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The Anthologist: A Novel |  | Author: Nicholson Baker
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $14.40
as of 11/24/2009 08:24 CST details
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Seller: updatedbooks
Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 8373
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 1416572449
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416572442
ASIN: 1416572449
Publication Date: September 8, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought.What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
 May be the best part of your day November 8, 2009
Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA)
Imagine a novel that is in large part a poetry lesson. The chief plot element involves whether the narrator will ever overcome his writer's block, although there is also a sub-plot involving whether he will catch a mouse in his kitchen. If you knew just these three things about it would you want to read it? Probably not. But then, what if you also knew the author was Nicholson Baker? "Aha!" you might think, just the sort of thing he could pull off.
Baker's narrator, Paul Chowder, is a poet who hasn't been publishing much recently, although he has a commission to produce an anthology. His once live-in female companion, Roz, has moved out, apparently in large part because Paul has failed to make headway writing the introduction to the book. His delinquency seems understandable when we learn that his own poems have been only free verse, although the anthology is to consist entirely of rhyming poems. "But then again my own poems sickened me," Paul tells us, "so I was confused." Yet he persists. "My life is necessary because I sustain the idea of poetry through thick and thin," he says.
True to his mission, interspersed with his reportage of his mundane daily life, Paul tells us what he thinks about poetry. He has opinions about meter, rhyme, enjambment, translations, and more. We also hear what he thinks about dozens of specific poets. Paul's views are often quite insightful, sound enough that we perhaps may take at least some of them as Baker's own.
But we can never take Paul too seriously. This is a man, after all, who reports that he once encountered Poe in a laundromat, but couldn't elicit "Ed's" explication of the poem he was working on, one about a raven.
Paul draws us into his own fixations by addressing us, his readers, directly throughout. He just assumes that we will follow along and be interested, much like some chatty neighbor you may have experienced, and it turns out that he is right. His digressiveness is a key element of the charm of the novel. He can move in the course of a single paragraph from the history of poetry to the history of clothespins and then back to poetry, for example. When after discussing the life and poetry of W.S. Merwin he abruptly interjects "I miss my mom and dad" and then returns directly to Merwin it doesn't seem too odd. It's just Paul being himself.
After two hundred pages we have come to care for Paul, about whether he will ever win Roz back, for instance. A catharsis occurs as he participates on a panel at a writer's conference in Switzerland. I won't disclose how it all turns out for him, but here is a clue: you should know enough already.
Read The Anthologist and you may find it to be the best part of your day -- perhaps it will even inspire you to write a poem or two.
A Love Ode To Poetry November 8, 2009
Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When I was in college, I used to love to read poetry. I devoured poems by Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Why am I starting a review with a look back to my own past favorite poets? Because that's what The Anthologist is REALLY all about; our personal relationship with poetry. I challenge anyone to read The Anthologist and not instantly get on the Internet and look up Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, James Fenton's The Vapour Trail, or any poem by Mary Oliver or perhaps, Selima Hill. It's nearly impossible.
Anyone -- poetry reader or non poetry reader -- is in for the treat of his or her life. The conceit Nicholson Baker uses is to create a character -- Paul Chowder -- who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poem. But he's procrastinating: the muse isn't with him, the love of his life has left him, and he's beginning to wonder if he can create something new and fresh. So he ruminates and ruminates and ruminates some more -- on the various love lyrics, ballads, sea chanteys, and rhymed couplets that he has connected with through the years.
Do you know what an ultra-extreme enjambment is and why it's the key to the whole poetry conundrum? You will after reading this book. Have you ever wondered why poets such as Vachel Lindsay or Ezra Pound were so depressive and in the latter case, outright crazy? Paul Chowder has his theories: "poets are our designated grievers." Do you believe that poems need to rhyme to be GOOD? See what Baker's character has to say! Are long poems better than short poems? Chowder ruminates, "They can all be cut down to a few green stalks of asparagus amid the roughage." I guess that settles THAT!
What poetry reader cannot swoon to a statement such as: "A Ted Roethke poem is like an empty shoe you find at the side of the road that some manic person has cast aside on a walk but Louise Bogan's poems are cared-for shoes in a closet, tight and heavy around their clacking wooden trees." What NON poetry reader won't want to read both Roethke and Bogan to find out what Paul Chowder means? And when Chowder says, "I was hoping to find a crack in the pavement where my ailanthus of a poem could take root" -- every would-be poet can relate.
I am not the type of reader who underlines -- I like my books pristine. But I took out my pencil and underlined whole passages of The Anthologist. THAT'S how good it is. After reading The Anthologist, I've resolved to go back to reading poetry for the love of it once again. Maybe I'll start with Mary Oliver...
 Skip this one November 1, 2009
A. Loring (Exeter, NH United States)
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
Good Start
I love the line: "Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat"
Endless dreary slog in the middle
Predictable ending
I would love to see this story as a short story it would be great!
 Poems and Plums/Rhymed and Unrhymed October 28, 2009
R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Once again Nicholson Baker has written an unconventional novel with a distinctive, informal voice. This time the subject is poetry. The narrator is Paul Chowder, a minor poet, on the brink of failure in love and professionally. In THE ANTHOLOGIST, Chowder relates his quotidian trials and tribulations as well as his struggles with overcoming writer's block and pounding out the long-overdue introduction to his anthology of rhymed poetry.
Interspersed throughout are ruminations and mini-essays on poetry, which surely are in truth Baker's opinions, a few of them verging on the idiosyncratic. The question Chowder/Baker keeps returning to is whether or not poetry should rhyme. Even though Chowder's published poetry is free verse, he (and Baker) seem to have a bias towards rhymed verse. In the language of the novel, they prefer poems over "plums." "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."
That quote is indicative of the amiable, light and breezy way Chowder/Baker addresses matters of poetry, so that the novel never takes on the stuffy, joyless airs of academia. Word play and puns abound. (E.g.: "Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis without a net. Lawn Tennyson.") Poets who are discussed meaningfully but briefly include W.H. Auden, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Algernon Charles Swinburne ("the greatest rhymer in the history of human literature"), James Fenton, and Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke.
The remarkable technical achievement of Baker in THE ANTHOLOGIST is to make his narrator so real that the reader at times forgets he is reading a book rather than listening to an extended monologue from a middle-aged guy named Paul Chowder seated across the table. It is not a great novel, but it is a highly accomplished one and a very entertaining one. Whether or not you like poetry (personally, my reactions to much poetry of the canon range from indifference to bewilderment), if you enjoy literate fiction you most probably will enjoy THE ANTHOLOGIST.
Poetry 101 for Grownups October 26, 2009
M. Feldman (Bowdoin, Maine, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you love poetry, you'll enjoy "The Anthologist." If you haven't read any poetry in a while, but think you'd like to read it more than you do, you'll appreciate "The Anthologist." (If you don't enjoy poetry, you won't like "The Anthologist." ) For poetry lovers, this funny and tender account of the travails of Paul Chowder, a (very) modestly successful poet with a severe case of writer's block, is full of wonderful anecdotes about all sorts of poets, from Swinburne to Roethke. Chowder also muses, from time to time, on the glories of the four beat line---and you find yourself interested---it's really quite astonishing--- in the intricacies of that usually rather dry subject, prosody (poetic meter).
Okay, so it's been a while since you've read much poetry. Why would you enjoy "The Anthologist"? Well, for one thing, the novel is inhabited by real people (although the events are fictional) like "The New Yorker" poetry editors past (Alice Quinn)and present (Paul Muldoon), and living poets, like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins. There's lots of poetry gossip. Even the eminent poetry critic Helen Vendler gets a mention. Then there are Chowder's rueful and amusing observations on the contemporary poetry scene, the world of sparsely attended readings, no money, and general public indifference, to say nothing of too many poets jostling for too few interested readers. And the way Nicholson Baker catalogs Chowder's writer's tics---the things that get him writing or get him distracted from writing or block his brain entirely--is sensitive and knowing.
Finally, "The Anthologist" might just tip you in the direction of something new. Chowder/Nicholson Baker loves W.S. Merwin (and Theodore Roethke and Louise Bogan, to name a few). I haven't read much Merwin, but now I'm going to.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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