酷我-北美枫

[hahaview]

Poem Text of A One-line Poem by John Hollander

The universe

Chinese Translation

一行詩

詩道於一
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[[hahaview]]

Poem Text of A One-line Poem by John Hollander

The universe

Chinese Translation

一行詩

詩道於一
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[hahaview]

John Hollander is a renowned American poet and literary critic. He is currently Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. As Paul Devlin points out in his introduction to A Conversation with John Hollander:

“Hollander’s poems span the full range of human emotions and must be counted among the most sophisticated productions of the human mind. His work is highly heterogeneous and cannot be summarized here. His poetry is urbane, but never decadent. It radiates with deep scholarly learning, but is never pedantic. On the contrary, his work is entertaining, in the "read this for fun, not just because it’s good for you" sense. (Although they are good for you too, like all great art.) They are profoundly philosophical, playful, lighthearted, quite funny, dark, and serious. Often they can be mysterious and sublime, but each is the work of a master craftsman.”

Here is an excerpt from his interview with John Hollander on poetry, which is posted at http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol1-2/hollander.html :

PD: Do you see good poetry or poetry as a fine art, threatened by the internet, by explosions of communications in general? Do you think people have less time/strong attention spans to spend absorbed in a poem than they did even twenty, to say nothing of two-hundred years ago?

JH: I’m more worried about people’s ability to pay informed attention—to be able to listen to—rather than merely hear—music, for example; to be able to detect and be negatively affected by specious argument and deception in public speech of all kinds; to know any history and geography; to understand not only something about science but about explanation in general; to read and speak foreign languages—in short, about the fate of knowledge in a discursive world that ignores or suppresses it and can deal only with what it calls "information". When you have educated readers, good poetry will take care of itself.

PD: I was thinking that perhaps Rhyme’s Reason may help "rescue" good poetry, by making it less daunting for people to try verse in traditional forms, instead of writing any-old-thing and calling it poetry. Was this something you had in mind when you wrote the book?

JH: Certainly. But it should be made clear that "traditional forms" include a variety of systems of verse, not merely accentual-syllabism. The very different modes of free verse written by Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman and, still over a hundred years ago by William Ernest Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson and Stephen Crane are certainly "traditional forms". Most people can’t read and hear and see poetry because they’ve been trained not to by bad teachers in a wretched educational system generally. I wrote the book to provide amusing examples of what different elements of verse could do in isolation and together, hoping that teachers and self-teachers (and people who write are always those to a degree) would find it useful.

PD: I think Rhyme’s Reason is not only an indispensable guide to English verse, but a work of art in and of itself, certainly a work of great humor and imagination. Can you give a brief history of why you wrote it, or how the idea(s) to write it came to you?

JH: I’d originally written quite a few of the self-descriptive examples in the first edition of Rhyme’s Reason as an appendix to the poetry section of a freshman reader I’d edited with Irving Howe and David Bromwich. But the wonderful acquisitions editor for literature at Yale University Press at the time (1980) had suggested that I could write many more of them and make them into a more comprehensive handbook. Thinking of my own students, and of how there was no such guide to the varieties of verse in English to which I could send them and that would help teach them to notice things about the examples presented—to see how the particular stanza or rhythmic scheme or whatever was being used by the particular words of the particular poem, for example—I got to work and with a speed which now alarms me produced a manuscript for the first edition of the book. I’ve never had more immediate fun writing a book.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[[hahaview]]

John Hollander is a renowned American poet and literary critic. He is currently Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. As Paul Devlin points out in his introduction to A Conversation with John Hollander:

“Hollander’s poems span the full range of human emotions and must be counted among the most sophisticated productions of the human mind. His work is highly heterogeneous and cannot be summarized here. His poetry is urbane, but never decadent. It radiates with deep scholarly learning, but is never pedantic. On the contrary, his work is entertaining, in the "read this for fun, not just because it’s good for you" sense. (Although they are good for you too, like all great art.) They are profoundly philosophical, playful, lighthearted, quite funny, dark, and serious. Often they can be mysterious and sublime, but each is the work of a master craftsman.”

Here is an excerpt from his interview with John Hollander on poetry, which is posted at http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~ganterg/sjureview/vol1-2/hollander.html :

PD: Do you see good poetry or poetry as a fine art, threatened by the internet, by explosions of communications in general? Do you think people have less time/strong attention spans to spend absorbed in a poem than they did even twenty, to say nothing of two-hundred years ago?

JH: I’m more worried about people’s ability to pay informed attention—to be able to listen to—rather than merely hear—music, for example; to be able to detect and be negatively affected by specious argument and deception in public speech of all kinds; to know any history and geography; to understand not only something about science but about explanation in general; to read and speak foreign languages—in short, about the fate of knowledge in a discursive world that ignores or suppresses it and can deal only with what it calls "information". When you have educated readers, good poetry will take care of itself.

PD: I was thinking that perhaps Rhyme’s Reason may help "rescue" good poetry, by making it less daunting for people to try verse in traditional forms, instead of writing any-old-thing and calling it poetry. Was this something you had in mind when you wrote the book?

JH: Certainly. But it should be made clear that "traditional forms" include a variety of systems of verse, not merely accentual-syllabism. The very different modes of free verse written by Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman and, still over a hundred years ago by William Ernest Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson and Stephen Crane are certainly "traditional forms". Most people can’t read and hear and see poetry because they’ve been trained not to by bad teachers in a wretched educational system generally. I wrote the book to provide amusing examples of what different elements of verse could do in isolation and together, hoping that teachers and self-teachers (and people who write are always those to a degree) would find it useful.

PD: I think Rhyme’s Reason is not only an indispensable guide to English verse, but a work of art in and of itself, certainly a work of great humor and imagination. Can you give a brief history of why you wrote it, or how the idea(s) to write it came to you?

JH: I’d originally written quite a few of the self-descriptive examples in the first edition of Rhyme’s Reason as an appendix to the poetry section of a freshman reader I’d edited with Irving Howe and David Bromwich. But the wonderful acquisitions editor for literature at Yale University Press at the time (1980) had suggested that I could write many more of them and make them into a more comprehensive handbook. Thinking of my own students, and of how there was no such guide to the varieties of verse in English to which I could send them and that would help teach them to notice things about the examples presented—to see how the particular stanza or rhythmic scheme or whatever was being used by the particular words of the particular poem, for example—I got to work and with a speed which now alarms me produced a manuscript for the first edition of the book. I’ve never had more immediate fun writing a book.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[hahaview]

A One-line Poem is a monostich which is made up of “the” and “universe” (uni-cum-verse). Due to the brevity of its form, due to the brevity of the form, the title is invariably as important a part of the poem as the verse itself. Therefore, we get a hint from its title, and this poem is literally a self-explanatory monostich and connotatively implies that poetry is the universe.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

[[hahaview]]

A One-line Poem is a monostich which is made up of “the” and “universe” (uni-cum-verse). Due to the brevity of its form, due to the brevity of the form, the title is invariably as important a part of the poem as the verse itself. Therefore, we get a hint from its title, and this poem is literally a self-explanatory monostich and connotatively implies that poetry is the universe.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

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