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Martin Harrison

An Introduction to Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Work

You can read some poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson and a dozen critical articles on her work in Jacket 20.

This piece was first published in ed. Denise Riley, Poets on Writing: Britain 1970–1991, London, Macmillan, 1992.
It is 3,100 words or about 4 printed pages long.

In 1979 ABC Radio producer Jan Garrett suggested he interview me on the topic of contemporary poetry and contemporary criticism about poetry — and in particular about Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s book, Poetic Artifice. I had been talking to Jan about the book. Instead of commissioning a talk or a mini-feature, Jan would often prefer to work in interview mode with writers — and he would commission a set of working notes as the basis of a recorded conversation.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, photo courtesy Jonathan Culler

Veronica and I had been friends and had regularly exchanged poems. In fact I first met Veronica at the first poetry reading I ever gave — she was the up-and-coming new poet, the ‘star’ was Clive James and I was the teenage ‘new voice’. We stayed in touch from then on: her support for the poetry I was writing at the time was incredibly valuable. And I think, too, I was one of the few people to whom she felt she could entrust early drafts of her own work. The ABC interview went to air as part of Australia’s weekly literary radio program Books and Writing. It’s delightful that a piece originally broadcast on a radio program whose origins John Tranter had a lot to do with now appears, all these years later, on a site which similarly John Tranter has initiated.

What follows are the working notes I sent Jan Garrett in late October or early November 1979 and which he used as material for questions. From memory we did the interview live in a coast to coast broadcast a few weeks later. I still think that Poetic Artifice is one of the very finest books I know about composition and about how poetic meaning comes about in new poetry.

— Martin Harrison, Sydney, September 2005

The current situation of modern British poetry had already come into existence by the early 70s when Veronica Forrest-Thomson was writing her book Poetic Artifice. In part, there was and still is a sense of frustration at the lack mainly of critical receptivity to innovation in poetry — the ‘public’, I’d better add, have never had a chance. Equally, there was and still is a retrospective sense of a gaping hole, an inexplicable missing of heart-beat after the modernist and innovative directions which occurred in Britain earlier in the century. The past ten years have, I think, begun to show that this latter impression was significantly wrong in detail, even if all too understandable as an emotive reaction. The hole has, as it were, been filled — the heart was, it seems, beating even if the head chose to ignore it. For there has been a slow increase of recognition (largely among contemporary poets) for the works of Bunting, Prince, Silkin and Graham, a different and more literate appreciation of Plath and McDiarmid and some slight renewal of interest in hitherto lost poets such as Loy, Sykes-Davies and Madge. But the predominance of an essentially upper-middle-class, realist, old-fashioned orthodoxy has yet to be significantly challenged....

It was to this appalling alliance made by academic literary teaching, by reviewing and publishing coteries and by inexpert poets no doubt sincerely attempting to write well and reach their putative audience that Veronica Forrest-Thomson addressed the urgency and theoretical difficulties of Poetic Artifice.

I am anxious to set her book in this admittedly simplified local context because I find it one of the best books about modern poetry that I know. Its energy and theoretical brilliance grow from a genuinely passionate, often satirical commitment to the immediate and local constituents of a contemporary poetry. It is a central book, not a fashionable book, not a book simply attempting to promulgate the latest style — but a theoretical reading of poetry as a whole in which she starts to reveal the underlying features which allow for poetry’s continuity from old to new, from traditional to modern. Yet neither is it a waywardly generalising book, for she locates her thought in a specific polemic about the modern in contemporary Britain and in a precise analysis of the nature of the reading and understanding of poetry. From a critical point of view, it is in the latter area — that of reading — that she achieves her most lasting insight: she focuses on the actual procedures of reading poems as a way of countering the bad habits of interpretive criticism which so often ‘explains away’ the textural richness of poetry and misses its delight. From a literary point of view, she begins the patient task of rebuilding a meaningful tradition of poetry which can embrace the poetry of Shakespeare and of a Victorian poet such as Swinburne, English-language modernists such as Pound and Eliot, foreign modernists such as Jacob and Tzara and contemporary innovators such as J.H. Prynne. In fact, she begins to outline a meaningful continuity between pre-modernist and modernist poetry and the British equivalent of our contemporary situation here. Lastly (and best), from the practical standpoint of writing poetry, I believe she does indeed show something of the true nature of creative innovation in literature.

Poetic Artifice is not an easy book. With so little other discourse compatible with, and capable of, her concerns — especially in the torpid British context — how could it be? To write her book, she had to confront a literary culture built upon a paradoxically open, paradoxically garrulous censorship which makes all manners of claim about its seriousness and happily expends any amount of cultivated ease in praising the unpraisable. In such an atmosphere, has it not always been difficult to raise matters which have feeling and substance?

The way to do this is not — as she clearly saw — to offer alternative styles, alternative objects of attention, alternative poets. Instead she writes a theoretical account of the reading of poems (both Shakespearian sonnets and modern verse) which sidesteps the issue of what is the new ‘new’ poetry and tells us something of our perennial encounter with verse. Those who all too insistently claim that their distant and uninquisitive version (tantamount to rejection) of modern writing reflects traditional commonsense have revealed to them the quicksand they tread on. But to do this is, at first sight, a complex procedure, for she speaks a critical language which exactly counterpoises the constituents of our reading of poems against the formal means that poems use. What she is against is that interpretive reading which begins by reducing poems to a ‘content’, an underlying ‘theme’, whose very formulation makes unintelligible and irrelevant much of the choice of language, diction and form which the poet in fact made use of. At the simplest level poetry is not prose, does not deliver messages as prose, and is not read as prose. At a more complex level she provides her critical terms of ‘naturalisation’ and ‘expansion’ as ways of exploring the customary naming of the world in ordinary language and its more specific naming in poems. Bad ‘naturalisation’ is the verification of a poem’s truth by unmediated reference to the real world. And in this impoverished reading, all poems are to be thought out as comments, anecdotes, descriptions of a world whose experiential language has already come into being fully-formed, self-sufficient and accurate. Much poetry — trivial, dull poetry — is written in this fashion. Its means of access, the easy glide from ordinary rational discourse to the poem’s polished commentary upon it, automatically guarantee that we come to think and feel nothing new through the experience of reading it. What such verse lacks is the formal, artificial complexities which allow for a mediation — an ‘expansion’ — between the language and speech-figures the poem employs and our already given understanding of the world. ‘Do not forget’, she quotes early on, ‘that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the language game of giving information.’ This statement of Wittgenstein’s turns out to be as harmless as an unidentified suitcase left in a government office foyer.

For through it she explodes a relatively recently-formed oppression, i.e. that the major reason for either writing or valuing a poem is to do with how it derives from its theme. Her view is not antithematic, is not against meaning in poetry. Far from it. But her careful reading of the non-semantic and conventional features of poetic composition leads us to see the way poems are neither written nor read for their literal ability to be ‘about’ things in the ordinary world; and she can perceptively locate this analysis around the works of poets as superficially diverse as T.S. Eliot and Tristan Tzara. All the time, she derives the meaningfulness of poetry from our ability to trace a poet’s reorganisation of a poem’s form, its complexity of language, its control of image and reference. Her reading is (in contradistinction to those non-poets and anti-critics who would make poetry a literal matter of either ethical or descriptive commentary) empirical and pragmatic: most importantly, it is literary, it is concerned with the continuities of art first and foremost. ‘When language is re-imagined,’ she writes, ‘the world expands with it.’ And again: ‘creative innovation must take place by disrupting the social ideas of “poetry” and recapturing the old levels of Artifice.’ Her exploration of the discontinuity between poetic language and ordinary language emphasises equally both ‘innovation’ and the ‘old levels’.

One might be tempted to accuse her of slyness, of an underhand recuperation of the new, were it not that it is the inherent and shared radicalism of both old and new which she firmly (and with great intellectual delight and wit) manages to grasp. Those who have conceived tradition ‘traditionally’ have at that moment fallen from it, unable to renovate poetry through its form, its conventional levels, its rhythm, its sound-pattern, its imagery: hence her abundantly well-argued judgements about the ‘abjectness’ of Larkin, the technical incompetence of much of Hughes. Hence, too, her brilliant reading of Pound’s imagism and Eliot’s rhyming poems. Through this reading, she brings meaningful criteria to bear on the so-called obscurity of modern poetry and provides a genuinely capable theory of the modern use of image. Her discussion seems to me (especially in the latter respect) an unmatched clarification, a true burning of dead timber to permit new growth.

Forrest-Thomson herself, in one of the book’s many moments of critical humour, parodies what is likely to be the most common misreading of her thought: ‘It may’, she says, ‘have seemed so far that the slogan of this book was “Words of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your meanings!’” I don’t intend to unravel the extremely complex weaving of arguments around her presentation of poetic language and technique, save to emphasise her contention that technique is, as she puts it, creative and imaginative in a more than fictional way: technique ‘brings out knowledge itself into a thematic synthesis ...’. Rather, there is something else, less openly stated, which is of equal importance.

The central categories of genre with which she thinks of modern writing are those of parody and pastoral — parody for its ability both to deny and to assert the literary past, pastoral for its status as one of the most mediated, most aesthetically ‘distant’ yet subtly referential forms of poetry. Certainly, I think she hits here a nerve of modern sensibility and delimits its process, its perceptual workings in modern poetic language, brilliantly. Yet her thought here also suffers from a tendency common among both writers about, and writers of, modern poetry. There is such relief in achieving an accurate genre description, that the consequent narrowing of vision is rarely noticed. There seems to be everywhere now a tendency to limit the modern to a constricted definition and see only this or that genre as definitive — and, accordingly, only this or that poet as its major exponent. Can we follow her, then, in her rather exclusive concentration upon the work of the Dadaists and on an American poet like John Ashbery?

I think there is a more fundamental thought supporting the book, which I find explicit in two connections which she makes: between the non-semantic features of verse and its emotionality, between the artificial levels of verse and the old Renaissance rhetorical devices. I trace these two configurations because of the practical emphasis of her book, its manifest concern with what poets actually do now and can do. The book’s intellectual and theorising cast should not mislead anyone into thinking that she sees these characteristics as central to actual poetic performance. Quite the opposite: her book’s immediate address is to search for ways of re-valorising the nature of sound in poetry, the nature of verbal delight and of emotive effect. At a simple level, it is because poets overlook these and similar conventional constituents of verse that they cannot (in her sense) think significantly and speak to us. The modern poem she most frankly admires is Four Quartets; and she trips up any expectation that she will launch into fashionable encomia of the syntactic revolution of her preferred modern poet, John Ashbery, by first writing about that most unfashionable of writers, Swinburne.

I could put the matter more paradigmatically than she chooses to, for she offers two opposing figures of the predicament of modern verse. The one she prefers is the verse which detaches itself from literal meaning to work through its own formal and linguistic means towards the discovery of new feeling and thought. The web she sees many contemporary poets caught in is the second: namely, that the pressure of moribund, insufficient form pushes the writer individually towards personal extremism of stance, emotional Angst and even (as with Berryman and Plath) suicide. For these poets, as she ironically comments, the development of form may indeed be a matter of life and death. Forrest-Thomson’s is a deeply felt notion of art, one which registers the price we have paid for shearing away from verse both its rhetorical constituents (in the true sense of Verbal/ grammatical’ constituents) and its mythically inspirational source. A ‘return’ is neither her formulation nor programme. Yet she chooses to open her book with a poet whose much misunderstood work is deeply rooted in rhetorical and parodic convention (Shakespeare) and closes it with a poet whose equally misunderstood work is regularly prone to naive, personal thematisation (Sylvia Plath). In fact, the poetry she seems to look toward hardly exists in English these days and she herself, who died in 1975, had only begun to write the poetry she believed in. Such verse is probably best identified, I would suggest, in the writings of those modernists who seem to have had least influence on the English-language tradition — writers like Neruda, Vallejo, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam. Poetry (we know) is neither a matter of making comments and ethical pronouncements literally, nor is the revolution one of words. From a reading of Poetic Artifice one does, in short, focus on the most chronic need of contemporary poets — the need to find expressive (i.e. not personal) form which combines both emotional tact and bravura. And one looks again at the ways in which poetry becomes significantly meaningful.

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