Nicholson Baker: The Anthologist

HOW ARE THOSE POETRY exercises coming? Did you do that thing I mentioned where you write down every real story somebody tells you or that you overhear in a twenty-four-hour period? Did I mention that exercise? Maybe not. I don't mean the stories that come to you on electric screens or through car loudspeakers but the ones from right around you. I overheard a story at the bank yesterday about a car-repair place that overcharged. And then somebody told me a story about a dog who ate a sock. The vet couldn't "shift it," so he removed the sock surgically and now the dog is doing well. And there were other stories, too. If you listen to them, the stories and fragments of stories you hear can sometimes slide right into your poem and twirl around in it. Then later you cut out the story and the poem has a mysterious feeling of charged emptiness, like the dog after the operation.

I'm not going to get all maudlin about why Roz moved on. She moved on, period. I know why. It's because I didn't write the introduction to my anthology. And I was morose at times with her, and I was shockingly messy. And I had irregular sleeping habits. And she was supporting us, and I was nine years older than she was. And I didn't want to walk the dog as much as I should have. And I got farty when we had Caesar salads. And I do miss her. Because she was so warm and so kind to me, and she taught me so many things. I squandered her good nature. I didn't take it seriously. I didn't see that it was finite.

ROZ TOLD ME, Just go up in the barn and write it. Referring to the introduction to my forthcoming poetry anthology, Only Rhyme. She said, Just go! Just go up there and write it! You want to write it. Your editor wants you to write it. I want you to write it. Write it!

I said I couldn't write it, it was too awful, too huge, it was like staring at death.

She said, Well, then write a flying spoon poem. Go up there and write something. You'll feel better if you do.

She was right, of course. So I went up to the barn. The second floor is empty and has very few windows. It smells like I imagine the inside of an old lute would smell. I brought up my white plastic chair, and I took notes, and I read, and I thought, and I took more notes, and I sang songs. It was a beautiful week in very early summer, and I felt as if I was sitting inside John Dowland's old lute. I sang a song that Sinead O'Connor sings, "She Moved Through the Fair." And I sang a song I wrote myself, that goes:

I'm in the barn, I'm in the bar-harn,

I'm in the barn in the afternoo-hoon.

I sang that one a lot. And I made up a new tune for Poe's "Raven."

But every time I actually tried to start writing the introduction, as opposed to just writing notes, I felt straightjacketed. So I went out and bought a big presentation easel, and a big pad of presentation paper, and a green Sharpie pen, and a red Sharpie pen, and a blue Sharpie pen. What I thought was that I could practice talking through the introduction as if I were teaching a class.

And in order to be relaxed at the easel, I drank a Newcastle. Also coffee, so that I'd be sharp. And still I wasn't sufficiently relaxed, so I drank some Yukon Gold that I found in the liquor cabinet. No, not Yukon Gold, that's a potato. Yukon Jack, a kind of Canadian liqueur. It was delicious. It added a slight Gaussian blur. And then some more coffee, so I'd still be sharp. Blurred, smeared, but sharp.

AT THE END of the week I didn't have the introduction. Roz looked sad and hurt, and I felt miserable. She said, "Well, are you at least making progress?" I said I was, because I was, I was making great strides. But toward what? I was having a gigantic hopeless exciting futile productive comprehensive life adventure up in the barn. I was hoarse from singing. I said I thought I'd probably have the introduction done after another week. Or at least a flying spoon poem as a fallback.

Roz pointed out that I was going to Switzerland very soon, and that was really the drop-dead deadline: get the introduction done before Switzerland. And I agreed that it certainly was. I went to a used bookstore and bought another anthology of Elizabethan verse-my fifth-and also the W. H. Auden/Chester Kallman edition of Elizabethan songs, with a cover drawn by Edward Gorey. I was pleased to have that-it includes actual musical settings.

And I spent some time on iTunes, where I found a song I liked by a group called The Damnwells. It's called "I Will Keep the Bad Things from You," and it's sung by a songwriter named Alex Dezen. At one point you can hear him turning the page. He's sitting there with his guitar, and he's doing this song, and he doesn't even know the words. He's just written it, apparently. He's just discovering it. And it'll never be as real for him as at that moment. He turns the page, and you hear the schwoooeeeet, and you want to cry.

Also I bought some software so that I could save the Flash video of Sinead O'Connor on YouTube doing her live rendition of "She Moved Through the Fair," which is even better than the one on iTunes. So I was moving forward, in a sense.

Roz said, But sweetie, you're spending all this money, and we don't have it. And that's true, we didn't have it. Back in the nineties I took a swoosh in the stock market, with money I got from my grandfather, and I did well for a while. That's when I met Roz and she moved in. I bought some shares of Koss Corporation, the headphone company, and then I split the hairy root ball and bought some Canon Depository Receipts. Then I split that hairy root ball. I bought Maxtor and then sold it. I bought stock in a tiny company called BeOS, and it doubled in a day and a half. Then I bought lots of bad stocks over several years and all the money shrank away, more or less. Roz was supporting us now, except for an equity loan on my house and a chunk of money I borrowed from my sister, who is not that rich. If, or when, I handed in the introduction to Only Rhyme, I'd get seven thousand dollars, because my editor, Gene, is very generous. Apart from that there was almost nothing due, just the odd thousand in honoraria here and there from book reviews or readings or panel discussions, like the one coming up in Switzerland. I can't teach. I tried it once at Haffner College and it practically unhinged me.

I said to Roz, "I know it seems excessive and a little odd, but I think this is the only way to really lay it all out fresh, and sing the pain." She nodded and she said okay, but in a very small voice. I could see she was losing faith in me and losing her love for me. And her respect for me.

BECAUSE WHO WANTS to be forced into the role of enforcer? Roz was a writer herself, and an editor; she wasn't a doubter and a prodder. She wasn't some calendar-tapping scold. She actually liked my poem "Smooth Motion"-she was first attracted to me because of it, I think. At least, she wasn't attracted to me for my looks, because I'm not smooth, in fact I'm pretty rough looking. Although I've lost some weight recently, and once Roz did say that I looked good in a certain subtly houndstoothed jacket that she helped me pick out.

She hadn't reckoned on having to be forever poking at me to get me to write one forty-page introduction to an anthology. And she didn't want to be arguing over money. And she wanted to adopt a child and I didn't-why? I don't know. I see these horribly spoiled rude selfish kids and don't want to risk being the father of one.

But I think if I'd just written even a tiny five-line poem about an inchworm on my pant leg it would have been fine. Anything, something. Roz commuted all the way to Concord to work for an alternative newspaper, but I think it would have been all right with her to support us for a little while as long as I was getting actual work accomplished.

But when I came down empty-handed from the barn at the end of the second week, that's when I really wounded her. She was standing in the hall putting her keys in her purse. Beautifully made-up. Smelling clean from her shower. She looked up and said, bravely, "So can I read it?" And I felt this horrible inner sensation: my caramel clusters of self were liquefying and pooling in the warmth of their own guilt. I said, "I'm sorry, honey. I don't have anything."