The Anthologist (8 page)

"Dear Paul Muldoon, Here's some new work, I hope you like it, all the best, Paul." Boy, I wish he didn't have my own name.

I
USED TO SIT
there in class, breathing, wondering, What's the teacher going to think of next? What's she going to teach us? Anything? I don't know. I'm just sitting here. I have no idea what's coming next.

And one time, she said, Today we're going to learn something new, and this thing is called "haiku." She wrote it on the board. And I thought, Interesting word, "haiku." Nice K.

Somebody discovered haiku way back about a hundred years ago. Obviously it existed for a very long time in Japan, but he discovered it in English. What was his name, that poet? Not Edwin Arlington Robinson. One of those guys who is known now for discovering haiku. And he called it: HOKKU. Hokku. He decided that hokku was a powerful force for order in English.

And he was wrong.

But I didn't know that. We're all sitting in the class, at these new desks. This was the sixties, and there were new desks that had recently come in, which had nice metal casters. They moved very smoothly over the linoleum of the floor. They didn't make the elephant trumpeting sounds that the wooden chairs made. They slid. And we were sitting at these smooth-sliding desks. Sun was pouring in. And they did have a groove to put your pencil in. Although I never put the pencil there.

In some cases they had an under area. Where you looked under, and there were months of your spelling worksheets crushed in. When the teacher told you to clean out your desk you just reached your hand in and you were like an excavator and you grabbed the crumpled paper and you just pulled it out and let it fall directly into the trash can.

So the teacher said: we're going to learn something new today. A new way of writing poetry. It's called haiku. And it's going to allow
you
--to make art.

And it has a couple of different lines, three lines, and one line has some arbitrary number of syllables, and another line has another arbitrary number of syllables, et cetera. And I heard her describing this, and I knew, even then. I knew even then that it was bogus.

This, children, is a kind of poetry that makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense whatsoever in English. That's what she should have told us. This form is completely out of step with the English language. And the person who foisted it on us--that person was a demon. Even at the time I knew that it wasn't right. Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn't work that way. I don't actually know Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.

And yet Basho was good--even in translation he is still good. And I've read haiku poems in English that have an interesting tripartite squashedness to them. A few years ago Roz and her best friend from college wrote emails back and forth to each other in haiku. They had a fun time doing it. So what am I fussing about?

A
FTER WE ALL LEARNED
how to do haiku, the teacher said, And now children, today we're going to write a poem in something called free verse. It can be a poem about bumblebees, or a poem about shadows. It can be a poem about making muffins. Brownies. An egg hatching. The woodpecker's eye. In fact, it can be a poem about anything fun and beautiful and deep and sad and wondrous and strange and interesting and true and perfect and maybe even a little bit
frightening.
And you have to write it. I'm assigning it to
you.
And here's the one thing I'm going to tell you.

One thing. Here's my so very important piece of wisdom, that I'm going to impart to you now. This is the wisdom. Are you ready, children?

It--Doesn't--Have--To--Rhyme. No, it doesn't have to rhyme! Don't
trammel
yourself, don't crib and confine yourself, by rhyme. It doesn't
have
to rhyme. Because you want your poem to burble up. You want it to flow out, as a newborn self. Like a little sprout of a tulip bud, just busting out of the earth.

Now, of course, I think: tulips rhyme. One tulip leaf goes this way, and the other tulip leaf goes that way. Their forms talk to each other. There's symmetry. There's a central stalk, and there's mirroring. Most definitely the tulip rhymes. Nature is full of rhymes.

But never mind, this was the axiom that she was passing on to us, because she'd learned it from the culture at large. "It doesn't have to rhyme." And in imparting this she was promising us that all the pantries of art, all the breakfast nooks of art, were going to be opened up to us hencefor-ward. She was flinging open the window for us, and those gingham curtains were just billowing and we could smell the pies cooling there on the sunny windowsills of child-hood.

What did she really mean by "It doesn't have to rhyme?" Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant
Don't rhyme.
She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote "FREE VERSE" on the board.

And I sat there on my chair with the very smooth casters and I thought, What does she mean it doesn't have to rhyme? It does have to rhyme! It's got to rhyme, because rhyme is poetry. Where did Little Miss Muffet sit? Did she sit on a cushion? Did she sit on a love seat? No, she sat on a tuffet. And if it doesn't rhyme it's just guano. "Guano" was one of my favorite words back then--I'd learned it from
Tintin.

But I said nothing, like the craven fourth-grader I was. I went ahead and wrote a poem. It was free verse, but it had one rhyme at the end. It was about a droplet of water quivering gracefully at the end of the tap before falling into "the land they call / Disposal." It was a terrible poem. But my mother liked it, and it was remarkably easy to write. And that was the beginning of my career.

M
Y FATHER WORKED
in the legal department of a company that made industrial mirrors. He was a good explainer and a soapbox-derby enthusiast. He explained to me how lasers worked, and when I started reading poems in college he often looked over my shoulder and said, "What are you reading--a poem?" He knew John Masefield's "Cargoes" by heart, and E. E. Cummings's poem about the watersmooth silver stallion, and he would recite them with his fists clenched if we asked him to. His motto was: "Don't force it." He died only a year after my mother did. I miss them both every day.

Tennyson's father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems. Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I'm not sure.

Last night I watched two episodes of
Dirty Jobs
and then went upstairs to bed after thinking that my poetry was not for shit, frankly. If I may be pardoned the expression. I got in bed, and I realized that what I wanted was to have some Mary Oliver next to me. If I had some Mary Oliver I would be saved. I didn't want to read any more of the
Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets
edited by Squire, and I didn't want another chapter of my friend Tim's book on Queen Victoria, I wanted Mary Oliver, so I went downstairs and got my new paperback copy of her
New and Selected Poems, Volume 1
and went back upstairs again. And I immediately felt more sure of what I was doing because I was reading Mary's poems. They're very simple. And yet each has something. I like almost every one of her poems. That's not even true of Howard Moss or of Louise Bogan. It's certainly not true of somebody like Tennyson or Swinburne.

At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of
Friends
is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but no recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.

I
LOOKED INTO THE FRIDGE
dipping my knees to ZZ Top while my dog Smacko slept on the floor. He's used to the TV, and he's used to loud music. It bothered him when he was a puppy, but he's smart and he knows somehow that the sounds aren't real. What bothers him now are ear mites and fleas.

Roz was very good at combing his undercarriage for fleas. He was my dog before she moved in, but even so she loved him to distraction. I would sit in a chair and she would sit on the floor with Smacko on his back next to her, and we would talk as she went hunting through his fur with her fingers. She'd find the fleas even when they were hiding in the fur just around his tiny turret. When she got one she would drop it in a glass of soapy water. Smack would narrow his eyes in sleepy pleasure at being groomed. I don't groom Smack nearly as much as Roz did, and I should. Everyone says this summer is a very bad one for fleas.

Louise Bogan said that Theodore Roethke made her "bloom like a Persian rosebush" during their long happy sex weekend together.

If I had a ponytail, which I don't, I'd cut it off with four slow scissorcuts and bury it in the garden with the rubber band still around it.

6

I
WOKE UP THINKING
a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

For days I had a dissatisfied feeling. I couldn't focus. I was nervous about Switzerland. I'm going to be in a panel discussion there on "The Meters of Love," with Renee Parker Task, who's a hotshot among young formalists. Just the kind of thing I'm bad at. Being empaneled. All yesterday afternoon I thought about timed backups, and search results, and mermaids, and women wearing clothes, and women not wearing clothes, and I felt unlyrical. And then I got in bed and I read a short biography of Nathalia Crane in an old textbook, and I read a poem by Sara Teasdale, and I thought about turtles. And then, in the back of Mary Oliver's
New and Selected Poems, Volume 1,
I wrote, "Suddenly there is lots to read." I also wrote: "Mary Oliver is saving my life."

One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you're at a beginning. If I open a biography, or a memoir, or a novel, when I open it in the middle, which is what I usually do, I'm really in the middle. What I want is to be as much as possible at the beginning. And that's what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.

Now. I want to make something clear. You may think we're in a new age, a modern or postmodern age, and yes, in a certain way we are. But as far as rhyme and anti-rhyme go, this is the third time around, or maybe the fourth. Thomas Campion, in 1602 or so, came out with an attack on the uncouthness of rhyme, which was very strange for him to do because he was one of the great lute-song writers of the day. He'd published two, maybe three books of airs. But no, suddenly rhyme and the normal meters were no good. They were vulgar, he said, they were unclassical, they forced a poet to go in directions he shouldn't go.

Everyone at court was buzzing about this strange tract of Campion's. And when Samuel Daniel read it it was as if his whole world was under siege, and he was deeply distressed. He said he felt that he must either "stand out to defend, or else be forced to forsake myself, and give over all." So he stood out to defend. Now remember this is more than four hundred years ago. All those years ago Samuel Daniel, writing in English, in words that you can easily read now--although some of them are spelled differently, and the sentences flow on in a way that our sentences don't--but Daniel says that for a poet who knows what he's up to, rhyme is no impediment. In fact, it helps him soar higher, he says. It "carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight." That's what rhyme does, if you're properly fitted for it.