Laura (Riding) Jackson

There are at least two words ‘poetry’, one meaning linguistic activity of a certain kind, the other meaning verbal matter produced by such activity. I speak in this little essay of what it is that poets are doing and what their activity amounts to in the scales of human behaviour, rather than of poetry the verbal matter – although I may be drawn into making incidental...

After I had long nursed a faithIn the promise on which poetry has thrived –The recalled promise of languageAt its careful rising in mindsTo teach all, little by little,Until life and speech are one,Union of being with itself,Of knowledge with the known,Instantaneity consumingThe separating silence heard as ‘time’,The beat, beat, of not-yet, not-yet –Suddenly I saw,...