“
And then here’s what I did. I’ll pass it on to you as a tip. I read what I’d written aloud to myself. Which is what you always do. But this time I used a foreign accent. The foreign accent is the twist that helps. I chose Charles Simic’s Serbian twang. Other foreign accents that can help you hear your own poem better are Welsh, Punjabi, and Andrei Codrescu’s Romanian. If those don’t work, try using a juicy Dorchester accent, or a Beatles Liverpool accent, or a perfectly composed Isabella Rossellini accent. Or read it as if you were Wystan Auden and you’d smoked a million cigarettes and brought a bottle of bine to wed with you every night. See if that helps. It didn’t help me much with the beginning of this poem, but it has helped me in the past and maybe it will help you.
- from Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist
So far, this book and its first-person narrator are so comfortable, so right, so resonant that I could happily spend the rest of the day typing out passages and trying to get you to read them. But vacuuming calls. This is just as well. It turns out every passage I would type out here as well as many other passages have been published as The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, which can be borrowed from a library or purchased, read, and re-read.
