酷我-北美枫

相思冰心

躲開相思。
披上裘兒
gg走出燈明人靜的屋子。

小徑里明月相窺，
枯枝 ──
gg在雪地上
gggg又縱橫的寫遍了相思。

English Translation: Thinking of You

To avoid thinking of you,
I wore a fur-lined gown,
And walked out of the well-lit, quiet room.

The bright moon came peeping down the garden path;
The withered branches
Had criss-crossed the snowy ground
And scribbled thoughts of love

The Smell of Mothballs (Sudden Fiction)

Such cool and breezy weather is kind of unusual in May. The sight of your approaching warms me. You say nothing, hold my hand tightly, and we walk off together.

Your overcoat gives off the faint scentl of mothballs. As I lean close to your shoulder, I think that a man’s body cannot smell any better with this clean, neutral smell. The wind is blowing now. You dutifully pull me closer to your chest and continue tol say nothing all the way home. The smell of mothballs becomes stronger. It is the smell of home. Yet, I know fully: It is your home.

Silence Is a Looking Bird co-authored by ericcoliu

In my view, the most challenging part of a poet’s work is to name the unnameable and articulate the unspoken or unspeakable. Silence is such a poetic realm worthy of further exploration and even transgression of the boundaries of imagination. In his succinct and intense poem below,

silence
.is
a
looking

bird:the

turn
ing;edge, of
life

(inquiry before snow

E. E. Cummings tackles this challenging subject by defining it through two vivid images: “the looking bird” and “the turning edge of life.” The first image signifies the potentiality of the unactualized voice and its underlying metaphor that has been displaced is that of the singing bird. The second one refers to the unimaginable passage where speech turns into speechlessness. These two images are beyond conventional representation. Is a looking bird still a bird? And can the turning edge of life be called a life? He works hard on the limits of literary representation and tries to pin down the elusive nature of his escaping subject.

Still, silence, Cummings humbly admits, partly resists definition because of its self-sufficiency as the punctuation mark, a period, at the beginning of the second line clearly demonstrates. Written in his innovative sentence structure, silence in itself is a sentence that hardly needs any verb. To further explore the unheard and express the unspoken, he resorts to the eye and points out the analogy between silence and snow, two words that begin and end with the poem. The last line, “(inquiry before snow,” is left out a closing parenthesis and followed by a huge blank, loudly announcing a white downpour, a visual snow that covers the rest of the page. This literary device is similar to a Chinese painting method, "leaving blank” (liu bai in Chinese), with which artists may leave the background blank to enhance the impact in order to emphasize a particular subject. Silence is made visible on the page by the surrounding blank space. If silence is the unspoken by definition, through the reader’s imagination, silence can be experienced visually on the page. To some extent, this poem is not only textual but also visual, and Cummings skilfully enables the reader to decipher the mute hieroglyphs of the page and to turn them into speech. Silence is a looking bird, which can realize its potentiality of singing beautiful songs through imagination.

Literary Imagination

The literary imagination clubs the fact of a lived life over the head, slits its throat, then pulls forth the guts, and with bare hands tears its body into bloodied pieces.

With pieces of the fact scattered everywhere, the imagination is wading through them. Once the imagination is finished with a fact, it bears no resemblance to the fact of a lived life.

What do you think of it? What's your literary imagination?

Rich and Poor

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway, "The rich are different from you and me."

Hemingway replied calmly, smiling,"Yes, they have more money."

I wonder what made this seemingly trivial exchange of the idea about rich and poor between two prominent American writers well-known in the American literary history.