The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online

ambitious notion but that I had a mound of obligations and I hadn't been sleeping well and it's not the kind of thing I normally do and maybe other people should get involved in a prime-mover kind of way and whatnot.
    And Victor said he hadn't been sleeping well either--he had two small kids.
    I said I'd give it some thought.
    T HERE'S NO EITHER-OR DIVISION with poems. What's made up and what's not made up? What's the varnished truth, what's the unvarnished truth? We don't care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in different places in the bookstore. But we don't do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of poems go straight to the poetry section. There's no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don't exist.
    For instance, I could write a poem right now about buying a big wheel of Parmesan cheese and putting it in my closet as an investment. It's not true, I haven't done that. I can't afford it. I'd love to own a wheel of really good Parmesan because the salt crystals are so delicious, but I don't. Even so, I could write that poem. And I wouldn't have to label it as a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem. It would just be a poem.
    Coleridge says that Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man. Did it really do that? John Fogerty says that the old man is down the road. Is he? Longfellow says he shot an arrow into the air. Did he, or is he just saying he did? Poe said that there was a raven tapping at his chamber door. Was there?
    We don't care. Why don't we care? I don't know. I don't have an answer for you today on that important question.
    Actually, sometimes we do care. In Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, which I just bought--because it's time for me to read Mary Oliver, whom I've known only through anthologies all these years--there's a good poem about a time when she sees a woman washing out ashtrays in an airport bathroom in the Far East. The woman has black hair and she smiles at Mary. I want this poem to be the account of something that actually happened. I do care, sometimes, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

    A NTHOLOGY KNOWLEDGE isn't real knowledge. You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.
    And you have to be willing to be sad. If you go to the doctor saying that you've experienced some sleeplessness, perhaps some sitting in the sandy driveway late at night in a white plastic chair, accompanied by thoughts of mortality and aloneness--maybe some strong suspicions that none of the poetry you've published is any good--the doctor is probably going to say, Ah, you're depressed. And he's maybe going to want to give you some pills.
    And as a result, you may be tempted to think: I'm one of them. I'm John Keats. Or Sara Teasdale. Or Longfellow. Or Louise Bogan. Or Ted Roethke--rhymes with "set key." Or Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or John Berryman. Berryman, who wrote funny poems and then stopped writing funny poems and launched himself off a bridge and, flump, that was it for him. Many suicides. Percy Shelley. Many suicides.
    So you might think to yourself, Oh boy, I am one of these great depressive figures. But you're not. Just because a doctor has scribbled a half-legible prescription on a piece of paper and given you some pills, you're not depressed. Not the way a real poet is depressed. You don't even come close.
    True poet's depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It's a full-body inability to function. You don't want to leave your room. Louise Bogan summed it up in two quick lines. This was back in I don't know when--nineteen-thirty-something. It was in a poem in The New Yorker called "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell." And the lines went: "At midnight tears / Run in your ears." She's lying there on her back, crying. Her eyes are overflowing, and the tears are cresting and coming around, and down, and they're flowing into her ears. There's