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发表于: 星期三 七月 29, 2009 12:53 pm    发表主题:

Poetry and tragedy

The U.S. poet laureate, selected by the librarian of Congress, has been called "the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans." USA TODAY asked the five most recent poets laureate to each select a piece of their work that they believe has a message for these difficult times.

The Dead

By Billy Collins

In the aftermath of the catastrophe of Sept. 11, which was nothing less than a psychic invasion of the United States, many people I know turned intuitively to poetry as a source of sanity and perhaps even consolation. Poetry has always accommodated loss and keening; it may be said to be the original grief counseling center. But American poets will have a hard time if they attempt a direct response to these events, because poetry by its nature moves us inward, not outward to the public and the collective.

Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the media has tried to fill that hole, that vacuum, with talk and print, but unsuccessfully. Poetry will not fill that space either, but poetry creates its own space apart from such terrible emptiness. It's not that poets should feel a responsibility to write about this calamity. All poetry stands in opposition to it. Pick a poem, any poem, from an anthology and you will see that it is speaking for life and therefore against the taking of it. A poem about mushrooms or about a walk with the dog is a more eloquent response to Sept. 11 than a poem that announces that wholesale murder is a bad thing.

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

— Reprinted from Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House, 2001.

Billy Collins, who will be the country's 2001-2002 poet laureate, is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, and a writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College.


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Night Letter

By Stanley Kunitz

My first reaction Sept. 11 was, of course, shock and dismay. And then I had the curious feeling that I had been through all this before. In the mid-30s of the past century, when Hitler's tanks and storm troopers were sweeping through Europe and the cities were being leveled one by one, it seemed as though civilization itself was doomed. The poem I wrote then, Night Letter, speaks for me now as it did then. Its concluding lines:

Night Letter (excerpt)

Violence shakes my dreams; I am so cold,
Chilled by the persecuting wind abroad,
The oratory of the rodent's tooth,
The slaughter of the blue-eyed open towns,
And principle disgraced, and art denied.
My dear, is it too late for peace, too late
For men to gather at the wells to drink
The sweet water; too late for fellowship
and laughter at the forge; too late for us
To say, "Let us be good to one another"?
The lamps go singly out; the valley sleeps;
I tend the last light shining on the farms
And keep for you the thought of love alive,
As scholars dungeoned in an ignorant age
Tended the embers of the Trojan fire.
Cities shall suffer siege and some shall fall,
But man's not taken. What the deep heart means,
Its message of the big, round, childish hand,
Its wonder, its simple lonely cry,
The bloodied envelope addressed to you,
Is history, that wide and mortal pang.

Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.

National Medal of the Arts recipient Stanley Kunitz is the 2000-2001 poet laureate. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, he taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University and was designated New York's state poet.


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Memorial

By Robert Pinsky

"Memorial" was written as an elegy for two people who were once close to me. By the time they died, both with considerable pain, I no longer saw them very often. I didn't witness the pain, as their families did.

The poem tries to meditate death's meaning, its peace, its painful process, the life of the dead in the imagination of the living. It is an effort at remembering and at imagining, and an attempt to register how hard those efforts can be.

Memorial (an excerpt)

(J.E. and N.M.S.)

... A public building
Is where the house was: though a surf, unyielding

And sickly, seethes and eddies at the stones
Of the foundation. The dead are made of bronze,

But living they were like birds with clocklike hearts—
Unthinkable how much pain the tiny parts

Of even the smallest bird might yet contain.
We become larger than life in how much pain

Our bodies may encompass all Titans in that,
Or heroic statues. Although there is no heat

Brimming in the fixed, memorial summer, the brows
Of lucid metal sweat a faint warm haze

As I try to think the pain I never saw.
Though there is no pain there, the small birds draw

Together in crowds above the houses — and cry
Over the surf: as if there were a day,

Memorial, marked on the calendar for dread
And pain and loss — although among the dead

Are no hurts, but only emblematic things;
No hospital beds, but a lifting of metal wings.


— Reprinted from The Figured Wheel, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996.

Robert Pinsky was poet laureate from 1997-2000. His most recent book of poems is Jersey Rain; he also is co-editor of Americans' Favorite Poems.


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In Praise of Grief

By Robert Hass

This poem was written to comfort someone enduring private suffering. The argument is that pain teaches us what we value. So perhaps it's relevant to this time of public mourning and anger.

In Praise of Grief

I've watched memory wound you.
I felt nothing but envy.
Having slept in wet meadows,
I was not through desiring.
Imagine January and the beach,
a bleached sky, g ulls. And
look seaward: what is not there
is there, isn't it, the huge
bird of the first light
arched above first waters
beyond our touching or intention
or the reasonable shore.

— Reprinted from Praise, Ecco Press, 1979.

Robert Hass, poet laureate from 1995-97, is a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is Sun Under Wood.


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Mercy

By Rita Dove

If, as Wallace Stevens says, the poet is the priest of the invisible, then a poem is no more or less than a message from that void, offered as manna for the spirit. I believe the power of human utterance, spoken into the silence of the universe, can be a stay against despair.

Mercy

An absolute sound,
this soughing above
the tops of trees.
For the longest while
I couldn't look up, so much
did I long to see the ocean,
rough and whitened.

Such soft ululations,
such a drumroll of feathers!
Yet it was no other weather
than Wind. I looked up; the sky
lay blue as always, Biblical
and terrifying, just where
it was supposed to be.

Copyright 2001 by Rita Dove. Reprinted from Ploughshares, Vol. 27, Nos. 2 & 3, by permission of the author.

Rita Dove, the poet laureate from 1993 to 1995, is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.