6 - Linguisticallywounded: The Poetical Scholar- Ship of Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Summary

A poet, Brian Kim Stefans, spots the dissonance immediately.

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.

Should the reader be a scholar these occasional moments in Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s critical masterpiece Poetic Artifice (1978) might seem out of place or saccharine lapses of taste to disguise the bitter pill of her neologistic and (still) iconoclastic prose. Stefans’ use of ‘re-used’ suggests an artless utilitarian recycling by scholarship of its insights, only relieved by elevations into the angelic ‘shop-talk’ of poetic practitioners. Stefans has a point. There are traces in Poetic Artifice of the unruly discourse of poetics. Poetics is the product of the process of writers’ reflections on writings, and on the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others a speculative tracing of possible ‘permissions to continue’, conjectural and provocative, that writers often leave untidily in their various writings – including, as is the case with Veronica Forrest-Thomson, in their scholarly and creative work. This essay will attempt to unravel scholarship from shop talk, literary theory from poetics, in an attempt to suggest differences between these discourses and to show how Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s own creative writing was furnished by this poetics (even while scholarship suffers stress from the overload of promise, the confusion between parallel discourses). As is quite common with relation to its poetics, creative work exceeds its terms. I will also offer a poem of my own as a further text and commentary on one of Forrest-Thomson’s poems, as well as a homage to her conceptual legacy, which (it is worth recording) changed permanently my own thinking about poetry (as both scholar and poet, and as a writer of poetics) when I was lucky enough to encounter her work early in my development.

Poetic Artifice functions as an implicit poetics of Forrest-Thomson’s poetry, but the relationship between poetry and poetics deserves further consideration and finer discrimination, for the book also claims to offer a ‘theory of twentieth-century poetry’, as it refers to itself in its subtitle.