Having recently read The Anthologist I wanted to tell you about my experience upon reading it. (Thank you, Litlove, for reviewing it and therefore bringing it to my attention.)

I should tell you that like the narrator I am a poet. Not a particularly good poet but I do have some poems published and, like him, I am a bit obsessed with words and their ways.

To tell you the truth, by the time I got to the end of chapter three I wasn’t sure if I could read it through. I put it down and it sat on my desk for over a week before I could get up the courage to finish it. I had to go through one book on indeterminacy, another on paradox and a third on intelligibility before my mind felt stabilized enough to attempt The Anthologist again.

Not that it isn’t funny. It is. The humanity of the character, the graceless charm, his wit, the vulnerability of the poet/anthologist were the power and the problem. You see I read the first three chapters in one go, a great gulp of the man’s love for poetry and his besotted, blind belief about the nature of his beloved, but it was too much. I got brain freeze and had to stop. He was like a man in love with a murderess and convinced that she was instead an angel, a mild and saintly woman with cool white hands.

But poetry isn’t like that at all. It isn’t a stroll along the road, the di bump of footfalls along the dirt road moving toward paradise. It’s more like a cobra and a mongoose with the poet always on the losing side. It’s free verse all the way babe, even when it rhymes. It was the thing, his need to limit poetry’s influence on him to something he could understand and control, that drove the anthologist to the state in which he could only wait for his next breath—where he could not complete anything, where contact became almost impossible, where even basic life functions became absurdly complex. That helplessness, that implacable love for the great poem that is always beyond one’s ken, it is inhuman. Dangerous.

And of course I couldn’t let it go. I dreamt about the bloody thing and despite my attempts to clear the brain pan of distress with philosophy, I had to pick it up again. Thank you sooooo much Mr. Baker.

So I picked it up again yesterday and read the final chapter very early this morning. I am so very glad it ended on an upbeat. I was really worried I was going to have to jump off the Burrard Bridge in despair but our anthologist managed to get himself released (at least temporarily) from the bondage to verse.

Knowing that, I can manage to accept the realization that I will have to read it again at some point in the near future. It made me, for example, dig out my W.S. Merwin, and although I don’t have a copy of The Vixen, I did find the title poem online. I do have Mary Oliver and several of the others mentioned in the course of the story. One need not have read the poems to understand the book but the relationship between the obsession of the anthologist and the poets pops like a sudden fourth dimension on what was just an ordinary 3-D ‘scape. I found myself wondering how many readers would seek out a poem or two and think about them within the context of the story. Oh, I do hope so. It would feel, I suspect, like the doorway to a secret garden full of Persian roses.

So do I recommend it? Of course, but with a warning label for poets. Beware, it should say, beware.

Am I this obsessed? Yes, I suspect so. I rather think my OCD can be laid at Lady Poesy’s feet. Am I serious? Only partly. But I do feel out of control. The words flood and then they suck back out carrying the world with them and there I am at the edge of a great abyss. What can one do under those conditions except wait for the opportunity to take the next breath?

I ask myself if I would give it up. Watch TV, or travel, or something that is not the clacking keyboard, the pen creating tiny rivers for ink in my black notebook. I’d have to give up books too, of course. They make me think, and feed my word habit in a most shocking manner. I could move back to the Rez where books are not much thought of, I could move back into the corporate world where one reads for numbness and for expediency but never for compassion nor for any real human understanding. (Maybe not fair, but that’s my experience of it.)

I don’t think I’d be happy though. But then poetry is a bit of a brutal occupation so happiness isn’t really in the cards. Relief might be though. Like the narrator’s release at the end of the book, his return to human-sized moments, to simple human love, work and companionship. And relief might be something I could feel if this current spate of poems gouging out my cranial innards gets to its birthing place one day. I doubt I will ever fit in the other worlds I have tried and, given their more human scale, I would never be allowed to forget it either. At least with Ms. Poesy, she doesn’t give a shit about me, doesn’t even notice she’s trampling all over me. (This is, oddly, kinder than the human cruelty visited on those perceived as outsiders.) This leads me to think that I might one day get out (at least temporarily) from under her feet. So poetry it is.

Anyway, this is why I got brain freeze after the first three chapters, why I couldn’t leave the book alone, and why I shall return to it. When one is faced with something as powerful as poetry, growth and understanding, it behooves one to understand as much as it possible about such vast reaches. So I’ll reread the book. Slowly. And when I come upon a poem, a poet named, I’ll stop and read it, then think about that new door, that new way to come to grips with the one who, like for the anthologist, is also my beloved. Not that I think the beloved will notice me. She isn’t human, I told you that. No. I want to understand so I can side step more effectively, survive my encounter with this greatest of free-verse babes while still having the opportunity to watch her in action. That’s my downfall right there. I’m greedy, but I think all poets must be, even ones that barely qualify.