Backstage #11

Bates Dance Festival.

Soy tu sombra.
(I am your shadow.)

Before I left for Maine, I was feeling a bit depressed; for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reflecting on an essay by Laura (Riding) Jackson titled “Poetry and the Good.” I sought out her prose because I was interested in the poet who wrote the poem “Prisms,” a rather strange and enigmatic work which first appeared in 1926. At the time, Riding would have only been twenty-five years old. Here’s the poem in full:

What is beheld through glass seems glass.

The quality of what I am
Encases what I am not,
Smooths the strange world.
I perceive it slowly
In my time,
In my material,
As my pride,
As my possession:
The vision is love.

When life crashes like a cracked pane,
Still shall I love
Even the slight grass and the patient dust.
Death also sees, though darkly,
And I must trust then as now
Only another kind of prism
Through which I may not put my hands to touch.

Laura (Riding) Jackson would go onto renounce poetry; this wasn’t the story I was looking for, but it’s also familiar and of personal interest to me, the story of why renounce something, particularly poetry, which feels, I’m sorry to say, more catastrophic and meaningful than renouncing one’s presence on social media.