The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

one, friends. Poink, poink, poink. "Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones O Sea." A monosyllabic meter. And tennis? Tennis is a slow duple meter. Pa- pock, pa- pock, pa- pock. "Two roads--diverged--in a yell--ow wood." Hm, "yellow" doesn't work. Fault--thirty love. Love means nothing in tennis, as you know. Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Lawn Tennyson. Marianne Moore was a lifelong tennis player but not a good metrist. She had a pet crow, and she circled her rhyme words with different colored pencils. Mina Loy once said, Imagine a tennis player who wrote poems. "Would not his meter depend on his way of life?"
    Ping-Pong--now there's a fine rollicking meter. You can recite Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome to a game of Ping-Pong. Try it:
Through teeth, and skull, and helmet
So fierce a thrust he sped,
The good sword stood a hand-breadth out
Behind the Tuscan's head.
    Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay. This used to be the poem that all little boys read in English private schools. It was violent, and it was nasty, and it galumphed right along. Headmasters would give this poem out as a present to their prize students. And 0.00001 percent of these little boys who read this poem ended up becoming great English Ping-Pong players. More to the point, 0.0000000001 percent of them ended up becoming great English poets. That was the glorious, indispensable inefficiency of the British educational system.
    Macaulay's theory, which he explained in his introduction, was that the Latin poetry that survived, that made it through the dark and sketchy times, wasn't representative of the songs people had sung in Rome. The literary poetry of Horace and et cetera had survived because it wasn't memorable. It had to be written down. It didn't stick in your head. The "lays"--the popular love songs and drinking songs and war songs--were all lost, every single one. So Macaulay, who was by the way a venomous essayist, wrote these bloody imaginary battle ballads to supply the lack.
    Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. "Through teeth, and skull, and helmet--" Crunch. "So fierce a thrust he sped--" It's completely disgusting and repellant.
    Three end-rests in that four-line stanza. Right? Four beats in each line. Lines one, two, and four have rests, line three doesn't, and that longer line gives it that parrun tun tan, tarran tan tan, tarRUM pum pom pom pom ending.
    English is a stressed language, and you want to boom it out sometimes. Then sometimes you want to whisper it, like this: " Give me my scallop-shell of quiet ." Poetry is written sometimes, I think, in a whisper. Not a stage whisper but a real human whisper. A confiding sorrowful whisper, brimful of emotion. And when it's declaimed it's ruined. Which is sad, really. Very very sad.
    You hear that bird? Chirtle chirtle chirtle chirtle. With birds it's different. Birds are very different than we are. They don't know what an upbeat is. They go, Chirtle, chirtle, chirtle, chirtle. And then the next time they might just go, Chirtle--chirtle, chirtle. It's like some kind of wigged-out aimless Gregorian chant. And then sometimes: Chirtle chirtle. And then: Chirtle chirtle chirt? Questioning. You don't know where you are with that. The meter is primitive. It's a primitive meter. But we obviously respond to it. When I hear that chirping, I know that the world is starting up. And that I'd better get something done that day, or I will have failed once again. As I have failed today.
    Chirtle chirtle. Chirtle. Chirtle.
    Nice chirpin' there, Mister Birdie! Good one. I like what you did there. That's good! Funky bitch! Love your work!

5
    I PACKED FOUR BOXES of papers in my office, and I threw out lots of things. This cleaning is helping me move forward. I put the chin-up bar in the door and hit my head on it twice because I forgot it was there. Then I took it down and put it in another door. I think if I really cleaned up my office it might be easier for me to finish the