Not much happens in this intriguing analysis of poetry through the frustrations of a writer doing an anthology introduction, writes David Orr.

Novels about poetry are a dodgy proposition. After all, novelists already have a near monopoly on narrative and discursive fiction -- turf once claimed by poetry -- and it seems almost impolite for our prose writers, having triumphed so thoroughly over their sister art, to set themselves up as tour guides to poetry's dwindling estate.

And let's face it, stories involving poets tend to be hokey or, worse, excruciatingly literary. Maybe the spires of libraries rise darkly in the gloaming; maybe bookish amour unfolds amid bosomy fields laden with the fleeting fruits of summer. At best, the author follows the course Stephen King takes in "The Tommyknockers" and skims over his protagonist's occupation in order to concentrate on the perilous effects of buried alien spacecraft.

Yet somehow Nicholson Baker has written a novel about poetry that's actually about poetry -- and that is also startlingly perceptive and ardent, both as a work of fiction and as a representation of the kind of thinking that poetry readers do. "The Anthologist" is the story of Paul Chowder, a semi-successful, middle-aged American poet trying and mostly failing to write the introduction to an anthology called "Only Rhyme." As in most Baker novels, not much happens.

Chowder sits in his workplace/barn and thinks; he shampoos the dog; he goes blueberry picking; he installs flooring for a neighbor; he pines for his former girlfriend Roz, who left him after getting fed up with his procrastination; he acquires a couple of finger injuries; he gives a reading; and finally, he sits on a panel on rhyme in Switzerland, at which he ... well, again, it's a Baker denouement, so not much happens, at least in terms of gunfights or ninjas.

Mostly what Chowder does is talk about poetry. And then talk some more. And then, you know, a little more. This wouldn't be an exciting prospect -- it would, in fact, be a dreadful prospect -- except that Chowder is possibly the most appealing narrator Baker has invented. He can be amiably whimsical ("God I wish I was a canoe") and then amiably bizarre ("Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn't because I'm still on the tree").

He is heartsick ("My life is a lie"), childlike ("I just want to sit and sing to myself") and perhaps more than anything else, funny without all of these things at once, and his observations have the unpredictable surfaces and depths of a rising wave. Here's how he begins a disquisition on the origins of rhyme:

"So the first thing about the history of rhyme ... is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else."

So he starts over. And that leads to this: "The important thing is that there's something called the 19th century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That's what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech."

Eventually he gets around to the origins of modernism and some pointed observations about its progenitors:

"Who takes it from here on in and says, I've got it, folks? I'll take care of it, you don't have to worry about it now. Who takes care of it? I'll tell you who. The worst possible person, unfortunately. His name was Marinetti. The leader of the Futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Manic Phil, who marinated the 20th century in his influence. Marinetti was aggressive, he wanted to change things, and he wanted to break things. He wanted old buildings leveled. He wanted Venice blown up. He was a great writer of manifestos. Or manifesti."

But then we're caught up in a finger injury he incurs while toting a computer downstairs: "And I knew that I was going to be fine, but that I might not be able to type for a while, which would give me a reprieve on writing my introduction. A great whimpery happiness passed through me like clear urine."

When you can talk like this, almost anything you say is going to be entertaining.

But this isn't almost anything; this is the dread subject, poetry. As time and Amazon rankings have proved, readers shrink in trembling bewilderment from descriptions like "paeonic foot" ("There's a useless term for you," Chowder says, and he's right). Yet take heart. While it's true that Baker charges directly at technical aspects of verse, it's also the case that these rambling semi-lessons are delivered much in the spirit in which a mildly drunken Penn Jillette might discuss David Blaine's latest attempt to bury/burn/defenestrate himself.

Here, for instance, is Chowder on pentameter: "People are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter. They're going to say, Oh ho ho, iambic pentameter! The centrality of the five-stress line! Because 'pent' is five in Babylonian, and five is the number of fingers on your hand, and five is the number of slices of American cheese you can eat in one sitting."

Chowder's own theory, which he returns to throughout the book, is that the "true" English line has a three-beat "slow waltz" rhythm ("How SMALL of all that HUman hearts enDURE") or a six-beat rhythm in which the last beat is a rest ("All HUman THINGS are SUBject TO deCAY [rest]").

The proposition is not what you'd call bullet-proof, but that's beside the point -- this kind of spouting off is exactly what we do when we read poetry privately, or are talking to people we aren't trying to impress.

There's a hoary but still useful distinction to be made between poetry as the chilly, brilliant, stellar sweep of millions of combinations of words over centuries -- as the product of thousands of minds moving upon silence, in Yeats's phrasing -- and the warmer, occasionally sentimental way in which individual readers find meaning in the smaller, match-lit pleasures of stanzas, words, lines and bits of trivia.

This latter aspect is what Baker has set out to capture in "The Anthologist." It's easy to underestimates this project, because in its lesser incarnations it so often comes swaddled in layers of hokum about feelings and hearts and "being human." But it's a vital part of poetry. "Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing," Chowder says. Well, no. But also: yes. We read poems because they have a knack for mattering. And how pleasing it is to be so gently, so poetically reminded of that.