The Anthologist is a novel about poetry.

I hadn’t planned to be reading it now. I bought the book during an epic binge at the Strand in New York (I was also victimized by poetry collections by William Carlos Williams and Ron Silliman and a nice, hefty tome of Marx). No question, I intended to get to it. After a fashion, it’s a book that I’ve been meaning to get to since it came out several years ago. I don’t read very much contemporary fiction, barring genre fiction, but I used to and hoped to use this to get myself back in the habit.

But, my plan was to make some more headway into The Wheel of Time or perhaps finish the final volume in Brin’s Uplift Trilogy.

For some reason, I read a bit of The Anthologist when I should have been finishing up Pope, but there was such a strange connection between the two that I knew it had to come next.

The narrator is a mediocre to minor poet who write free verse but loves to read rhyming poetry and is flailing in an effort to complete a paying gig: the writing of a lengthy (forty page) introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry.

The narrators lengthy discursive internal monologues on poetry just brought to mind what I had learned and felt diving into Pope.

So that’s why I read this book next and not something else. I’m reading something else now, so I guess it all evens out.

The Anthologist is driven by chronology, rather than plot. You see, the story, at least until the very end, where something like a climax and resolution occurs, is the internal narration of the narrator, a semi-successful poet name Paul Chowder. The internal narration is driven by chronology because Chowder, the character, is driven by procrastination. The book is a chronicle of the narrator distracting himself to avoid working on this introduction to an anthology (hence the title) that is supposed to be working on. The pleasure comes from both the head shaking chuckles inspired by how he weasels around buckling down and getting to work, as well as his erratic, discursive monologues about poetry and the history of poetry. Interspersed are some ‘interactions’ with dead poets (seeing some great poet in the supermarket, for example). You know they’re not actually there and Chowder isn’t trying to convince the reader of their reality. While interesting, I don’t actually see the point nor necessarily feel that they fit terribly neatly into the whole.

That resolution I mentioned is, invariably, unsatisfying. The voices in one’s head (not talking auditory hallucinations here, just the running commentary we all have with ourselves and which makes up the bulk of this novel) do not end, they do not resolve themselves. As a result, any ‘ending’ was pretty much always going to feel rushed and inadequate. And so it was, but that’s okay. He kept that part very short, so that parts that will still linger a month from now will be the lovely stuff that came before.