Abstracts of Papers
Kathryn Murphy:
"Ardent obliquity": Reading Veronica Forrest-Thomson
and J.H. Prynne
The British poets Veronica Forrest-Thomson and J.H. Prynne were active in a loose grouping of poets who began publishing in the 1960s, called "the Cambridge school" or, in the title of one anthology, "the conductors of chaos"1. These poets worked outside mainstream British poetry and claimed elective affinities with the American tradition, in particular William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry and Charles Olson. The poetry of these writers is notoriously difficult of access, both in terms of its obscure publication and of its departure from the traditional conventions, discourses, subject matter and diction of poetry. This "difficulty", in both senses, is strategic. Resistance to mainstream publication can be understood as resistance to the commodification of poetry, while both Prynne and Forrest-Thomson, in their critical writings, have argued for ways of reading poetry which refuse paraphrase. Forrest-Thomson, in her book-length critical work Poetic Artifice2, argued strenuously against what she termed "bad naturalisation": the tendency, when reading a poem, to reduce it to information about the non-verbal world, whether descriptive or biographical. While Prynne and Forrest-Thomson use similar arguments in their prose and sometimes similar techniques in their poetry to avoid the possibility of reductive readings, the effects achieved, and the implications of these for reading poetry in general, are very different. This paper will present close readings of poems by Forrest-Thomson and Prynne to examine what can be said about a poetry which refuses paraphrase, and will examine the implications of such readings in the theoretical context of reader-response criticism.
1 Sinclair, Iain (ed.), Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology, Picador, London: 1996. 19.
2 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, Manchester University Press, Manchester: 1978.
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