Skip to main content

Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Why is Poetic Artifice So Hard To Find?

No other single poet-critic is arguably as important for post-war British poetry (not even Empson, Alvarez , Hamilton or Heaney) as Veronica Forrest-Thomson, one of the eccentric geniuses that the UK seems to produce every so often. To simplify, she took Wittgenstein's ideas about language and the world, and applied them to the language games within poetic practice. Her influence on the alternative poetic traditions of the British isles is immense - indeed, she also inspired Charles Bernstein and the "Language poets" of America (her Introduction to Poetic Artifice lays the groundwork for his Artifice of Absorption, when she writes, "all norms of other kinds of discourse are changed when absorbed by a poem"). Alison Mark's Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry is a good place to start, for those who want to read more.

So, here's the question, how come it is so hard to locate copies of her brilliant, significant masterwork, Poetic Artifice? Does anyone know of a reprint currently available, from Shearsman, Salt or Carcanet, say? The original goes for over £100 on the Internet. It seems strange, even almost scandalous, that such an important critical work, whose thoughts and implications underpin so much of the Cambridge school of poetry, and beyond, should lie out of the reach of many of those who might want to easily own a copy. Yes, it is in (some) libraries, but hardly in great numbers. I look forward to someone clearing this up.

Comments

Lucretius said…
To anyone who is listening, read this book. Her early death deprived her of the chance to make the appropriate noise about herself and her ideas.

She's like all of Andrew Duncan reduced and without the exotic surround sound.

DCAndersson
Tara Deal said…
I just saw this book listed on Amazon.com for $98 (which is £50) from a used bookseller. Shipping is usually only a couple of dollars from the States. Fifty pounds is still a lot, but if you're desperate....
Carrie Etter said…
I assume it's included in the new Collected Poems just published by Shearsman.
EYEWEAR said…
Poetic Artifice itself is a prose work of some length. I'd be surprised if it was included with her poems. But that'd be a very useful omnibus collection, certainly.
Anonymous said…
A picture of her here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/20/index.shtml

How/why did she die?
Anonymous said…
I feel a curiosity regarding the death of Veronica Forrest-Thomson that is more than ghoulish. Everyone agrees that she died young, beautiful and brilliant at 27, but the death seems like a symbolic memory pursued through the pages of an unpublished Wittgensteinian novel by a metaphoric sleuth. Apparently, she passed away just after the Cambridge Poetry Festival - a reaction, perhaps, to what she heard there, or a plaguing nostalgia for what she hadn't, or couldn't? This synecdochic mortality to the sound of verse is exceptionally strange, perhaps uncanny. Forrest-Thomson is hugely underrated as a maker herself - she was an early language poet who was overlooked at the time because she hadn't fashioned what the literary establishment thought of as a style. Her verse is indeed peculiarly mannered, but contains lines of genius:

A drastic diminution
of pronouns in the early weeks of marriage
(lack of third persons, not to mention more banal examples)
leads to this retracted meadow...

which establishes language as the basis of a sense of relationship, or rather the acute lack of it strangely produced by intimate proximity. I would love to know what happened to Forrest-Thomson. How did she get so permanently into her retracted meadow?
NJ Pierotti said…
I am a Poet and an independent publisher who happens to own a copy of "Poetic Artifice".
If I could get around the copyright issue, I would be happy to republish it, in a facsimile or even a new format.

If anyone would like to help me surmount the copyright issue or can offer any advice on proceeding, I would be happy to republish the book. Contact me at eurydice@cruzio.com.
Anonymous said…
In response to 'anonymous' writing on the 6th April, I knew Veronica Forrest-Thomson very slightly at Cambridge. In the course of a brief conversation I learned that she had won the Leeds Poetry Prize, and was shown one of her poems, beginning: "In the stream...", footnote: "of consciousness". I don't remember the year, other than that it would have been between 1968 and 1971. She said that she was married, and also provided a personal detail, indicating a radical personal choice, which I hesitate to specifiy here, despite the fact that she had no compunction about communicating it in the presence of several other people. For that reason alone, when I heard almost a decade later, of her death some years before, I assumed it to have been suicide.

My interest (and curiosity) was recently reawakened by the discovery of Alison Mark's study in a collection of books belonging to my Oxford-undergraduate son. there seems to be an understandable reticence amongst her admirers to discuss the circumstances of her death.
Anonymous said…
I have copy of it. I sell books but I have it for my own collection. I worked in book shop in Auckland NZ and it was on the shelf there for NZ$5 but I got it for zero as I used to pay myself with books...

I see it is going for about NZ$160 or so. The trouble is that she is deceased and there are not many copies. So collectors will want it.

But you can always contact a book dealer directly and negotiate. Also I, for example, can do a "search" (it will go continuously on my abebooks account even for several years) which can eventually find someone who might have it quite cheap. You have to wait for that. There are companies how search for books for you but as I say look around especially on ADD ALL.

But it could turn up for sale thrown out of a library or in an "op" shop.

She committed suicide but I don't know why. Jacket magazine has some things about her (Google Jacket and poetry etc)

She was clearly a genius.

Richard
Richard said…
Here is my name for contact etc
Tom Davis said…
I was a colleague of Veronica's in the English Department at Birmingham University at the time of her death. She died of asphyxiation. She was drinking alcohol, and incautiously took a pill which stuck in her throat and choked her. There was no suggestion of suicide at the time, and no easy way to effect ones own death by such a method.

See http://www.cambridgeliteraryreview.org/wp-content/uploads/BerengartenCLR1.pdf p.157

Tragic.

Tom Davis
Angus Sinclair said…
If you feel Poetic Artifice is an important work and young poets should be reading it then scan a copy as a PDF and shove it online. Why persuade publishers to make money off dead poets?

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".