Veronica forrest thomson

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest Thomson was born in Malaya in 1947 to a Scottish family of rubber planters.

We need not to be so blinded, however […]’.⁹ Through her close readings of Plath, and anticipating many of Jacqueline Rose’s criticisms in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Forrest-Thomson also sought to push back against the discourses of ‘confessionalism’, ‘extremism’, and psychic suffering that had negatively shaped interpretations of Plath’s poems even before her suicide in 1963, but which had especially come to circumscribe Plath’s reception during the early 1970s, when Forrest-Thomson was composing Poetic Artifice.¹⁰

Yet the poems of Winter Trees also do not offer themselves as self-evident exemplars of ‘Artifice’, despite the fact that Forrest-Thomson concludes her book with a reading of Plath’s ‘Purdah’ in which she praises the speaker for ‘remain[ing] enigmatical, presenting only the words on the page’.¹¹ On the contrary, ‘Purdah’, in particular, and Winter Trees, as a whole, can be seen to pose difficulties for both Forrest-Thomson’s theory and her poetic practice.

The noun ‘experiment’ can be defined as the ‘action of trying anything, or putting it to proof; a test, a trial’.²² Yet in the transitive sense, to ‘experiment’ is simply ‘to experience; to feel, suffer’.²³ To ‘experiment’ in this second sense is synonymous with the sensuous experience of touch, which is what Judith Butler has identified as the ‘animating condition of sentience’ and ‘actively animating principle of feeling and knowing’.²⁴

Any such relation between ‘feeling and knowing’ is something that Forrest-Thomson actively avoided theorizing in both ‘Irrationality and Artifice’ and Poetic Artifice, and this had implications, also, for her poetry, as Gareth Farmer explains in his recently published study Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poet on the Periphery (2017): “Affective levels and parodic excesses unanticipated or positively resisted in theory emerge during the process of composition.”²⁵ Yet the mutual relation that Butler underscores between cognition and emotionality was, I argue, crucial to Forrest-Thomson’s developing poetics, as particularly evidenced by her poem ‘Pastoral’, which I discuss in the final section of this article.

Yet apostrophic address in ‘Canzon’ is undercut by the foregrounding of ‘love’ with ‘desire’, a move which indicates that this statement is not really about empathetic communion or intimacy. My answer is an emphatic negative, because of the fact that the statement that one is unable to articulate or even experience grief does not necessarily negate grief itself.

Her academic dismissals of the Movement’s kitchen sink poetry may be a partial loyalty to these by-then-neglected poets.

In 1971, she won The Leeds New Poets Award, resulting in the publication of her second book, Language-Games. She even refers to herself in the third person: ‘Whatever the relation of Dada to Swinburne, Lear, Tennyson, and Forrest-Thomson […]’.⁸⁵ She then goes on to analyze the poem on purely formal grounds, arguing that the ‘gentle foal’ is ‘important’ not for his ‘physical being’, but ‘for his entle oal sounds’; these sounds are meaningful, she emphasizes, because they are echoed in the phrase ‘linguistically wounded’, which she describes as ‘crucial’ for both ‘the theme and for the rhythm’ of this poem.⁸⁶ The fact that the foal’s physical being is usurped by the sound of his name is a ‘pretty paradox in view of the poem’s theme’, she suggests, ‘since the poet is saying (thematic synthesis) just that: pre-occupation with linguistic problems prevents contact with the physical word world’.⁸⁷ In her reading of ‘Pastoral’, Forrest-Thomson acknowledges that ‘the foal looks remarkably like a traditional symbol used to give the kind of empirical instance in a discursive argument that we saw in Donne and Eliot’.⁸⁸ However, she argues that something different is happening in the poem, which she explains by invoking the poetic genealogy of Dada, lauding its ‘concrete meaninglessness’ as a ‘fundamental aesthetic experience’.⁸⁹ Such an ‘aesthetic experience’, she argues, is shared by the notions of ‘aesthetic distance’ and ‘content as form’ that are crucial to ‘poetic artifice’.⁹⁰

‘Linguistically Wounded’

Yet ‘Pastoral’ cannot fully be explained by either lineage: neither by the amped-up meaninglessness of Dada, nor by the more traditional metaphysical conceits of Donne and, by extension, Eliot.

The beauty of the theory (which is only lightly sketched here) is that it allows one to cross the lines separating various "poetics" — these codes of literary identity that are more often a system of dislikes — and cross into that central element all poetry shares, the physis of its Artifice.
    While there are, in general, some flawed arguments in Poetic Artifice, it is remarkably flexible, especially in its anticipation of the sort of bad Naturalization that "postmodernism" itself has created, in which the marginal, the excessive, the fractured and the irrational have all found their way toward the clarity of general understanding, some of it actually as easily acquired as the "confessional" rubrics that the experimental branch of poets were once poised to attack (the "Ellipticist" writers, who are often seen as taking once "avant-garde" styles and utilizing them in rather comfortable verse are, perhaps, the result of such a lack of complex reading/writing practices in contemporary poetry).
    In the book, Forrest-Thomson uses one of her own poems as examples of Artifice, and even reconstructs a newspaper article, using such common tactics of Artifice as unusual capitalization (in a "Futurist" manner), jarring line breaks and random quotation marks, in the process of an argument.

Experience is an active verb. One might even go a step further and advocate for an unacknowledged register of feeling in Forrest-Thomson’s late poetry that not only contests the authority of her male modernist models, but also anticipates contemporary critical discourses in experimental poetics, including the work of Riley and other practitioners and theorists.⁹¹

To begin with, we might identify a related, albeit more fully investigated, register of feeling in the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s 2016 collection 3 Summers, which grapples with the same tension between linguistic materialism and emotionality that Forrest-Thomson explores in ‘Pastoral’ and Plath confronts in ‘Words’:

When I learned grief, its arms changed into the forelegs of an animal and bark climbed upwards to sheath its hips I also longed to be under that bark, I longed for my own hoofs.

This portion of the poem is reproduced in Poetic Artifice:

Jade— Stone of the side, The antagonized Side of green Adam, I Smile, cross-legged, Enigmatical, Shifting my clarities […] A concatenation of rainbows. Her reliance on Eliot is particularly evidenced by her juxtaposed reading of The Waste Land with David Gascoyne’s ‘The Rites of Hysteria’.

Keston Sutherland, for instance, considers her poems as ‘wonderful failures to prescriptively reduplicate her theory and to demonstrate its validity’.

In constructing the theory of Poetic Artifice, she quotes her husband’s affirmation that a poem does not evoke ‘an external context but forces us to construct a fictional situation’; she states-

‘All artifice requires is that unmeaningful levels be taken into account, and that meaning be used as a technical device which makes it impossible as well as wrong for critics to stand poems in the external world.’

The book would only be published posthumously in 1978, for after a heavy night’s drinking, on the eve of an important reading VFT was due to make on the Southbank in London, she seems to have inadvertently asphyxiated herself.

Behind her she left an outline with a further few draft chapters of a second critique- Obstinate Isles (a consideration of Ezra Pound and 19th Century poetry) and a third book of poems, published in 1976 as On the Periphery, something VFT rarely allowed herself to be.

Her youthful death left a litany of poets in her wake to draw from and write after her.

Further contributing to the sensation of an acquisitive linguistic impulse or appetite is the fact that Forrest-Thomson’s speaker, in a further perversion of Hamlet’s cutting words to Gertrude (‘A bloody deed—almost as bad, good-mother,/As kill a king and marry with his brother’),⁷⁶ does not merely confess to ‘Killing the King’ and ‘joining […] my brother’, but to killing both ‘my father’ and ‘my mother’.

The photograph of Forrest-Thomson’s annotation to ‘Purdah’ is also reproduced courtesy of Girton College Archive, Cambridge, Papers of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, GCPP Forrest-Thomson. Thomas Butler notes how VFT’s belief that “poetry must be understood at the level of its basic materiality before one can convert it into conceptual meaning” appealed to “the Cambridge poets who were deeply skeptical of new, late-1970s forms of capitalism”, which seems a roundabout reason to find such an idea appealing, especially from one who placed so little emphasis on political considerations.

She added a hyphen to her name- the kind of strategized detail which she’d more readily focus on- reminiscent perhaps of E.A.

Robinson’s comment about his own attempts at poetical revisionism- ‘This morning I removed the hyphen from hell-hound. Indeed, some of Forrest-Thomson’s assertions — that "The ’meaning’ of a poem may have more to do with the ’intention’ to write a poem with reference to particular variants in convention than with the utterance itself," for example — might have been written about Bernstein’s practice, especially in books such as Rough Trades and Dark City, and some of her work in Collected Poems, especially those which use prose-like sentences along with parody, anticipate or influence his techniques.
    The following, from "Le Signe (Cygne)," possibly a sound translation at heart, strikes with its sing-songy allusions to figures of intellectual culture in a way that resembles writing of Bernstein’s pseudo-movement, the "Nude Formalism":

Veronica Forrest-Thomson was the author of three poetry collections and the influential critical work Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry.

While From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars Govern a life.⁸¹

Words are exhausting, this stanza seems to imply; because we cannot master them (they are ‘riderless’), they will likely master us.