Abstract

In this essay I consider the importance of the poetic and theoretical work of the poet, academic, and literary theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–75), a substantial and talented poet and poststructuralist theorist whose work, until recently, was relatively unknown. Forrest-Thomson has been influential and significant for both British and American contemporary poets, including the so-called Language Poets, notably the poet and theorist Charles Bernstein, who has taken up her poetics in his own. Her early response to structuralist and poststructuralist thought establishes Forrest-Thomson as an important figure in both the development of critical theory and its articulation in poetic language. Forrest-Thomson’s aesthetic was founded on her engagement first with William Empson, then with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, succeeded by the work of the Tel quel group in Paris, in particular the semiotic theories of Julia Kristeva and the re-reading of Freud through linguistics by Jacques Lacan. The location of Forrest-Thomson’s project, at the confluence of two major strands of poetry—the canonical and the “avant-garde”—gives her work a unique position in the development of poetry and criticism in English. I consider here the fragmentation of the subject; the reader’s role in the production of meaning; naturalization; sense and reference; and radical innovation or the “impossibility” of an avant-garde. I explore such textual features as innovation and experiment; continuity and discontinuity; the use of preformed linguistic texts; the practices of quotation, allusion, imitation; and irony and parody. Semantic intransigence, syntactic disruption, chance, and composition as process are explored to just this side of textual impermeability in an attempt to define or designate the outer limits of poetry and its relationship to the leading edge of language itself.

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