Poems: (2015) third edition

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Galley proofs of the Ferry Press edition of ‘Brass’, 1971, with annotations by Prynne including a diagram by relating to marginal alignments. From MS Add.10144. Travellers’ tales, however, will tell you little about the single-minded devotion of this avant-gardist to his art. Prynne’s statements on poetry have been scattered to the winds as letters, lectures and notes in academic and samizdat publications. Private Eye scored a satirical hit when they informed readers that photocopies of AD Penumbra’s critical essay “Than With Whom What Other: A Challenge to Scansion” could only be obtained “by application to the British Library.” Haslam’s ripening analogy suggests the distinction that Prynne once proposed, in a 1961 essay, between unrewarding “difficulty” and satisfying “resistance”: “the palpable texture of human affairs,” from which “we derive our most powerful and sustaining sense of the world, in all its complex variousness.” As a young critic with Ezra Pound’s Cantos under his belt, Prynne was unimpressed by cotton-wool-wrapped evocations of “a landscape or environment not containing other beings that we can conceive of as living… their own various lives.” Nor was he satisfied with the man-in-the-street knowingness of contemporaries such as Philip Larkin. Neither kind of poetry was responsive enough to the world as it spread out beyond the writing desk: “the modern poet would hardly recognise a contingent event if he saw one, and least of all if he had been expecting it,” concludes another essay from the early 1960s. The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, ed. Ryan Dobran (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Jie ban mi Shi Hu]. From author-holograph, in original Chinese (Cambridge: Poetical Histories, 22; printed and distributed by Peter Riley (Books), 1992).

The curve of Prynne's career has seen a steady intensifying of this kind of challenge to the reader. After the rationalistic meditations of a first volume that he has decided not to reprint, the oeuvre has been marked by strongly motivated deflections of established reading methods. In The White Stones and Kitchen Poems, the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts for the occasion of utterance. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes. In Brass, the reader is jolted, more rudely and exhilaratingly, from one unruly format to another, and is forced to cope with constant adjustments of tempo and tone, stretching from invective to elegy, not simply within the volume as a whole, but often within each text. Linearity and narrative, if not dispensed with altogether, become increasingly redundant, and in the adoption of the poetic sequence as the most frequent vehicle for Prynne's concerns, the emphasis on recurrent figures and sound patterns begins to tip the balance in favour of "vertical" rather than "horizontal" priorities in interpretation. This tendency is established in the "diurnal" sequences of the 1970s ( Fire Lizard, A Night Square, Into the Day) and developed and complicated throughout the following two decades. Prynne’s criticism rises to poetry itself when he speaks about the life of words in this mystical way. “Within the great aquarium of language the light refracts and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed”; “rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement”; “language is a human emotional system, an engine of love not just in nomenclature but in the syntax of passion.” Such claims for language as the symbolic medium that brings the world into being locate his literary thinking in the high modernist tradition of Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens. In a lecture on the verse of his American mentor, Charles Olson, from 1971, he described the “language” of the universe as “its capacity for love. And the capacity of the universe for love is that for which man was born. I believe utterly that it is man’s destiny to bring love to the universe.” Davie introduced me to the name of Charles Tomlinson. He’d been Tomlinson’s teacher when Tomlinson was a student here. An important starting point for Tomlinson as a poet was Wallace Stevens. I had read a little of Stevens as a student before I came into connection with Davie, but there’s no doubt that my connection with Davie and through him with Tomlinson opened the door to Stevens as an important writer. That was a significant moment, too, because a world that had previously been occupied more or less exclusively by Pound and Williams now opened to another presence of a very different kind, a seriously intellectual poet of cerebral focus, committed to an active intelligence of mind. This was quite distinct from anything that I’d found in Pound, or in Creeley, or in Olson, come to that. Difficulties in the Translation of 'Difficult' Poems" by J.H. Prynne. Cambridge Literary Review 1/3 (2010).Finding aid for The English Intelligencer Archive at Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

It must ultimately be emphasized that it Prynne’s project is to endorse an aesthetics of reflection. His use of chiasmus is often recuperated as an incarnational aesthetics of mimesis, whereby the high was embodied in the low, the low in the high. The figure of such an aesthetics is paradox, implying circularity and closure. By effectively foreclosing the play of word over word, Prynne was able to reify the structure of his poetry, and make it both subject and object of its own processes. Instead of being viewed as an effect of signification, the poems become things—real entities—in their own right. In this sense of the poem as thing he followed the mainstream of Anglo-American modernism. Let’s talk about the development of your practice. You were an undergraduate here at Cambridge. Tell us about your work with the scholar and poet Donald Davie.

March 2023

In The Making of the Reader, David Trotter proposes a useful distinction between “pathos” and what he terms “anti-pathos”. In any poem the voice of the self and the voice of the text are subtly different. For a Romantic poet their clash results in pathos: the pathos of origins, sincerity and feeling. In modernist poetry, what we frequently get instead is “anti-pathos”, which rejects appeals to origins and insists on dissonance, not harmony, as the defining condition of art. As an advert for Prynne’s work, this would seem to send out all the wrong signals: pellucid, approachable and a world away from our image of Prynne the wilful mystagogue. As Jeremy Noel-Tod has pointed out, the immediate context is a geological controversy on whether the Pleistocene gave way as smoothly as we think to the Holocene, the era taken to mark the beginning of human time. With arch wit, Prynne embroils us in a modernist controversy, but one that played out roughly 12,000 years ago.

Prynne’s humour in person, delivered with a precise accent over half-moon spectacles, can be disarmingly Wodehousian. The poet and critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson once reported that her doctoral super- visor claimed Cambridge University Library had “got his middle name wrong. / He says it stands for Hah / But there is a limit” (in fact, his given names are Jeremy Halvard). In his poetry, however, the wit is sardonic and satirical, expressing a profoundly sceptical worldview in which English slides every- where on a flood of contamination and corruption—political, financial and environmental. “Make a dot / difference, make an offer; these feeling spray-on / skin products are uninhabitable, by field and stream” advises Unanswering Rational Shore (2001), vamping on the staccato verbalism of shopping channels and rolling news.Prynne’s poetry is powerful and dense. Each book is an experiment, made in a concentrated burst of effort: a mode of writing instigated by the academic calendar, with its rhythm of term and break. The poems investigate the languages of economics and the conditions of inequality; Marx and Mao are important influences. The poems also combine a deep knowledge of science with practical expertise in geology and botany: the devotions of a naturalist are frequently audible. And always there is literature: the history of English poetry, and the collective, global memory of the English language. This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century.’ - Adam Phillips, Observer