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

who talked to me from behind a screen. He, however, could see me, and from there
could reach out with his whip and snap it over my head with a great snap, or let
it fly onto my back, in which case it made, instead, a flat, slapping sound.

"Sing," he would say, and I would answer, "Ab-so-la-la," but by then, that was
wrong.

In this manner I learned your syllables and syntax. I learned the prefix for the
poem and the suffix for happiness, and I learned to call the president of poems
sometimes: Humble-Master-of-the-Names-of-Things, or sometimes:
Humble-Master-of-the-Thingness-of-Things-that-Objects-Should-Speak-Through-Him.
And I learned, whatever I wore, to bare my back in his presence or in the
presence of any of you poets of the palace as a temptation to the whip. Yet, I
must confess it, I still, even at this moment...I still don't know what a poem
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.