Laurie Price was born in New York City in 1955. She received her B.A.in Poetics at Naropa Institute in 1981. Her publications include a chapbook, Going on Like This (Northern Lights Int'l/ Brooklyn Series, 1991); Except for Memory (Pantograph Press,1993); and a chapbook, Under the Sign of the House (Detour Press, 1998). As a recipient of a 1993 Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry she lived in Oaxaca and Mexico City for several years while working on literary art objects and exhibiting them in the three-person show "Inside Out." Her writing has appeared in Arshile, Big Allis, Black Bread, New American Writing and The World.
Working Notes
What’s crucial frequently comes as a surprise. I comb back and forth across the language fields hoping the tines will catch on something to show that which is difficult to say or be said. I hunt and gather; I scavenge through the givens and try to navigate the variables and the unknowns. Accumulating details the work ahead. I accumulate the details. Beckett said, "the task of the artist in our time is to accommodate the mess." Sometimes this means mediation or invention. Sometimes an other vocabulary dictates itself into being. I’m hunting down the specifics of an animate and knowable address, torquing the discourse with language through language. There’s a there there.
Smoke
the physical which is not logical
scrap that and start again
the physical which has and is
capacity, human body & its ways
in the art of assembling, dance and frame
left as is or was, capacity, and gathering
strength or accumulating grace
met by left as is or was
someone depends on that
this detour that thinks this detour is thinking
must begin again, take a stand, brave
determination and failure
to balance a coordinate
relax the drones
intervention reversing the ceiling which had
had, pale color respirating
after edges stack of buildings
had come, were going
it was the best of times the worst of times
fawn disorder young private issues quelled
one single dwelling
dog for its dog
January’s curious plan museum
Radio at Night
eventually future retains my other
subject to imagination the story I do
now at night, whispering fan
and the green radio light
what’s purple is a golden crescent
in a black sky suspended between
the bridges where I carry forward
to write alive the lines or be still
later white windmills of sleep
power the leaves of dreaming
a tree & future retains my other
radiant light where it sings