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The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader
A rich cross-section of the modernist poet and critic's work from 1923 to 1987.
In a single volume, the essential work of a major Modernist poet and thinker. Some see Laura Riding and Laura (Riding) Jackson as virtually two separate writers, the former a strikingly original Modernist poet and critic, the latter a supposedly reclusive thinker on man and woman, language, meaning, and truth. However, encountering her work in this rich cross-section, one discovers a remarkable consistency of theme developing throughout, from the earliest poems and stories to the "post-poetic" writings of her final years. The selections presented here span sixty-four years and include famous works of poetry and prose—some long out of print or difficult to find—significant lesser-known writings, and an important previously unpublished late essay, "Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate."
Contents:
Chronology of Laura (Riding) Jackson's life
A prophecy or a plea
Dimensions
Makeshift
The sweet ascetic
To a cautious friend
If a woman should be Messiah
Incarnations
The mask
Take hands
Lucrece and Nara
Mortal
The Quids
The virgin
Back to the mother breast
As well as any other
The lullaby
The tiger
The rugged black of anger
Echoes, 1-6
The map of places
Death as death
The troubles of a book
Opening of eyes
The wind suffers
You or you
World's end
Rhythms of love
Beyond
Come, words, away
As many questions as answers
Earth
The wind, the clock, the we
Respect for the dead
There is no land yet
The flowering urn
Poet : a lying word
Nor is it written (from Three sermons to the dead)
Be grave, woman
Divestment of beauty
The reasons of each
After so much loss
Doom in bloom
Seizure of the world
Nothing so far
Chapter VI : the making of the poem / Laura Jackson and Robert Graves
Shame of the person
The myth
What is a poem?
A complicated problem
The corpus
The damned thing
From Though gently
Experts are puzzled
The fable of the dice
The second letter : to continue to begin with
From The word "woman" and other related writings : chapter 4 : being a woman
Preface to the first edition
Daisy and venison
Reality as port huntlady
A last lesson in geography
In the beginning
The exercise of English, sections 1-2
In defence of anger
From The world and ourselves : part V, recommendation 14 (abridged)
From Collected poems : to the reader
Introduction for a broadcast; continued for Chelsea
Poetry and the good
The sex factor in social progress
How now to think of women
Preface to Selected poems : in five sets
Sequel of 1964 and of 1974 to 'A last lesson in geography'
On 'In the beginning'
What, if not a poem, poems?
The road to, in, and away from, poetry
Introduction to The poems of Laura Riding
Preface to the second edition of Progress of stories (abridged)
Rational meaning, chapter 18 : truth (abridged)
Body & mind and the linguistic ultimate
Nonce preface
Outline
The telling
In a single volume, the essential work of a major Modernist poet and thinker. Some see Laura Riding and Laura (Riding) Jackson as virtually two separate writers, the former a strikingly original Modernist poet and critic, the latter a supposedly reclusive thinker on man and woman, language, meaning, and truth. However, encountering her work in this rich cross-section, one discovers a remarkable consistency of theme developing throughout, from the earliest poems and stories to the "post-poetic" writings of her final years. The selections presented here span sixty-four years and include famous works of poetry and prose—some long out of print or difficult to find—significant lesser-known writings, and an important previously unpublished late essay, "Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate."
Contents:
Chronology of Laura (Riding) Jackson's life
A prophecy or a plea
Dimensions
Makeshift
The sweet ascetic
To a cautious friend
If a woman should be Messiah
Incarnations
The mask
Take hands
Lucrece and Nara
Mortal
The Quids
The virgin
Back to the mother breast
As well as any other
The lullaby
The tiger
The rugged black of anger
Echoes, 1-6
The map of places
Death as death
The troubles of a book
Opening of eyes
The wind suffers
You or you
World's end
Rhythms of love
Beyond
Come, words, away
As many questions as answers
Earth
The wind, the clock, the we
Respect for the dead
There is no land yet
The flowering urn
Poet : a lying word
Nor is it written (from Three sermons to the dead)
Be grave, woman
Divestment of beauty
The reasons of each
After so much loss
Doom in bloom
Seizure of the world
Nothing so far
Chapter VI : the making of the poem / Laura Jackson and Robert Graves
Shame of the person
The myth
What is a poem?
A complicated problem
The corpus
The damned thing
From Though gently
Experts are puzzled
The fable of the dice
The second letter : to continue to begin with
From The word "woman" and other related writings : chapter 4 : being a woman
Preface to the first edition
Daisy and venison
Reality as port huntlady
A last lesson in geography
In the beginning
The exercise of English, sections 1-2
In defence of anger
From The world and ourselves : part V, recommendation 14 (abridged)
From Collected poems : to the reader
Introduction for a broadcast; continued for Chelsea
Poetry and the good
The sex factor in social progress
How now to think of women
Preface to Selected poems : in five sets
Sequel of 1964 and of 1974 to 'A last lesson in geography'
On 'In the beginning'
What, if not a poem, poems?
The road to, in, and away from, poetry
Introduction to The poems of Laura Riding
Preface to the second edition of Progress of stories (abridged)
Rational meaning, chapter 18 : truth (abridged)
Body & mind and the linguistic ultimate
Nonce preface
Outline
The telling
380 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
2 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Laura (Riding) Jackson
52 books29 followersLaura (Riding) Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.
1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson
She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.
1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson
She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 21, 2010
The selection of materials by Elizabeth Friedmann is very intelligent. While evenly divided between two major periods of work, The Reader privileges the first and third "sections" into which the book is organized. The two major periods correspond to Laura Riding's work in poetry between 1923 and 1938; and Laura (Riding) Jackson's late "personal evangel" from 1966, called The Telling, which seems to have come in her and her late husband, Schuyler Jackson's return to linguistic endeavors in the Sixties, after a period of revision and re-orientation. That is to say, Friedmann sees, quite justly, I think, The Telling as the equal of the poet-critic's great late modernist period. Friedmann doesn't include in the first section all the poems I love, but her excerpting from the important books A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), Contemporaries and Snobs (1928), and Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928) is shrewd and even leading. And in the second section the editor unleashes an amazing unpublished essay, Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate (1986). Nor is there time here to but mention the inclusion of work construably fiction and fictioning, from The Progress of Stories. Quite manageable in size for a writer whose output was after all prodigious, the volume contains riches. Laura (Riding) Jackson is a writer without parallel in American letters. She was in some sense a great American woman of letters, our first, with important work in poetry, fiction, criticism, editorial stewardship, lexicography and the spiritual essay. That serious readers of American literature have overlooked her does not, of course, speak well of the way we value our literature. Nonetheless here she gloriously is.
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April 22, 2013WHAT, IF NOT A POEM, POEMS?
A poem emits something that delights, seeming truth-like. But one learns, at long poetic last, that the poem cannot yield truth itself, truth unqualified: it is too muc hcommitted to yielding the semblance to be capable fo yielding the pure reality. This, it is hard for the poet to know, for, though the poet perceive that, here and there, truth did not get its full due, such perceptions would lose themselves in the growing satisfaction felt in the coming to bue of that extraordinary thing, a poem. (240)
Poetry is conditioned by the arbitrary postulate that there is an inexpressible, and all its devices are designe for the suggestion fot eh inexpressible: in it, crucial inguistic difficulties are evaded through the illusion that there is an inexpressible. The art of potry is assumed by readers ,or hearers, and poets themselves, to render this postulated inexpressible as-good-as-expressed; but, always, in poetry, there is something not 'there', something never touched. Poetry, that is, postulates an inexpressible that, somehow, it can express: words are used, within this self-contradictory field of linguistic principle, to create physical impressions of what is left verbally unexplored for the sake of the exercise of the art of poetry!
I could no more in a poem of my earlier life as a poet than in a later one cross the line of expression wher the further comprehension leads words into a whole speaking. Not I or anyone else could by poetic means succeed in articulating a vision fo the woman-man identity-separation transcended by love--even as The Divine Comedy could not have fulfilled Dante's ambition of saying of Beatrice what had never before been said of another woman. In poetry, allegory plays the part of truth, where a passion to bring something of the further onto the stage of expression fires the poet's faculties. (244-5)
In poetry there is no forward movement. The potential of movement is dissipated in the use of the words to produce the sensory effect of movement. The oet may strain to make the art of producing the effect and the reality of movement somehow partners--but the poem must be a poem, and not a progress. The successful poem transports you int oitself; yet, when you have come to the end of the poem, you have gone nowhere. (247)
RATIONAL MEANING: A NEW FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFINITION OF WORDS
One [region of linguistic functioning] is that of rhetoric, or concern with linguistic effectiveness in general literary (or quasi-literary, oratorical) performance. The other is a region of linguistic performance that is distinguished iin its objective of eloquence from the genera lltierary genre, as dedicated to a perfect eloquence: that is poetry, aimed at a rightness of expression that will have an effect of finality--as of all's being said that there is to say. (272)
Scientific interest in truth is limited to a queer notion of truth as a tentative property of theories, which can only be statements advanced as possibly true, and are therefore incapabe of being true as stated, the true statement requiring the eloquence of conscious sagacious rightness of expression. (277-8)
Language does not exist by itself; it is a partnering presence, in human life, to the human mind, and its internality has the same qualities of coherence with itself that the internality of the human mind has. The internality of the mind is encased in personal actuality. THought occurs in the mind, moving there towards express existence. It becomes express in the mind, but does not transcend the enclosure of personal actuality except in language, which is a thought-field of the mind where it is free from the private bodily location and can function with expressive immediacy as supra-personal in identity, of one nature and actuality with mind present within other enclosures of personal actuality. (280)
The physical aspect of words belongs exclusively to the area of the occasions of correlation, has no internal significance, no part in the correlation of meanings that the person mind seeks in, and exacts of, language, and that the mind of language exacts of, and seeks in, minds. (281)
Where the objective in statement is truth, the concern is not with the production of an idea, impression, belief, in the person or persons addressed; there is not a will to produce a right, as against a wrong idea, impression, etc. With truth, the concern is with the rightness of the words uttered as an expression of what is entertained in the mind of the communicator: the dominating interest is, thus, to reveal one's mind, in some phase of its articulate, its purposive, intellectual processes. What virtue there is in truth inheres in the interaction between the mind's meaning, that is, the understanding of its experience at which it arrives in its thinking, and the demarcated particulars of meaning that are language's register of individualized modes of common understanding, iin which incidents of common mental experience of experienceability are corroborated as of common intellectual validity. (284-5)
New modern developments of the facile in literary style and in popular diction-idiom, interacting on each other without design but also by the force of a new general "cultural" identification of linguitsic nicety and scrupling with freedom-curbing, anti-natural conventionality, have distracted human minds from their natural innocent preoccupation with what we have described as their witness-bearing function. (287)
Rather than with truth, all the professional specialists in truth-possibilities are concerned with strategies of knowledge that will protect them from "being wrong." (288)
FOOTNOTE:
Truth--animation of words with purpose of mind to make manifest possessed awareness, productive of complete rightness of expression.
Verity--animation of words with purpose of mind to make available possessed knowledge, productive of total accuracy of exposition. (289)
A poem emits something that delights, seeming truth-like. But one learns, at long poetic last, that the poem cannot yield truth itself, truth unqualified: it is too muc hcommitted to yielding the semblance to be capable fo yielding the pure reality. This, it is hard for the poet to know, for, though the poet perceive that, here and there, truth did not get its full due, such perceptions would lose themselves in the growing satisfaction felt in the coming to bue of that extraordinary thing, a poem. (240)
Poetry is conditioned by the arbitrary postulate that there is an inexpressible, and all its devices are designe for the suggestion fot eh inexpressible: in it, crucial inguistic difficulties are evaded through the illusion that there is an inexpressible. The art of potry is assumed by readers ,or hearers, and poets themselves, to render this postulated inexpressible as-good-as-expressed; but, always, in poetry, there is something not 'there', something never touched. Poetry, that is, postulates an inexpressible that, somehow, it can express: words are used, within this self-contradictory field of linguistic principle, to create physical impressions of what is left verbally unexplored for the sake of the exercise of the art of poetry!
I could no more in a poem of my earlier life as a poet than in a later one cross the line of expression wher the further comprehension leads words into a whole speaking. Not I or anyone else could by poetic means succeed in articulating a vision fo the woman-man identity-separation transcended by love--even as The Divine Comedy could not have fulfilled Dante's ambition of saying of Beatrice what had never before been said of another woman. In poetry, allegory plays the part of truth, where a passion to bring something of the further onto the stage of expression fires the poet's faculties. (244-5)
In poetry there is no forward movement. The potential of movement is dissipated in the use of the words to produce the sensory effect of movement. The oet may strain to make the art of producing the effect and the reality of movement somehow partners--but the poem must be a poem, and not a progress. The successful poem transports you int oitself; yet, when you have come to the end of the poem, you have gone nowhere. (247)
RATIONAL MEANING: A NEW FOUNDATION FOR THE DEFINITION OF WORDS
One [region of linguistic functioning] is that of rhetoric, or concern with linguistic effectiveness in general literary (or quasi-literary, oratorical) performance. The other is a region of linguistic performance that is distinguished iin its objective of eloquence from the genera lltierary genre, as dedicated to a perfect eloquence: that is poetry, aimed at a rightness of expression that will have an effect of finality--as of all's being said that there is to say. (272)
Scientific interest in truth is limited to a queer notion of truth as a tentative property of theories, which can only be statements advanced as possibly true, and are therefore incapabe of being true as stated, the true statement requiring the eloquence of conscious sagacious rightness of expression. (277-8)
Language does not exist by itself; it is a partnering presence, in human life, to the human mind, and its internality has the same qualities of coherence with itself that the internality of the human mind has. The internality of the mind is encased in personal actuality. THought occurs in the mind, moving there towards express existence. It becomes express in the mind, but does not transcend the enclosure of personal actuality except in language, which is a thought-field of the mind where it is free from the private bodily location and can function with expressive immediacy as supra-personal in identity, of one nature and actuality with mind present within other enclosures of personal actuality. (280)
The physical aspect of words belongs exclusively to the area of the occasions of correlation, has no internal significance, no part in the correlation of meanings that the person mind seeks in, and exacts of, language, and that the mind of language exacts of, and seeks in, minds. (281)
Where the objective in statement is truth, the concern is not with the production of an idea, impression, belief, in the person or persons addressed; there is not a will to produce a right, as against a wrong idea, impression, etc. With truth, the concern is with the rightness of the words uttered as an expression of what is entertained in the mind of the communicator: the dominating interest is, thus, to reveal one's mind, in some phase of its articulate, its purposive, intellectual processes. What virtue there is in truth inheres in the interaction between the mind's meaning, that is, the understanding of its experience at which it arrives in its thinking, and the demarcated particulars of meaning that are language's register of individualized modes of common understanding, iin which incidents of common mental experience of experienceability are corroborated as of common intellectual validity. (284-5)
New modern developments of the facile in literary style and in popular diction-idiom, interacting on each other without design but also by the force of a new general "cultural" identification of linguitsic nicety and scrupling with freedom-curbing, anti-natural conventionality, have distracted human minds from their natural innocent preoccupation with what we have described as their witness-bearing function. (287)
Rather than with truth, all the professional specialists in truth-possibilities are concerned with strategies of knowledge that will protect them from "being wrong." (288)
FOOTNOTE:
Truth--animation of words with purpose of mind to make manifest possessed awareness, productive of complete rightness of expression.
Verity--animation of words with purpose of mind to make available possessed knowledge, productive of total accuracy of exposition. (289)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews