The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker Page B

Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.
    I'm hoping that someday I'll have to clean them out and that somebody will return. But for now, this is what I've got.
    I ALWAYS SECRETLY want it to rhyme. Don't you, some of you? Admit it. You open the latest issue of a magazine. Could be Harper's, could be The Atlantic, or The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker, or the TLS. Or some swanky literary magazine. You locate the poem, because you're naturally curious to see what this week's or month's trawl is--what it is that was, in the busy mind of that poetry editor, most pressingly deserving of publication. And you look at the poem. There it is. You take in the title--"Way Too Much." Way Too Much: Okay! And then you check the name of the writer--hmm, Squeef Corntoasty, never heard of him. Or: I sure have seen Squeef Corntoasty's name popping up in a lot of places lately. Or if it says "translated from the Czech by Bigelow Jones," forget it, you instantly move on, because translations are never good.
    Well, wait--that's not fair. That's ridiculously unfair. I've read some wonderful translations. Translations of Transtromer, for instance. But my heart does droop when I see that it's a translation.
    But let's say this poem is one hundred percent original work. How are you going to approach it? How about we just sort of touch the first line. Just a glance. Take it in, guardedly, without really reading it. Maybe just the first phrase: "I try to sit up straight." And then you break away to go down the words on the right-hand side. Right down the outer edge. "Pain," "truffle," "start," "shelter," "an," and "bell." Ah. Now you know: it doesn't rhyme. Once again they've done it. They've stabbed me right in the god-damned lung. Once again they've rejected the whole five-six centuries of our glorious tradition.
    But all right--that's fine. It's a plum, not a poem. That's what I call a poem that doesn't rhyme--it's a plum. We who write and publish our nonrhyming plums aren't poets, we're plummets. Or plummers. And some plums can be very good--better than anything else you might happen to read ever, anywhere. James Wright's poem about lying on his hammock on Duffy's farm is a plum, and it's genius. So is Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish," of course. "I caught a tremendous fish"--genius. So you think maybe this plum-poem is good in its own uniquely free kind of way. Is it? You read a line or two. No, it isn't. In fact, it's oozing with badness. It's so bad. How can it be this bad? How can this bad plum be sitting here, in type, in front of me? I don't get it.
    Or maybe it's one of the very few that do rhyme. These are even worse, sometimes, because the rhyming is so painfully inept--like unclever Ogden Nash gone squiffy.
    And yet if you go back and look at old editions of The Nation or The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day--or if you go farther back, to Reedy's Mirror or The Century magazine--and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.
    The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful political piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it's going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it's going to have some "cuts"--that is, some art--and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it's The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it's going to have some poems. The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it's about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality