Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

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YOU CAN’T INCLUDE IT ALL. You might think, I’ll write a poem and it will have every good thing in it, and every bad thing, and every middling thing — it’ll have Henry Cabot Lodge and clouds and eggplant and Chuck Berry and the new flavor of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and bantam roosters and gas stations and seafoam-green Vespa scooters and the oversalting of rural roads — but it doesn’t work. I’ve tried. As soon as the poem becomes longer than two pages, it stops being a poem and becomes something else. The longest poem I ever wrote came out in 1980 in a journal, now forgotten, not well known even then, called Bird Effort , which is the name of a Jackson Pollock painting. In the same issue was a poem by John Hall Wheelock, who had recently died — a friend and confidant of Sara Teasdale’s who produced a glorious posthumous oral autobiography. Really, if you want to know about kindness and poetry in the twentieth century you should immediately read John Hall Wheelock’s memoir. It was published a while ago by the University of South Carolina Press.

My long poem was called “Clouding Up” and it went on for two and a half pages. It was mostly about clouds. There was something in it about the Cloudboys and the Nimbians, I 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.

“The 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.

“Misery 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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YOU 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 that I could move my head to like a wobble-headed figure on a cabbie’s dashboard. Now I pay attention to the words. “Got to get up early in the morning, to find me another lover.”

Then Fountains of Wayne came on, playing “All Kinds of Time.” Holy shit, is that a good song. What a great undulating guitar thing in the middle. Shit! Apparently Collingwood, one of the songwriting pair of fountains, has or had a drinking problem — well, who wouldn’t after singing a song as good as this one? He managed to catch the moment nobody has ever caught, the suspended hopeful moment as the quarterback is looking for a receiver, the most poignant and killing moment in football. There are some great chords, and Collingwood is able to control his falsetto notes, and the whole thing is just total genius. The quarterback knows that no one can touch him now. He’s strangely at ease. The play is going to end in a sack — we realize it, gathered around the wide-screen TV — and then this slow wavy-gravy warble of a guitar solo comes on that is like the look of a football in flight — the football that he hasn’t yet thrown — and it’s totally mystical and soul-shaking. Power pop is the name given to Fountains of Wayne’s style of music, it seems — but whatever it’s called, they are great songwriters and they deserve thanks.

Roz’s old blue Corolla was in the parking lot when I got to Fort McClary. She was sitting inside reading a new New Yorker . All those years of New Yorker s that came when we were living together. She would read the articles. I flipped through, checking out the poems and laughing at the cartoons — some of the cartoons. And meanwhile the magazine got thinner. There was that terrible period a few years ago, after the crash, when there were almost no ads. Monsanto was on the back cover for a while — Monsanto, for goodness’ sake, who wanted to inject cows with growth hormones so that their bony overtaxed bodies would rev up and create ungodly udderfuls of milk until they mooed to the skies for relief and their hooves rotted in the muck of their tight stalls. Monsanto actually had the gall to sue a dairy up in Portland, Maine — Oakhurst Dairy — to stop them from saying on the label that Oakhurst milk had no artificial bovine growth hormones, even though it was just a fact. Monsanto is evil, truly evil.

Roz hugged me and hugged our dog — it was our dog for a while, now it’s my dog again — and she said happy birthday. She was wearing a light cotton sweatery thing I hadn’t seen before, and a soft scarf that I knew from way back. I asked her how she was doing. “Okay, how about you?”

“Doing fine,” I said. “The washing machine finally died, but I’ve kind of gotten into using the laundromat. Shall we clamber over the rocks? You know, the way we used to?” I gave it a Mick Jagger inflection and she smiled.