NICHOLSON BAKER reading with KYLE BUCKLEY, IAIN PEARS and KATHY REICHS at IFOA, at the Fleck Dance Theatre, Friday (October 23), 8 pm part of On Hearing Voices panel with IAIN PEARS, ADAM THORPE and DAVID WROBLEWSKI at the Brigantine Room, Sunday (October 25), 4 pm.
THE ANTHOLOGIST by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster), 245 pages, $32.99 cloth. Rating: NNNNN
Although Nicholson Baker’s best known for his novels and his non-fiction, it was reading poetry that changed his life.
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“I’ve published one poem, but it’s really a non-poem,” says the author of The Mezzanine, Vox and National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Double Fold, on the phone from South Berwick, Maine.
“But in my early 20s, when I was working on Wall Street and wanting to become a writer, I bought Stanley Kunitz’s and Howard Moss’s collected poems and picked up The New Yorker Book Of Poems.
“Those books really taught me how to write prose.”
All three of those tomes make their appearance in The Anthologist, his witty and clever book about a minor poet who’s procrastinating while writing the introduction to a book of rhyming poems.
Neurotic protagonist Paul Chowder isn’t a strictly autobiographical creation Baker’s married with two kids and a major fiction writer, while Chowder’s just broken up with his girlfriend and living alone.
But The Anthologist lets Baker address his own theories of poetic meter, deliver stories about poets both known (Elizabeth Bishop) and obscure (Louise Bogan, Sara Teasdale) and, in his own inimitable way, digress in hilarious detail about literary ephemera like why “Carpe diem” was mistakenly translated as “Seize the day” and how Archibald MacLeish could have won three Pulitzer Prizes.
Baker’s prose is as suggestive and funny as it’s ever been, the observations he makes (about everything from Ezra Pound to Project Runway) astute.
Like Chowder, Baker also has the desire to write something beautiful and lasting.
“I guess that’s the fact of being a writer,” he says. “You look at the thing after you’re done and there’s always a disappointment. Maybe that’s the exciting thing.
“If I’d felt I’d written something that I was unreservedly proud of, I might stop. And I kind of like writing.”
