Poems: (2015) third edition

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During the interview, Prynne often referred to his etymological dictionary (Barnhart’s), doubled in bulk by his interleaved notes, citations, and correspondence with the editors of the OED. The difficulty of his language, the liberties of his syntax, and the complexity of his prosody have steadily increased as he approached the volume most discussed here, Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is(2011). He freely conceded that the poems are not written with the reader in mind. How this can seem a necessary and even generous commitment, of a piece with his career as a dedicated teacher, is one of the mysteries of his poetry. J.H. Prynne, The Art of Poetry No. 101," interview with Jeff Doven & Joshua Kotin, Paris Review 218 (Fall 2016). For Prynne, the production of a poem, the production of a book, are as much part of the cycles of commercial fetishisation as the creation of the poem itself. So, it is the responsibility of the poet (and reader) to work at diminishing a degree of moral irresponsibility that overshadows the creation and production of art. Which explains why most Prynne works have been available in small print-run pamphlet forms published by presses for whom profit is not a motive. The forthcoming Poems are being published by a combination of the Australian presses, Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and Bloodaxe, keeping costs down and avoiding, as much as possible, the usual dictates of the market.

Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer, eds. Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison & Luke Roberts (Cambridge: Mountain, 2012). Includes early correspondence and essays by Prynne and others. How then might one read Prynne's work? It appears so alien to our habits of reading, so unlike the lyric poetry we are more habituated to; it is only on quite prolonged exposure that its coherent arrangement - sonically, prosodically, thematically and metonymically - becomes evident: though this is, admittedly, a profound and giddying experience. Even then, one is at a loss as to how to naturalise this experience, to make of it something as familiar as "a meaning". It feels more like a painting or a piece of music, or perhaps a sculpture; something to experience both intellectually and sensually. Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999.

Poems 2016–2024

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. It is an astringent approach, and the idea that Prynne’s poems are self-referential closed circuits is a handy excuse for the baffled. The truth, however, is that early Prynne is quarried from all too real and resistant material: frequent preoccupations include capitalism and commodification, scientific method and research, cultural archaeology, glaciation and the problem of waste (a recent pamphlet is titled Refuse Collection). The syntax of a Prynne poem will tend to be slippery, but one coping strategy is to imagine the humble comma-splice promoted to organising principle, yoking the poem’s heterogeneous material together. “Frost and Snow, Falling” begins: “That is, a quality of man and his becoming, / beautiful, or the decoration of some light and /fixed decision, no less fluent than the river / which guards its name”. It begins in medias res, like an overheard conversation, and uses parataxis to shuttle between the human and the natural worlds. This poem, too, ends with a geological vision, of “the whole pleistocene exchange” melting like snow, “driven into the ground”.

The Oval Window" (1983), for instance, alludes to, and represents, various frames of perception: the "oval window" itself is part of the ear, containing free-moving crystals which allow us to orient ourselves; they represent the impact of the world on our senses, and are also our means of making the world intelligible. But "The Oval Window" also entertains other "views" - "windows" on to financial data, for instance - and as these different frames and their partial vistas tilt and unsettle each other, our own ability to orient ourselves is challenged.Du Nouveau dans la guerre des clans[ News of Warring Clans] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne. 1980. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) By means of such techniques, Prynne was also able to incorporate parody and archaism, as with “The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts” published in Wound Response (1974). This text is a parodic evocation of the language of scientific research, which is at its conclusion played across an archaic diction, a device which, though no less constructed than the scientific discourse, permits the effects of turning and displacement to work on the mind of the reader. For Ben Watson—a former student of Prynne and one of his wittiest critics—the philosophical devotion to contradiction is what has driven this poetry to ever greater obscurities (including, since the 1970s, its general withdrawal from the personal voice). Responding to Kazoo Dreamboats, or, On What There Is, a long poem from 2011 which reads like a raging argument between a research library and an electric fence, Watson writes: “Prynne is a prankster, a trap, a contrary Mary in a blue robe twinkling with kitsch lights… a creator of baroque caves of language glittering with aphorisms and jokes and surprises.” Difficulties in the Translation of 'Difficult' Poems" by J.H. Prynne. Cambridge Literary Review 1/3 (2010). Jeremy Prynne lecture on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI". Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #28 (April 1999). See also related review of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1969).

Veronica Forrest-Thomson, On the Periphery, includes a memoir by Prynne (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1976). However, since language does not stay in place, word splitting endlessly away from meaning, the poetry of truth, of the real, has always to be repeated. The end is always already a new beginning. In the volumes that followed The White Stones, Prynne engaged upon a rigorous investigation of the possibilities opened up for him by the earlier work. Context is everything. Language itself (as Prynne's etymological and philological forays suggest) carries residual traces of its historical and literary uses and contexts; it is neither pure nor innocent, and is not simply a coin that can be uncomplicatedly traded for a single meaning. What Prynne's work presents us with is not his opinions, scrambled and awaiting our delighted decryption, but the simultaneous processes and viewpoints of the worlds created in language. As he once wrote, in the closest he has come to a personal statement on his method: "It has mostly been my own aspiration, for example, to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usage; and thereby with the reader's own position within this world."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.” The recent controversy over Prynne's merits has made more people aware of his work, at a time when all of it is easily available. It is undeniable that his poetry offers both pleasures and challenges of an unusually complex kind: and it is for precisely this reason that many people will testify, without hyperbole or sentimentality, that his poetry has changed their lives. The Huntsman of the Rubáiyat: J H Prynne and Peter Henry Lepus Go to Abu Ghraib" by Simon Eales. Cordite Poetry Review (February 2016). Prynne is eighty, and he stands over six feet tall. Each afternoon of our visit, he folded himself into a low easy chair in his upper room and talked candidly and unflaggingly, with genial precision. When amused, he clapped his hands three times in brisk delight; when it occurred to him to show us a book, as it often did, he was up out of his chair to find it before we could stir to help. On the third day of the interview, he gave us a tour of the Gonville and Caius Library, where he served as Librarian of the College from 1969 to 2006. Gedichte (in German). Translated by Stolterfoht, Uhl; Thill, Hans. Heidelberg: Verlag das Wunderhorn. 2007. ISBN 9783884232811.