Veronica Forrest-Thomson,
Poetic Artifice.
In the preface, Forrest-Thomson lays out her intentions for the book:
(x) [Responding to Wittgenstein's assertion that poems, though composed in the language of information, 'aren't used in the language-game of giving information'] It is easy to treat poetry as if it were engaged in the language-game of giving information and thus to assume that what is important about a poem is what it tells us about the external world. The meaning of the poem is extended into the world; this extended meaning is assumed to be dominant, and if formal features are to become noteworthy components of a poem they must be assimilated into this extended meaning. Such an approach falsifies are experience of poems...
(xi) all components of poems are taken up and smothered by a critical reading anxious to convert all verbal organization into extended meaning-- to transform pattern into theme.
F-T calls this "Naturalization": an attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language & organization by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement about the non-verbal external world, by making the Artifice appear natural.
this can't be completely avoided-- useful to understand both poetry as an institution and poems as significant utterances. BUT 'intelligibility at the cost of blindness'... good naturalization dwells in the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as phonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organization rather than set them aside in an attempt to produce a statement about the world.'
*I think I'm starting to understand the root of my dissatisfaction with the lyric poetry I was in the habit of writing: besides not acknowledging the overweening ego of the writing, [and this isn't entirely another separate thought] I was taking the devices of its artifice for granted. Meaning was paramount, with puns or sound play present but all to one end-- little consideration of the sonic landscape or the visual aspects of the poem. Aaron was talking about some poets he met in TX at his school, and described them "as though they were trying to figure out the mystery that is poetry, once and for all" which sounds familiar. Not in the "let's play and experiment" way, but in the "this is how it's done" way. Yuck.
"Rational Artifice"
F-T begins by examining some Wallace Stevens poems-- poems that "rely on and refer to experience rather than... question and explore it"; poems that ask us to perform naturalization, where they are "only obscure enough to hint at profundity."
Whereas William Empson's poem baits the reader with "normal conversation diction" but inverts itself & the reader's expectations-- the naturalization that has been happening, unchallenged, is suddenly stopped in its tracks:
I find it normal, passing these great frontiers,
That you scan the crowds in rags eagerly each side
With awe; that the nations seem real; that their ambitions
Having achieved such variety within one type, seem sane;
I find it normal;
So too to extract false comfort from that word.
It's the repetitions of "I find it normal" that cause us to go back and reexamine the relationship set up in the beginning 4 lines, the image that we partook of willingly and uncritically-- because the poem has larger concerns than just rendering a scene.
"Are the judgements of the first three lines 'normal' because of their appropriateness to the experience and the objects of experience, or are they normal because they are explicable, though at odds with the facts objectively viewed?... Is it normal and false to derive comfort from judgements that something is normal, or is it normal to extract false comfort-- comfort that one knows is false?"
In another Empson poem, "High Dive," three types of specific language are employed-- this demonstrates rational obscurity-- to describe the poet and reader's position with language:
(61) Like God, Diver, and Scientist, the poet and reader stand above language, to whose potential function they give form; stand above a text which they inform." (this "depends on our knowledge that we are reading a poem-- our ability to undertake the kind of operations necessary to construct meaning in poetry.")
Extending this metaphor of the diver/poet, who must be outside/tribal outcast in order to re-create the conceptual schemes of a society which offers him no hope of absolute knowledge or value in human activity, there are 2 options: either don't dive/walk down the already-constructed stairs or accept the task of creating new society, personality, and order as he dives.
(65) If he is a poet this means that he must create a new kind of technique which will make critical reading difficult and his style obscure, but the style will be rationally obscure so that the critic can, by applying his rules, eventually interpret the poem."
So if I'm understanding this chapter correctly, it's important to resist shallow poetry-- F-T gives an example of a Larkin poem that first renders a scene then concludes with a semi-epiphanic ending-- but this only tells us something we already know, in a pretty straightforward way. It encourages us to naturalize its images but doesn't move beyond that relationship of relating. So, if I understand, there's really no point to this as an exercise-- because poetry should be doing something more. It might have a meaning or meanings, but it shouldn't just hand it over direct--it should embody its clues to its undoing or understanding and invite the reader to play along.
