SOURCE: Jackson, Laura (Riding), and Elizabeth Friedmann. “Laura (Riding) Jackson in Conversation with Elizabeth Friedmann.” PN Review 17, no. 4 (March-April 1991): 57-77.

In the following interview, Riding discusses her perspective on literature and literary criticism, her relationship with the Fugitive poets in the early 1920s, and major influences on her work.

[Friedmann]: You have written somewhere that ‘writing is not my work; it is the form my work takes.’ What, then, do you consider to be your work?

[Jackson]: I concern myself here with avoiding the too-facile categorization of activities ‘writer’ and ‘writing’. These are loose terms. They do not collect different activity-modes but amalgamate them—associate them as roughly connected. I regard my ‘work’ as work of exploring the possibilities of through exactitudes, that is exactitudes of thought within the possibility of what the possibilities of language exactitudes allow.

In an Epilogue essay, entitled ‘The Literary Intelligence’, you wrote...