三位加拿大诗人推荐的加拿大诗歌
这是下午和我谈陈子昂“登幽州台歌”英译的三位多伦多诗人Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, Andy Patton给我推荐的加拿大诗歌，共17位诗人。
(1)Robert Bringhurst
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-bringhurst
These Poems, She Said
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said” from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982. Copyright © 1982 by Robert Bringhurst. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press,
(2) John Thompson “Stilt Jack”
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2009/08/john-thompson-1977.html
(3) John Newlove “The Well Travelled Roadway”
http://notesandqueries.ca/taking-the-measure/
(4) Al Purdy" The Country North of Bellville" and "My Grandfather's Country"
http://www.blackbough.com/excerpts/belleville.html
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/purdy/index.htm
Bush land scrub land —
Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elvezir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
for miles —
Yet this is the country of defeat
where Sisyphus rolls a big stone
year after year up the ancient hills
picnicking glaciers have left strewn
with centuries' rubble
days in the sun
when realization seeps slow in the mid
without grandeur or self deception in
noble struggle
of being a fool —
A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
not fat
with inches of black soil on
earth's round belly —
And where the farms are it's
as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the stony earth and pulled
it apart to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
and maybe some cows and
room for some
of the more easily kept illusions —
And where the farms have gone back
to forest
are only soft outlines and
shadowy differences —
Old fences drift vaguely among the trees
a pile of moss-covered stones
gathered for some ghost purpose
has lost meaning under the meaningless sky
— they are like cities under water and
the undulating green waves of time are
laid on them —
This is the country of our defeat and
yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows
and shade his eyes to watch for the same
red patch mixed with gold
that appears on the same
spot in the hills
year after year
and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten acre field until
the convolutions run parallel with his own brain —
And this is a country where the young
leave quickly
unwilling to know what their fathers know
or think the words their mothers do not say —
Herschel Monteagle and Faraday
lakeland rockland and hill country
a little adjacent to where the world is
a little north of where the cities are and
sometime
we may go back there
to the country of our defeat
Wollaston Elvezir Dungannon
and Weslemkoon lake land
where the high townships of Cashel
McClure and Marmora once were —
But it's been a long time since
and we must enquire the way
of strangers —
— "The Country North of Belleville," Al Purdy
(5) Paulette Jiles “Waterloo Express”
(6) Kim Maltman “Technologies/Installations”
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/maltman/poem5.htm
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/maltman/
http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=76&reviewid=432
And after that--what? Alienation. Insulin.
Lights, for example, on the harbor.
— P. Handke
So many troubles and all we've got to offer up to them
is indecision — maybe have a few drinks
with old friends while the moon is full and they're in town:
they don't know where they're going any better than we do!
I'm sick of pain as a way of life —
but then who isn't? Like an ox to the slaughter —
And spare me the morphine of sentimentality
(unless you want to write for television, that is):
suffering, salvation,
all the little mysteries we're supposed to have
such faith in: boiled down
there's not much more than a thimbleful of
nourishment to all that.
I guess I'm trying to think about my friends,
the cousin from Vermont nobody likes.
Might as well throw in the cat too while I'm at it.
Little crises. Now and then something so overpoweringly terrifying
it paralyzes all the small animals in the
neighborhood when it gets loose there.
I want to know why I can't just puff a little gaiety into them,
a little life. Run a line up through the cerebellum
and inflate them with it, fill them up so full that
someone else could lean against them in their turn,
and (leak or no) be comforted, at least for half a night.
Christ and Christ and Christ and Christ — and Christ again!
There're so many "Christs!" in my head I can't get rid of them all!
If only I'd've had my head turned just a little,
or been not so headstrong,
hungrier for something — god knows what —
I could be ten years gone along the straight and narrow,
with a wife and kids and carefree, and a good job in the city,
on the weekends gather clippings from the lawn up in a wheelbarrow
and be none the wiser.
Hah!
I want to say to my friends
"We're not getting any younger, you know," and watch them
watching me, looking jaded and a little fearful.
I want to take all those things that
matter to people and cause them pain —
and smash them to pieces.
Then I'll get up in the middle of the night and realize
I've still got three hours of sleep left — and feel glorious.
Hear a dog howling — several dogs — howling together,
going into a frenzy. Soon they'll be
running together, looking for something to chase,
and kill. Then I'll go out and stand by the shore.
It'll be cold and a cold, wet wind will be blowing.
In from the sea. It'll be blowing and I'll stand there,
let it whip the hair against my face.
It'll be out on the headlands where the few
offshore islands sink and dip, in and out among the banks of
fog and morning mist, and I'll keep watching them,
trying to give them continuity — to somehow
feel their presence.
And because I'll want to hate something,
I'll hate the ship that sails past each night, close to shore,
lit up with couples out on the harbor for a night of
dancing and romance. Snatches of music
drift across the water then, you know.
And I'll imagine standing there, wishing all my little troubles,
and my big ones too, out onto that ship,
as it heads out from the harbor, all the
mean unwieldy spirits, all the thoughts and
sorrows, all the grievances, and suddenly
I'll look up, I'll look up and see the people have
stopped dancing — they'll have stopped dancing and be
(gloriously!) standing at the railing,
slowly getting smaller and smaller, with big hats on their heads!
(7) Roo Borson “Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCBsGiLulg
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/aboutus/artistsstories/writing/mo127888106192749830.htm
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/borson/crit.htm
SUMMER GRASS
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales
alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.
The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,
and home is just a place you started out,
the only place you still know how to think from,
so that that place is mated to this
by necessity as well as choice,
though now you have to start again from here,
and it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early evening
beside the Travelodge, as wayward and causal as
will, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be —
though this was in retrospect, and only practice
for some other life. Do you still love poetry?
Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds,
banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,
one note each, the rustling blades grow green —
and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen
suspended in the river weeds like a turtle
up for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.
And what would you give up,
what would you give up, in the beautiful
false logic of math, or Greek? In the sum
of the possible, long ago in the summer grass …
Here beside the river I close my eyes: there
the little girls lean continuously across a rusted
sign that says Don’t Feed The Swans
and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;
the young cygnets, hatched from pins
and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning
what has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t
have to do with this is all the rest:
one more chance to blow out the candles and wish
for things we wished for
that wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.
Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice
beneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning
with a name. But cloud — or grief, when grief
is loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,
when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.
(8) Don McKay “Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night”
(9) Dale Zieroth “Clearing: Poems from a Journey”
(10) David William McFadden: Gypsy Guitar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/mcfadden/index.htm
(11) Dennis Lee “Civil Elegies”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQQWNXUnCuw
http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/dennislee.html
http://houseofanansipress.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/an-insiders-look-at-civil-elegies-with-guest-blogger-dennis-lee/
(13) George Grant ”Technology and Empire Perspectives on North America”
(14) Raymond Souster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Souster
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/513.html
(15) George Bowering “Kerrisdale Elegies”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bowering
(16) Sharon Thesen “Aurora”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Thesen
(17) Gary Geddes “Snakeroot”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Geddes
(1)Robert Bringhurst
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-bringhurst
These Poems, She Said
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said” from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982. Copyright © 1982 by Robert Bringhurst. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press,
(2) John Thompson “Stilt Jack”
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2009/08/john-thompson-1977.html
(3) John Newlove “The Well Travelled Roadway”
http://notesandqueries.ca/taking-the-measure/
(4) Al Purdy" The Country North of Bellville" and "My Grandfather's Country"
http://www.blackbough.com/excerpts/belleville.html
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/purdy/index.htm
Bush land scrub land —
Cashel Township and Wollaston
Elvezir McClure and Dungannon
green lands of Weslemkoon Lake
where a man might have some
opinion of what beauty
is and none deny him
for miles —
Yet this is the country of defeat
where Sisyphus rolls a big stone
year after year up the ancient hills
picnicking glaciers have left strewn
with centuries' rubble
days in the sun
when realization seeps slow in the mid
without grandeur or self deception in
noble struggle
of being a fool —
A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
not fat
with inches of black soil on
earth's round belly —
And where the farms are it's
as if a man stuck
both thumbs in the stony earth and pulled
it apart to make room
enough between the trees
for a wife
and maybe some cows and
room for some
of the more easily kept illusions —
And where the farms have gone back
to forest
are only soft outlines and
shadowy differences —
Old fences drift vaguely among the trees
a pile of moss-covered stones
gathered for some ghost purpose
has lost meaning under the meaningless sky
— they are like cities under water and
the undulating green waves of time are
laid on them —
This is the country of our defeat and
yet
during the fall plowing a man
might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows
and shade his eyes to watch for the same
red patch mixed with gold
that appears on the same
spot in the hills
year after year
and grow old
plowing and plowing a ten acre field until
the convolutions run parallel with his own brain —
And this is a country where the young
leave quickly
unwilling to know what their fathers know
or think the words their mothers do not say —
Herschel Monteagle and Faraday
lakeland rockland and hill country
a little adjacent to where the world is
a little north of where the cities are and
sometime
we may go back there
to the country of our defeat
Wollaston Elvezir Dungannon
and Weslemkoon lake land
where the high townships of Cashel
McClure and Marmora once were —
But it's been a long time since
and we must enquire the way
of strangers —
— "The Country North of Belleville," Al Purdy
(5) Paulette Jiles “Waterloo Express”
(6) Kim Maltman “Technologies/Installations”
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/maltman/poem5.htm
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/maltman/
http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=76&reviewid=432
And after that--what? Alienation. Insulin.
Lights, for example, on the harbor.
— P. Handke
So many troubles and all we've got to offer up to them
is indecision — maybe have a few drinks
with old friends while the moon is full and they're in town:
they don't know where they're going any better than we do!
I'm sick of pain as a way of life —
but then who isn't? Like an ox to the slaughter —
And spare me the morphine of sentimentality
(unless you want to write for television, that is):
suffering, salvation,
all the little mysteries we're supposed to have
such faith in: boiled down
there's not much more than a thimbleful of
nourishment to all that.
I guess I'm trying to think about my friends,
the cousin from Vermont nobody likes.
Might as well throw in the cat too while I'm at it.
Little crises. Now and then something so overpoweringly terrifying
it paralyzes all the small animals in the
neighborhood when it gets loose there.
I want to know why I can't just puff a little gaiety into them,
a little life. Run a line up through the cerebellum
and inflate them with it, fill them up so full that
someone else could lean against them in their turn,
and (leak or no) be comforted, at least for half a night.
Christ and Christ and Christ and Christ — and Christ again!
There're so many "Christs!" in my head I can't get rid of them all!
If only I'd've had my head turned just a little,
or been not so headstrong,
hungrier for something — god knows what —
I could be ten years gone along the straight and narrow,
with a wife and kids and carefree, and a good job in the city,
on the weekends gather clippings from the lawn up in a wheelbarrow
and be none the wiser.
Hah!
I want to say to my friends
"We're not getting any younger, you know," and watch them
watching me, looking jaded and a little fearful.
I want to take all those things that
matter to people and cause them pain —
and smash them to pieces.
Then I'll get up in the middle of the night and realize
I've still got three hours of sleep left — and feel glorious.
Hear a dog howling — several dogs — howling together,
going into a frenzy. Soon they'll be
running together, looking for something to chase,
and kill. Then I'll go out and stand by the shore.
It'll be cold and a cold, wet wind will be blowing.
In from the sea. It'll be blowing and I'll stand there,
let it whip the hair against my face.
It'll be out on the headlands where the few
offshore islands sink and dip, in and out among the banks of
fog and morning mist, and I'll keep watching them,
trying to give them continuity — to somehow
feel their presence.
And because I'll want to hate something,
I'll hate the ship that sails past each night, close to shore,
lit up with couples out on the harbor for a night of
dancing and romance. Snatches of music
drift across the water then, you know.
And I'll imagine standing there, wishing all my little troubles,
and my big ones too, out onto that ship,
as it heads out from the harbor, all the
mean unwieldy spirits, all the thoughts and
sorrows, all the grievances, and suddenly
I'll look up, I'll look up and see the people have
stopped dancing — they'll have stopped dancing and be
(gloriously!) standing at the railing,
slowly getting smaller and smaller, with big hats on their heads!
(7) Roo Borson “Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCBsGiLulg
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/aboutus/artistsstories/writing/mo127888106192749830.htm
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/borson/crit.htm
SUMMER GRASS
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales
alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.
The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,
and home is just a place you started out,
the only place you still know how to think from,
so that that place is mated to this
by necessity as well as choice,
though now you have to start again from here,
and it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early evening
beside the Travelodge, as wayward and causal as
will, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be —
though this was in retrospect, and only practice
for some other life. Do you still love poetry?
Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds,
banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,
one note each, the rustling blades grow green —
and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen
suspended in the river weeds like a turtle
up for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.
And what would you give up,
what would you give up, in the beautiful
false logic of math, or Greek? In the sum
of the possible, long ago in the summer grass …
Here beside the river I close my eyes: there
the little girls lean continuously across a rusted
sign that says Don’t Feed The Swans
and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;
the young cygnets, hatched from pins
and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning
what has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t
have to do with this is all the rest:
one more chance to blow out the candles and wish
for things we wished for
that wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.
Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice
beneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning
with a name. But cloud — or grief, when grief
is loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,
when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.
(8) Don McKay “Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night”
(9) Dale Zieroth “Clearing: Poems from a Journey”
(10) David William McFadden: Gypsy Guitar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McFadden
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/mcfadden/index.htm
(11) Dennis Lee “Civil Elegies”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQQWNXUnCuw
http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/dennislee.html
http://houseofanansipress.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/an-insiders-look-at-civil-elegies-with-guest-blogger-dennis-lee/
(13) George Grant ”Technology and Empire Perspectives on North America”
(14) Raymond Souster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Souster
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/513.html
(15) George Bowering “Kerrisdale Elegies”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bowering
(16) Sharon Thesen “Aurora”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Thesen
(17) Gary Geddes “Snakeroot”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Geddes
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