Barthes and Forrest-Thomson

The Scottish poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) is one of the first poets writing in English to have engaged with Barthes in a major way. Many of her poems reference him and some are titled after his work, and he has left his mark on her critical writing. However, because of the manner and order in which these texts were made available to Anglophone audiences, her view of Barthes in the early 1970s seems incomplete and skewed to our eyes today. Embarking on close readings of her poetry and prose, this chapter offers a detailed breakdown of the relationship between the work of Forrest-Thomson and Barthes.

A Great Indelicacy

The introduction offers a summary of the book’s aims and objectives as a study of poets’ engagements with Barthes, explains its methodology of focusing on works which makes explicit reference to Barthes rather than inferring his influence from a wider range of the sources, and gives a potted history of engagements with Barthes in English leading up to his first being read seriously by poets in the early 1970s. It considers the Anglophone literary press in this period as well as academia, and situates Barthes in relation to movements such as structuralism and Marxism.

Rejections of Barthes

The methodology of the book means that writers’ engagement with Barthes is what is studied, but this risks erasing writers who shy away from him. This chapter considers why some poets, particularly those who are people of colour and/or queer, reject Barthes aesthetically and politically. This issue is positioned in relationship to contemporary discussions of avant-garde poetry and whiteness, and these concerns are illustrated with a more in-depth reading of the work of John Yau. This is followed by a discussion of queer objections to the Barthes of language poetry and a consideration of his work in the context of the New Narrative. The chapter concludes by considering why Kathy Acker rejects Barthes in favour of Bataille.

Barthes and Love

In the late 1980s a new approach to Barthes begins to emerge, centred around the use of his work to approach the emotional life. Although this is more traditional poetic subject matter, Barthes still inspires innovative and avant-garde approaches. This chapter demonstrates the relevance of Barthes’s work on love to Anne Carson and Deborah Levy, and also shows how his other texts can be applied to these purposes, showing how Kristjana Gunnars uses the more technical Writing Degree Zero to write about grief. The chapter also uses Chris Kraus’s notion of ‘lonely girl phenomenology’ as part of the critical framework with which it approaches alternative creative engagements with theory.

Barthes in Journals

As many of the poets considered here belonged to poetry ‘movements’ which constituted themselves through journals, this chapter is structured around those journals, considering the various ways in which small poetry periodicals used Barthes. Considering reviews, interviews, and manifestos, it offers a narrative of Barthes in notable magazines such as the New York-based L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and its Canadian counterpart Open Letter, and smaller publications such as Bloomington, Indiana’s Wch Way. In this way, it includes the work of poets and critics whose engagement with Barthes is more tangential and bound up with the general project of a community of writers, such as Michael Palmer and Steve McCaffery.

Barthes in America

This chapter considers how Barthes was read in America, among a far wider range of poets than in Britain. It starts with a brief consideration of Robert Duncan’s essay on the ‘kopoltus’, and then looks at the poets gathered in Ron Silliman’s 1975 anthology ‘The Dwelling-Place’, New York School writers such as Bernadette Mayer, and other ‘Language poets’, closing with a more in-depth consideration of the importance of Barthes to Lyn Hejinian. Links are established between these writers’ poetics, which are varied but all describable as ‘language-centred’.

Conclusion: Nothing Better than a Theory

This conclusion offers a summary of the book’s argument and suggests future directions for Barthes scholars in poetry studies and vice versa. It asks what interventions poets might make in the future in dialogue with recently published posthumous works by Barthes, and stresses the importance of the ongoing ‘co-production’ of the meaning of both poetic and theoretical texts.