Rational Meaning: Toward a New Foundation for the Definition of Words (And Supplementary Essays)

Abstract

Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson. Rational Meaning: Toward a New Foundation for the Definition of Words (and Supplementary Essays). Ed. William Harmon with an introduction by Charles Bernstein. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997. It is a strange time for Laura (Riding) Jackson, the poet. Her Collected Poems from Persea Books is easily available, and within the last five years two editions of selected poems and one edition of her juvenilla have been published. Although this may not seem an overabundance (particularly considering her recent death in 1991), it is a curious confirmation of the activity she so "devoutly renounced" in the early 1940s. As she wrote in the 1970 preface to her Selected Poems: In Five Sets, "Those who have known my poems.. have for the most part (as the indications go) shrugged off my change of view of poetry as exhibiting an inconsistency so bizarre as to be explicable only in private life terms" (Collected Poems, 414). It is hardly a surprise that the work of a poet who renounces being one continues to be read-and with increased interest. The poems of George Oppen and Rimbaud, for instance, are in many ways enriched by the silence or repudiation which interrupts or completes them. Yet one must wonder why the work Laura Riding accomplished after her disavowal of poetry has of late been so poorly represented. While Lives of Wives, The Word Woman and Other Related Writing and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine are prose works recently published, all predate her momentous decision in 1941 when she returned to America from Europe and married Schuyler B. Jackson. Perhaps her greatest work, her "personal evangel," The Telling, initially published in 1967 in Chelsea magazine and then five years later in book format, is out of print. The publication of Rational Meaning: Toward a New Foundation for the Definition of Words does much to combat what can seem a conspiracy to make poetry comfortably seem an end-limit, the disavowal of which can lead to no new space of or for writing. Yet as the authors explain, "the change of view of poetry that the first of us experienced was no mere turning away from poetry.... Her thought, her work, was plotted towards a general human event of full articulateness realized" (446). Charles Bernstein, in his introduction, calls Rational Meaning a "`poet's work,'...a pursuit of poetry's love for language by other means" (ix-x). Bernstein, as much as any other poet or critic, has explored and interrogated how and what we culturally define as "poetry." While he is well aware of the risk involved in disarming Rational Meaning, and Laura Riding's career, of their polemic against what Riding calls the "sleep maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on todays's doorstep" (The Telling, 11), there remains the interest in linking this deeply anti-poetic work to the project of poetry. And indeed, for Laura Riding, Rational Meaning is the continuation of the linguistic project she initially conceived through poetry: "The poetic course became for me more and more, as I dedicated to it my faith in the good significance of the human existence, and my powers, a course in which to unite, with all my virtue of comprehensive, personally general, sincerity of dedication, the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual trails of the journey to truth-to the plane of utterance on which human speaking spoke the language of being with a full, universal explicitness of sense" (CP, 5). …