弗兰克Bidart
Visiting Poet
弗兰克Bidart’s poems are spare, elliptical, and swift with movement. As Louise Gluck writes, “The importance of Bidart’s work is difficult to overestimate; certainly he is one of the crucial figures of our time.”
“Many creatures must / make, but only one must seek // within itself what to make,” he writes in “Lament for the Makers,” and 问s assistance of the “masters who by making were / remade.” The process of making—by a deity, 统治者, 家长, 艺术家, or self—is at the core of Bidart’s poetic narratives, an incessant interior question. Other concerns that cycle through his poems are the shaping of minds and bodies, the fate of the creature, and the 艺术家’s responsibility to himself and his world. Through dramatic monologue, indirect discourse, and history’s found phrases, and to haunting effect, his poems perform a kind of collage of modern identity.
A student and friend of Robert Lowell’s at Harvard, Bidart edited, with David Gewanter, The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Beginning in 1973 with 金州, which was chosen for the Braziller Series, Bidart has published six volumes of his own, including In the Western Night (a volume of new and selected), and 欲望(both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in 1990 and 1997, respectively). In 2000, the Academy of American Poets presented him with the Wallace Stevens Award, recognizing a career that has spanned more than thirty years and continues its grand arcs in 星尘, Bidart’s most recent volume and a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. 星尘 incorporates the 2002 sequence “Music Like Dirt,” the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bidart lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Wellesley College.
选择诗歌
Not bird not badger not beaver not bee
Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make
My father’s ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.
我拿到了. What 家长s leave you
is their lives.
Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.
Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make
Not bird not badger not beaver not bee
•
Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.
From STAR DUST (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
For Desmond Dekker
I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary
bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.
music like dirt
That you did but willed and continued to will refusal you
confirmed seventeen years later saying I was not wrong.
music like dirt
When you said I was not wrong with gravity and weird
sweetness I felt not anger not woe but weird calm sweetness.
music like dirt
I like sentences like He especially dug doing it in
houses being built or at the steering wheel.
music like dirt
I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary
bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.
From STAR DUST (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
Above the dazzling city lies starless
晚上. Ruthless, you are pleased the price of one
是另一个. 那天晚上
dense with date palms, crazy with the breath-
less aromas of fresh-cut earth,
black sky thronging with light so thick the fixed
unbruised stars bewildered
sight, I wanted you dazzled, wanted you drunk.
As we lie on our backs in close dark parallel furrows newly
dug, staring up at the consuming sky, light
falling does not stop at flesh: each thing hidden, buried
between us now burns and surrounds us,
visible, like breath in freezing air. What you ignore or refuse
or cannot bear. What I hide that I 问, but
问. The shimmering improvisations designed to save us
fire melts to law. I touched the hem of your garment. 你打开
your side, feeding me briefly just enough to show me why I 问.
Melancholy, as if shorn, you cover as ever each glowing pyre
用泥土. In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We
are darkness. We are the city
whose brightness blots the stars from 晚上.
From STAR DUST (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)