Laura Riding to the World: “What Shall We Do?”
Poet Laura (Riding) Jackson is probably more famous for her renunciation of poetry than for her writing of it. In 1938, her Collected Poems was published when she was only thirty-seven, though she lived another fifty-four years, twenty of them without publication at all.
Tooth and Bag
Nora wears a girdle on the outside of her dress. It’s her back brace.
Come out among them and be ye different.
Wears panties on her head to keep her Pentecostal hairdo in place.
The Demise of the Sea
SEA DEMON
and the sea too means nothing
and the sea too is a round o
and in vain does man hop
into the deep from guns and blades
Even Donkeys
I honor the light and the dark inside you.
What do you honor?
How much would you give me to eat this?
Crewel
“Responsibly” I embroider some “nerves” (this nervous orderly, from the basement upstairs at midnight:) not now, nor have I ever been a responsible worker since “hungrier” is an attribute (he has to clean her light-producing organs) of appetite exhaling warm blue light as she embroiders
Stanford
Come out of your program, we’re all poolside.
Perfect
Katie and I cleaned together.
Carol and Shirley
almost every day Carol visits Shirley or Shirley visits Carol
The values by which men have found it possible not merely to survive but to live with dignity
That thing I call the Death Apparatus: that thing I call the Swallower
Max Pengall’s Christmas Story
There was a tremor
