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.
Elizabeth Goldring Piene was born in Forest City, Iowa. She grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and during her father’s sabbatical years she lived with her family in Rome and Mexico City. She received her B.A. cum laude from Smith College and a master’s degree from Harvard University. Although visually challenged, she continues to work as a poet, writer, media artist and inventor. At the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975-2013), she held positions as research fellow, senior fellow, acting co-director, exhibits and projects director, and lecturer. While at MIT, she invented seeing machines and created a visual language, retina prints and video documentation addressing conditions of blindness. Goldring has authored five books of poetry and Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art, Science, Technology at MIT, a history of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, as well as several articles and exhibition catalogues. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and journals including Asylum, Prairie Schooner and New Letters. She has given readings and performances in the United States and Europe. Corona Diaries 1 and 2 were performed with flutist David Whiteside for Silo Solos at the online Frankfurt Book Fairs during the pandemic (2020, 2021). In 2004, she was awarded the Smith College Medal and in 2006, she received “Best and Brightest” Awards from MIT Technology Review, Esquire, and Scientific American. She lives and works in Groton, Massachusetts. She also maintains a residence in Boston. Goldring was married to the artist Otto Piene, who died in Berlin in 2014.
“’Today I picked daffodils,’ begins one of the haunting and beautiful poems in Still Blue, ‘today I swam the shadows,’ encapsulating how the speaker in these pieces must navigate an ephemeral world that seems to perpetually slip between exactness and abstraction. In wrought lines and precise images, through associative leaps and haiku-like compression, this expansive collection interrogates the relationship between loss and solace, the mundane and the transcendent, the ineffable and the indelible, and the blurring of boundaries between “the shadows of things mended and things destroyed.”
—Matt Donovan, author of The Dug-Up Gun Museum
Distributed for BkMk Press.
