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Poems: (2015) third edition

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A poem requires work, and it is the reading process that preserves the poem's integrity. N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, in their lively study of the poetry of J.H. Prynne, Nearly Too Much (Liverpool University Press, 1995), write of the 'indeterminacy' and the 'avoidance of totality and closure' in Prynne's poetry and we might cite this as reason for the poet's rejection of his earlier, more "traditional"/linear material (not included in Poems). This volume, The White Stones, was composed in the earlier 1960s, at the same time as working with students in the study of English and European poetry of various classical traditions, and also assimilating the force of the New American Poetry of that period. A good reading knowledge of French and German and Italian kept open a complex historical perspective, and an extremely partial understanding of Chinese demonstrated the influence of Ezra Pound in a new cross-light. Prynne's name has long been, among poetry readers, oddly totemic: he is demonised by some British poets, idolised by others. He is regarded as obscure in two senses. One, he is not regarded as "well known". The difference, perhaps, between the general obscurity of British poets and the obscurity of Prynne is that he has made few efforts to publicise himself: he doesn't give interviews, is not willingly photographed, produces his barely publicised work through small presses in (rather beautiful) limited edition chapbooks, and rarely features in mainstream publications except as an idle shorthand for a wide variety of avant-garde writing.

Long respected as a teacher at Cambridge University and librarian at Gonville and Caius College, J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century. A lyrical experimentalist, his work has mesmerised and attracted readers from around the world for three decades. It has brought some to Cambridge in pursuit of new and unread texts, it has inspired students to develop their own ways of investigating the processes of poetry, to question the prescribed ways of reading, and led translators such as the late and brilliant Bernard Dubourg to dedicate themselves to exploring the nuances and variations in language and potentials of "meaning" that lie in its structures. The poem confronts “it,” that which is “less” than the “yes and no” of the dialectic of presence and absence of ontology. The poem can extend “it” only the flatness of a demotic denial. Nonetheless, the very contrast of idioms in the language splits the poem away from the conclusion it seeks to effect: “stuff it.” The subject receives from what is other even the message he emits. Lézard de feu[ Fire Lizard] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne: B. Dubourg. 1975. OCLC 1113486452. j) Appendix: Additional Publication Details [print run of editions; name and location of the printer, typesetter, binder, designer, distributor, where known]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.” They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (privately printed, 2001). 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.

Britain’s leading late modernist poet,” as his Poems bill him, nevertheless remains as enthusiastic about his vocation as ever. He has begun to speak more candidly in old age about his work, happily telling a Cambridge audience recently how Kazoo Dreamboats was written in a Bangkok hotel room with a view of a concrete wall (“just what I wanted”) and a physics textbook for company. In a statement from 2010, published in Kathmandu as part of a collection of essays otherwise written in Nepalese (AD Penumbra, eat your heart out), Prynne writes: “To be in and across all things a poet, in daily involvement with the dialectic of imagination and real things, has been a task giving the profoundest joy and fulfilment. The task in this work has been to maintain the fundamental argument of contradiction, even while opening one’s powers of feeling and knowledge to the largest extent, so that language occupies the entire space of the poet’s self-being and then overflows it.”

The amount of scientific material in the poems would not have seemed so strange even a few decades ago: most of the canonised poets engaged with the scientific activities of their time, including Wordsworth and Shelley. The "two cultures" identified by CP Snow, and the rapid splitting of scientific inquiry into ever-increasing specialisms, have made even less likely Wordsworth's dream that scientific knowledge could be integrated into the unity of life rather than used to portion and control it. Gedichte (in German). Translated by Stolterfoht, Uhl; Thill, Hans. Heidelberg: Verlag das Wunderhorn. 2007. ISBN 9783884232811.

Massepain[ Marzipan] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Cambridge: P. Riley. 1986. OCLC 52405901. J.H. Prynne, The Art of Poetry No. 101," interview with Jeff Doven & Joshua Kotin, Paris Review 218 (Fall 2016).

One begins to appreciate how grossly partial a single viewpoint is, and how political its exclusions. "What can't be helped / is the vantage, private and inert", Prynne writes; but the ambiguities in "can't be helped" call attention to one of the poem's themes; of what constitutes empathy, of how, and how much, we "care".

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