by Mary Helen Callier

If we put away our poems, we shall lose… a beautiful unrealness, that makes us feel… we know what realness is.— Laura (Riding) Jackson, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?,” Denver Quarterly vol. 9, no. 2, Summer 1974

*

In May 1973 Laura (Riding) Jackson sent a query letter to Burton Feldman at the University of Denver, the then editor of Denver Quarterly, asking if he would be interested in publishing an essay of hers wherein she addressed her “relations with The Fugitives about which, under the name of impersonal scholarship, some outrageously false accounts have gained status of literary history…”[1]

The Fugitives were a literary group that began at the University of Vanderbilt in the 1920s, with whom she was, in her account, disproportionally aligned. She offered the tentative titles “About Myself and the Fugitives and Things Related,” and “About the Fugitives and Myself…”[2]

This letter marked the beginning of a lively correspondence between (Riding) Jackson and Feldman regarding her work. The Laura (Riding) Jackson folder within Feldman’s papers contains their editorial correspondence (mostly his letters to her) regarding her four published essays and eleven poems[3], which appeared in Denver Quarterly between Summer 1973 and Spring 1975.[4] There is a warmth to their letters, an intimacy, which I have come to understand as part, or close to part, of the “total human quantity”[5] (Riding) Jackson so desperately wanted from language, but was unable to find in poems. She renounced poetry soon after the publication of her Collected (1938), stating that she “withdrew from all literary associations, and especially from close working associations I had maintained with a number of writers, to the good of whose own writing, and for the sake of a common human cause of comprehension of the good in language, I had very earnestly and hopefully devoted myself.”[6]

Laura (Riding) Jackson has been historicized as a figure of junctures. Said to mark a split between modernism and postmodernism, she’s been grouped in with The Fugitives, called the springboard for the Language poets, she’s even been dubbed “first poet of” New Criticism,[7] a mode of analysis (Riding) Jackson herself called, in her fourth and final essay published in Denver Quarterly in the Spring of 1975, “that pettifogging New Criticism onto which various language-analysis schools have endeavored to graft their theories.”[8] And yet, almost prophetically, it is this sense of displacement, this dizzying parallax of varying junctures and points of departure her work is said to have occupied, that echoes her own thinking regarding what she saw as something wrong within language: its severance into varying factions and fields. As she said in her fourth and final essay published in Denver Quarterly, discussing the growing disconnect between the fields of literature and linguistics: “For language to be conceived of as a quantity other to literature in relation to it as a quantity, and grammar to be conceived of as a quantity other to language in relation to it as a quantity, something must have gone wrong, or failed to go right, in the total human quantity,”[9] and it was this perceived loss of the “total human quality” that led (Riding) Jackson to abandon “literary associations.” For (Riding) Jackson, poetry came to be one of those areas within language where things failed to go right. She came to view poetry, through what she called its “effects of completeness,”[10] as a kind of aberration of language’s innate potential to express. In only inadequately conveying a part of what language could offer, poetry denied language of its capacity to render the total human quantity that language, for her, indubitably constituted. The poem, as an aesthetic object, would always supersede the truth out of which it had initially grown.

[The] poem, at any rate, has the irremediable flaw of all poems: for reasons of art, it excludes what is not less important to the theme than what is made explicit, all its organization being directed towards the effect of completeness. The omitted, the unsaid, in poems, what is trimmed-out, is the measure of the extent to which truth is subjected to the discipline of art in them.[11]

It was this relation between poetry and truth that ultimately drove her renunciation. For (Riding) Jackson, poems—because of their aesthetic trappings as poems—nullified the truth out of which they were crafted. Poets told “incomplete” stories … stories that bore, yet, “the appearance-marks of completeness,” a completeness that, “… numb[ed] the very faculties it [the poem]– initially– stimulate[d].”[12]

*

Born in 1901 in New York City, she attended Cornell University, where her papers are housed. During her life she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and was co-recipient for a Bollingen Prize in 1991, the year of her death at ninety. I first became fascinated with Laura (Riding) Jackson in the fall of 2022, after reading her poem, “Earth.”

Earth

Have no fears for earth.

The universal name of it is Nothing.

If it is Earth to us, that is our secret.

The outer records leave off here,

And we may write it as it seems to us,

And as it seems, it is,

Being so still and reasonable

Amidst great speed and strangeness.

 

For that which is unseen, or only seen,

That which is space, unearthly space,

It is a time before Earth was,

And we move only inwards,

Towards ourselves and it.

 

From which, it is a place of places,

An onlywhere of everywhere.

And have no fears for it,

Its destiny is simple,

To be further what it is.

 

How long this means in present miles we know,

Though not in coming hours.

But we are not tired yet,

Nor need be while we count as always

In the lazy scale of ever.

So have no fears.[13]

 

I immediately admired the poem for its totality, by which I mean I admired the poem’s willingness to close, prosodically and rhetorically marked by the evolved repetition between the first and last lines. The “So” in the concluding line offered a kind of rhetorical argument or proof: as if the poem had solved its quandary. The totality of what remains inexpressible, of what’s beyond the poem’s grasp, remains indeterminate, as it lies outside the bounds of what is possible in language: “For that which is unseen,/ or only seen,/ That which is space, unearthly space,/ It is a time before Earth was,/ And we move only inwards,/ Towards ourselves and it.” Whatever existed outside of the bounds of language remained inexpressible— because it was, simply— outside of the bounds of what language could express. This reflected itself, prosodically, in the rounded-out return of the final line of the poem. Like the earth, the poem itself, in its closure, created a kind of circularity: whatever existed outside of the scope of language would remain inexpressible: “Its destiny is simple/ To be further what it is.” The circularity of the earth (the knowable, travelable realm) evoked the circumference of language itself. It was this very effect of completeness, what (Riding) Jackson herself would later renounce, that drew me to it.

I came to locate other threads of her thinking, other reasons for her renunciation, here as well. For one, the tension between “is” and “seems,” which in this poem carried an air of inevitability regarding the poem’s/language’s potential, would later be part of her decision to leave poetry: “And we may write it as it seems to us,/ And as it seems, it is…” The risk here was obvious: that the semblance, whatever the poem could offer, ran the risk of replacing what “is.” While this poem was printed in 1930, it was this very sense of poetry’s obstruction or obfuscation that would be, by the end of that decade, what drove her away. On writing about her renunciation, in her second Denver Quarterly essay, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?,” from the Summer of 1974, she says:

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 much committed to yielding the semblance to be capable of 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 be of that extraordinary thing, a poem.[14]

For her, it was a problem of aesthetics: poetry, while attempting to capture the truth of whatever initial impulse it grew out of, could not help but create semblances, and the danger for L(R)J was that these semblances replaced whatever initially was. What mattered for (Riding) Jackson was that this was not an issue inherent to language, but to poetry specifically.

*

In his essay “Reading Renunciation: Laura Riding and the End of Poetry,” Tom Fisher explores the legacy of (Riding) Jackson’s renunciation. Drawing on previous writing by Jennifer Ashton and Jerome McGann, he acknowledges the way in which her renunciation, and her critical “post-poetry” work written following that renunciation, have been read as signifying a split between modernism and postmodernism, as well as the loci of out which the “language-centered writing of the eighties” emerged, the impetus for what McGann called the “rethinking of poetic truth as a linguistic and social experience and event rather than as an epistemological or imaginative category.”[15] Fisher agrees with Ashton, who stated that “[T]he language poets who have sought to claim [Riding] as their precursor have founded their poetics on doing just what she so vehemently refuses.”[16] Fisher goes on to explain how:

For Ashton, the poetics of the language poets are founded on a privileging of the very materiality of language that Riding “vehemently” believed subsumed and eclipsed meaning so effectively, irrevocably, and disastrously. And despite McGann’s compelling argument about Riding’s post-poetry prose—particularly his emphasis on its social, dialogic and interactive character—Riding’s insistence on the “soundlessness of truth” and craft’s debasement of meaning remains, it may seem, an ultimate impediment to constructing a line of influence from Riding to a postmodern avant-garde… If, as Ashton says, the language poets start where Riding stops, thinking their projects together is not an egregious critical error, but a potentially productive and provocative reading practice that can show us something about the poetic methods and assumptions of each…[17]

It is my goal here, however inadequately, to do this work of thinking their projects together. It is not my goal to solve or rectify the contradictions that arise in looking at L(R)J’s work, but to illuminate such aporias and bring them into conjunction with her own writings. In reanimating her work in the present, I want to place her alongside thinkers across the dividing line(s) she’s said to occupy and show how her work both aligns with and differs from the apparent modes she’s been said to have grown out of and inspired, while constructing a line of influence across three varying thinkers and bodies of work. In looking at L(R)J’s critical dictum regarding poetry’s effect of completeness alongside Lyn Hejinian’s writing on closure, I hope to illuminate or trace the alternate ontology (Riding) Jackson offers, one predicated on language’s sufficiency, which seems useful within a poetical-critical atmosphere wherein Hejinian’s theory of closure has become commonplace. I want to think critically about the stakes of closure, what undergirds our thinking that poetry needs to reject it at all, what this decision to reject closure tells us about our stances on language, and what we think language can do.

Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure” was originally written as a talk and given at 544 Natoma Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983, less than a decade after (Riding) Jackson published her essay in Denver Quarterly renouncing poetry due to its effect of completeness. I’ve always understood Hejinian’s closure as a semantic one—the lack of closure she posited or desired was gestural; an expression of or towards possibility, as-yet-inexpressible. To reject closure meant to enact the draw of desire with its ever extending, reached toward potential.

Hejinian says:

Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say. We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children… discover that words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things… and the words for them.[18]

It is in this gap, this parallax, where words are “not equal to the world,” that the critical difference between (Riding) Jackson and Hejinian emerges. It is one that bears consideration as it complicates, or at least necessitates a more robust consideration of the lines of contention between (Riding) Jackson and the Language poets. While (Riding) Jackson may have agreed that poetry does this, because of its aesthetic nature as poetry, language, for her, could not not equal the world. In (Riding) Jackson’s conception, language did equal the world. Poetry merely veered away from what language might accomplish, because it became enamored with its own artifice. As she says in “What, If Not a Poem, Poems?”:

Poetry is conditioned by the arbitrary postulate that there is an inexpressible, and all its devices are designed for the suggestion of the inexpressible: in it, crucial linguistic difficulties are evaded through the illusion that there is an inexpressible. The art of poetry 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 as inexpressible that, somehow, it can express: words are used, within this self-contradictory field of linguistic principle, to create physical impressions of what it left verbally unexplored for the sake of the exercise of the art of poetry![19]

It is this notion of the inexpressible as-good-as-expressed that seems to be the dividing epistemological difference between Hejinian and (Riding) Jackson. While Hejinian accepts the something not ‘there’ as an essential aspect of language (“words are not equal to the world”), (Riding) Jackson sees it as a failure particular to poetry, not inherent to language, as such. It is interesting to me that the one theory (Hejinian’s) has prevailed. I have read or referenced “The Rejection of Closure” in many of the classrooms I have participated in, and I have begun to wonder about its function. Is the something not ‘there,’ the something never touched, a mere aesthetic illusion devised and favored by poets, who have come to their own aesthetic appreciation of the inexpressible as-good-as-expressed over expression itself? I think it is crucial to note that for (Riding) Jackson, this obsession with the illusion of the inexpressible (which, on a different and potentially more interesting note may be simply an aesthetic experience people who read poetry want) is separate from language’s innate capacity as expressibility, wherein language equals the world and what can be known can only be known in language.

To step back in time, and to briefly place (Riding) Jackson on the other side of the dividing line she’s come to occupy, I want to bring her theory of language’s totality into correspondence with Walter Benjamin’s early 1916 essay, “On Language as Such,” one of his earliest major works, in which he articulates his theory regarding the metaphysics of language. In doing so I hope to create a kind of trajectory from Benjamin to (Riding) Jackson to Hejinian, one that might offer insight into Hejinian’s perceived parallax in linguistic signification. For Benjamin, everything partakes in language, and to apprehend anything at all is to partake in its language. As he says, “If mental being is identical with linguistic being, then a thing, by virtue of its mental being, is a medium of communication, and what is communicated in it is—in accordance with its mediating relationship— precisely this medium (language) itself…”[20] The mental being was “therefore postulated as communicable, or, rather, situated within the communicable…”[21] If linguistic being and mental being are inevitably aligned—if the mental being, as such, is linguistic, thereby inextricable from the communicable—then anything conceivable, by nature of being conceived, has the potential for expressibility in language. In this construction there can be no outside of language, because whatever lies outside of it remains inconceivable. If that is true, then the movement from Benjamin to (Riding) Jackson to Hejinian concerns a critical shift regarding language’s relation to the world, and the trajectory between them marks the birth of this perceived parallax in signification. For Benjamin, there was no parallax, no point where words didn’t equal the world, as the words we had for things were their being, being communicated to us. Where Hejinian found parallax, Benjamin found magic. As he says:

Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. At the same time, the notion of the magic of language points to something else: its infiniteness. This is conditional on its immediacy. For precisely because nothing is communicated through language, what is communicated in language cannot be externally limited or measured, and therefore all language contains its own incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity. Its linguistic being, not its verbal contents, defines its frontier.[22]

The difference between what Benjamin sees as incommensurability, and what Hejinian sees as parallax is the difference between the linguistic being and its verbal contents, which seems to be where (Riding) Jackson intervenes with her concerns regarding the aesthetics of poetry. For (Riding) Jackson the verbal contents of poetry came to stand in the place of or usurp whatever the linguistic being of an object, as apprehended, was. The notion that children discover, as Hejinian suggests, “that words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things… and the words for them” would have seemed, for (Riding) Jackson, a failure not on the part of language but a misrepresentation of the relation itself, because things could be nothing other than whatever words we have for them. In that change in preposition, from in to through, a loss of capability occurs. For (Riding) Jackson, poetry, in postulating an inexpressible, denied the very nature of language as constituting what the mental being is. While Hejinian rejects closure because language is inherently limited, inadequately aligned to the world, (Riding) Jackson rejects poetry as an art of postulated inexpressibility, one capable of distorting what language inherently is.

While these thinkers occupy very different periods and positionalities, they are all writing within the span of sixty-four years, and in tracing a line of influence between them, however haphazard, we can see a shift in thinking regarding language’s function. While Benjamin is not a poet, his thinking around the totality that language constitutes aligns with (Riding) Jackson’s. If there is a parallax to language for (Riding) Jackson it is what emerges via the aesthetics effects, the benumbing enchantment, of poetry. The choice of scope here is important. What had been, for (Riding) Jackson, a crisis in poetry’s relation to language becomes, for Hejinian, a crisis in language itself, where “words don’t equal the world.” If we look at the relation between (Riding) Jackson and Hejinian we can imagine a trajectory wherein (Riding) Jackson’s anxiety around the aesthetics’ relation to truth grew to encompass the whole of language, as if the benumbing enchantment she saw as particular to poetry had opened and swallowed the entirety of language itself. If Benjamin’s view of language was that it was magic, that language had its own agency, emanating, or at least seeming to emanate, out of objects themselves, Hejinian’s view of language took a more psychological turn, less attuned to this balanced relationship between subject and object than to the psychological condition of the subject itself: “Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.”[23]

In tracing this trajectory of influence, it is important to note the status these three figures occupy, as well the canonization of these particular works: Benjamin is a giant of modernism, yet this is one of his earliest essays. While (Riding) Jackson is, or has been, a key figure in numerous poetical-critical movements, her own critical writings could be said to lie outside of the canon, while Hejinian’s essay “The Rejection of Closure” has, by my estimation, come to be one of the more canonical essays of the last fifty years, and is often included in many introductory writing syllabi. In tracing a trajectory between them we can see the emergence of Hejinian’s parallax in signification—that is, a pivotal shift in belief regarding what language can do, and where it comes from. For Benjamin, what is conceivable at all is communicable. For (Riding) Jackson, while the mental and linguistic should be aligned, the aesthetic intercedes in this relation, posing a kind of threat. For Hejinian, the gap has widened almost completely, except now it isn’t conceived of as a problem of the aesthetic interceding, but a problem of language itself. Is there really such a difference between Hejinian’s parallax and Benjamin’s infinity? Probably not, though the affective presentation matters. One produces displacement, the other, magic. While Hejinian finds pleasure in the open text’s ability to endlessly signify, it is a different kind of pleasure from the magic we encounter in Benjamin, where things and the words we have for them operate by way of magical collaboration, where language itself seems to be magically produced by way of our mere apprehension and engagement with the world. The sheer proliferation of names, of our ability to name things, for the names of things to issue forth was, for Benjamin, magic. If Benjamin found pleasure in the infinity of naming, Hejinian’s parallax seems to come from a lack of belief in our adequate potential to name. Whatever pleasure is found, for her, is found in our ability to gesture towards the inexpressible, to leave the door open for meanings to proliferate, creating the arbitrary postulate (Riding) Jackson dubs the “as-good-as-expressed.” It is possible to see the movement between, across, and among these three thinkers as tracing a kind of emergent aesthetic anxiety: both the emergence of a lack of belief in the aesthetic gesture itself, as well as the renunciation to the gesture as such, not as a choice, but as the only available option. The issue that arises is this: if we fail to believe in poetry’s ability to offer anything other than the “inexpressible as-good-as-expressed,” and if we come to believe it is less a problem of aesthetics than a problem inherent to language itself, indicative of language’s innate misalignment with the world, then we run the risk of forgetting that things can actually be said.

*

What follows is a brief timeline of the correspondence between Feldman and (Riding) Jackson, including excerpts from their correspondences as well as from her four published Denver Quarterly essays.

May 1973: (Riding) Jackson writes to Feldman, asking if he would be interested in publishing her essay.[24]

November 6, 1973: Feldman responds to (Riding) Jackson’s query, accepting the essay for publication. “Thanks very much for your—what to call it?—your bibliographic-literary historico-autobiographical essay. We would like to publish it in our next issue. It is clearly an important essay… both as it bears on your own work and reputation, and certain aspects of the career of contemporary literature in general… As to ‘style’—but of course it is not the ‘style’ at all… Your style is what you claim it to be: an instrument of subtle precision…”[25]

Winter 1974 : L(R)J publishes “Some Autobiographical Corrections to Literary History”, with the aim of clarifying her place within the literary canon. She begins this essay:

The reasons for my withdrawing from literary scenes have been misrepresented, and misunderstood. But it is pertinent here to say only that I withdrew to a way of life in which I concerned myself directly with comprehension of the good in language, without any condition upon this of necessary involvement in literature…[26]

She publishes this essay alongside eleven poems. The poems are prefaced by a paragraph excerpt from her forthcoming work, The Telling, itself prefaced by the reflexive third-person statement regarding her stance on poetry, a statement she included thereafter with all reprints of her poems:

“Laura (Riding) Jackson does not approve reprinting, of poems of hers, with reference to her having renounced poetry a few years after the publication of COLLECTED POEMS. The view she came to have of poetry after long devotion to it is reflected in the following passage from her recently published book THE TELLING”

The future-facing truth-telling that it promised our ears and imaginations never breaks from the tellers: the telling travels round and round the tellers in standstill coils, a bemusement in which tellers and listeners are lost. Teller, listener, story, become in poetry one bemusement, in which present and future seem to commingle, and the desire to tell the truth and the need to hear it shrink from the touch of fulfillment in lazy unison. Poetry’s numbered wording abbreviates truth to the measure of mortal premonition, which has but a midnight’s reach. Poetry is a sleepmaker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on today’s doorstep.[27]

Summer 1974: She publishes, “What, if not a Poem, Poems?”, an essay further discussing her renunciation, in which she explores her views on poetry’s relation to truth.

No matter how hard the waters of poetry are churned with the effort of words, the poem passes in its utterance, leaving nothing behind but a fast-disappearing wake– lovely while it lasts. Yet we have known nowhere else for resort, no other speaking-place where a possibility seemed of realizing our comprehension, in words, of what further is, which, finding no hold, let us fall back slowly or fast, at their forward rate. In poetry there is no forward movement. The potential of movement is dissipated in the use of words to produce the sensory effect of movement. The poet 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 into itself; yet, when you have come to the end of the poem, you have gone nowhere.[28]

Spring 1975: She publishes her last two essays in Denver Quarterly, both of which were written as appendices to Rational Meaning: A New Foundation For the Definition of Words, a text she co-authored with her husband, linguist Schuyler B. Jackson. These essays are titled: “Dr. Grove and the Future of English Dictionaries,” and “Supplementary Comment Concerning George Watson’s Thinking on Noam Chomsky.”

*

Throughout their correspondence (Riding) Jackson was writing from Florida; Feldman, from Denver. Bits of life seep into these letters: vacations, the weather. Some are written quickly: “Please excuse this brief note—I’m trying to catch the mail.”[29] Some long and labored: at times densely editorial, questioning idiosyncrasies of spelling, punctuation. They discuss particulars: typography, which words to bold.[30]

*

While it is exactness that she is praised for (Feldman’s first letter to her praises what she calls her own “subtle precision”) it is inexactness that haunts her legacy. While she is said to have collaborated with Robert Graves on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), she writes in “Some Autobiographical Corrections,” that Graves took credit for most of the book. She says Graves explicitly took credit for a “chapter famed for the analysis made in it of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129”, a method of analysis that was, she states, later borrowed by William Empson for his text “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” a method of analysis Empson proceeded to “dismember … into seven artifices, not comprehending the single critical soul of the original and improvising for them the synthetic critical soul.”[31] In this criticism we can hear the echo from her previous concerns: between the aesthetic (“synthetic”) and the objective (“single”), between what she conceived to be a unified totality having been “dismembered into… artifices.”

In this 1974 essay, “Some Autobiographical Corrections,” she goes on to discusses Graves’ revealing of her pseudonyms without her consent, of which the archive suggests there are three.[32] She also discusses, at length, both Robert Graves’ and W.H. Auden’s plagiarism of her work, including close-readings of both of their poems alongside her own. She says that over the years the plagiarism of her work was so extreme her friends would send her poems they saw published with her traces in them.[33]  What does Jackson say of the plagiarism, the misuse of her legacy? “But to what does it all amount?… I know to what it amounts humanly. Depravity, in the human world at large… In the quarter of the human world known as the literary world, there are no vents for depravities of performance, there is not even a category so denoted: all is sanctified under the term ‘literary.’”[34]

*

I leaf through the small manilla folder labeled “Laura (Riding) Jackson” tucked within a cardboard box of Feldman’s papers in the University of Denver’s Special Collections Library. Most of the archive contains Feldman’s correspondence to her, and it is mostly through his responses that I am able to glean the shape of her thinking, her personality, as well as bear witness to the devotion, care, and respect she commanded.

*

The papers are scrambled, out of order. I spend an afternoon organizing them chronologically, yet some materials escape my organization: lacking dates, names, signatures.

*

Despite her decision to leave poetry, she could not escape it: her biography, poetry, and influence were, in the decades after her initial renunciation, exceedingly warped, like an outdoor fire that, as she once said of poems, “jumps its bounds.”[35]

*
One note, written in her handwriting, wisping black inked letters with varying degrees of space between them, reads CONFIDENTIAL.[36] As the page continues the space between the letters grows, the letters, too, morph and elongate. Silence is the only word I can clearly make out.

*

“Lately, I have always to be writing letters…” Feldman begins his last (archived) letter to (Riding) Jackson on April 7, 1975, “but never the ones I want to write to the ones I would like most to write to…”[37] Feldman goes on to discuss a recently written review of her work, published in Chelsea a few months prior. The review focused on Graves’ plagiarism of her work, which (quite unsurprisingly) didn’t please (Riding) Jackson. As Feldman says: “Nothing is more telling xxx (no pun) than your remark that Kirkman might after all have simply dropped all schematism and turned directly to your writing, if he wanted to show your work important.”[38]

She responds a week later, her final (archived) letter to Feldman, dated April 14, 1975, two and a half years after their initial correspondence. She says “Your letters to me always fall as if from a heaven of ease of feeling… And wasn’t the De Kooning affair placed like a room-divider between Kirkman and me an indecency? The editor is my friend. But there are – no, I’ll say it differently: insensitivity is no respecter of friendship (or anything else). —- (The printer prepared the way for it, but helplessness permitted it.)”[39] Even here there is a hint of her theory: the tool (or language) prepared the way, but it could not be faulted. Ultimately, it was the human element she held such high standards for, the human element, in all things, that was the cause of failure. Language was adequate for her, but poets weren’t. But it was in her correspondence with Feldman that she had access to the total human quantity she sought, where language was pitched to its truest quality: communicability. In her final letter to Feldman she says: “You make me feel that you are there, xxx to what I say, where I say with care   This is a rare experience. Less and less is there attendance at the saying of ‘things,’ the writing, speaking in writing, of words. It gets worse and worse. It’s at least no better in academic quarters, generally.”[40] Following Benjamin, whatever pleasure (Riding) Jackson seems to have derived from language was inextricable from language’s inmost nature as communicability, which, while warped in poetry, constituted everything the human, as an apprehending subject, was capable of.

*

I’ve placed (Riding) Jackson’s poetics alongside Hejinian’s and Benjamin’s thinking in a brief attempt to illuminate the interstitial space between the modern and postmodern worlds she’s said to inhabit. While her demands on language seem at times impossible, I have found myself taken by her refusal to believe in anything other than language’s sufficiency. L(R)J demands that we mean what we say, or rather she acknowledges any apparent disconnect between saying and meaning as the fault of whoever is doing the talking. In reading her work and bringing her words into conversation with these legacies of which she is a part, I have attempted to illuminate what Fisher calls “the ultimate impediment to constructing a line of influence from Riding to a postmodern avant-garde,” [41] and, while honoring this legacy, I have hoped to dig into the epistemological knots that occur in the ease of such a construction. It may be that a type of parallax exists between things as they are and our words for them. It may be that part of the progression I’ve traced is the birth of this parallax in linguistic signification, the split or loss of belief in the idea that the mental and linguistic beings can so totally align. What (Riding) Jackson’s renunciation and her subsequent critical work can offer us is the possibility of the opposite, where the fault may not lie in language, but in those who use it. As she said of her own perceived poetic failure, discussing her poem, “Lucrene and Nara”: “What is this but an epilogue to extinction? Why did I give up so easily?”[42]

 

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Dr. W. Scott Howard for his continuous support on this project and for awarding me the Summer 2023 Denver Quarterly Research Grant; the 2024 Louisville Conference of Literature and Culture, where this work was presented on the “Experimental Thoughts on Experimental Poetics” panel; Dr. Ryan Perry, for his tutorial on Walter Benjamin in the Spring of 2023; Kate Crowe, Curator of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Denver where the Burton Feldman papers are housed; and my mother, who helped me attempt to decipher Laura (Riding) Jackson’s handwriting. The works of Laura (Riding) Jackson featured in this essay appear with permission from Cornell University, Denver Quarterly, and the University of Denver. This work would not have been possible without the support of these individuals and institutions.

 

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and the Language of Man.” in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 62-73.

Feldman Documents, Laura Riding, 1973-1975. Special Collections and Archives, Anderson Academic Commons, University of Denver. M145.04.0010.0022. https://duarchives.coalliance.org/agents/people/8670 Denver Quarterly Records, Special Collections and Archives, Anderson Academic Commons, University of Denver.

Fisher, Tom. “Reading Renunciation: Laura Riding’s Modernism and the End of Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 3 (2010): 1–19.

Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure,” The Language of Inquiry. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 40-58.

Heuving, Jeanne. “Laura (Riding) Jackson’s ‘Really New’ Poem,” in Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie, Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 191-208.

(Riding) Jackson, Laura. “Some Autobiographical Corrections of Literary History.” Denver Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 1-33.

(Riding) Jackson, Laura. “Poems*” Denver Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 34-37.

Riding, Laura. Twenty Poems Less. (Paris: Hours Press, 1930). Housed in the University of Denver’s Special Collections.

(Riding) Jackson, Laura. “What If Not a Poem, Poems?” Denver Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 1-13.

(Riding) Jackson, Laura. “Concerning George Watson’s Thinking on Noam Chomsky.” Denver Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 19-25.

(Riding) Jackson, Laura. “Dr. Grove and the Future of English Dictionaries.” Denver Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 1-18.

 

[1] (Riding) Jackson’s initial letter to Feldman, dated May 24, 1973, University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[2] (Riding) Jackson’s initial letter to Feldman, University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[3] These eleven poems were a reprinted selection from her Collected (1938). They included an excerpt from Voltaire, her “earliest of preserved poetic writing (1921)”; “Pride of Head,” a “very early” poem, first published as “Body’s Head” in Poetry; “Postponement of Self”; “By Crude Rotation”; “Jewels and After”; “With the Face”; “Unread Pages”; “Fragment”; “Auspice of Jewels”; an excerpt from Sickness and Schooling; and “After So Much Loss.” The excerpt from Voltaire and “Pride of Head” both contain notes designating their status as revisions. Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Poems*,” vol. 9 no. 2, Denver Quarterly, (Winter, 1974): 34-47.

[4] Image of Envelope from the archive, from Professor Burton Feldman, addressed to Mrs. Schuyler B. Jackson. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[5] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Concerning George Watson’s Thinking on Noam Chomsky,” vol. 10, no. 1, Denver Quarterly, (Spring 1975), 22.

[6] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Some Autobiographical Corrections of Literary History,” vol. 8, no. 4, Denver Quarterly (Winter 1974): 1.

[7] Jeanne Heuving, “Laura (Riding) Jackson’s ‘Really New’ Poem,” Gendered Modernisms, ed Margaret Dickie, Thomas Travisano, University of Pennsylvania Press, (1996), 193.

[8] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Concerning George Watson’s Thinking on Noam Chomsky,” vol. 10, no. 1, Denver Quarterly (Spring 1975): 20.

[9] (Riding) Jackson, “Concerning George Watson’s Thinking,” 22.

[10] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “What, If Not a Poem, Poems?”, vol. 9, no. 2, Denver Quarterly, (Summer 1974): 3.

[11] (Riding) Jackson, “What, If Not a Poem, Poems?”, 3.

[12] (Riding) Jackson, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?”, 13.

[13] Laura Riding, Twenty Poems Less, (Paris: Hours Press, 1930), 3. Housed in the University of Denver’s Archives and Special Collections, Twenty Poems Less is a signed edition of 200, “set by hand and privately printed on hand-press.” Alternative versions of the poem appear in other volumes.

[14] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?”, 3.

[15] Tom Fisher, “Reading Renunciation: Laura Riding’s Modernism and the End of Poetry,” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 3 (2010): 14.

[16] Fisher, “Reading Renunciation,” 14.

[17] Fisher, “Reading Renunciation,” 14.

[18] Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” The Language of Inquiry, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 48.

[19] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?”, 8-9.

[20] Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 66.

[21] Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” 66.

[22] Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” 64.

[23] Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” 49.

[24] (Riding) Jackson’s initial letter to Feldman, pictured in the accompanying image. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[25] Burton Feldman’s response to L(R)J’s initial letter, dated Nov 6, 1973, excerpted in the accompanying image. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[26] (Riding) Jackson, “Some Autobiographical Corrections,” 2.

[27] (Riding) Jackson, “Poems*,” 34.

[28] (Riding) Jackson, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?,” 11.

[29] Feldman to (Riding) Jackson, dated Jan 2, 1973, University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[30] Feldman’s editorial notes to (Riding) Jackson (accompanying image), University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[31] Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Some Autobiographical Corrections,” 12-13. And on the matter of Empson’s borrowing of her method of analysis, in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, which Graves took credit for, she says: “it applied a method original to that work, originating with myself…”

[32] Letter from Feldman to Ellsworth Mason, a library director at the University of Boulder who wrote to acquire some of (Riding) Jackson’s letters for his archive, contained her previous pseudonyms. Feldman mediated this relationship between (Riding) Jackson and Ellsworth Mason and these correspondences are also contained in the archive of her files (accompanying image). University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[33] (Riding) Jackson, “Some Autobiographical Corrections,” 24.

[34] (Riding) Jackson, “Some Autobiographical Corrections,” 24.

[35] “Sometimes a poem gets away from me, as they say of an outdoor fire that jumps its bounds.” (Riding) Jackson, “What, If not a Poem, Poems?,” 2.

[36] Excerpts from an undated, unaddressed letter in (Riding) Jackson’s handwriting concerning Michael Kirkman’s review of her work in Chelsea. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[37] Last letter in the Burton Feldman papers from Feldman to (Riding) Jackson, dated April 7, 1975. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[38] Last letter in the Burton Feldman papers from Feldman to (Riding) Jackson, dated April 7, 1975. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[39] Last letter in the Burton Feldman papers from (Riding) Jackson to Feldman, dated April 14, 1975. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[40] Last letter in the Burton Feldman papers from (Riding) Jackson to Feldman, dated April 14, 1975. University of Denver, Burton Feldman Papers, file M145.04.0010.0022.

[41] Fisher, “Reading Renunciation,” 14.

[42] (Riding) Jackson, “What If Not a Poem, Poems?,” 11.

Mary Helen Callier‘s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Annulet, Sixth Finch, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral student in the English and Literary Arts department at the University of Denver, where she serves as a poetry editor for Denver Quarterly. Her first book, When the Horses, was the winner of the 2023 Alice James Editor’s Choice and is forthcoming with Alice James Books.