The Anthologist

ESPECIALLY BEGINNINGS. The begi

So you've got the begi

Do you care how things are spelled? Obviously not. Spelling? What's that? That's absurdity. That's a whole different layer of opacity-the layer of squirming black shapes on a page. That's years in the future. What you're doing, inside your head, is classing things by sound shape. And by detachable head. And that's where rhyme comes in.

Think of what happens when you say the word "moon." What does the speech part of your brain do? It says, Okay, assignment: moon. Jaw down a bit, lips together. And flatten. Good. Then commence huffing out some sound. Constrict the vocal cords. Mm. Now open and flute the lips into an O shape. Ooo. Moo. And then terminate by flipping up the bottom of the tongue and lightly caressing the roof of the mouth. Airtight seal. And out the nose. Moon-ah. And you're done.

That's all your mouth control center knows. It knows a series of muscular commands. It does not know spelling or meaning. And because it's an efficient mouth control center, it classes that series of muscular commands as being very similar to one next door to it: rune. The end is the same, and it's going to store that near "moon," but it's going to give you a different begi

The tongue is a rhyming fool. It wants to rhyme because that's how it stores what it knows. It's got a detailed checklist of muscle moves for every consonant and vowel and diphthong and fricative and flap and plosive. Pull, relax, twitch, curl, touch. And somewhere in there, on some neural net in your underconsciousness, stored away, all these checklists, or neuromuscular profiles, or call them sound curves, are stored away, like the parts of car bodies, or spoons, with similar shapes nested near each other. Broom and loom and tomb and spume and womb and whom are all lying there on the table in one spot. And you figured all that out by yourself. They rhyme.

And what's different about them? The all-important begi

Buh. Hoo. Huh. Hay. And once you've got them classed and labeled, you can start taking off and putting on the sound-wigs. You pick up "plume" and you carefully, patiently, take off the PL and you put it aside. Don't drop it! And you pick up the BL, put that on. Get it properly adjusted. Brrrrrr. Brrrroooom.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in your mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. They're saying, That way that you first learned language, right at the begi

And that's why we like puns, too. Some puns. A few puns. Orange you glad. Puns and plays and near-misses and alliterations. Fair and foul. Fee fie fo fum. Liquor locker. The Quicker Picker Upper. Road rage. Boxtop. Pickpocket. Smile and dial. Drink and drive. Lip-smacking, whip-cracking Cracker Jacks.

Or: Sir, isn't that a steering wheel sticking out of your zipper? Yes, it's driving me nuts.

We like to visit the parallel sound-studio universe with all these mixing boards and XLR patch cables going here and there, independent of the other part of our head, which is the conscious part that has spent a long time sweating the books and trying to make sense of objects and ideas and meanings. Trying to be a responsible citizen.

Rhyme taught us to talk.

I RANG NAN'S DOORBELL and told her how good the chicken was, and she said she was glad to hear it. But she seemed a little preoccupied, maybe even a little down. She said that she'd just gotten two very high estimates to put in a wide plank floor in her guest room-both more than twenty-eight hundred dollars.

"To nail in a pine plank floor?" I said, exaggerating my incredulity. "Well, blow me down. I'll do it for you at cost."

She said no, no, that was impossible-and anyway did I know how to install floors? Which was a legitimate question in the circumstances. I said that yes, I did know how to install floors, if by "floors" you didn't mean hardwood floors. I'd installed the plank floor in my ell with my dad a few decades ago. And I've done a little light cabinetwork over the years, I added modestly. "You have to allow a little space at the ends for expansion, that's all."

She considered. "I'd have to pay you, otherwise it's awkward."

"Pay me fifteen dollars an hour. I'm not a real carpenter. We can do it together. Your son can help."

She looked at me for a while and then she smiled. Would I like to come over later and measure the room?

I said I would.

8

MAYBE I COULD DO a weekly podcast. Play some theme music, maybe Root Boy Slim singing "Put a Quarter in the Juke," and then: Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder's Bowl of Poetry. And I'm your host, Paul Chowder, and this is Chowder's Plumfest of Poems. Hello, and welcome to the Paul Chowder Poetry Hour. I'm your host and confidant, Paul Chowder, and I'd like to welcome you to Chowder's Flying Spoonful of Rhyme. And this is Chowder's Poetry Cheatsheet, and I'm your host, Paul Chowder, from hell and gone, welcoming you to Chowder's Thimblesquirt of Verse.

I could never keep it up. You have to hand it to those pod-casters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody's listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.

Let's begin today, however, by talking about the history of rhyme. If you're prepared, I'm prepared. Actually I'm not all that prepared, because when I'm prepared that's when I fail. I learn too much and it crowds out what I actually know. There's crammer's knowledge and then there's knowledge that is semipermanent.