楼主 (文学城)
原创平水韵七律二首 （一） 有燕倾情抹鬓丝，江南入梦出尘时。 仙还旧雨青蓑遇，谁借新风白絮离？ 陶影柳边难隐姓，唐心月下易明诗。 忽闻绝句云霄外，天马终无伯乐羁。 上平四支 （二） 寒门不掩坐忘机，有物多情织布衣。 在野蛩声天下放，辞京雁影月前归。 宫廷百变同因果，笔墨无妨各是非。 识字清风勤展卷，书生梦采首阳薇。 上平五微 *** The other day my wife asked me why Tang poetry mattered in America. Instead of an answer, I gave her a puzzled look despite myself. Frankly, she knew next to nothing about Chinese. So, how come she threw me this curveball question? Never mind. She had already landed in my lap, along with a copy of Cathay. Holy moly, it was good old Ezra Pound's Cathay, a slim volume containing 15 classical Chinese poems rendered in English. Chinese-illiterate, Pound nonetheless picked up the Tang spirit and ran with it. Published in 1915, his Cathay ended up as a game changer for American literature in the roaring '20s. Soaring from Cathay was a Tang soul for all American literati to look up to, and they did. Indeed, the celebrated American poet T.S. Eliot rightly regarded Tang poetry as a breath of fresh air. Eliot went on to win a Nobel prize. Ernest Hemingway, another Nobel laureate, also had a taste of Tang, perhaps unknowingly, thanks to Cathay which gave rise to American modernism in the Jazz Age. Jazz reinvented American music to which my wife and I couldn’t help dancing. Tang revived American poetry with which we couldn’t help rhyming. There’s no daylight between Tang and Jazz. Both were in the moonlight. So were we. … Author: Lingyang Jiang