The Anthologist

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That show's it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spout it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton.

Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn't work that way. I don't actually know any Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.

What's the meter of badminton? That's a hard one, friends. Poink, poink, poink. "Break, break, break, / On they 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 yel l-- 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's there's a fine rollicking meter. You can recite Macaulay's Lay of Ancient Rome to a game of Ping-Pong.

And I knew that I was going to be fine, but that I might not be able to type for a while, which would give me a reprieve on writing my introduction. A great whimpery happiness passed through me like clear urine.

What he could do was rhyme better than anybody. Deaf? Didn't matter. He heard what he needed to hear. Not only did he rhyme, he danced new dance steps while he rhymed. He mixed rhythms in a way nobody had done before. He was good at a certain kind of crooning, stinging pulse, with the rhymes coming poom, pom, ching, chong. Nobody else came close to him in this. His sound was everywhere. It was trance music. It went round and round inside your brain.

Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle--when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented.

Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.

...spending your life concentrating on dea

Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle--when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented.

Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.

...spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.

And they tried. They were eager kids. They worked at it. But they weren't rhymers, And this is what everybody who teaches poetry discovers. If you ask grade-school kids to rhyme, it may sound jingly, but it's an appealingly artless jingle. If you ask college kids to rhyme, however, they're going to sound awful. Because the percentage of genuine rhymers is tiny. If you ask them to write a poem that doesn't rhyme, on the other hand, it's not so clear that they lack the basal gift. They may come up with something that has a rawness and a quick quiet stab of honesty and even wit sometimes--if you don't ask them to rhyme. And so there you are, a person who has loved rhyme all your life, and what are you saying to the impressionable people you are teaching? You're saying And remember--it doesn't have to rhyme.

So there was a lot going on there in the nineteenth century. And they lived their lives, and they wrote some poems, and then suddenly they bumped into the end of it. And they blasted through into 1901. That was the big moment, because then there they were in the twentieth century. When you're in the twentieth century, it's a whole different ball game. There are huge tropical plants dripping raw latex. There are giant pieces of diesel-powered earth-moving equipment. Turbines, huge hydroelectric projects. There's dynamite blowing up over there. There are exotic shores that are lapped at by alien warm pale-blue crinkled Saran Wrap sheets of ocean. There's neon, of course. Italy is a mess, Switzerland--who knows? France is a question mark. As is Austro-Hungary. It's all up for grabs! And who conquers the twentieth century? Who takes it from here on in and says, I've got it, folks? I'll take care of it, you don't have to worry about it now. Who takes care of it? I'll tell you who. The worst possible person, unfortunately. His name was Marinetti. The leader of the Futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Manic Phil, who marinated the twentieth century in his influence. Marinetti was aggressive, he wanted to change things, and he wanted to break things. He wanted old buildings leveled. He wanted Venice blown up. He was a great writer of manifestos. Or manifesti.

And one morning in 1909, Marinett's Futurist manifesto was published in Paris. The intellectuals opened the Figaro that morning, and there was this full page of authoritative promulgations. That said that the past was to be jettisoned. That Europe needed a new way of thinking. It was time to embrace steam and speed and power and war. The old ways were no good. Marinetti didn't use the word, "fascism," but that's what it led to. Futurism led directly to Mussolini and Hitler. It also led to modern poetry. The two roads diverged, but not so much. There was in Marinetti's modernism a desire to stomp around heedlessly and a wish to sweep the counter clean. The ambitious poets really liked Marinetti.

And some of the girl poets liked the guy poets. Mina Loy, for example--that brilliant strange juxtaposer. She had her affair with Marinetti. As I've mentioned. And what happened then was that the gentleness, and the sharp eye, and the kind of lovely, sexy anarchy of Mina Loy was conjoined with the machine-admiring bullying mechanistic destructiveness and manicness of Marinetti. And out of these two forces, Marinetti and Mina Loy, was begotten a young bully who talked loudly and sneered in public. His name was Ezra Pound. Sara Teasdale disliked Ezra Pound, and Ezra Pound disliked Sara Teasdale, so it was mutual.

And that's what I want to talk to you about. I want to clarify the sweep of it all. And the grandeur of it all. And the tragic waste of it all. The perversion of talents. The discouragement of gifts. The misapplication of energies. And even so, the flowering of some really nice poems along the way.

suffer from imeros, a word from Sappho that meant a kind of almost sexual craving for romance. A lust for love.

"Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a g

"Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping—there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you're an adult, you don't sob quite that way. But when you're a little kid, you go, "Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih." You actually cry in a duple meter.

"Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. (emphasis mine—APS) We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die."