The most striking engagement with the issues that concerned Forrest-Thomson – particularly in Poetic Artifice – appears in Charles Bernstein's long poem of poetics, his ‘Essay on Criticism’, Artifice of Absorption. In this remarkable work, first published in 1987 as a special issue of the magazine Paper Air and later included in A Poetics, Bernstein deals with many of the major debates which inform Forrest-Thomson's work: questions of the relationship between subjectivity and language, poetry as a vehicle for experience, poetry as knowledge, and the position of the reader in relation to the text. In Bernstein's text these are absorbed into and filtered through an engagement with Forrest-Thomson's dominant concerns with poetic artifice and naturalization. Her two key concepts find their correlatives in Artifice of Absorption's two sections: ‘Meaning and Artifice’, and ‘Absorption and Impermeability’.

We have already seen how artifice calls attention self-reflexively to its own operations and to the way in which language constructs the world. And how readers choose, particularly in the case of poetry, to engage with language which is distinctly different from the ordinary language of communication, and then seem driven to reduce its difference to an assimilable narrative.