美国桂冠诗人的自白

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这年头，诗人不是一个招人待见的称号，写诗也不是一个安身立命的行当。古往今来，不少怀抱理想与激情的诗人只不过在俗世里演绎了一首又一首潦倒的悲歌。但我依旧喜欢写诗。从少年开始，一直到步入古稀，我始终没有放下那支写诗的笔。这不是愚蠢的狂热，不是一生的职业追求，当然也不是为了吸引异性的目光。我写诗只是因为喜欢，就像鱼儿喜欢水一样自然。

When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out2) that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself, “This son of mine has always been a little nuts3).” Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come to my senses4) and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome5) and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

Another question poets old and young are typically asked in interviews is when and why they decided to become poets. The assumption is that there was a moment when they came to realize there can be no other destiny for them but to write poetry, followed by the announcement to their families that had their mothers exclaim: “Oh God, what did we do wrong to deserve this?” while their fathers ripped out their belts and chased them around the room. I was often tempted6) to tell the interviewer with a straight face that I had chosen poetry to get my hands on7) all that big prize money that’s lying around, since informing them that there was never any decision like that in my case inevitably disappoints them. They want to hear something heroic and poetic, and I tell them that I was just another high school kid who wrote poems in order to impress girls, but with no other ambition beyond that. Not being a native speaker of English, they also ask me why I didn’t write my poems in Serbian8) and wonder how I arrived at the decision to ditch9) my mother tongue. Again, my answer seems frivolous10) to them, when I explain that for poetry to be used as an instrument of seduction, the first requirement is that it be understood. No American girl was likely to fall for a guy who reads her love poems in Serbian as they sip Coke.

The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going. I now regret destroying my early poems, because I no longer remember whom they were modeled after. At the time I wrote them, I was reading mostly fiction and had little knowledge of contemporary poetry and modernist poets. The only extensive exposure I had to poetry was in the year I attended school in Paris before coming to the United States. They not only had us read Lamartine11), Hugo12), Baudelaire13), Rimbaud14), and Verlaine15), but they made us memorize certain poems of theirs and recite them in front of the class. This was such a nightmare for me as a rudimentary16) speaker of French—and guaranteed fun for my classmates, who cracked up17) at the way I mispronounced some of the most beautiful and justly famous lines of poetry in French literature—that for years afterwards I couldn’t bring myself to take stock of18) what I learned in that class. Today, it’s clear to me that my love of poetry comes from those readings and those recitations, which left a deeper impact on me than I realized when I was young.