The anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Ostensibly, this short novel is about Paul Crowder, a poet with a serious case of writer’s block, who is way late in producing a 30 page introduction to a poetry collection. His editor is on his case and longtime girlfriend, Roz, has moved out. Life consists of sitting in the barn or on the driveway in a white plastic chair avoiding putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. But it is really a love song to poetry and a wonderful book to have read in April, National Poetry Month (I’m really behind in these posts!). As Paul says, “The tongue is a rhyming fool. It wants to rhyme because that’s how it stores what it knows…..So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in your mind because they refer to different notions, but they’re cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that’s what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. They’re saying, That way that you first learned language, right from the beginning, by hearing what was similar and what was different, and figuring it all out all by yourself, that way is still important. You’re going to hear it, and you’re going to like it. It’s going to pull you back to the beginning of speech.” Lovely book. (and the above quote is interesting in light of the book I am now reading on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein). 243 pp.