Playing by the rules

A second-tier poet, his own life a mess, offers an antic polemic on the reasons for rhyme

September 06, 2009|William H. Pritchard

The irrepressible protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s new novel, Paul Chowder, puts it like this at one point: “You know what? I could write forever. This is me. This is me you’re getting. Nobody else but me.’’ It’s a gloss, surely, on Baker’s extraordinary literary career.

Now in his early 50s, he has written eight novels; a collection of essays (“The Size of Thoughts’’), containing the brilliant “Lumber’’; “Double Fold,’’ about recent misbehavior by libraries over-anxious to shed their paper holdings by electronic conversion; and most recently, the controversial “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.’’ The novels range from exquisite birds’ eye presentations of the world’s minutiae (“The Mezzanine,’’ “A Box of Matches’’), to creative sexual fantasies (“Vox,’’ “The Fermata’’), to explorations of the mind of an 8-year-old girl (“The Everlasting Story of Nory’’) or of a distraught American determined to assassinate George W. Bush (“Checkpoint’’). What Baker’s novels as well as his essays have in common is an antic, humorous, uncanny sense of the physical constituents of things (how they are put together, how they work) and a conviction that what the writer has to say is absolutely original.

Chowder has written and published poems but is still waiting to come up with a “really good poem.’’ While waiting, he has assembled an anthology of rhyming verse for which he is trying, unsuccessfully, to write an introduction. His girlfriend, Roz, who had been supporting him financially, has moved out, tired of waiting for Chowder to write the introduction and (he admits) because he is “morose,’’ “shockingly messy,’’ and has “irregular sleeping habits.’’ A further complication is that while he is all in favor of poetry that rhymes, he has given it up in his own work, instead composing poems in unrhymed, free verse, which, he agrees with Robert Frost, is like “playing tennis without a net.’’ His distaste for free verse began in fourth grade when the teacher, encouraging students to write poems, assured them they didn’t need to rhyme. As Chowder translates it, “I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I’m going to insist that you must be free.’’ Watching her write “FREE VERSE’’ on the blackboard he disagrees “because rhyme is poetry. Where did Little Miss Muffet sit? Did she sit on a cushion? Did she sit on a love seat? No, she sat on a tuffet. And if it doesn’t rhyme it’s just guano.’’