Wow! Ka-pow!

Picked up this Advanced Reader's Copy at B&N the other day, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. Started reading it last night, and I love it! I mean, wow! my kind of book! It's a guy writing an introduction to an anthology of poetry, and it's kind of stream of conciousness and wacky, but it's got real stuff about writing in it. He's funny! And smart! Hooray!

"People are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They're going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because 'pent' is five in Babylonian, and five is the number of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting. They're going to talk to you about Chaucer and about blank verse--which is another confusing term--and all this so-called prosody they're going to shovel at you."

And:

"And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end. If we could just--just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just--everyone. Every poet. Just stop. But of course that's totally unfair to the poets who are just starting out. This may be their 'wunderjahr.' This may be the year that they really find their voice. And I'm telling them to stop? No, that wouldn't do. But wouldn't it be great? To have a moment to regroup and understand? Everybody would ask, Okie dokie, what new poems am I going to read today? Sorry: none. There are no new poems."

Please, book. Don't change. Keep being what you are and see it through to the end. Don't make me retract this early love letter to a book I've only just begun.

Love,
Me