"Carol Emshwiller - Acceptance Speech (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

is, or how to find one, or which syllables make one up, or whether a syllable
is
part of one or belongs to a part of another entirely different poem.

The first poem of mine that hung from the flagpoles (and I still don't know
why)
was:
Look for the tender. The tenders
of the stock. Flocks
of fish fly. By
now they nest in the poet's curls. Whirl
his thoughts like fish. Oh fly
them by. And by.

After that poem, the screen was removed and I was allowed to see, at last, the
president, Humble-Master-of-the-Poem, his head of black curls going gray, his
yellow eyes, his ears set forward in greeting .... It was he, then, who taught
me to snap the whip, "Because," he said, "your syllables will travel at the
speed of sound, sounding out over the whole world." "Snap," he said, and I
would
snap. "Sing," he said, and I would sing, and many's the time he stole my
syllables and took them as his own and only let, as you would call them, the
lesser of my syllables be taken as said by me, though, neither then nor now,
do
I know which are the lesser of my syllables and many that you say are lesser,
I
think otherwise, while those on the banners are those I would deny.
"Don't think," he would tell me. "That way lies the false madness and not the
true madness of the poem." But sometimes he said, "Think! Think, think,
think,"
and I still don't know, I confess it, when to think and when to not think.

First, then, the poet's whip lashing out at me, and afterward, a long time
afterward, the bed where he mothered me as only (as you say) poets can mother,
fed me blossoms and let me recover, for a while, from poetry. By that time I
had
learned better than to repeat myself. By that time I was scarred and bruised,
but knew not to stop talking when poems were being called for -- not to let
any
line that might be turned and twisted and hooked onto another line or divided
in
that strange way of yours into even more nonsense than I'd thought it had -- I
learned not to let any such lines stay unsaid.

It was a long rest he (and you) gave me. And for all that time, not one single
little poem or even syllable, not one suffix or prefix was allowed from me,
though I had been beaten to the point that, whenever my vigilance relaxed,
poetry would pop out of my mouth at random. The president, Humble-Master,
shushed me and yet, even so, I saw him pressing down what I had said into his
little clay tablet, quickly, with the long nails of his paws. (You had let my