VERO BEACH — A two-part Laura (Riding) Jackson Lecture Series, hosted by the FAU Lifelong Learning Society & the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation will take place 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Monday, November 16 at the Vero Beach Main Library and on Wednesday, November 18 at the Environmental Learning Center. The Wednesday session concludes with a tour of the Laura (Riding) Jackson historic home, located at the Environmental Learning Center. The instructor is Barrett Watten, Ph.D.
Laura Riding Jackson is a major but neglected American modernist poet, who produced a remarkable body of poetry, collected in 1938, that took lyric poetry to the limits of representation. In the late 1930s, Riding underwent a crisis of belief in poetry itself, placed her poetic oeuvre “under erasure,” and went on to produce a series of works that address the “truth” of language apart from poetry’s inadequacies. Settling in Wabasso,Florida, she produced new texts such as The Telling and, with her husband, co-authored a lengthy critique to the possibility of truth in language titled Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words.
First Session: “Haunted by Possibility: Laura Riding’s Poetry and After” – Poet and critic Barrett Watten, one of several “language-centered” writers inspired by Laura Riding’s work, will introduce her poetic oeuvre, framed by her biography, and the reasons she felt she could not continue it.
Second Session: “The House of Language: Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Rational Meaning and the Truth of Experience” Watten will present Jacksons’ little known project Rational Meaning on-site at the Wabasso house, preserved since her death in 1991, and where she and her husband completed the work. Seeking an intersection between language and house as “site,” Watten will explore the relationship between Riding’s critique of language and her life.
Barrett Watten is Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (winner of the 2003 René Wellek
Prize) and numerous volumes of poetry, including Frame (1971-1990), Bad History, and Progress/Under Erasure. With Carrie Noland, he co-edited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Dislocation, based on the 2004 conference at UC Irvine, currently under review; and with Lyn Hejinian, he is co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-98, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.
Course # FM205
Fees: $30 for members,
$35 non-members
Information: Call Kellie Leveille at (772) 873-3338 / kleveill@fau.edu