Poems: (2015) third edition

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These poems we heard this evening, some of them were quite witty, some of them were adept. But they’re all poems written by a poet, and I could do without that. I want a poet to break out of his or her poetic identity, to ­establish a whole new set of possibilities for the reader and for him- or herself. To hear poems that must have been written by a poet is to find them trapped in the poetic habits from which they originate. There wasn’t a poem anywhere in that sequence that I heard that I would have been glad to read for a second time. They’re all perfectly okay—humorous, relaxed, and ­entertaining, and ­extend his working practice. But they wouldn’t do anything for me. You know? I can’t imagine why he did them. What was the motive? What was the serious development of his practice that poems like that would help him to find his way to? It didn’t seem to be that those questions had any good answers. I t is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable. His name had become, as The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry put it in 1994, ‘synonymous with all that is most rebarbative in the work of the contemporary English avant-garde’. Considering his obscurity (limited edition pamphlets circulating among those in the know; no publicity, no interviews), it is remarkable how much fear and loathing the mere existence of his work once generated. J.H. Prynne, The Art of Poetry No. 101," interview with Jeff Doven & Joshua Kotin, Paris Review 218 (Fall 2016).

So it proved. For four days at the end of January, we met after lunch in his rooms at Gonville and Caius College, at the University of Cambridge, and talked, with a break for dinner, until we ­pleaded exhaustion sometime after midnight. At the conclusion of each day’s interview, Prynne graciously walked us out through the sixteenth-century Gate of Honour before returning to his desk in the rooms he has kept since he was first appointed as a fellow, in 1962. 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) Perles qui furent[ Pearls That Were] (in French). Translated by Alferi, Pierre. Marseille: Éric Pesty Éditeur. 2013. ISBN 9782917786208.

February 2023

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. 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. The other obscurity associated with Prynne is that his poetry is regarded as hermetic, baffling, difficult of access, uncertain of interpretation. To his detractors - and, despite his obscurity, something about Prynne does engender a disproportionate amount of alarmed hostility - he can simply be dismissed as incomprehensible, or near enough: on a recent Today programme, John Sutherland suggested that "only four people... can understand him". He is regarded as having no readership.

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”.Oripeau Clinquaille. French translation of Brass, by B. Dubourg and J. H. Prynne (Paris: Po&sie, 3, 1977), Librarie Classique Eugène Belin.

There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. Prints in the New Snow: Notes on ‘Es Lebe der König’, J.H. Prynne’s Elegy to Paul Celan" by Matt Hall. Cordite Poetry Review (2013). But Prynne's poetry also employs a breadth of vocabulary that takes the reader across the OED and down into its historical layers of accrued meanings, not to mention the specialised jargons and lexicons of disciplines as different as microbiology, finance, astronomy, optics, medicine, neurophysiology, genetics and agriculture. It is work informed by a vast amount of reading and its range and pitch are concomitantly daunting.

PolonskyGreek Africa AMS Archive Management System Archives Australia bicycles bikes Cambridge Cambridge collectors Cambridge Digital Library Cambridge University Library Canada Changi Charles Darwin Christmas Conservation cycling Digitisation Emma Nichols Exhibitions First World War Ghana Greek Bindings Greek manuscripts Incunabula India Islamic manuscripts Manuscripts Maps Medieval manuscripts Nigeria Pamphlets Photographs Poetry Preservation Provenance Royal Commonwealth Society Second World War Shelf Lives Singapore Sri Lanka Thomas Erpenius Tour de France Victorians Blogs

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. Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. 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." Yet there is also an enormous relish for the world, and all its “stuff,” which saves this writing from being merely high-minded. “I for my own part,” Prynne has said, “have a positive addiction to the meanest trash and to unmitigated urban pollution.” Over the years he has also immersed himself in the study of shamanism; Chinese; metallurgy; medieval and Tudor music; botany; and geology (which resulted in one of his greatest single poems, “The Glacial Question, Unsolved”).

Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York). The Huntsman of the Rubáiyat: J H Prynne and Peter Henry Lepus Go to Abu Ghraib" by Simon Eales. Cordite Poetry Review (February 2016). The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2023. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the unchanged contents of 34 texts, from Each to Each (2017), written in 2016, to Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023), as well as the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence.