE it has

Refuse, lumber, litter, orts, tares, weeds, sweepings, scourings, offscourings; rubble,

débris

, slough, dross,

scoriae

,

2

dregs, scum, flue, dust,

see

Dirt.

If you search a library catalog with this handful of alternatives in mind, and add a few more as they occur to you, you can amass a relevant poets’ and writers’ Garbage checklist without too much trouble. There is an Orts by Ted Hughes (1977) and an Orts by George MacDonald (1882); an Orts and Scantlings by H. C. Dillow (1984), and Scantlings: Poems, 1964–1969 , by Gael Turnbull. (An ort is a morsel of leftover food.) There is Tares , by a poet named R. S. Thomas (1961), and Tares: A Book of Verses by Rosamond Marriott Watson (1898). Or you can try the charming-sounding Chaff and Wheat: A Few Gentle Flailings (1915), by Francis Patrick Donelly, or Sweepings (1926), by Lester Cohen, or Slough Cup Hope Tantrum , by Alan Davies (1975). Stephen Vincent Benet brought us The Litter of the Rose Leaves (1930), following up on Frank William Boreham’s Rubble and Roseleaves, and Things of That Kind (1923). The poets of the Sludge Collective came out, in 1973, with Sludge: Daughter of Ooze, Son of Stain . Ohio University Press published Conrad Hilberry’s Rust: Poems in 1974; Turkey Press produced Michael Hogan’s Rust: Poems in 1977. Out of the Dunghill: A Series of Fifty Odes by Gordon Jackson came out in 1981. Allen Ginsberg published 150 copies of Scrap Leaves: Hasty Scribbles circa 1968; Marietta Minnigerode Andrews gave us Scraps of Paper in 1929; Edwin C. Hickman is the author of Scraps of Poetry and Prose , from 1854, preceded by Scraps and Poems , by Mrs. R. A. Searles, published by Swormstedt and Power of Cincinnati in 1851, and by Scripscrapologia, or Collins’ Doggerel Dish of All Sorts , a collection by John Collins from 1804. 3There is a book of prose pieces by Rod Mengham called Beds & Scrapings , and Scrut , 4poems by George Roberts, published by Holy Cow! Press in 1983. Someone named Tuschen published Junk Mail: Poems in 1970; Richard Le Galliene published The Junk-Man and Other Poems in 1920; Jack Kerouac’s “Junk” came out as a postcard poem in 1976. In Old Junk (1918, revised 1933), a little-known though moving collection of World War I essays intersprinkled with thoughts on toadstools and bedside reading, H. M. Tomlinson describes entering a French town after the German withdrawal and has a G. K. Chestertonian moment:

The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments.… It is perplexing to find how little remains of the common things of the household; a broken doll, a child’s boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a corn-chandler’s ledger.…

I don’t know that I ever read a book with more interest than that corn-chandler’s ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a commonplace record of the common life which circulated there, testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have been no matter to me.

Tomlinson even gives a wartime inflection to lumber in his preface: “My friend added his own gas-mask and apparatus to the grim lumber on the hat-rack. The floor was wet, and was cumbered with heavy boots, guns, and dirty haversacks.”

Back to cheerfuller Garbage -heaps, though. Charles Ira Bushnell published Crumbs for Antiquarians , a book of revolutionary war studies, in 1864–66; and the Reverend Elnathan Corrigton Gavitt came up with the fine title Crumbs from My Saddle Bags for a book of pioneer reminiscences published in 1884. About then T. De Witt Talmage tried the simpler Crumbs Swept Up . Dylan Thomas published “The Crumbs of One Man’s Year” in The Listener in 1947. Nathaniel Parker Willis offered The Rag-Bag, a Collection of Ephemera (1855); Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes produced an anthology called The Rattle Bag in 1982. There is Waste Basket, Husks of Wheat, Dump Truck, Debris, Sewage, Bin Ends, Stubble Burning, Stubble Poems, Dirty Washing, The Waste Land, Out of the Bog, Bog Poems , and Disgust , which are books of poetry by Charles Bukowski, Diane Wakoski, Keith Abbott, Madge Morris, Valerie Hannah Weisberg, Victoria Rothschild, Roland Gant, Willie, Sylvia Kantaris, T. S. Eliot, Harold Strong Gulliver, Seamus Heaney, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, respectively. Layton Irving is the author of Droppings from Heaven (1979); Thomas MacKellar in 1844 wrote a book of occasional poetry called Droppings from the Heart; and the poet Duncan McNaughton titled one of his books Shit on My Shoes (1979). There is even a Poop, and Other Poems (1972) by Gerald Locklin. Douglas Houston produced With the Offal Eaters: Poems in 1986, and Ordinary Madness Press published Doug Hornig’s Feeding at the Offal Trough: Poems in 1983.

Ammons, performing a subject search in an online catalog for “Garbage Disposal,” was (so he tells us in Garbage , p. 49) pleased to retrieve nothing, since it gave him a “clear space and pure / freedom to dump whatever.” Ammons’s online catalog (presumably it is Cornell’s) has more clear spaces than mine: on the day I devoted to this offal search (December 1, 1994), I found several books by typing FIND SUBJECT GARBAGE DISPOSAL: one was a Combustible Refuse Collection Survey performed in Cleveland, circa 1940, by the WPA. But I found no books of poetry or collected prose entitled Sullage , or Dregs , or Rinsings , or Squeezings , or Medical Waste , or Filth-Inhabiting Flies , or Draff , or Vetch —and I hereby reserve the right (nonexclusive, of course) to use any or all of these, alone or in combination, for future books. Most surprisingly, there is no book of poetry or gathering of fugitive review-essays called simply Lumber. Lumber and Other Essays: one can imagine some minor turn-of-the-centurion like Augustine Birrell or Edmund Gosse or W. E. Henley 5settling on it as a title, but as it happens, none of them quite saw their way to it. There is, however, an ahead-of-its-time book by one Selina Gaye called The World’s Lumber Room (1885) that A. R. Ammons would probably like. Its epigraph is a slightly emended quotation from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield: