A major influence on my early turn to form and my recent return to form, expressed in my volume The Meaning of Form, (see here) and which is revisited in detail in its current Chapter Two, is an old one: Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice (1978). It is a sheer delight to see that Gareth Farmer’s new edition of the book is out from Shearsman. (See here.)I first encountered the book in 1979 at a crucial time in my PhD studies. I regret most deeply that at an administrative stage it was decided that her methodology was ‘not strong enough’ to be used in it, by some committee or other. (They meant ‘unknown’ and wanted me to read Bloom instead.) The book had been reviewed by my tutor Helen McNeil in The New Statesman. However the lesson remained and it is indeed a book that changed my (poetry) life. (And it changed others: like Alison Mark, to whom I introduced the work).
Forrest-Thomson valorises what she calls the non-meaningful
devices of poetry; meaning can be read only as torqued by artifice in defiance
of a method of reading called ‘naturalisation,’ which she defines as the
‘attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic organisation
by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the
non-verbal external world, by making the Artifice appear natural’. Our best
reading occurs when this process is resisted almost successfully and artifice shines most artificially.
This axiomatic sense that an unexamined form is not worth
reading naturally opposes instrumental readings that temper textuality with social naturalisations. Writing about
what is sometimes called ‘linguistically innovative’ poetry that works by
defamiliarisation, undecidability or through structural and linguistic
complexity, means that I take form to be unavoidable as an issue, though it
seems not to be in other areas of literary (or cultural) studies, though even
to say so should seem odd. My critical and poetic commitment to the discourse
of writerly poetics also necessarily focuses upon form.
Even
the most casual reader of her book will glean the central notion that Bad Naturalisation
(to ‘set aside’ ‘the non-meaningful devices’ of poetry ‘in an unseemly rush
from word to world’) is a betrayal of poetry’s specificity, since it involves
the ‘attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic
organisation by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement
about the non-verbal world, by making the Artifice appear natural’. This is the process many exegetes of a
poem seem content with, to talk away the poetry in prose paraphrase (and many
of us are ‘guilty’ of this) while we pay lip service to the autonomy of the
literary work. What Forrest-Thomson demands is a system of delaying this (inevitable)
process in order that a poem’s formal features may be fully registered as an
integral part of the poem’s total effect, not as a mere vehicle of, or
supplement to, meaning.
A process of ‘external expansion’ of the words of the text
into the world and then an ‘external limitation’ back into it characterises bad
naturalisation. Meaning is sought beyond the poem (perhaps in social and
literary contexts) and dragged back into it. ‘The attempt to relate the poem to
the external world limits our attention to those formal features which can be
made to contribute to this extended meaning.’ A bad reading, for
example, will relate a free verse poem to the fractured state of society it is
assumed to ‘reflect’, while other aspects, say its harmonious alliteration,
which contradict the poem’s supposed message, are conveniently ignored. On the
other hand, ‘Good naturalisation dwells on the non-meaningful levels of poetic
language, such as phonetic and prosodic patterning and spatial organisation,
and tries to state their relationship to other levels of organisation rather
than set them aside in an attempt to produce a statement about the world.’
More precisely good naturalisation ‘dwells at length’ (delaying the forces of naturalisation for as long as
possible) ‘on the play of formal features and structure of relations internal
to a poem’: for example, on ‘all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal
and logical devices which make poetry different from prose’.
Naturalisation – both good and bad – constructs
intelligibility by reaching out to the non-verbal, and is inevitable, we must
remember, in any reading.
Her work is fundamental to my The Poetry of Saying. (See here.) In The Meaning of Form
and in ‘Linguistically Wounded: The Poetical Scholarship of Veronica
Forrest-Thomson’ in ed. Turley, Richard Margraf, The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions, Essays and Studies
2011. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, for the English Association, I take issue with some of her
methodology (I don’t believe poetic artifice is non-meaningful, and it’s
possible neither did VFT (as the secret society that has read this work
hitherto often calls her) by the end of her short – far too short – life. But
this is not the place to extend those critiques.
For a creative response to her work as a theorist
and poet, read here.
For those who can buy The
Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or order it for
libraries, here are the places
Here is some book data:
eBook ISBN
978-3-319-34045-6
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-34044-9
