E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Sad news.  The major poet Peter Porter has died at the age of 81, in London.  Just heard this on the six o'clock BBC news.  The BBC report (a brief obituary notice) noted his "tragic life" - death of his mother at 9, and the suicide of his first wife, which led to his most-acclaimed book, The Cost of Seriousness .  It also noted that, while he has born Australian, he had long ago become one of England's most admired poets (he moved to London in 1951, half a century ago).  It noted his formal similarities to Auden , and his satirical edge.  It also noted his love of music and painting - constant themes in his poems.  Finally, it noted his many awards, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Forward Prize.  I met Peter Porter soon after I moved to London in 2003.  While I cannot claim him as a friend, he was always an exceptionally courteous and lively interlocutor, at numerous literary events and parties, where my wife and I woul...

Alistair Noon reviews Collected Poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson This collection of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s curious, witty, observant, crafted, exploratory poems includes, as your average Collected might do, a section entitled ‘Uncollected Earlier Poems’. But unless you’re a reader able to put a restraining order on all prior biographical knowledge, it’s hard not to read all of these poems as early work: Forrest-Thomson died at the age of 27. The obvious question is what another fifty-odd years of writing might have produced. Though one shouldn’t make too much of this of course: when Hendrix died, at the same age, he had demonstrated that rock can be art. Some people just get it all done faster. Forrest-Thomson’s first book Identi-kit (1967) gives, in places, a sense of having being written by a young person. Late-teen/early-twenty-something cynicism comes through in the imagery of stasis and decay, the themes of banality and theatricality in conversation, and the use of psycho...

There is always need for more talk and writing about Veronica Forrest-Thomson , and this Saturday, there'll be lots of it at the symposium about her at Cambridge. Meanwhile, we need to get Poetic Artifice back into print.

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...