In Praise of Artifice – an essay by Caroline Clark

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, Manchester University Press, 2016

Olga Sedakova, In Praise of Poetry, Open Letter, 2014

In 2007 I started translating a long essay by Olga Sedakova titled In Praise of Poetry. The final result was published in this Open Letter Press book in 2014 alongside two sequences of poems translated by Stephanie Sandler and Ksenia Golubovich. I learnt a great deal about translating during the time I spent working on this essay, and thankfully could take any questions I had to the author herself (the Italian translation was also a great help for the notes). The essay has also given me a good deal to think about as someone who writes poems herself, and it is in this capacity that I now write this essay-review.

In 2016 I started reading Poetic Artifice by Veronica Forrest-Thomson. This was with some trepidation as I wasn’t able to come to it without preconceptions of its difficulty and theoretical nature. I read it at my desk taking notes, translating it in a way. And it was perhaps as early as the first page that I realised that I’d like to write about it in conjunction with Sedakova’s essay.

What are you working on? I had a friend round and took the chance to try and briefly tell her about these two seemingly very different poets and the essays I was preparing to write about. Well, Poetic Artifice is known as a cult text these days. In it Veronica Forrest-Thomson sets out a theory in which she argues that true poetry must reveal an element she calls Poetic Artifice. The poet must use techniques and language in a way that distinguishes it from everyday language and the reader must learn to read poems without Naturalising them, that is, without imposing interpretations on them to make them more comprehensible in terms of everyday language and reality external to the poem.

Whereas, I continued, Olga Sedakova talks about how she started to compose poems, her childhood, how language first revealed itself to her, her grandmother, the poets that first meant the most to her: Rilke, Dante, Pushkin, places near to Moscow that mean the most to her, and ultimately what poetry is—how it must be ‘permeated with the energy of meaning’. Oh, I like the sound of Olga’s essay, can I read it?

 And I realise I have perhaps done an injustice to both of them, making them sound immediately like representatives of two imagined camps of the poetry world. Veronica Forrest-Thomson by making her out to be the tricky, academic poet, set on wrenching the poem away from common utterances and installing a rigorous form that takes it ever further away from possible comprehension, and Olga Sedakova by perhaps putting her in the company of Russian mystical and personal poets as imagined by the West. Well, I had to start somewhere. And it’s important to start with how they could easily be misrepresented.

Born in 1947, Forrest-Thomson wrote Poetic Artifice in 1972 when she was 24, with the work itself being first published posthumously in 1978. Forrest-Thomson was very much writing from within the atmosphere of Cambridge: post-structuralism, literary and formalist theory. Indeed, what she is setting out is a theory of poetry. She places herself at the centre of the contemporary dialogue about poetry hoping that she will provoke further discussion leading to a ’more adequate theory’.

She goes on to outline the aim of her book: ‘to state and argue the case of Artifice’, in other words to:

state the relationship between poetry and the external world [. . .] to show precisely how poetic form and poetic context affect the sentences they include and the non-verbal world which the sentences imply [. . .]

In doing so she demolishes poets such as Hughes, Larkin and Stevens (the latter is perhaps rather dismantled and then partially restored), all of whom she deems most guilty of inviting bad Naturalisation: when the poem can too readily be translated in terms of the external world. Among the poets she most admires are Donne, Eliot, Prynne and Ashbery.

She deplores the ease with which readers seek to ‘wrench’ messages from poems, and calls poets who facilitate this ‘message-merchants’. Hers is a battlecry against any such poet who

exploits [. . .] the notion that the ‘poetic’ is simply an elaborate way of                                   saying plain things.

She is fighting against the willingness to bring what is already known to the reader. Her main adversary here is William Empson, whom she accuses of misinterpreting poems, which results in bad Naturalisation. To show this there are pages of very close analyses of poems, which I found needed a couple of readings. Indeed she seems to be aware that not everyone will fully take in what she is setting out:

It will be enough if someone gets the right idea of the relation of poetry to other language and, through language to the world and back.

Her tone is didactic, unflinching, electric, fierce and at times humorous. She sets out to prove her points academically and ultimately to show how a poem works.

Sedakova is two years younger, born in 1949. She wrote her essay in 1981,  whereafter it was circulated as an underground samizdat. Her poetry was first published in Paris in 1986 and only in the USSR during Glasnost in 1988. Since then her reputation at home has grown greatly, while abroad she has been translated into many languages and received many awards. She is an expert on Dante and, like Forrest-Thomson, thinks highly of T.S. Eliot’s work (though she had not read his work at the time of writing her essay).

In Praise of Poetry is written in response to a friend’s request to speak about how she first started to compose poems. She proceeds by interweaving biographical happenings with discussion on the nature of the poetic word. Her tone is conversational, with most footnotes later added to the translations of the essay (Italian and now English) to fill in information on the names, events and quotes that she breezes over. There are no numbered sections or chapters. Thoughts develop organically and it is difficult to quote sentences cut off from what comes before and after.

She has spoken elsewhere of how the essay can be seen as beginning in the manner of Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood’ and moving on to an ars poetica. The first half in particular does certainly feel very personal with the inclusion of her earliest childhood poems, the importance of her grandmother, her understanding and fear of death, how it should feel before composing a poem. But far from being a confessional poet, these moments of what might seem to be intimacy all swiftly lead in the first half to illuminate the metaphysical nature of a child’s understanding of the world and her first encounters with language, and in the second half to her understanding of the poetic word.

My attempts to forge connections between poems and events are of course pointless: I doubt whether we can say what is really connected to what; what caused the cloud          swirling wordlessly in my mind to burst—a cloud that is not really connected to any cause. Besides words, besides rhythm, besides meaning, what else is there? What is it that torments us, contracting and expanding, growing near and far like a dry cloud of dust, with a kind of supersonic whistling? Without what does life seem emptier than empty? The only thing I can call it is: “something new.”

She has no theory to prove; and her pronouncements on what poetry is often feel revelatory. Indeed she sends up the kind of language that Formalists use and is against any objective theory of poetry (and let’s remember she is writing her essay 10 years later than Poetic Artifice). What I find fascinating is how, despite their differences, Sedakova and Forrest-Thomson seem to agree on what is at the heart of their understanding about poetry.

For Sedakova, it is this ‘something new’ as quoted above. In this passage Sedakova goes on to illustrate her point with a description of Saint Francis being ordered by the Lord to find a golden ball in his breast: a ball which is not there and cannot be there. He is being asked to perform an impossible task, the miraculous.

This is what I believe is the only new thing. Poetic meaning must be new in this way. It is wrong to think that poetry concentrates, encapsulates or heightens meaning that already exists without it in ‘reality’. [. . .]

What they do not agree on is where this new thing, this meaning comes from: for Sedakova it is ‘bestowed’ as a gift and something the world sorely needs. Of course, for Forrest-Thomson, who is presenting a theory, this must come from the mastery of the poet, something Sedakova would not deny either. In any case, Sedakova is saying, as is Forrest-Thomson, that poetry is not the rephrasing of something that has already been said:

The spoken and heard word does not exist in order to articulate, repeat or, still less, reveal anything—and this includes the one speaking it. This word [. . .] strives to enrobe.

Both talk of the problem of poetry dealing with an already-known world, using the medium of words, which anyone can use, as Forrest-Thomson writes:

Language is common both to the realm of poetry and to the domain of ordinary experience and this is one of the main factors which a study of poetic language must deal.

And we are dealing with this no less today. In the January-February 2018 issue of PN Review (and still available on their site), Rebecca Watts’s essay ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’ begins with the question:

Why is the poetry world pretending that poetry is not an art form?

I imagine most readers here heard about Watts’s essay. It questions the support that a group of young female poets receive from the establishment for their work that is often first featured on social media—usually Instagram or YouTube. The opening question that Watts poses is one that Sedakova too discusses:

But connecting up words seems to be a simple business. Not surprisingly, there is no formal theory for it, unlike with music. And there is no academy, as there is for design and drawing. No musically ungifted person (in the strictest sense of the word “gift,” i.e. being physically able to hear, sense rhythm, etc.) would attempt to compose a symphony. No person lacking a fast and accurate connection between the hand and eye would set about painting a still life. But in order to write a poem, the question of even the minimum amount of talent never arises. Everyone is talented enough to write, and those who publish their poems not much more so than others. Since the advent of free verse, not even an agility in finding assonances or a grasp of meter is required. Can we define the minimum physical talent a creator of verse requires?

And she does, I assure you, go on, quite wonderfully with the help of Hans Christian Andersen, to define this minimum amount of talent that a poet should have.

Nowadays it can seem quite controversial to even say that no, not everyone is a poet and no, not everything written down is a poem. For the Instagram poets discussed the screen dictates form, while content is the direct expression of emotion and personality. Forrest-Thomson’s criticism of what she saw as an ‘anxiety to communicate’ on the poet’s part and encouragement of it from the reader, is more relevant than ever.

No doubt these poets believe they are being sincere; their raw and generally shared emotions get lots of likes. But Forrest-Thomson and Sedakova both see poetic sincerity rather differently. Here Forrest-Thomson could be critiquing the Instagram poets rather than Wallace Stevens:

these meditations, however sincere philosophically or biographically, cannot be sincere poetically in the way that Eliot’s lines are sincere, for they do not through their technique question the existence of language, reality, or the fact that poetry mediates between them. They rely on and refer to experience rather than question and explore it.

And on the subject of the lyric poet’s personality Sedakova believes that it is his ‘most sincere wish to cease being himself’ and that the success of a poem depends on the poet transcending this personality.

So what should poems be about? Can we not write about how hard it is to be a mother from our own personal experience? Anything can be the subject of the poem, say both poets. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about. Sedakova sees some poets, such as Khlebnikov, as having the ability, or inspiration, to create new ideas and images, while others as needing to borrow their material. Pushkin, for example, creates ‘improvisations on a given theme’. This does not compromise his ability to give us that ‘something new’, which she sees as being essential in a poem.

Forrest-Thomson could not agree more that it is acceptable to rely on the already-known for material; the problem is when this becomes the desired destination, as she writes of Larkin’s poetry:

It leaves poetry stranded on the beach of the already-known world, to                                   expand and limit itself there.

Both are calling for a reordering, a transformation of what we know. Indeed, Sedakova demonstrates just the kind of artifice of which Forrest-Thomson would approve. I can only imagine how much Forrest-Thomson would like Sedakova’s sequence titled ‘Tristan and Isolde’ (also translated in this book), where the aboutness, the narrative of the original story, is barely evident.

For Forrest-Thomson the presence of Poetic Artifice is a sign of the poem’s integrity: that the poem has no obligation to be about anything or relate to the world beyond its lines, and that its form: linguistic, rhythmic, syntactic choices, works to support this integrity. This is not to say that it should be incomprehensible in terms of its aboutness; she very much believes in the rational. For her the problem is one of continuity and discontinuity:

the way in which poetry retains its continuity with the world articulated by ordinary language while distancing itself from these customary modes of articulation.

While she says it is time to leave behind the old dichotomies of the past (idealism/realism, form/content, etc.), her theory still very much depends on setting form against content. She talks of raising up certain elements of language—those that are non-meaningful and which give the poem its form—above the use of language to communicate a ‘socially-given real world’: the dominance of form over content. She tries at times to reconcile the two by also calling for ‘content as form’. She asks that poets reveal a ‘third area which has always existed and is always in the future. . .’ Here we sense any theory floundering.

In any case, her theory is grounded in one of the most established of dichotomies: poetry versus external reality. Today her book seems to entrench the idea of two camps within the world of poetry, which lurks at the roots of any conversation about what poetry is. Let’s give these two imaginary camps the simplistic banners they deserve: ‘aboutness’ and ‘not-aboutness’. Poets and poetry journals often find themselves placed on a scale of ‘aboutness’ and ‘not-aboutness’, and there is the temptation to place Forrest-Thomson at the extreme end of such a scale. In truth, nowhere does she call for pure artifice. She says a number of times that she believes poems should contain what is meaningful and intelligible, the rational. But for her, form does always come first.

I have always had a hard time understanding how form can be set against content, and prefer to take on more of what she says about the wholeness of the poem. The only third area which I see to have always existed is the whole thing, the integrity of the poem—be it easily intelligible or more abstract. Here is where she really has my attention:

the true function of poetry: that it must create a middle area where Artifice can open up imaginative possibilities in both the forms and contents of other languages, and thus transcend the world these impose.

Sedakova calls poetry an ‘infinitely dependent thing’; it cannot be cut off from what Forrest-Thomson would call external reality. Sedakova talks of things which have no place in any theory: deep inspiration, miracles, transformation and poetry as a gift. She too sees a third element, besides content and form: ‘the salvific power of poetry’. This is the innate note of victory and freedom which she hears in all poetry. Without this element, she explains, whatever might call itself poetry in truth ‘belongs to the domain of boredom’:

More often than not poets either say something they did not intend to say, but have uttered through a slackness of mind, imitativeness or in the hope of an “it may work” or a “how about this.” Or they say precisely what they intended to say (where the urge is usually to say something utterly shallow and egoistical). . .

Reading these two essays as a poet can be tough in terms of taking on what is being called for. And when you hear words such as:

Very few combinations of words amount to poetry: sometimes just a line of poetry, sometimes two or three words. (Sedakova)

you do wonder whether you have a place here at all. Although my spirits are lifted each time I read her conclusion to her elaboration of what style is:

You see, to speak more modestly, a perfect, flawless thing is impossible, but here’s what is possible: the completion of a task that you personally, based on the sum of your past and present, are incapable of completing. This is possible and has been attested to numerous times.

But in any case these poets are not trying to garner favour from anyone, let alone encourage anyone to write poetry. 

The quality that Sedakova is looking for is more elusive than Forrest-Thomson’s, but I can imagine her arguing quite robustly to the latter:

Believe me, there is something that cannot be disputed, that we can never prove and that cannot prove anything, for indeed that is all there is.

Of course, the differences are great. Where Forrest-Thomson surmises, Sedakova leaves us with her utterances. She is praising poetry; her praise is for the ‘sacred and utterly audacious act of humility performed by poetry’, where she sees meaning to rise shimmering above the whole.

But Forrest-Thomson’s essay does not only appeal to those who put formal considerations above all else. Some will get more than others out of the close readings of the poems; passages where she writes more freely are a delight to read. Her essay is worth reading alone for the final chapter on the pastoral and parody.

I am by no means as familiar with Forrest-Thomson’s book as with Sedakova’s essay and will certainly need to re-visit it. This is the first time I have read my translation of Sedakova’s essay without the aim of checking the English against the Russian. Although I have found things I would amend, I am glad I could read it through at a distance from the original without having to check the Russian. Apart from the focus on her development as a poet, Sedakova’s essay gives a fascinating insight into the realities of being an unfavoured poet in the era of Stagnation; and her words on various poets, particularly Mandelstam, are most valuable.

Both essays are relevant more than ever in view of the on-going (no, they’ll never stop) discussions about what poetry is. Both poets believe, or insist, that the poem must contain or reveal something new. Something that cannot be there if it is paraphrased, something that can only exist in the poem as a whole. They both believe that what the poem is about, its material, is of less importance than this whole. Depending who you are, these ideas today will either sound increasingly old-fashioned or more urgent and true than ever. But it is not just the ideas that are relevant today, it is the tone in which Forrest-Thomson and Sedakova write that should remind us how we can talk about poetry: with ferocity, wit, confidence and an indestructible freedom.

(this essay was first published in Tears in the Fence in 2019)

Caroline Clark is the author of a collection of poems, Saying Yes in Russian, published by Agenda Editions (2012); a collection of poem-stories and photographs, Sovetica (2021) and a work of non-fiction, Own Sweet Time: A Diagnosis and Notes (2022) both with CB editions. 

She translated the title essay in In Praise of Poetry by Olga Sedakova, published by Open Letter Books (2014). She and her co-translators, Stephanie Sandler and Ksenia Golubovich, were awarded the 2015 Heldt prize for Best Translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies.

She works as a community interpreter for Russian speakers in Lewes, UK.