从社交网络诞生的香艳诗歌小天后(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.

俄勒冈州波特兰市的一个潮湿夜晚，诗人帕翠莎·洛克伍德(Patricia Lockwood)在拿起话筒之前干掉了一小杯廉价的波本威士忌。这是她第一次在读诗会开始之前喝酒。为了在表演开始前放松她“紧张的盆底肌”，她时常闹一些只有自己明白的笑话：她可能会对着话筒大声地喝水，或是打着滚上讲台。这次喝酒也是这个目的，尽管那酒尝起来就像是某个树林水洼里的脏水。

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.”

当晚，一百多名诗歌迷挤在一个大约1,150平方米的木头和金属制品加工车间的一角。他们大多20多岁，拿着廉价罐装啤酒，期待着洛克伍德开始朗读她那持续时长12分钟、活泼嬉闹的诗作 “美国咪咪照的父亲和母亲”(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，苹果般丰满的面颊，一头短发透着鬼马精灵。她看上去像一个早期迪士尼的动画造型——很有可能是某种林中生灵。最近她的一位粉丝把她画成了小马宝莉的样子。她的外表和她的诗作反差巨大，而洛克伍德对此沾沾自喜。

“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.”

“艾米丽·狄金森(Emily Dickinson)是美国诗歌之父，而沃尔特·惠特曼(Walt Whitman)是美国诗歌之母，” 她读到：“沃尔特·惠特曼裸着身子，在树林里，深深凝视着一池静水——在那个时代，这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.”

像所有的听众一样，我笑出了声，然后平静下来，欣赏这首以变化多端的现代人的痴好来重新想像两位19世纪美国诗歌界重要人物的作品。偶尔，车间里的电焊噪音还会打破诗节之间的沉寂，洛克伍德后来说这首诗是她迄今为止“感觉最爷们” 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.

在这次表演前不久,我的一位朋友向我推荐了洛克伍德的作品，给了我一本他的小型诗歌出版社刚出版的《气球爆破不法之徒黑色》(Balloon Pop Outlaw Black )。这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，这本作品居然名列《纽约客》批评家年底推荐作品的榜单；还是2013年最畅销的由小出版社出版的在世诗人的诗歌作品；这些殊荣标志着洛克伍德成了独立诗歌创作的新贵。这周，她的第二本诗集《母国父国祖国恋》(Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals)由企鹅出版社出版。在今年4月，她还宣布将自己的回忆录版权卖给河源出版社 。

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.

在美国，大多数通过顶尖的独立或商业出版商出版作品的诗人都在大学教书。他们几乎所有人都有高等学历——艺术创作硕士甚至创意写作博士。美国高校研究生院里的各种文学工作坊到底有什么样的效果，对此人们一直争论不休。“艺术创作硕士作家vs.纽约作家” （指经过正统科班训练并在大学供职的作家和居住在纽约市，为了出版作品自己打拼的作家——译注）这个最近流行起来的网络模因(meme)是这个话题最新的变奏。洛克伍德没有艺术创作硕士学位，她甚至没有上过大学。她21岁就结了婚，几乎没有工作过。按她自己的描述，她成年后的生活方式就像普鲁斯特，每天在她的“桌—床”上写好几个小时。现在，32岁的洛克伍德即将成为文坛新星。促成这一成就的是坏运之后的好运，加上只有局外人才能保持的那种对成功天真的期盼。

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.”

洛克伍德让别人叫她“翠莎”(Tricia)。她最大的名气可能来自她的Twitter账户。她在Twitter上定期地展示着她那超现实的、性感露骨却又经常荒诞无稽的幽默。这为她吸引到了三万名粉丝和一些喜剧界的仰慕者。著名脱口秀主持人柯南·奥布莱恩(Conan O’Brien)的长期搭档安迪·里希特(Andy Richter)把洛克伍德视为自己的朋友，尽管两人从来没有在线下见过面。“她有幽默感，有趣，还是个怪咖——对我来说，一个人有这些特点就足够了，” 里希特说。梅根·阿姆拉姆(Megan Amram)是美剧《公园和游憩》(Parks and Recreation)的编剧之一。她最初是读到了洛克伍德的诗作，对后者把“流行文化提升到几乎神圣的高度”的能力大为欣赏。阿姆拉姆之后发现了洛克伍德的Twitter。“我们两个人都喜爱颠覆平淡无奇或是陈腔滥调的说法，”阿姆拉姆对我说道。“我们还都喜欢嘲讽女性在性关系中遭到物化的现象。”被喜剧频道(Comedy Central)评为“Twitter上最幽默人士”的罗伯·迪兰尼(Rob Delaney)从阿姆拉姆那儿听说了洛克伍德。迪兰尼在Twitter上有超过100万的粉丝，他说：“我当时真是太兴奋了，我把她写的都读了一遍。”

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”灵感来自政治丑闻和有线新闻频道对手机潜在的性威胁的报道。这些“性短信”采用了精辟简练的诗歌形式，艺术再现了当代人对欲望让人脸红心跳的表述。洛克伍德从2011 年开始在Twitter上发送这些短信，不久一些网络媒体开始收集它们认为最好的词句。郝芬顿邮报刊登过这样一篇稿子，标题是“帕特丽霞·洛克伍德的性短信诗歌让你笑出声”。很多诗歌不适合在本报刊出，下面的节选读者可以感受一下：

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领毛衣。你是一位冬天里的艺术老师。你把你整个头钻进了我的身体。

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

你并不需要海姆利奇急救法，但是我还是对你施救。一粒葡萄从你嘴里蹦了出来，而你从来没有吃下过这粒葡萄。

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

我是宗教审判现场的一个水杯。你是教皇干燥的嘴。 你起了皱，我弄湿了你。

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.”

对于一些晦涩的长篇幅诗作，洛克伍德发现她的Twitter粉丝有着出人意料的耐心。“大家会认为读者太懒，不愿读诗，他们只不过需要一个让他们信任的声音带他们入门，”洛克伍德说。洛克伍德的作品曾在享有很高声誉的《诗歌》杂志上发表。多恩·夏尔(Don Share)是这本杂志主编 。虽然洛克伍德声称她不会在诗作里表明自己的政治观点和立场，但是夏尔却说政治性是洛克伍德诗作的一大特色。“她对政治、经济、社会问题、两性问题和性别身份问题都非常熟悉。她把这些我们每天都会接触到的信息变成了使人震撼的诗作。”

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.

夏尔的这番评价用来形容洛克伍德的长诗《强奸笑话》(Rape Joke)再贴切不过了。去年夏天，这首诗被病毒式传播。迄今为止，从没有任何别的当代诗作这么流行过。洛克伍德和她的丈夫，报纸编辑杰森·肯德尔(Jason Kendall)把这首诗简称为“R.J.”。她从2012 年春天开始创作，素材来自于她不到20岁时一段痛苦的经历。“我并不是觉得自己的生活经历非写不可 ，”洛克伍德说。“我写这首诗是因为形式载体于我不期而至。指代、重复——这些是那么完美。”她写下了一个有注解的诗稿，然后，就像她经常做的那样，把它放到了一边。

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，在一场单人脱口秀演出中，喜剧演员丹尼尔·托什(Daniel Tosh)的一大段表演都是围绕着强奸笑话这个主题。观众中一位女士忍不住叫道“强奸笑话从来都不好笑”。托什回应道：“如果现在就有五个男人把这位女士强奸的话，大家会不会觉得好笑？”托什的这一回应引起了一场美国全国上下关于喜剧禁忌的大讨论：是不是有一些事情我们不能拿来开玩笑？在什么情况下我们可以笑，而这个“我们”到底指的是谁？就在喜剧演员、女权主义者、性暴力的受害者和那些滔滔不绝的专家学者们忙着发表他们的观点时，洛克伍德找出了诗稿并完成了终稿。她把诗稿发给了网上杂志《尖锥》()。直到好几个月过去了，那些诗才发表出来。

“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:

诗的开头是这样的：“强奸笑话说的是你那年19岁，而他是你的男朋友。”接下来诗里讲了一个笑话，于是变得复杂起来。

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

强奸笑话留着一把山羊胡。一把山羊胡。

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：一个强奸笑话正看着镜中的自己，梳妆整理，好让自己看起来更像一个强奸笑话。“啊，”它想，“对。一把山羊胡。”

“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?”

“这不是一首中规中矩的诗，”诗人特伦斯· 海耶斯(Terrance Hayes)告诉我说。海耶斯把《强奸笑话》选入了2014年版的《美国最佳诗作》系列。 “诗中的幽默和理查·普莱尔(Richard Pryor美国黑人喜剧演员——译注)的幽默一脉相承。玩笑的中心是一把利刃，但是玩笑却包含了一种磨难以及对这种磨难的认识。这使得这首诗表达出了对其他遭受着这种磨难的人们的同情，”海耶斯说。“整首诗提出了一个大问题，不是吗？”

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.

这首诗在Facebook、Tumblr和Twitter上产生了巨大的反响。在《尖锥》网站上发表的那个上午，洛克伍德的Twitter一分钟就收到了几百条信息。《沙龙》杂志的网站在那天稍后发表了一篇文章，宣称洛克伍德“可能为强奸玩笑大辩论做出了定论”。而英国的《卫报》注意到就在洛克伍德“不经意地使一代人重燃对诗歌的兴趣”的同时，她还可能成就了另一件更为困难的事情。“她可能是第一个有真正的幽默感而能写出抨击强奸玩笑之作的人。而从另一个角度想，这首诗实际上是不是在为强奸玩笑辩护？”不管怎么样，把这首诗看做是某种宣言是一个错误。《强奸笑话》拒绝不幽默，但是它同时拒绝让你由于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.”

后来洛克伍德在Twitter上说：“《强奸笑话》的真正的结论是这样的。你不必把它写出来。但是一旦你这么做了，那你想怎么写都可以。”

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纳州福特维恩市。她的作者简介说她成长于“中西部最糟糕的那些城市里”。但是介绍里没有说的是她父亲是一位结了婚的天主教教士，现供职于密苏里州堪萨斯市的一个主教教区。这里我们需要一点解释。

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.

洛克伍德的父亲格雷格(Greg Lockwood)和母亲凯伦(Karen)在两人还不到二十岁的时候就结婚了。凯伦从小就是天主教徒，而格雷格是无神论者。格雷格那会儿刚刚加入海军。 在离挪威海岸不远的一艘核潜艇上的一次巡逻任务中，格雷格经历了他后来所谓的“史上最深刻的皈依”。格雷格声称在几次个人挫折后，他真诚地自我反省，产生了皈依念头。但是洛克伍德家人都说真正的原因是格雷格和他的队员在前一次执行长达88天的巡逻任务时看了70多遍《驱魔人》(The Exorcist)。不管是何原因驱使，洛克伍德变成了一位虔诚的基督徒。他成家生子，上了大学和神学院，并最终被任命为一名路德教会的教士。在1985年的一天早上，他“一觉醒来，发现自己成了一名天主教徒。”几年之后他成了一位天主教神父，由于两次的皈依经历，对宗教有着无比热诚。

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.

用洛克伍德的话来说，她的父亲是一位慈爱却有个性的一家之长。他会在客厅里穿着他的神父长袍，或是差不多什么也不穿——翠莎说他“要么全套法衣加身，要么就一丝不挂”。他喜欢看圣经历史题材的电影，几乎到了痴迷的程度。他还喜欢弹蓝调吉他，大吃香肠，时不时播放前卫摇滚给家人听。翠莎洛克伍德的母亲相比之下要谨慎的多。她给全家定制食谱；小心在意着她的五个子女有没有过敏迹象；她还喜欢讲双关语笑话。家人叫她K摇滚。她声称在翠莎四年级的时候，她就知道女儿命中注定要成为作家。

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.”

洛克伍德童年对宗教有着强烈的虔诚心。“天主教非常美丽，”她跟我说。“由于父亲是一位神父，这使得天主教对我来说有着格外的权威性。相辅相成地，父亲也变得格外权威。”少女时代的她遵循着一套严格的着装要求，放学后只能参加非常有限的课外活动。其中之一是一个叫做“上帝帮”的青年组织。“那会儿大家都在谈论犯罪帮派，”洛克伍德回忆说。“我们这个组织的理念就是：如果有这么一个帮派，但是却是一个酷酷的供奉上帝的帮派，那岂不是很棒？”在上帝帮里成员们用暗语交流，领导人会列下“所有你不能做的性行为”。

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.”

洛克伍德一家在圣路易斯和辛辛那提的教区之间频繁搬家。洛克伍德至少住过五所不同的教区长府邸，上过六所不同的学校——都是天主教的。她受到的文字方面的教养侧重于繁规缛节。在家里，她的读物大多是“丁尼生(Alfred Tennyson)、教谕和汤姆·克兰西(Tom Clancy)的惊悚小说”。但是从16岁开始她一直在写一部作品。洛克伍德对此颇为严肃认真，她试图在作品里把希腊神话和天主教的礼拜仪式联系起来，这和爱德华·卡索朋(Edward Casaubon )——乔治·艾略特(George Eliot)的《米德尔马契》(Middlemarch)里那位枯燥无趣的老牧师的毕生事业有很多相似之处。 “这是所有16岁的少年都爱做的事，”洛克伍德说。“好吧，16岁的孩子们才不会做这个，他们爱做的是互相爱抚。而我是在爱抚希腊神话。你总得有一个发泄情感的方式。我是卡索朋的火热少年版。”在某个时候，定义她童年的信仰没有任何缘由地消失了。“就像童贞，某一天醒来，你发现它没了。”

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.

在辛辛那提上高中时，洛克伍德在一本诗集里读到了一首诗。这首诗居然很幽默。洛克伍德发现这诗的作者肯尼思·柯克(Kenneth Koch)是辛辛那提人。柯克是纽约派诗人的固定成员，他是约翰·阿什贝利(John Ashbery)和弗兰克·奥哈拉(Frank O’Hara)的同时代人，也是他们的朋友。有一次，他到镇上的公共图书馆朗读他的诗作。洛克伍德参加了这次活动，还在朗读结束后提了问。当柯克之后单独找她跟她谈话时，洛克伍德并不十分受宠若惊。她只有18岁，却是位诗人。“你理所当然地认为大家都会注意到你，”她说。

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纳波利斯的圣约翰学院学习文学。但是在她第一个学期开始前的那个圣诞夜，父亲投下一枚重磅炸弹：他们供不起她上大学。“从这件事你多少能看出我和权威的关系，”洛克伍德说。“我甚至没有想到我应该申请贷款。我当时想，那就这么着吧。”

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，住到了离父母的教区长府邸不远的一个废弃的修道院里。她在一个书店里找到一份工作，但是没有维持很久。和她一起混迹的人们用她自己的话描述是“一个女同性恋狼群——这是我人生中第一次有机会当一个野丫头。”

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.

她开始把自己的诗作贴到在网上留言板。正是这些网上留言引起了肯德尔的注意。肯德尔的父母都是传教士。他在泰国和韩国长大，那时他住在科罗拉多，以写诗为生。两个人开始通信，最终发展到电话交谈。在某个时候，肯德尔决定开车去辛辛那提看望她。“那时，在网上交友还是挺奇怪的事情，”洛克伍德说。肯德尔当年20岁，她19岁。但是因为她的名字是派翠莎，他觉得她可能会年长一点。

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.”

当远道而来的追求者和洛克伍德一家见面时，肯德尔发现女友的父亲在楼上看电视的房间里擦拭他的手枪。格雷格·洛克伍德对肯德尔说的第一句话是: “把你的驾照给我。我有些朋友是当警察的。”

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.

洛克伍德神父最终主持了他们的婚礼。新婚夫妇搬到了科罗拉多斯普林斯。在那儿，翠莎开始着手写一部小说。他们的公寓俯瞰着一个叫做“众神之园”的景色壮美的公园。但是洛克伍德把她的桌子搬到了一个壁橱里，这样她就不会被景色分神。以一个20岁年轻人特有的自傲，她把写完的小说寄给了纽约几个顶尖的文学作品经纪人。小说引起了一些兴趣。不久，她就找到了一个知名的出版代理。

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.”

这本不同寻常的小说名叫《对生拇指史》(The History of Opposable Thumbs)。“伟大的小说都会写到乱伦。如果不是这样，那它们不是好小说，”洛克伍德告诉我。“这是威廉·福克纳(William Faulkner)教给我们的。”她和肯德尔对作品期望甚高。但是小说却没能出版。最终，出版商告诉洛克伍德：“在9/11后的氛围中，人们不会想花钱买一本描写姐妹性爱的书，更何况书里面还有一个人物因为坏疽烂掉了一只手。” 《对生拇指史》不久就销声匿迹。洛克伍德说：“如果作品没有被出版，我不会就此纠结。我就像在树林里的一头熊，拉了泡屎后就转移阵地。”

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.

在接下来的八年中，肯德尔不再写诗，而转行当了记者、设计师，并给新罕布什尔、佛罗里达和佐治亚的当地报纸当过编辑。在那段时间里，洛克伍德在佛罗里达的一家餐馆打过四个月的工，工作的大部分时间都被她用来在订餐本上写诗。她还在计划上大学，但同时她对自己进行人文教育。她贪婪地阅读，涉猎广泛的题材。除了像华莱士·史蒂文斯(Wallace Stevens)、玛丽安·摩尔(Marianne Moore)和T.S. 艾略特(T.S. Eliot)这样的现代作家，她还读了喜欢写警句的儒勒·列那尔(Jules Renard)和散文家米歇尔·德·蒙田(Michel de Montaigne)的作品。除此之外，她还看了一堆卡通读物，尤其喜欢唐老鸭的叔叔史高治(Scrooge McDuck)的冒险故事。“我并不在乎品味，”洛克伍德说，“我就是想了解东西。”夫妇俩生活节俭。她读书写作，他出去上班，还成了她的经纪人。在洛克伍德对她的作品不满意不想投稿的时候，丈夫把她的诗从废纸篓里捞出来，投给各种杂志。他做了一个电子表格，记录他们的投稿进度。“我们对所有人采取了闪电攻势，”肯德尔说：“我们开始用她的作品骚扰人们 。”闪电攻势持续了好几年。最终有一首诗被《诗歌》杂志刊登（第179号投稿）。接着另一首（第240号投稿）被《纽约客》采用，这改变了一切。

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.

在佛罗里达生活了五年后，夫妇俩在佐治亚州的萨凡纳找到了一处住处。肯德尔在《萨凡纳晨报》(The Savannah Morning News)找到了一份特稿编辑的工作。洛克伍德的诗刚在《纽约客》上发表。就在这个时节上，肯德尔开始注意到他的视力出现了问题；他在工作的时候阅读有困难。一位眼科医师发现他的双眼都有白内障，而且程度已经很深——这对一位健康的30岁年轻人来说相当罕见。医师告诉肯德尔，如果再发展下去的话，手术会有相当风险，有可能丧失视力。肯德尔和洛克伍德的医疗保险并不能支付全部的治疗费用。他们还差大约一万美元。绝望之中，洛克伍德向她的Twitter粉丝们倾诉了她的困境。她的网上朋友们敦促她开一个PayPal账户。她在一天晚上11点发推文说账户已经开通，到了第二天早上11点，这一万美元已经筹满了。