Poetry

“Poetry can be a succinct way of saying a lot . . . there are other texts you can do [with language], but I think poetry has the best chance of stimulating the visual sense.” - Elizabeth Goldring

Still Blue (2023)

Still Blue collects Goldring’s key work across the decades in poetry and images. As a poet and visual artist who is legally blind, Goldring explores different ways of seeing—through the concision of poetic syntax, through her innovative experiments with the scanning laser ophthalmoscope as an MIT researcher, and through poems that consider vision, its loss, disability more broadly, human mortality, natural beauty, and the poet’s response to war. The stunning visual images of the human retina offer bold statements of color, montage, and technological exploration. [Amazon]

excerpt:

Still Blue

The Zero Foundation headquarters moved into Huettenstrasse 104 the year after Otto
died.

Our bedroom in Huettenstrasse
is not there
anymore

blue space
velvet womb
no windows
to frighten my inner cosmos (canaries)
While he leaves me
Paints with fire
Works through the night

Crying eyes
My soul still blue
The bedroom
not there
anymore

— Still Blue, BkMK Press, 2023

Ey- (2002)

"When artist and poet Elizabeth Goldring found a way to use technology for visual art, the images she captured on her damaged retinas became "frozen traces of seeing, the memory of words that move and flow into meaning." These exquisite prints are grounded on the image of her optic nerve, "individual as a thumbprint," to embody not only Goldring's remarkable vision but the very process of creation. As a poet, Elizabeth Goldring pushes through silence to speak. As a visual artist who is blind, she uses darkness to frame the world she allows, then compels us to see. Eye is a work of transformative--and great--art." --Hilda Raz (Amazon)

excerpt:

Driving Down to Nice

I remember
the four a.m. flowers
the fresh scents
the closed air of the car,
how red sun
filled the blue morning
as we drove down to Nice,
and how s h e came up
over the knobbed hairy tit mountain
(the citron sorbet in Cassis
with lemon rind pressed in it)
the sun
burned black at the center,
orange
opening into yellow
(the taste of lemon rind).

As we drove into Nice
I felt the earth shake
and the bitter aftershocks
as shadows of the black sun
crossed your eyes
clouding the lavender fields
back at Senanque,
stifling songs of Missa Solemnis
still hot in my gut.

— Ey-: poems & retina prints, BkMK Press, 2002

Without Warning: 49 Poems (1995)

excerpt:

Socks

Walking the tread mill
I watch the socks get in front of each other.
I’m mesmerized by their red color
and the idea that they’re your socks.
I’ve worn them without asking you.
Even if you won’t walk the tread mill
Your socks have gotten mixed up with my feet.
They’re our socks.
I grin despite the friction of tread mill
and walking feet.

— Without Warning. Kansas City: BkMk Press and Helicon Nine Editions, 1995

Laser Treatment: poems and two stories (1983)

excerpts:

Full Moon

Full moon swings
from a lamp post.
Night misses day.

A Black Rose

black rose
rises
200 feet
a
long
time

black rose
shouts
”what is it?”

“black rose”

“mean
a black rose,
man?”

“how much does it cost?”

Alexandria
July, 1978

— Laser Treatment. Boston: Blue Giant Press, 1983