Poetry and Plot or Poems or Plot? On Nicholoson Baker's Anthologist (and a little bit about V LaValle's Big Machine)

"I've had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I've been genuinely interested in poetry -- interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing poetry it is a very different activity. Writing it, its as if the word 'poetry; is a thousand miles away. It's inapplicable."
- Nicholoson Baker, The Anthologist

Baker's narrator in this novel-on-poetry offers all kinds of tidbits that the writer-within-you will most likely identify with. ( Here's a link to a charitable and mostly accurate review. ) I think you can be pretty sure (if you're a writer) that you'll identify because nothing he says is too controversial or too particular. He -- the character -- is a distillation of any number of neurotic literary personalities into one burbling stream of consciousness. It can be comforting to listen to some sounds from your internal monologue echoed in the rambling, in a nice get-out-of-cartesian-isolation sort of way.

I respect Baker because he does little things like print "writing poetry it is" instead of "writing poetry is." That little "it" colloquializes the speaker's phrases and also makes a little verbal phrase that sediments a whole room -- context along with the activity-- into "writing it." There you are, in a room, staring off or at a screen or paper, wedged between things, at some distance from a window, working on a particular project. Just "writing" is contextless, theoretical, conceptual.

That said, I am reading the Anthologist because I got bored with Fermata. Sure, I found it titillating and fanatically well-written (for narrative details like the above "it") but ultimately, I found it broke Aristotle's recommendation to privilege plot over character. Coming from a poet, this may be unexpected, but I like plot. (I also think the best poems have plots: little intralinear dramas.) I love V Woolf and W James not because of their characters per se but because the way the characters propel domestic microplots. And I almost always prefer a snappy William Gibson novel to anything concerned with what you might label "personal discovery."

I haven't finished the Baker, but I'm not holding my breath for a reversal and recognition. Quite by contrast, I adored the finale and creepy, disgusting, allusive whirlwind of Victor LaValle's Big Machine. After finishing it, I looked backwards to his earlier Ecstatic but it didn't grip me with the same perversity of plot twist. I am looking forward to what ever he does next.