從社交網絡誕生的香豔詩歌小天后(1)

Just before she took the microphone one soggy night in Portland, Ore., the poet Patricia Lockwood downed a shot of cheap bourbon. She had never had a drink right before a reading, but she often enacts some private joke when she speaks in public. It might be slurping her water loudly into the microphone, or rolling (instead of stepping) onto a stage, or, in this case, ingesting something that tasted to her like a puddle in a forest — anything to erase what she calls the “anxiety kegels” leading up to a performance.

俄勒岡州波特蘭市的一個潮溼夜晚，詩人帕翠莎·洛克伍德(Patricia Lockwood)在拿起話筒之前幹掉了一小杯廉價的波本威士忌。這是她第一次在讀詩會開始之前喝酒。爲了在表演開始前放鬆她“緊張的盆底肌”，她時常鬧一些只有自己明白的笑話：她可能會對着話筒大聲地喝水，或是打着滾上講臺。這次喝酒也是這個目的，儘管那酒嚐起來就像是某個樹林水窪裏的髒水。

That evening, more than a hundred poetry fans — most of them in their 20s, most of them clutching cans of bargain beer — crowded into a corner of a 12,000-square-foot wood-and-metal shop as Lockwood began a 12-minute romp of a poem called “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.”

當晚，一百多名詩歌迷擠在一個大約1,150平方米的木頭和金屬製品加工車間的一角。他們大多20多歲，拿着廉價罐裝啤酒，期待着洛克伍德開始朗讀她那持續時長12分鐘、活潑嬉鬧的詩作 “美國咪咪照的父親和母親”(The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics)。

Lockwood is all large eyes, apple cheeks and pixie haircut — like an early Disney creation, perhaps a woodland creature; one of her fans recently rendered her as a My Little Pony. The contrast between how she presents and what she writes is something Lockwood delights in.

洛克伍德有着大大的眼睛，蘋果般豐滿的面頰，一頭短髮透着鬼馬精靈。她看上去像一個早期迪士尼的動畫造型——很有可能是某種林中生靈。最近她的一位粉絲把她畫成了小馬寶莉的樣子。她的外表和她的詩作反差巨大，而洛克伍德對此沾沾自喜。

“Emily Dickinson was the father of American poetry and Walt Whitman was the mother,” she read. “Walt Whitman nude, in the forest, staring deep into a still pool — the only means of taking tit-pics available at that time.”

“艾米麗·狄金森(Emily Dickinson)是美國詩歌之父，而沃爾特·惠特曼(Walt Whitman)是美國詩歌之母，” 她讀到：“沃爾特·惠特曼裸着身子，在樹林裏，深深凝視着一池靜水——在那個時代，這是拍咪咪照的唯一方式。”

I laughed, like everyone else in the audience, and then settled in for a poem that re-envisioned two 19th-century pillars of American poetry through a kaleidoscope of contemporary obsessions. Occasionally, the sound of arc welding filled the silences between stanzas. It was, she later said, “the butchest I have ever felt.”

像所有的聽衆一樣，我笑出了聲，然後平靜下來，欣賞這首以變化多端的現代人的癡好來重新想像兩位19世紀美國詩歌界重要人物的作品。偶爾，車間裏的電焊噪音還會打破詩節之間的沉寂，洛克伍德後來說這首詩是她迄今爲止“感覺最爺們” 一首作品。

Not long before this performance, a friend of mine introduced me to Lockwood’s work, handing me a copy of her first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” which his small poetry press had just published. Large portions of it are meditations on the cartoon character Popeye. It would seem an unlikely candidate for a New Yorker critic’s end-of-the-year picks, yet it was, and it also became the best-selling small-press poetry book of 2013 (by a living poet), marking Lockwood as indie-poetry royalty. This week, her second collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” comes out from Penguin, and in April, Lockwood announced the sale of her memoir to Riverhead.

在這次表演前不久,我的一位朋友向我推薦了洛克伍德的作品，給了我一本他的小型詩歌出版社剛出版的《氣球爆破不法之徒黑色》(Balloon Pop Outlaw Black )。這本作品的一大部分都是由卡通人物大力水手引起的遐想。出乎所有人意料的是，這本作品居然名列《紐約客》批評家年底推薦作品的榜單；還是2013年最暢銷的由小出版社出版的在世詩人的詩歌作品；這些殊榮標誌着洛克伍德成了獨立詩歌創作的新貴。這周，她的第二本詩集《母國父國祖國戀》(Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals)由企鵝出版社出版。在今年4月，她還宣佈將自己的回憶錄版權賣給河源出版社 。

Most poets who publish with the top indie or trade publishers in the country teach at universities, and nearly all have taken advanced degrees — an M.F.A. or even a Ph.D. in creative writing. The effect of grad-school workshops on literature in the United States has been the subject of endless debate — the M.F.A. vs. N.Y.C. meme being the most recent variation on the theme. Lockwood has no M.F.A., she never even went to college. She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her “desk-bed.” Now, at 32, Lockwood finds herself on the verge of literary fame, a product of ill fortune followed by good fortune and the perhaps naïve expectations of success that only an outsider can maintain.

在美國，大多數通過頂尖的獨立或商業出版商出版作品的詩人都在大學教書。他們幾乎所有人都有高等學歷——藝術創作碩士甚至創意寫作博士。美國高校研究生院裏的各種文學工作坊到底有什麼樣的效果，對此人們一直爭論不休。“藝術創作碩士作家vs.紐約作家” （指經過正統科班訓練並在大學供職的作家和居住在紐約市，爲了出版作品自己打拼的作家——譯註）這個最近流行起來的網絡模因(meme)是這個話題最新的變奏。洛克伍德沒有藝術創作碩士學位，她甚至沒有上過大學。她21歲就結了婚，幾乎沒有工作過。按她自己的描述，她成年後的生活方式就像普魯斯特，每天在她的“桌—牀”上寫好幾個小時。現在，32歲的洛克伍德即將成爲文壇新星。促成這一成就的是壞運之後的好運，加上只有局外人才能保持的那種對成功天真的期盼。

Lockwood, who goes by “Tricia,” may be best known for her persona on Twitter, where her steady stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers and a string of admirers in the world of comedy. Andy Richter, the longtime sidekick to Conan O’Brien, considers her a friend, though he has never met her offline: “She’s funny, she’s interesting and she’s a weirdo — which is all I ask for in a person.” Megan Amram, a writer for “Parks and Recreation,” came across Lockwood’s poetry first, relishing her ability to “heighten pop culture to saintly levels,” and then found her Twitter feed. “Both of us love the subversion of common sayings or verbal tropes,” Amram told me, “and we also love making fun of the way women are viewed as sex objects.” Rob Delaney, whom Comedy Central called “the funniest person on Twitter” and who has more than a million Twitter followers, heard about Lockwood from Amram. He “went insane,” he said, “and read everything by her.”

洛克伍德讓別人叫她“翠莎”(Tricia)。她最大的名氣可能來自她的Twitter賬戶。她在Twitter上定期地展示着她那超現實的、性感露骨卻又經常荒誕無稽的幽默。這爲她吸引到了三萬名粉絲和一些喜劇界的仰慕者。著名脫口秀主持人柯南·奧布萊恩(Conan O’Brien)的長期搭檔安迪·裏希特(Andy Richter)把洛克伍德視爲自己的朋友，儘管兩人從來沒有在線下見過面。“她有幽默感，有趣，還是個怪咖——對我來說，一個人有這些特點就足夠了，” 裏希特說。梅根·阿姆拉姆(Megan Amram)是美劇《公園和遊憩》(Parks and Recreation)的編劇之一。她最初是讀到了洛克伍德的詩作，對後者把“流行文化提升到幾乎神聖的高度”的能力大爲欣賞。阿姆拉姆之後發現了洛克伍德的Twitter。“我們兩個人都喜愛顛覆平淡無奇或是陳腔濫調的說法，”阿姆拉姆對我說道。“我們還都喜歡嘲諷女性在性關係中遭到物化的現象。”被喜劇頻道(Comedy Central)評爲“Twitter上最幽默人士”的羅伯·迪蘭尼(Rob Delaney)從阿姆拉姆那兒聽說了洛克伍德。迪蘭尼在Twitter上有超過100萬的粉絲，他說：“我當時真是太興奮了，我把她寫的都讀了一遍。”

Lockwood’s Twitter “sexts” — inspired by political scandals and cable-news stories on the sexual menace of cellphones — reimagine the sweaty-thumbed expression of a generation’s libido as a kind of gnomic poetry. She began composing the sexts in 2011, and soon online journals were compiling their favorites. The Huffington Post ran an article with the headline: “Patricia Lockwood’s Sext Poems Will Make You LOL.” Many are unprintable in these pages, but here’s a taste:

洛克伍德在Twitter上的“性短信”靈感來自政治醜聞和有線新聞頻道對手機潛在的性威脅的報道。這些“性短信”採用了精闢簡練的詩歌形式，藝術再現了當代人對慾望讓人臉紅心跳的表述。洛克伍德從2011 年開始在Twitter上發送這些短信，不久一些網絡媒體開始收集它們認爲最好的詞句。郝芬頓郵報刊登過這樣一篇稿子，標題是“帕特麗霞·洛克伍德的性短信詩歌讓你笑出聲”。很多詩歌不適合在本報刊出，下面的節選讀者可以感受一下：

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me

我是一件有生命的男式高領毛衣。你是一位冬天裏的藝術老師。你把你整個頭鑽進了我的身體。

Sext: I give u the Heimlich maneuver when u don’t even need the Heimlich maneuver. A grape pops out of u that u never even ate

你並不需要海姆利奇急救法，但是我還是對你施救。一粒葡萄從你嘴裏蹦了出來，而你從來沒有吃下過這粒葡萄。

Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You pucker; I wet you

我是宗教審判現場的一個水杯。你是教皇乾燥的嘴。 你起了皺，我弄溼了你。

Lockwood has found that her Twitter fans have surprising patience with some of her longer and less accessible poems. “The idea about readers being too lazy to read poetry — they just need an in,” she said, “a voice they can trust.” Though Lockwood claims not to assert her politics in her poems, Don Share, the editor of the venerable Poetry magazine, in which she has been published, says that’s one of the most striking things about her work. “She’s right on top of politics, the economy, social situations, sexual situations, gender issues,” he says. “She converts the feed of information we get all day into these striking poems.”

對於一些晦澀的長篇幅詩作，洛克伍德發現她的Twitter粉絲有着出人意料的耐心。“大家會認爲讀者太懶，不願讀詩，他們只不過需要一個讓他們信任的聲音帶他們入門，”洛克伍德說。洛克伍德的作品曾在享有很高聲譽的《詩歌》雜誌上發表。多恩·夏爾(Don Share)是這本雜誌主編 。雖然洛克伍德聲稱她不會在詩作裏表明自己的政治觀點和立場，但是夏爾卻說政治性是洛克伍德詩作的一大特色。“她對政治、經濟、社會問題、兩性問題和性別身份問題都非常熟悉。她把這些我們每天都會接觸到的信息變成了使人震撼的詩作。”

That was certainly the case last summer when her long poem called “Rape Joke” went viral as no contemporary poem has before or since. Lockwood and her husband, Jason Kendall, a newspaper editor, refer to the poem as “R. J.” She began writing it in the spring of 2012, drawing on a painful incident from her late teens. “It wasn’t because I felt a pressing need to write about my life,” she says. “It was because the form arrived to me, the vehicle arrived, and it felt so perfect — the anaphora, the repetition.” She laid a draft of the poem out in notes and then, as she often does, set it aside.

夏爾的這番評價用來形容洛克伍德的長詩《強姦笑話》(Rape Joke)再貼切不過了。去年夏天，這首詩被病毒式傳播。迄今爲止，從沒有任何別的當代詩作這麼流行過。洛克伍德和她的丈夫，報紙編輯傑森·肯德爾(Jason Kendall)把這首詩簡稱爲“R.J.”。她從2012 年春天開始創作，素材來自於她不到20歲時一段痛苦的經歷。“我並不是覺得自己的生活經歷非寫不可 ，”洛克伍德說。“我寫這首詩是因爲形式載體於我不期而至。指代、重複——這些是那麼完美。”她寫下了一個有註解的詩稿，然後，就像她經常做的那樣，把它放到了一邊。

That summer, during a stand-up set, the comedian Daniel Tosh went into an extended riff on rape jokes, which prompted a woman in the audience to shout, “Rape jokes are never funny.” Tosh’s response — “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?” — sparked a nationwide debate about taboos in comedy: Are there things we just can’t laugh about, and who is the “we” that gets to laugh and in what circumstances? While comedians, feminists, survivors of sexual violence and the usual pundits weighed in, Lockwood went back to the draft and finished the poem. She sent it to The Awl, an online magazine, where it sat for months.

那年夏天，在一場單人脫口秀演出中，喜劇演員丹尼爾·託什(Daniel Tosh)的一大段表演都是圍繞着強姦笑話這個主題。觀衆中一位女士忍不住叫道“強姦笑話從來都不好笑”。託什迴應道：“如果現在就有五個男人把這位女士強姦的話，大家會不會覺得好笑？”託什的這一回應引起了一場美國全國上下關於喜劇禁忌的大討論：是不是有一些事情我們不能拿來開玩笑？在什麼情況下我們可以笑，而這個“我們”到底指的是誰？就在喜劇演員、女權主義者、性暴力的受害者和那些滔滔不絕的專家學者們忙着發表他們的觀點時，洛克伍德找出了詩稿並完成了終稿。她把詩稿發給了網上雜誌《尖錐》()。直到好幾個月過去了，那些詩才發表出來。

“The rape joke is that you were 19 years old,” the poem begins. “The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.” And then the poem complicates itself — with a joke:

詩的開頭是這樣的：“強姦笑話說的是你那年19歲，而他是你的男朋友。”接下來詩裏講了一個笑話，於是變得複雜起來。

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

強姦笑話留着一把山羊鬍。一把山羊鬍。

Imagine a rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”

想像一下：一個強姦笑話正看着鏡中的自己，梳妝整理，好讓自己看起來更像一個強姦笑話。“啊，”它想，“對。一把山羊鬍。”

“It’s not a well-behaved poem,” Terrance Hayes, who selected the poem for the 2014 edition of “The Best American Poetry” series, told me. “It’s humor as we understand it from Richard Pryor, which is to say, there’s a blade at the heart of the joke, but there’s also a kind of suffering, and an awareness of that suffering, which gives it a kind of empathy for people who are exposed to it,” he said. “The whole poem is a big question, isn’t it?”

“這不是一首中規中矩的詩，”詩人特倫斯· 海耶斯(Terrance Hayes)告訴我說。海耶斯把《強姦笑話》選入了2014年版的《美國最佳詩作》系列。 “詩中的幽默和理查·普萊爾(Richard Pryor美國黑人喜劇演員——譯註)的幽默一脈相承。玩笑的中心是一把利刃，但是玩笑卻包含了一種磨難以及對這種磨難的認識。這使得這首詩表達出了對其他遭受着這種磨難的人們的同情，”海耶斯說。“整首詩提出了一個大問題，不是嗎？”

The response to the poem was huge across Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter — Lockwood was getting hundreds of tweets a minute the morning it was posted. An article published later that day in Salon declared that Lockwood “may have the final word in the rape-joke debate.” The Guardian noted that even as she “casually reawakened a generation’s interest in poetry,” she had done something perhaps even more difficult. “She may well be the first person with an actual sense of humor to write an attack on rape jokes. Or is it actually a defense of rape jokes?” Either way, it would be a mistake to reduce the poem to a manifesto. “Rape Joke” refuses not to be funny, but it also refuses to let you take comfort in getting the joke.

這首詩在Facebook、Tumblr和Twitter上產生了巨大的反響。在《尖錐》網站上發表的那個上午，洛克伍德的Twitter一分鐘就收到了幾百條信息。《沙龍》雜誌的網站在那天稍後發表了一篇文章，宣稱洛克伍德“可能爲強姦玩笑大辯論做出了定論”。而英國的《衛報》注意到就在洛克伍德“不經意地使一代人重燃對詩歌的興趣”的同時，她還可能成就了另一件更爲困難的事情。“她可能是第一個有真正的幽默感而能寫出抨擊強姦玩笑之作的人。而從另一個角度想，這首詩實際上是不是在爲強姦玩笑辯護？”不管怎麼樣，把這首詩看做是某種宣言是一個錯誤。《強姦笑話》拒絕不幽默，但是它同時拒絕讓你由於理解了它的幽默而感到沾沾自喜。

Later Lockwood tweeted: “The real final line of ‘Rape Joke’ is this. You don’t ever have to write about it. But if you do, you can write about it any way you want.”

後來洛克伍德在Twitter上說：“《強姦笑話》的真正的結論是這樣的。你不必把它寫出來。但是一旦你這麼做了，那你想怎麼寫都可以。”

Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and was raised, as her author blurb states, in “all the worst cities of the Midwest.” What it does not say is that her father is a married Catholic priest, currently in a diocese of Kansas City, Mo. This requires a bit of explanation.

洛克伍德出生在印第安納州福特維恩市。她的作者簡介說她成長於“中西部最糟糕的那些城市裏”。但是介紹裏沒有說的是她父親是一位結了婚的天主教教士，現供職於密蘇里州堪薩斯市的一個主教教區。這裏我們需要一點解釋。

Greg Lockwood married Lockwood’s mother, Karen, when they were both teenagers; he had just joined the Navy. Karen was raised Catholic, but Greg was an atheist. During one patrol, on a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, he underwent what he later described as “the deepest conversion on record.” He claims it grew out of soul-searching following several personal setbacks, but the family legend ascribes it to the fact that he and the crew on his previous patrol watched “The Exorcist” more than 70 times in 88 days. Whatever the catalyst, Lockwood became a devout Christian. He started a family, attended college and seminary and eventually was ordained as a Lutheran minister. And then one morning in 1985 he “woke up Catholic”; a few years later he became a priest, with the zeal of the twice-converted.

洛克伍德的父親格雷格(Greg Lockwood)和母親凱倫(Karen)在兩人還不到二十歲的時候就結婚了。凱倫從小就是天主教徒，而格雷格是無神論者。格雷格那會兒剛剛加入海軍。 在離挪威海岸不遠的一艘核潛艇上的一次巡邏任務中，格雷格經歷了他後來所謂的“史上最深刻的皈依”。格雷格聲稱在幾次個人挫折後，他真誠地自我反省，產生了皈依念頭。但是洛克伍德家人都說真正的原因是格雷格和他的隊員在前一次執行長達88天的巡邏任務時看了70多遍《驅魔人》(The Exorcist)。不管是何原因驅使，洛克伍德變成了一位虔誠的基督徒。他成家生子，上了大學和神學院，並最終被任命爲一名路德教會的教士。在1985年的一天早上，他“一覺醒來，發現自己成了一名天主教徒。”幾年之後他成了一位天主教神父，由於兩次的皈依經歷，對宗教有着無比熱誠。

In Lockwood’s telling, her father ruled the home as a loving and idiosyncratic patriarch who wore his cassock in the living room, or else very little — “It was either full regalia or nothing” — watched sword-and-sandal movies obsessively, played blues guitar, ate copious amounts of sausage and fed the family a steady dose of prog rock. Her mother was a more cautious presence who instituted family diets, watched her five children for signs of allergies and had a penchant for puns. The family calls her K-Rock; she claims to have known when Tricia was in the fourth grade that she was destined to be a writer.

用洛克伍德的話來說，她的父親是一位慈愛卻有個性的一家之長。他會在客廳裏穿着他的神父長袍，或是差不多什麼也不穿——翠莎說他“要麼全套法衣加身，要麼就一絲不掛”。他喜歡看聖經歷史題材的電影，幾乎到了癡迷的程度。他還喜歡彈藍調吉他，大吃香腸，時不時播放前衛搖滾給家人聽。翠莎洛克伍德的母親相比之下要謹慎的多。她給全家定製食譜；小心在意着她的五個子女有沒有過敏跡象；她還喜歡講雙關語笑話。家人叫她K搖滾。她聲稱在翠莎四年級的時候，她就知道女兒命中註定要成爲作家。

As a child Lockwood was intensely pious. “Catholicism is very beautiful,” she told me. “When your father is a priest, it’s invested with extra authority, and your father is invested with extra authority.” As a teenager, she had a strict dress code and a very limited range of after-school activities, which included a youth group called God’s Gang. “There was a lot of talk about gangs at the time,” she recalled, “and the idea was, what if there was a gang but it was a cool gang — for the Lord?” In God’s Gang they spoke in tongues, and the leaders would outline “all the sex you can’t do.”

洛克伍德童年對宗教有着強烈的虔誠心。“天主教非常美麗，”她跟我說。“由於父親是一位神父，這使得天主教對我來說有着格外的權威性。相輔相成地，父親也變得格外權威。”少女時代的她遵循着一套嚴格的着裝要求，放學後只能參加非常有限的課外活動。其中之一是一個叫做“上帝幫”的青年組織。“那會兒大家都在談論犯罪幫派，”洛克伍德回憶說。“我們這個組織的理念就是：如果有這麼一個幫派，但是卻是一個酷酷的供奉上帝的幫派，那豈不是很棒？”在上帝幫裏成員們用暗語交流，領導人會列下“所有你不能做的性行爲”。

The family moved frequently within the dioceses of St. Louis and Cincinnati. Lockwood lived in at least five different rectories and attended six different schools, all of them Catholic. Her literary education was heavy on rules, and at home the reading was pretty much limited to “Tennyson, encyclicals and Tom Clancy novels.” But from age 16 she was always at work on a manuscript. These were intensely serious attempts to link Greek mythology to Catholic liturgy, much like the life’s work of Edward Casaubon, the dry old cleric in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” “It’s what 16-year-olds do,” she said. “Well, that’s not what 16-year-olds do; they fondle each other. I was fondling the Greek myths. You have to have some outlet. I was a hot teen Casaubon.” At some point, the faith that defined her childhood simply vanished. “Like virginity, you wake up one day without it.”

洛克伍德一家在聖路易斯和辛辛那提的教區之間頻繁搬家。洛克伍德至少住過五所不同的教區長府邸，上過六所不同的學校——都是天主教的。她受到的文字方面的教養側重於繁規縟節。在家裏，她的讀物大多是“丁尼生(Alfred Tennyson)、教諭和湯姆·克蘭西(Tom Clancy)的驚悚小說”。但是從16歲開始她一直在寫一部作品。洛克伍德對此頗爲嚴肅認真，她試圖在作品裏把希臘神話和天主教的禮拜儀式聯繫起來，這和愛德華·卡索朋(Edward Casaubon )——喬治·艾略特(George Eliot)的《米德爾馬契》(Middlemarch)裏那位枯燥無趣的老牧師的畢生事業有很多相似之處。 “這是所有16歲的少年都愛做的事，”洛克伍德說。“好吧，16歲的孩子們纔不會做這個，他們愛做的是互相愛撫。而我是在愛撫希臘神話。你總得有一個發泄情感的方式。我是卡索朋的火熱少年版。”在某個時候，定義她童年的信仰沒有任何緣由地消失了。“就像童貞，某一天醒來，你發現它沒了。”

While in high school in Cincinnati, she encountered in an anthology a poem that was actually funny and learned that its author, Kenneth Koch, was a Cincinnati native. Koch — a fixture of the New York School, friend and contemporary of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara — came to read at a public library in town and Lockwood went to hear him, asking a question in the session that followed. She wasn’t surprised that he singled her out to talk with afterward. She was 18 and a poet. “You just expect that the world will notice you,” she said.

在辛辛那提上高中時，洛克伍德在一本詩集裏讀到了一首詩。這首詩居然很幽默。洛克伍德發現這詩的作者肯尼思·柯克(Kenneth Koch)是辛辛那提人。柯克是紐約派詩人的固定成員，他是約翰·阿什貝利(John Ashbery)和弗蘭克·奧哈拉(Frank O’Hara)的同時代人，也是他們的朋友。有一次，他到鎮上的公共圖書館朗讀他的詩作。洛克伍德參加了這次活動，還在朗讀結束後提了問。當柯克之後單獨找她跟她談話時，洛克伍德並不十分受寵若驚。她只有18歲，卻是位詩人。“你理所當然地認爲大家都會注意到你，”她說。

Lockwood planned on studying literature at St. Johns College in Annapolis, but on Christmas Eve before her first semester, her father dropped a bombshell: they couldn’t afford to send her. “It tells you something about my relationship to authority,” she said. “I didn’t even think I should try to get loans. I just thought, That’s that.”

洛克伍德原打算去安納波利斯的聖約翰學院學習文學。但是在她第一個學期開始前的那個聖誕夜，父親投下一枚重磅炸彈：他們供不起她上大學。“從這件事你多少能看出我和權威的關係，”洛克伍德說。“我甚至沒有想到我應該申請貸款。我當時想，那就這麼着吧。”

She moved into an abandoned convent near her parents’ rectory, briefly got a job in a bookshop and hung out with what she describes as “a lesbian wolf pack — I was allowed to go feral for the first time.”

她搬了出去，住到了離父母的教區長府邸不遠的一個廢棄的修道院裏。她在一個書店裏找到一份工作，但是沒有維持很久。和她一起混跡的人們用她自己的話描述是“一個女同性戀狼羣——這是我人生中第一次有機會當一個野丫頭。”

She also began posting on poetry message boards. It was there, online, that her poetry caught the eye of Kendall, a child of two missionaries who spent formative years in Thailand and Korea but who was by then living in Colorado and writing poems. The two corresponded and eventually began talking on the phone. At some point Kendall decided to drive to Cincinnati to meet her. “This was when it was still weird to meet on the Internet,” Lockwood said. He was 20 years old. She was 19, but he thought that with a name like Patricia, she was probably older.

她開始把自己的詩作貼到在網上留言板。正是這些網上留言引起了肯德爾的注意。肯德爾的父母都是傳教士。他在泰國和韓國長大，那時他住在科羅拉多，以寫詩爲生。兩個人開始通信，最終發展到電話交談。在某個時候，肯德爾決定開車去辛辛那提看望她。“那時，在網上交友還是挺奇怪的事情，”洛克伍德說。肯德爾當年20歲，她19歲。但是因爲她的名字是派翠莎，他覺得她可能會年長一點。

When the distant suitor arrived and met Lockwood’s family, he found her father upstairs in the TV room, cleaning his handgun. The first thing Greg Lockwood said to Kendall was: “Give me your driver’s license. I’ve got cop friends.”

當遠道而來的追求者和洛克伍德一家見面時，肯德爾發現女友的父親在樓上看電視的房間裏擦拭他的手槍。格雷格·洛克伍德對肯德爾說的第一句話是: “把你的駕照給我。我有些朋友是當警察的。”

Father Lockwood eventually married them. The couple moved to Colorado Springs, where Patricia set to work on a novel. Their apartment looked out on a majestic park, Garden of the Gods, but she moved her desk into a closet so she wouldn’t be distracted by the view. With the hubris of a 20-year-old, she sent the finished novel to the top literary agents in New York. There was interest, and soon she had major literary representation.

洛克伍德神父最終主持了他們的婚禮。新婚夫婦搬到了科羅拉多斯普林斯。在那兒，翠莎開始着手寫一部小說。他們的公寓俯瞰着一個叫做“衆神之園”的景色壯美的公園。但是洛克伍德把她的桌子搬到了一個壁櫥裏，這樣她就不會被景色分神。以一個20歲年輕人特有的自傲，她把寫完的小說寄給了紐約幾個頂尖的文學作品經紀人。小說引起了一些興趣。不久，她就找到了一個知名的出版代理。

The book was called “The History of Opposable Thumbs,” and it was unusual material. “Great novels have incest; if not, they’re not good,” Lockwood told me. “William Faulkner taught us that.” She and Kendall had high hopes, but the novel languished, and she was eventually told that, “in the climate after 9/11, people aren’t willing to take a chance on sister-on-sister action where someone loses a hand to gangrene.” The book fell off the map. “If something doesn’t get published,” Lockwood said, “I’m like a bear leaving scat in the woods. I move on.”

這本不同尋常的小說名叫《對生拇指史》(The History of Opposable Thumbs)。“偉大的小說都會寫到亂倫。如果不是這樣，那它們不是好小說，”洛克伍德告訴我。“這是威廉·福克納(William Faulkner)教給我們的。”她和肯德爾對作品期望甚高。但是小說卻沒能出版。最終，出版商告訴洛克伍德：“在9/11後的氛圍中，人們不會想花錢買一本描寫姐妹性愛的書，更何況書裏面還有一個人物因爲壞疽爛掉了一隻手。” 《對生拇指史》不久就銷聲匿跡。洛克伍德說：“如果作品沒有被出版，我不會就此糾結。我就像在樹林裏的一頭熊，拉了泡屎後就轉移陣地。”

Over the next eight years, Kendall, who no longer wrote poetry, worked as a reporter, designer and editor at local newspapers in New Hampshire, Florida and Georgia. During that time, Lockwood was employed for four months at a Florida diner, where she mostly wrote poems on her order pad. Lockwood still planned to go to college, but in the meantime she undertook her own literary education, reading widely and voraciously — modernists like Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot; the aphorist Jules Renard and the essayist Michel de Montaigne; and piles of comic books, particularly the escapades of Scrooge McDuck. “I wasn’t concerned about taste,” she says. “I wanted to know things.” They lived frugally; she read and wrote, he went to work and took on the role of her manager, salvaging many of her poems from the wastebasket, submitting them to journals when she was disinclined to and maintaining a spreadsheet to track their efforts. “We blitzed everybody,” he said. “We started blasting people with her stuff.” The blitz went on for years. Eventually a poem was accepted by Poetry (Submission No. 179) and then The New Yorker (Submission No. 240), and that changed everything.

在接下來的八年中，肯德爾不再寫詩，而轉行當了記者、設計師，並給新罕布什爾、佛羅里達和佐治亞的當地報紙當過編輯。在那段時間裏，洛克伍德在佛羅里達的一家餐館打過四個月的工，工作的大部分時間都被她用來在訂餐本上寫詩。她還在計劃上大學，但同時她對自己進行人文教育。她貪婪地閱讀，涉獵廣泛的題材。除了像華萊士·史蒂文斯(Wallace Stevens)、瑪麗安·摩爾(Marianne Moore)和T.S. 艾略特(T.S. Eliot)這樣的現代作家，她還讀了喜歡寫警句的儒勒·列那爾(Jules Renard)和散文家米歇爾·德·蒙田(Michel de Montaigne)的作品。除此之外，她還看了一堆卡通讀物，尤其喜歡唐老鴨的叔叔史高治(Scrooge McDuck)的冒險故事。“我並不在乎品味，”洛克伍德說，“我就是想了解東西。”夫婦倆生活節儉。她讀書寫作，他出去上班，還成了她的經紀人。在洛克伍德對她的作品不滿意不想投稿的時候，丈夫把她的詩從廢紙簍裏撈出來，投給各種雜誌。他做了一個電子表格，記錄他們的投稿進度。“我們對所有人採取了閃電攻勢，”肯德爾說：“我們開始用她的作品騷擾人們 。”閃電攻勢持續了好幾年。最終有一首詩被《詩歌》雜誌刊登（第179號投稿）。接着另一首（第240號投稿）被《紐約客》採用，這改變了一切。

After five years in Florida, the couple found a home in Savannah, Ga. Kendall was working as a features editor at The Savannah Morning News. Lockwood had recently published her first poem in The New Yorker. And then Kendall began to notice something wrong with his vision; he was having trouble reading at work. An ophthalmologist found advanced cataracts on both eyes — quite rare for a healthy 30-year-old. If they progressed, he was told, the surgery could become too risky, and he would potentially lose his eyesight. Their health insurance didn’t cover the whole cost of the procedure, leaving them roughly $10,000 short. Desperate, Lockwood shared their predicament with her Twitter followers. Her online friends urged her to set up a PayPal account. At 11 p.m. one night, she tweeted that the account was up, and by 11 a.m. the next day they had raised the entire sum.

在佛羅里達生活了五年後，夫婦倆在佐治亞州的薩凡納找到了一處住處。肯德爾在《薩凡納晨報》(The Savannah Morning News)找到了一份特稿編輯的工作。洛克伍德的詩剛在《紐約客》上發表。就在這個時節上，肯德爾開始注意到他的視力出現了問題；他在工作的時候閱讀有困難。一位眼科醫師發現他的雙眼都有白內障，而且程度已經很深——這對一位健康的30歲年輕人來說相當罕見。醫師告訴肯德爾，如果再發展下去的話，手術會有相當風險，有可能喪失視力。肯德爾和洛克伍德的醫療保險並不能支付全部的治療費用。他們還差大約一萬美元。絕望之中，洛克伍德向她的Twitter粉絲們傾訴了她的困境。她的網上朋友們敦促她開一個PayPal賬戶。她在一天晚上11點發推文說賬戶已經開通，到了第二天早上11點，這一萬美元已經籌滿了。