List members might like to look at this recent posting to Jacket # 14, at
http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket14/stefans-forrest-thomson.html
Here's the opening page --
Brian Kim Stefans: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and High Artifice
One of the misfortunes of the lack of attention being paid to English
poetry of this century is the obscurity of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a poet
who died in 1975 at the age of 27. Forrest-Thomson is the author of Poetic
Artifice, a book that outlined a theory of poetry from a critical
perspective — i.e. a tool to determine the success or failure of a poem
rather then merely a vocabulary for describing the phenomenon of a "poem" —
but one which, rather than confirming or resisting a "tradition,"
concentrated on those elements of the poem that resist quick interpretation
or, in her terms, "naturalization" by the reader or critic.
Though Poetic Artifice adheres to the conventions of a text that can be
re-used by members of the academy, there are moments when Forrest-Thomson's
skill as an experimental poet, along with her occasional wit, lift the
writing and theory itself beyond the level of disinterested speculation,
engaging the reader — should the reader be a poet — in what is serious
shop-talk.
Written in the early seventies, at a time when the avant-garde poetry scene
in England was still on the defensive against the Movement writers and was,
it appears, lacking unity, the book has an wide range of characters;
Shakespeare, Swinburne, Pound, Eliot, William Empson, Sylvia Plath, Ted
Hughes, Philip Larkin, John Ashbery, J.H. Prynne, and the critic/poet
Stephen Bann (representing the "concrete" poets), among others, come under
consideration. This is a mix that one would not find in any American book
of theory by a poet, probably because the United States has not had a
mainstream poet who has dominated the scene in the way that Ted Hughes or
Philip Larkin, at that time, did. When there was one, like Robert Lowell,
experimental poets either ignored him or ridiculed the premises of his or
her work with little specific analysis of their poems, as if they weren't
poems at all.
Forrest-Thomson doesn't demonstrate this partisanship which often turns
thoughtful considerations of poetry into declarations of independence;
consequently, her theory is given cogency by a very apparent love of
"traditional" poetry and her own positioning of herself as critic and
latecomer, despite the urgencies she felt as a poet.
______________________________
John Tranter, Editor, Jacket magazine
from John Tranter
Editor, Jacket magazine: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/
- new John Tranter homepage - poetry, reviews, articles, at:
http://www.austlit.com/johntranter/
- early writing at:
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/
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