New Edition of Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Poetics of Artifice Reviewed at LRB

This March, Shearsman published a new edition of Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice: A Theory of 20th-Century Poetry, edited by Gareth Farmer.

This book, writes Peter Howarth for the current issue of the London Review of Books, was "one of the first works of criticism to incorporate post-structuralist theory about the fictionality of the written ‘I’, and to weld it onto an account of how poets ought to write. It also announced a change in literary-critical taste, from Ginsberg to Prynne and Ashbery, from loosely confessional free verse to the Language poets. Above all, it was an attack on the ‘confessional’ poetry of uncensored lives and raw emotions: it taught Anglo-American readers to understand, like French chefs and French post-structuralists, that the ‘raw’ is already a subcategory of the cooked." More from this review:

...[U]sing Plath as the clinching example of the poet who dissolves herself into ‘the words on the page’ is a marvellous piece of cheek. It makes the book’s death-of-the-author thesis look like a wink at the reader: the stone Buddha in Plath’s poem is smiling, after all. Artifice, for Forrest-Thomson, is less a way to disappear than to maintain one’s poise, holding life safely apart for a moment and stylising it. Midway through the final chapter, a discussion of Dadaist poetics suddenly turns into a guide for irony-spotters:

Some instances. One: in September 1972 an exhibition of The Surrealist Revolution is held, under the auspices of the French government, in the Musée de l’Art Décoratif in Paris. Two: the proprietor of L’Hôtel de France tells me that in order to enter my room I must insert the key upside down and turn it counter-clockwise.

If you can appreciate the unintentional joke, then you are on the side of ‘artificial detachment and aesthetic distance’, and so ‘better fitted to appreciate Artifice as readers of poetry’. Yet living as though one’s life were a film directed by an absurdist director doesn’t mean blithely disregarding pain. ‘There is nothing funny about the lives of Rimbaud or Lautréamont,’ she adds, but ‘how else could we bear them; how else could we risk the same?’

Poetic Artifice teaches readers to engage with the artifice, not the content, of poems by Ashbery or Prynne by showing how, in their work, everyday phrases and the sympathies that usually accompany them are reassembled into unsettling combinations that surprise everyone, including the poet. Poems emerge from a process of composition, she argues, in which world and words constantly mediate each other, and ‘the poet … does not himself know what world he is in until the mediation has taken place (the poem is written).’ Her poem ‘Zettel’ closes with a thought from Wittgenstein:

One’s hand writes it does not write because one wills but one wills what it writes.

But her insistence on wresting poetry away from non-poetic life also produces some of her more flamboyant misreadings...

And on and on at LRB.