讀到一本書裏說，想要成為詩人的人，比讀詩的讀者還多！人們總是各有各的盲點，似乎寫詩的人尤甚，對自己寫的更容易愛不釋手，對別人寫的卻不容易看上眼。但對於經常讀的 - 從而必然會變得稍為謙遜的讀者來說，會明白好些以中文寫的詩真的是慘不忍讀 - 很多作者 [指中文出版書刊，網上大家都是寫著玩或正練習是另碼事] 似乎還停留在現代詩就是詩興大發，情緒的一呼而就或者用極致的語言精心編織一組別致的意象而已。。。其實在成為一個能深入細讀的讀者之前，並不需要急匆匆地去寫。。。若對好的詩歌到底什麽樣子，還是不以為然的話，讀下Jorie Graham的佳作《The Geese》-說佳作不是吹的，因為這首已經被錄入詩歌教科書《The Norton Anthology of Poetry》：
Today as I hang out the wash I see them again, a code
as urgent as elegant,
tapering with goals.
For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese
as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading.
Sometimes I fear their relevance.
Closest at hand,
between the lines,
the spiders imitate the paths the geese won’t stray from,
imitate them endlessly to no avail:
things will not remain connected,
will not heal,
and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds
the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush,
as if, at any time, things could fall further apart
and nothing could help them
recover their meaning. And if these spiders had their way,
chainlink over the visible world,
would we be in or out? I turn to go back in.
There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling
without the sense that you are passing through the one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,
your body an arrival
you know is false but can’t outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,
this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.
