美国国家公共电台 NPR--It's World Poetry Day: NPR's love of poetry goes back to its founding

（单词翻译）

It's World Poetry Day: NPR's love of poetry goes back to its founding

Transcript¹

On World Poetry Day, we look at how people are sometimes compelled to express their feelings and ideas through poems.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

This Tuesday is World Poetry Day, and we are taking note of this day on NPR. May sound like a cliche² that you turn on the news and your public radio station is talking about poetry, but in this case, the cliche is absolutely true.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

And today we own it. In 1971, the very first year of NPR's All Things Considered, the show featured an anti-war poem. It was by the French poet Jacques Prevert.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Be forewarned, you old guys. Be forewarned, you heads of families.

INSKEEP: I consider myself warned. In more recent times, MORNING EDITION has featured other poets.

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FRANNY CHOI: The world keeps ending, and the world goes on.

INSKEEP: Franny Choi wrote of surviving calamities³, as did Saeed Jones.

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SAEED JONES: But for now, we are alive at the end of the world.

FADEL: Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht has been thinking of the power of poetry.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Sometimes when we go to a culture we don't understand and we see something that looks like poetry, we call it religion or spirituality.

FADEL: Hecht wrote a book about poetry called "The Wonder Paradox⁴."

HECHT: I think of it as gifts from the subconscious⁵. And in some ways, if you want your subconscious to speak to you, you have to give it words that the subconscious can understand.

INSKEEP: Gifts from the subconscious - that sounds like poetry. So why do people feel compelled to write poems?

HECHT: The attempt to express how beauty makes us feel or how sorrow makes us feel is probably real central to our development of language.

FADEL: And Hecht says poetry fits our time.

HECHT: It's because of its brevity and beauty and the fact that it's been built to be read over and over and over.

FADEL: Think of it like an especially compelling tweet, only more thoughtful.

INSKEEP: (Laughter) I like that. I like that.

FADEL: My tweets are poetry, Steve.

INSKEEP: Oh, I know that. I know that. You know, I sometimes say poetry to warm up my voice in the morning. Once upon a midnight dreary⁶, while I pondered weak and weary - it's the rhyme. It's the sound of the words - a lot of things to love about poetry.

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