“The original pain of hearing a word is a trauma suffered passively, by the ear, in the pleasures of the voice.” (Blasing 61)
“As a dove . . . Some dolorous message knit below / The wild pulsation of her wings” (Tennyson 18)
In “Necessary Artifice: Form and Theory in the Poetry of Tel Quel,” Veronica Forrest Thomson slightly surprisingly names John Ashbery as the poet whose work comes closest to fulfilling the theoretical ideals of the Tel Quel group. She quotes a few lines from “The Skaters,” focussing particularly on absence of explanation within the poem, and on “the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract” (24-5). Apart from the “repeated jumps” this isn’t very close to the practice of the poets most closely associated with Tel Quel in the 1960s and early 1970s—Jacqueline Risset, Marcelin Pleynet and Denis Roche—except in one respect, and it is this one that the article concentrates on. She, like them (though perhaps not so much like Ashbery) focuses on semantic integration, and holds out against it. In particular, she wants poetry to “evade” interpretation, and instead to foreground “uncertainty about the relation between poet, reader, language and world,” such that no one interpretation can be prioritised over another. The area of the disappearance of interpretations is, she claims, the “level at which the poem produces itself as an exploration of language which is also the discovery of aspects of the world evaded by systematic linguistic organisation.”
Her argument, roughly, is about the relation between mind and world, a topic which occupied her a great deal in the early seventies. The link between ordinary-language grammar and proscriptive thought and interpretation is the problem, and the solution as she explains it is that the French offer a rearrangement of material language structures such that the result is process rather than meaning. Cambridge in 1970 and 1971 was a fairly conservative place. Chomsky and Wittgenstein were more widely read and talked about than Lacan, Althusser and Kristeva. It was late in 1971 when a glossy white quarto called Signs of the Times provided a slender collection of translations and introductions of structuralist texts. Its editors explained that “‘literature’ in the writing of such as Mallarmé, Roussel, Joyce, has been precisely the refusal of that repression or concealment of the work of the SIGNIFIANT (its materiality) that paradoxically (and it’s a paradox that Julia Kristeva here wishes to note and understand) the culture founded on the sign has been able to effect” (Signs of the Times 1). This was something that Veronica Forrest-Thomson believed to be true, and it is echoed (though its awkward prose style isn’t) in the practice of her writings. But in order to maintain it in the way she did she had to introduce another sort of repression, an attempt to disallow the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Kristeva’s argument. This paper considers the extent to which Forrest-Thomson’s effacement of the psychoanalytic unconscious from her reading of this theory both skews her thinking, and influences her poetry in the early 1970s, and our subsequent reading of the poetry of that juncture, including her own.
Bridges
Poetic form encodes and articulates influence, but not always in circumstances of its own making. Bearing this in mind, we might begin by looking at form and formal procedures in two of Forrest-Thomson’s later poems, each of them written in memory of a poet who was important to her own writing, the self-explanatory “In Memoriam Ezra Pound” and “Le pont traversé” (Collected Poems 80-3), which commemorates the deportation and death during the second World War of the French poet Max Jacob. Both these poems are about death and poetic form. Of all her poems they are among the most haunted by the spectres of voice, not just—as in other poems—by fragments or whole lines of other poems, but by the sheer associative power of phonemes and morphemes. And because this is so close to the way language works in dreams and jokes, it allows plenty of play for something like humor as well, with tonal shifts, shifts of register and reference, and all the other confidential devices of her poetic armoury.
The poem for Pound was written after his death in November 1972, and brims with fragments of other elegies, by Shelley and Tennyson, as well as elegiac echoes of Eliot and her own half-ironic, half-serious use of the loss of childhood as a way of thinking about elegy and pathos-effects. The connections are multiplex and ramifying: to connect Krishna’s admonishment of Arjuna with the first slurp of ice-cream, for example, is to suggest a new pattern of thinking about the eternal in man. The poem begins with Ovid, mutating into ovoid obsequies through the insertion of that “o” of nothingness or emptiness into the proper name. (The letter “o” is repeated frequently in the poem, from “obit” in the epigraph to the “O Ferris wheel” of the final line.) Ovid’s banishment may evoke Pound’s incarceration, but the substitution of Wallace Stevens’ emperor of ice-cream for sterner Augustan authority takes us by association, as in Stevens’ poem, into an elegiac world that uses childhood as an easy way to establish sorrow. This easy way is rejected, though, by the tone in which the Teddy-Bears’ Picnic and the hidden ice-cream cornets are introduced (with the almost endless capacity of these lines to suggest associations enabling the “four ice-cream cornets” to also evoke Donne’s angels, blowing their trumpets at the round earth’s imagined corners), which suggests mimicry rather than authentic personal utterance, an idea which is given more scope in the last line of the first verse paragraph: “the fingers find the eyes and type. Take down the book.” The ambiguity of the instruction “Take down the book,” simultaneously an instruction to take dictation and an invitation to read, is the necessary preparation for the leap into the spectral past which challenges “the blank day of critical interpretation.” Forrest-Thomson’s embarrassment in the face of elegy takes the form of an exploration of her own pastness. The complex play on the words “past” and “pastoral” in the third sentence is a good demonstration of this: “I pasture [we might have expected “I picture” here] the pastel / colours of the heart, a part from and partial sense / of lethal elegies hidden in the provinces / of desolation and ice-cream ‘the lost land / of Childhood,’ and the defeated past.” Looking for the ice-cream cornets hidden in the picture, the fingers find the “eyes” hidden in the word “ice,” while the voice of the text continues silently screaming above the “precipice” of emptiness. With the contemplation of death, to quote Anna Kavan, “A terrible cold world of ice and death had replaced the living world we had always known,” which introduces one of several difficult questions which run through Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s poems: namely, what is it that we have always known?
When she transforms Shelley’s phrase, from “Adonais,” “’Tis Death is dead, not he” into “’Tis life is dead not he,” she foregrounds the absence of transcendence which replaces eternity with memory, bound perpetually into the discourse of the past which haunts us but to which we do not have a right—“He is not here he has outsoared the shadow / of our right.” Just as the poem laments the loss of the land of childhood without taking it personally, so it stresses the land of poetry as a spectred isle, where how the stress falls on an autumn day causes stress to the poem and threatens to deprive it of its swing, to render it static, and as insubstantial as the “ice” in voice. At the same time as stress falls as paralysing anxiety, it also falls as energising ictus, which in turn recalls earlier memories of verse. “Remember, remember the first / of November” both associates this marking of Pound’s death with the ritual burning of a traitor’s effigy and reduces it to the distant subject of a children’s rhyme. For all his claims that his Cantos was an epic “including history,” Pound’s “history is here and nowhere,” dispersed and refracted in the radiance of his books. Death itself threatens to stop the pulse of the poem, but the dead speak on through the verse, animating it with their voices. The task is to allow them the right degree of stress in their own right, and balance that with the ambiguities and transformations created by the ear and the eye, in puns, sound patterning, misquotations, dislocations, new contexts, and new sorts of focus. The many references to light and darkness, shadow and radiance in the poem might alert us to its need to “find the eyes” in the “isle” of the poem, the lens of their vision constantly recycling the material of the page.
“In Memoriam Ezra Pound” is, though, to all intents and purposes, monolingual. Its companion poem, “Le pont traversé: Ode” operates in and between four languages. Ovid was invoked in the first line of the poem I’ve just been discussing as “transpontine,” in reference to his exile. It is typical of Forrest-Thomson that she not only puns on the ambiguity of transpontine’s other derivation (from pons, bridge rather than pontus, sea) in the title of “Le pont traversé” but she also exploits its status as a proper name, namely the name of a bookshop in Paris, where the poem is set. The poem memorialises the poet Max Jacob, a Jew who became a catholic but was arrested by the Gestapo in Orléans in 1944 and imprisoned in Drancy transit camp, where he died of pneumonia before he could be transported to Auschwitz or Birkenau, but like the poem in memory of Pound it reveals, or rather exploits as its process, an unease at the idea of direct treatment of death. It opens flippantly, and follows the opening with a compaction rather than a pun in “je suis la victime et le bureau” so that Baudelaire’s self-tormentor becomes a comment on the Nazi’s bureaucracy of genocide, at the same time as being a joke. This characteristic slippage runs throughout the poem, most clearly and densely in the lines: “I’ve never known what this fish / was called in English, lieu: plaice?” The word lieu has two meanings in French. It is the name for the fish we know as pollack; and it also means “place,” which in turn sounds like another English fish-name: plaice. A smart trans-lingual joke, yes, but also an indication of the way Forrest-Thomson is layering reference in this poem, refracting it and redistributing our reading vision and our attention. The poem is set in various locations in Paris, but in another way it sets itself within the associations and even within the sound of the word “Paris.” In the bookshop, she notices a new edition of Aragon’s Paysan de Paris advertised as “à paraître,” and continues riffing on the sound pattern of the place: “Apparaîtra le pari [the bet, the wager] et paresse d’être de la / vie,” and so on, breaking up, recombining and redistributing the elements of sound. Even Pound is brought back into this exchange economy as his name (and perhaps his reputation) as currency “float[ing] on the sterling market.”
The Memorial to the Deportation on the Ile de la Cité, is below the ground, behind Notre Dame. In a circular plaque on the floor of the memorial is the sentence “They descended into the mouth of the earth and they did not return” which, as the poem does not fail to note, evokes Virgil’s “facilis descensus Averno.” But it is the somewhat different tone of the Emperor Hadrian’s Animula vagula blandula,[1] that takes precedence, haunting the thought of death like Breton’s revolver. Like the Pound poem, too, this poem references Eliot’s Four Quartets and Shelley’s “Adonais,” this time via its Platonic epigraph in the line and a half of Greek that ends the poem;[2] all of which, and all the other literary references, are fitting enough, given that the title locates us in a bookshop. But the idea of the bridge has significance beyond that and beyond the literal Paris bridges. Both these poems, and this one in particular, make very noticeable use of the bridge between the “drivelling ghosts” of babble, the semiotic,[3] the nonsense making material system of language, and the personal language experience which severs us from our early emotional relation to language sounds and allows us entry into the symbolic, the realm of meaning. The task of the poem is to call both sides in question. Where there is more than one language in play, there are more sides than just these two, of course. If indeed there is “No God but / confusion and Pound is its prophet,” the confusion is in language use and its politics, not just in language itself. The lines which follow directly on from the reference to Pound come from a once well-known school textbook by Alfred M. Hitchcock, of Hartford Public High School, Composition and Rhetoric (Henry Holt & Co, 1906), and is one of a number of (originally English) illustrations of “twisted metaphors”: “I smell a rat; I see it floating through the air; and, by heavens, I’ll nip it in the bud!” How far, the poem might be asking, does wordplay, including wordplay between languages, destabilize referential meaning, and how far does it actually constitute it? What are the political implications of the disordered linguistic world which surrounds the central act of mourning in this poem? (I think here of Orwell’s argument in “The Politics of the English Language” that incoherent thinking leads to incoherent politics, and his examples, recalling Hitchcock’s, such as “The fascist octopus has sung its swansong” or “The jackboot has been thrown into the melting pot.”)
Writing to me in July 1972, Veronica copied out a sentence from Jacob’s Le cornet à dés on the back of the envelope: it said “Une oeuvre ne vaut pas par ce qu’il contient mais par ce qui l’environne” (“The value of a work lies not in what it contains but in what surrounds it”). Apart from introducing the idea of the poem as container, and of the container as poetic form, this posits a further less definable limit. How can we know the limits of what surrounds it? Are there limits? If the surrounding is where the work’s value, and therefore its politics, is to be found, we might want to work out what form this surrounding, which we could call the not-poem, has. Given that it has to be defined in some way dialectically by the poem, would it make sense to think of the poems as receptive shapes, variations on the outside-in imprint of Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture “House”? The content would then be the container, but the container would be an illusory one, or at least a virtual one. In this sense, the conceptual form of these poems could be described as metaleptic.
Vision and Translation
I have described these poems as diffusing and refracting the sense of words, as if words were light. In doing this I had in mind one of the contemporary French poets Veronica Forrest-Thomson was most interested in, Denis Roche. Roche was one of the poets associated with the magazine Tel Quel, in my view about the most interesting one, and Forrest-Thomson was sufficiently involved in his work to spend a certain amount of time translating it. In 1961 he had published a suite of poems called “La poésie est une question de collimateur,” a title that translates roughly as “Poetry works like a collimator.”[4] Think of Forrest-Thomson’s multilingual language surface as prismatic, and collimation, as a way of removing parallax, enabling exact focus, and filtering out the wrong sort of noise might come to seem an important part of the creation of form. But perhaps not of her form. There’s something much more reminiscent of Laura Riding about Denis Roche, in his absolutism as well as in his renunciation of poetry.
Forrest-Thomson’s interest in Roche’s poems reflects her sense, as she records it in her article “Necessary Artifice,” that there’s nothing new to write about. As a result, “[t]he movement of the mind among words . . . is devalued” (11) This conviction provides much of the basis for the argument of her posthumously-published book Poetic Artifice, and leads her in her own writing and in her criticism to want to re-emphasise the non-semantic features of poems, including both aleatory compositional techniques (which she wasn’t very interested in), and paralinguistic elements involving sound and form (which she was very interested in). Even while he was still writing poems, Roche objected to it as an activity, arguing that it had had its day and made itself, in his word, “inadmissible,” by virtue of having become, in the wake of Symbolism, no more than a sentimental idea of itself. He renounced the writing of poetry publicly and definitively, and his oeuvre was ceremonially closed, in 1972, the year in which Forrest-Thomson was translating some of his work as well as writing the poems I have been discussing. His position is that poetry has become the wrong sort of container; as Mutlu Konuk Blasing puts it in a different context, “‘poetry’ has become a screen on which to project our real-life fantasies of freedom’” (Blasing, 20 n8). What Roche proposes instead is the destruction of personcentred discourse and its replacement by quotation and collage, but composed in shapes that look like poems. The conventional response to this at the time was that whatever else it gained, such poetry lost an authentic pulse, lost a personal rhythm. But pulses come in many forms; even the French collimator’s lenses are pulses. I mean they are lentilles, lentils (lens in Latin means lentil, and in French lentille means both lentil and lens) and therefore may be thought of as pulses in the optical unconscious. The pulses of stress and rhythm are wired into the tesselated language of Forrest-Thomson’s poems. Let me draw on Blasing’s phrasing again, where she argues that poetry presents language as simultaneously “a foreign mechanism and an intimate, constitutive history,” which is why the unconscious is (in Lacan’s famous apothegm) “other people’s language.” Blasing takes this idea further when she talks about the “the discourse of the linguistic code itself and the emotional power that it commands as such.” But where she goes on to argue that translation “loses the sense of the unheimlich that is heart of poetry, the experience of the intimate otherness of the mechanical operations of the linguistic code and of our histories, both personal and communal,” I want to suggest that Forrest-Thomson shows that this is not, or not always, the case (Blasing, 9). Or rather, that the presence of inter-lingual transformations in her poetry involves practices very like translation.
To explain briefly what I mean, I need to restate the implicit distinction I began with, the distinction between paralinguistic features and unconscious features, the psychoanalytic subject and the subject of language. I am concerned here with the whole somatic materialism of language, as it is only within this framework that the idea of the pulse can begin to achieve prosodic and semantic sense. When we’re thinking, as Forrest-Thomson often is, about the best perspective for creating distance from both our own voices and the instituted voices of poetic history, we can choose to view language through a variety of different lenses, but one of the most reliable is translation. Translation undermines normal thinking about meaning, shifting the focus away from an idea of transparency, with its implication of an unproblematic relation between language and its object, towards forms of “understanding” with their built-in provisionality. Much of Forrest-Thomson’s writing in the early seventies is quite pugnaciously concerned with trying to think about this. Yet there’s a certain stubborn crudity, not to say lack of full comprehension, about her translations, which I find revealing. In her poems and articles, and in Poetic Artifice, she is—I think rather unnervingly—insistent on the tensile relationship between referential and non-referential functions of language. I don’t mean to imply that we aren’t all concerned with this, whether as poets or critics. But in her case, the exploitation of this relationship becomes a source of personal pathos, and maybe the discloser of lyric being, as I intimated was the case in the Pound elegy. I’ll return to this later, but first I want to make a diversion through her translations of Denis Roche’s “Eros Energumène,” and its Preface.
Her French was good, and she read extensively in the language, and she insists frequently that she knows what she’s doing when she translates French. Yet her translations of Roche’s poems seriously flatten the original French, removing all the tonal qualities associated with historicity and quotation; comparing them with translations of the same poems by Harry Mathews (Auster, 533-39), her versions communicate no awareness of Roche’s use of different registers, nor his use of quotation. Either that, or she had deliberately chosen to erase all trace of them in favour of mere lexical juxtaposition. In a 1972 letter to Paul Buck, responding to his comments on her Roche translations, she wrote that “I am not a machine for interpreting and I reproduce in the vein of one language what I find in the sinew of another. If you suppose the inaccuracies of exact word equivalence arose from inadequacy in my knowledge of French you couldn’t be more mistaken.” (Collected Poems, 280) The pugnacity here is absolutely typical, but may be partly bluster. To take just one example, she translates the phrase “plats de résistance” as “surfaces offering resistance” rather than the usual “main dishes” or, metaphorically, “prime examples.” For all her talk of sinews and veins, this is not a choice felt in her linguistic corporeality. It’s a mistake. Not her only one, either; there are others, one of which is particularly revealing. It comes in her first extract from Denis Roche’s Preface (Collected Poems, 149). Here are Roche’s French, her translation, and a translation of my own:
Denis Roche’s original text reads like this:
le contenant [:] un ensemble de lois non connues régissant (et sans qu’il soit possible de le faire a volonté en ce moment) des types de faits à dominante pulsionelle (déroulement de l’écriture, rythme d’arrivée des enchaînements métaphoriques et des ellipses, rythme de déroulement de la lecture, rythme des thèmes, de leur apparition et de leur destruction, rythme des structures de discours, de leur arrivée et de leur disparition, rythme de disposition, d’étalement, d’enserrement, d’écoulement des textes imprimés, rythme de succession des pages et de leur imbrication possible et de leur succession comme autant d’empreintes (au sens biologique), toujours fonctions d’un acte social qui est celui d’écrire et d’un autre acte sociale qui est celeui de rire. [italics in the original]
Veronica Forrest-Thomson translates this:
the container, that is: the set of unknown laws, which we cannot at present operate with full consciousness, and which controls effects that are primarily pulsational. Such effects make up the infolding of the writing, the rhythm with which such chains of images appear and ellipses are created, the rhythm in which reading is unfolded, rhythm of themes as they appear and are destroyed, rhythm of structures of discourse (phrases, syntactic links) in their arrival and effacement, rhythm of arrangement, deployment, containing and flowing of language, within the printed text, rhythm of the the succession of phrases, their overlapping and sequence. All these things are like so many marks (in the biological sense of the term); they are functions of a social act which is writing, and of another social act, which is reading.
An alternative translation might read as follows:
the container: a collocation of rules, of which we are unaware, and which govern (without us being capable at present of using them at will) the sorts of effect whose chief characteristic is that they stem from the drives/they are instinctive (the way the writing develops, the rhythm with which sequences of tropes or ellipses appear, the rhythm that develops as you read, the rhythm of the subject matter as topics are brought in or despatched, the rhythm of linguistic structures as they appear and disappear, the rhythm of the arrangement, display, containment, and unfolding of printed texts, the rhythm of the sequence of pages, their possible overlap and the way they succeed each other as so many imprints (in the biological sense of the word), while always being functions of one social act of writing and another social act of reading.
She translates Roche’s term “pulsion” as “pulsation,” a choice of some significance. In French, “pulsion” is the word used to designate impulse or more specifically, in the psychoanalytic sense, drive (what Freud calls Trieb). By translating it as “pulsation” (an English word which more properly translates the French “pulsation”), Forrest-Thomson is offering, whether knowingly or by chance, a very different interpretation of Roche’s unconscious container. The central issue here is the manner in which we experience the pulse of poetry through its non-semantic elements, and what if anything these non-semantic elements have to do an area which plays a significant role in the poems examined earlier and in psychoanalytic theory, the acquisition of language in infancy and childhood. The claim that underlies Roche’s account is one that might be aligned with Nicholas Abraham’s argument about poetic rhythm and the unconscious (Abraham, 107-32). The stresses in the poetic line work because of the intimate relation between stresses, pulses and drives. The process implied by “pulsation,” on the other hand, is a different one, a conscious one, movement fraught with feeling like the “wild pulsation” of Tennyson’s dove’s wings, or throbbing like a pain or a heart (or a vein), or regularly expanding and contracting like the horizons of ideas in the poems I began by looking at. By electing to substitute “pulsation” for “drive” she is foregrounding a physical process of rhythmic repetition and thereby displacing much of the range of materials Roche associates with unconscious and instinctual processes. Where Roche emphasises the external features which constitute the unconscious social rhythm of the act of reading, Forrest-Thomson incorporates them more closely into an idea of the conscious self. Interestingly, another commentator has focussed on the same point, but to argue a different case. Suzanne Raitt, reviewing the Collected Poems and Translations, wrote that:
Her translations are in fact fairly uneventful—as translations of linguistic artifice might be—but one word, “pulsation,” stands out as a key to the force that continually pushes her language to its limits. “Pulsation” is Forrest-Thomson’s translation of the French word “pulsion,” beloved, as she knew, of French psychoanalysts. It is more usually translated as “drive,” and, by implication, desire. But “pulsation” gives the idea of an emotional or cardiac rhythm which replaces conventional poetic metre, and beats with other pulses in language itself that are not necessarily to do with meaning: syntactic relations, the tensions of gender, typography, and layout. Much of the energy that flows through her poetry is not articulate, but the linguistic field is the only one in which it can be harnessed and organised (she herself wrote, following Wittgenstein, of “the impossibility of expressing, or even of experiencing, a non-linguistic reality”) (Raitt, 305)
All of which is true, and true to Roche’s formulation, except that by jettisoning the link with a psychoanalytically theorized unconscious implicit in “pulsion” and “drive” (and perhaps even in “desire”) and turning back to the Wittgensteinian position Raitt describes, she downgrades the significance of the very features she is so deeply aware of and concerned with in her poetry, the paralinguistic features the deep cognitive significance of whose effects is never exhaustively traced within her framework of “Poetic Artifice.” Even in her insistence, which we saw at the start of this paper, that poetry be understood to operate as an exploration of language such as to reveal “aspects of the world evaded by systematic linguistic organisation” she remains powerfully attached to “the world.” In her attempt to contain the unpredictable and unruly elements, she underestimates the extent to which the linguistic minestrone we inhabit is also the sound of our selves.
This is something, though, that her poems know better than she does. Although in the end her translations are little more than exercises, led by her eyes’ search for equivalences, her own poems enable the process of translation to come into its own because she is translating her own language, even when she is doing it through her use of other languages. Although the poetic thinking she does in the elegies for Pound and Jacob is dense and transformative, it succeeds because she is working with an unprocessable surplus of other people’s language. In this respect, as also in respect of the multilingualism of these poems, she is achieving an effect—especially in “In Memoriam Ezra Pound”—which reaches back into the pathos of infantile amnesia. She is displacing her confrontation with the fact of these poets’ deaths, and with the imagination of death, on to a sense of her own displacement vis-à-vis language, and her impotence in the face of its over-determining demands. But rather than accept the Lacanian or Kristevan approach which was knocking other people’s socks off at the time, or even work out her own version of the unconscious, she represses psychoanalysis altogether, by rewriting it as a language-game, writing out the dark (im)pulses and leaving a container full of lentilles, lenses to refract other people’s language and disperse the conceptual foundations of Tel Quel. Reluctant to explore all the ways in which the lens of the lyric eye shapes the somatic materiality of language, she denies herself access to thinking that might have issued in a politics of poetic form; instead she opts for the willful aestheticisation of politics in these two elegies which so uneasily foregrounds lyric pathos.
Notes
[1]The poems translates as “Sweet little soul, fickle yet cuddlesome, / My body’s guest in close companionship, / Into what regions art though flitting now, / Thy little self so naked, pale and cold— / Forgetting all the fun we used to have!”
[2]Shelley translated the epigraph, “To Aster,” as follows: “Thou wert the morning star among the living, / Ere thy fair light had fled;— / Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving / New splendour to the dead.”
[3]Kristeva’s semiotic of drives and the chora, a nourishing and maternal prelinguistic rhythmic “receptacle” would be in place here, in terms of the reception of her ideas, despite Forrest-Thomson’s reservations about her thought.
[4]The term “collimator” may refer to a small fixed telescope with cross-wires at its focus, used for adjusting an astronomical or other instrument; and a tube with a slit and lens (or the lens itself) used in a spectroscope to collect the light and throw it upon the prism in parallel rays. Collimators have a variety of uses, including in gunsights, laser diodes, in neutron, X-ray and gamma ray optics, and in monitoring sources of radioactivity in nuclear power stations.
Works Cited
Abraham, Nicolas. “Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: Time, Rhythm, and the Unconscious.” In Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Nicholas T. Rand and Maria Torok. Trans. Benjamin Thigpen and Nicholas T. Rand. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
Ashbery, John. Rivers & Mountains. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.
Auster, Paul (ed.) The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, with Translation. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry; the pain and the pleasure of words. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2007.
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. “Necessary Artifice: Form and Theory in the Poetry of Tel Quel,” Language and Style 7:1 (1973): 3-26.
—. Collected Poems and Translations. London; Lewes; Berkeley: A2; Allardyce, Barnett, 1990.
Heath, Stephen, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Prendergast (eds). Signs of the Times: Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics. Cambridge: no publisher, no date [1971].
Hitchcock, Alfred M. Composition and Rhetoric. New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1906.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon 76 (April, 1946): 252-265
Raitt, Suzanne. Rev. of Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Collected Poems and Translations. Woman: a cultural review 1:3 (1990): 304-308
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.