THE DISCLAIMER OF PERSONS

Why is "Riding" hiding, and who is speaking to us from within that evocative parenthesis? In "Disclaimer of the Person," an "I" riddles its way into self-definition: "I am a woman. / I am not the sun which multiplied, / I am the moon which singled. / I am not the moon but a singling." A relentlessly singular female voice carves through language into namin g-as-being: "I am I. / I am my name. / My name is not my name. / It is the name of what I say. / My name is what is said. / I alone say. / I alone am not I. / I am my name. / My name is not my name, / My name is the name."

Comparisons with Gertrude Stein come to mind, yet the association is misleading. Joyce Piell Wexler, who has written the first book about Riding, explains the difference: "While Stein wanted to break down the historical associations of words to make langu age a neutral medium like paint or stone, Riding wanted to destroy the personal associations of words to make language a medium for the universal." The person, the persona, the personal are whittled down to the irreducible minimum, disclaimed, even discarded, so that poetry may attain to truth through the accuracy of its language. No emotion, no lyricism, above all, no confessions.

During the '20's and '30's, when she reigned over modernist poetry circles in New York, London and Majorca, Riding believed that "to go to poetry is the most ambitious act of the mind." (W.H. Auden called her "the only living philosophical poet.") Yet she renounced poetry as mendacious c. 1940 and withdrew from print into the parenthesis of a private life. Riding left Robert Graves, her companion and disciple of many years, to marry Schuyler B. Jackson, definitively displacing her personal name.

This disappearing act puzzles us more than forty years later. Riding gave an account in the "Preface"to her Selected Poems: she said that she renounced poetry because of "something poetry fails to be--belying its promissory advertisement of itself." Poets failed to see "the problem of poetry as a problem in the field of language"; they exalted the technicaliti es of "craft" over the diff iculties of "creed." Like children entranced with gaudy toys, such poets fell in love with poetry's sensuous appeal and forgot its mission to attain to spiritual truth.

Already in 1930, Riding called poet "a lying word," using the deliberate prose of a seer: "It is a false wall, a poet: it is a lying word. It is a wall that closes and does not." One must "stare the wall through now, well through" to a poem that is "a written edge of time." In Selected Poems, Riding included work that strives toward such an extreme, that suggests a "something after "the traditional consolations of poetry. Consider "Beyond":

Pain is impossible to describe
Pain is the impossibility of describing
Describing what is impossible to describe
Which must be a thing beyond description
Beyond description not to be known
Beyond knowing but not mystery
Not mystery but pain not plain but pain
But pain beyond but here beyond

The reader "stares through" the inadequacy of language to pain's paradoxical transcend ence, reaching past Emily Dickinson's "formal feeling" to a "here beyond."

Given the willful avoidance of poetic figure, the intensity of an occasional metaphor is all the more startling, as in the very Dickensonian "Death as "Death":

To conceive death as death
Is difficulty come by easily,
A blankness fallen among
Images of understanding,
Death like a quick cold hand
On the hot slow head of suicide.
So is it come by easily
For one instant. Then again furnaces
Roar in the ears, then again hell revolves,
And the elastic eye holds paradise
At visible length from blindness,
And dazedly the body echoes
"Like this, like this, like nothing else."

But death, "Like nothing-a similarity / Without resemblance," itself undermines the uses of metaphor, however startling. This is poetry which all but undoes its own raison d'etre and strides calmly toward the temptations of silence.

"Fragment," (not included in either Selected Poems or the 1980 Persea/Carcanet editions) appears less somber, almost good-naturedly St einian in its language experimentation.

What a tattle-tattle we.
And what a rattle-rattle me.
What a rattle-tattle-rattle-tattle we-me.
What a rattle-tattle.
What a rattle-tattle.
What a me.
What a what a
What a
What a
What a
What
a

Yet the poem pares itself away before our very eyes, in a very unSteinian gesture toward a minimalist conclusion of both language and relationship.

When Riding wrote love poems, they too were unlike anyone else's. Physical love attains a perfection and a permanence through its translation into language in "When Love Becomes Words":

To be loving is to lift the pen
And to use it both, and the advance
From dumb resolve to the delight
Of finding ourselves not merely fluent
But ligatured in the embracing words
Is by the metaphor of love,
And still a cause of kiss among us,
Though kiss we do not--or so knowingly,
The taste is lost in the taste of the thought.

Love-making, like poem-making, should advance to the realm of thought, putting aside the sensuous intoxication of mere ph ysicality.

In the years just before her defection from poetry, however, Riding found that there were still "as many questions as answers"-the title of her poem excerpted below (which Stein may have been quoting as her famous last words).

What is to start?
It is to have feet to start with.
What is to end?
It is to have nothing to start again with,
And not to wish.
. . . . . . .
What is to be?
It is to bear a name.
What is to die?
It is to be name only.
. . . . . . .
What is to ask?
It is to find an answer.
What is to answer?
Is it to find a question?

This aphoristic catechism reopens the questions of being, being named, knowing, and implicitly, the conditions that underlie the possibility of writing intelligently. One can see why Riding withdrew into speculations about the adequacy of language to the expression of first questions: hers has always been "a mind locked in combat with words" (Wexler). Many will find her austere, perhaps even "appallingly bleak" (Louis MacNiece), yet her linguistic combat offers an alternative to blatant confessionalism and a cure for facile poetics. Austere, yes, but with a certain grand, impersonal honor.
-Carolyn Burke

Note:

The poems quoted may be found in:
Laura Riding, Selected Poems: in Five Sets, Norton, 1973 Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Poems of Laura Riding, Persea (U.S.), Carcanet (U.K.)

See Joyce Piell Wexler's critical biography, Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth, Ohio University Press, 1979, and the following: Jane Marcus, "Laura Riding Roughshod," in Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers, Macmillan, 1982.