Poems: (2015) third edition

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Jeremy Halvard Prynne, known as J.H. Prynne, was born in Kent, England in 1936. After an education in the English primary and secondary system, followed by a period of two-year service in the British army, Prynne was enrolled as an undergraduate at Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1957 to 1960. He graduated with a first in the second part of the English Tripos, and took up an appointment as Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard during the academic year 1960-1961. He returned to England as a research student at Cambridge University, and in 1962 was appointed to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. An honorary professor at the University of Sussex, Prynne has also taught at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. A prolific poet, he is the author of the collections Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), To Pollen (2006), Biting the Air (2003), Triodes (1999), Her Weasels Wild Returning (1993), Not-You (1993), Poems (1982), The White Stones (1969), Kitchen Poems (1968), Day Light Songs (1968), and Force of Circumstance (1962), among many others.

Part of the pleasure for some readers, including myself, is the discovery of fresh vantage points on the world, garnered from chasing references in the poems, whether historical, musical, literary, scientific or economic. As one reader has said, "the experience I always get reading Prynne, going to the dictionary and the encyclopedia, is the excitement I was cheated out of by my education, having it all served up, rather than, like my grandfather, finding it out for myself (after work) with great effort and little societal encouragement." 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. This autodidactic pursuit, necessarily different for each reader, is an incidental pleasure rather than the whole point of the poetry, though it does seem unavoidable. One should perhaps note that the contexts implied by Prynne's poems are unignorably part of our world, and part of our language (and in their initial strangeness can induce the same combinations of fear and wonder once associated with the sublime). It may be uncomfortable for us to become aware of these contexts, and to become aware of our ignorance of them, but the artist is under no obligation politely to spare our feelings by reducing his frame of reference to that of a notional "general reader", and would be showing scant respect for such a reader if he did. Prynne presents a body of work of staggering audacity and authority such that the map of contemporary poetry already begins to look a little different.'– Roger Caldwell, TLSPrints 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). In fact, Prynne has frequently participated in the forming and supporting of literary communities. After a conventional first book, Force of Circumstance (1962, now disowned), he read and lectured in the US, working closely with avant-garde poets such as Charles Olson and Ed Dorn, assisting with Olson's Maximus poems, and contributing to Dorn's satirical magazine Bean News. Poèmes de cuisine[ Kitchen Poems] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne. 1975. OCLC 500082771. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) 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. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005, followed by a further seven along with a group of uncollected poems to the third edition of Poems (2015).

Difficulties in the Translation of 'Difficult' Poems" by J.H. Prynne. Cambridge Literary Review 1/3 (2010). The poem comes from The White Stones (1969), a book as central to postwar British poetry as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings or Rosemary Tonks’s Iliad of Broken Sentences. Around the time Prynne wrote it, his fellow Cambridge poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson was developing the theories of “naturalisation” that inspired her critical study Poetic Artifice. To Forrest-Thomson, as a formalist, poems are all about language, whereas “naturalising” readings want to think that poems are really, deep-down, about daffodils or train journeys from Hull to London. 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. 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.

Massepain[ Marzipan] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Cambridge: P. Riley. 1986. OCLC 52405901. u Ling-en shi xuan: Han Ying dui zhao, Selected Poems by J. H. Prynne. Edited by Ou Hong, translated by English Poetry Studies Institute (bilingual edition). (Guangzhou: Zhongshan da xue chu ban she, 2010). Tomlinson was a seriously intelligent poet but he was also a descriptive poet who wrote about the natural scene in a way that Stevens wouldn’t do. Of course, that aroused a certain Englishness in me because I knew those landscapes and was party to them and produced by them. Not from Tomlinson’s part of the world, but nonetheless, it was a very English kind of activity. So reading that and reading Stevens and starting to think about composing poems offered a great number of competing possibilities all converging upon each other.

The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J.H. Prynne, ed. Ryan Dobran (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). 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. Hoc Genus Omne" and "Ideal Weapons for Suicide Pacts," Plant time bulletins by Erasmus "Willbeen" Darwin, aka J.H. Prynne, Bean News (1972). 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). 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.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. Brass, published in 1971, indicates the direction Prynne took. “L’Extase de M. Poher” is a sustained and delirious denunciation of the bureaucratic, scientific discourses of technological man. Out of the conflict of these discourses an extraordinary verbal surface is constructed, composed of multifarious idioms, each of which, as it collides with the other, is given as designated by a single sign, “rubbish.” Throughout the larger part of the text, this one sign governs what could be an almost infinite number of significances. “Rubbish” is not bound to any single concept, but can range across the discourses of the modern world. One discourse is interchangeable with any other. In the last few lines, however, there is a crossing over, a chiasmus, which in another context Prynne called the “twist-point.”“Rubbish” is that which gives onto the “essential,”“the / most intricate presence in / our culture.”“Rubbish” alters its status: from being a single sign in the larger field of the poem, it becomes all those signs (actual objects in the real) that can signify the essence of things. In other words, there is a triggering effect, whereby the verbal entity “rubbish” shifts its status in respect of the real, the change in status being the mark of the poem’s access to and participation in the ground beyond it. Prynne’s poetry aims at effecting a disappearance of the ego in an encompassing subjectivity that communicates without intermediary with the essence. Thus the poem conceives of itself as a “model question,” a question both to and of the model that turns the subject, the reader, and opens him to his own access to being.

Sand og Kobber (in Norwegian). Translated by Grue, Torleiv. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober. 1989. ISBN 9788270944934.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. The turnings of thought here—in a poem from Prynne’s 1969 collection, The White Stones, now reprinted by NYRB—are characteristically contradictory. “The continuance / of quality” is proposed as an ideal condition, “the time / of accord” between self and world. Idealism comes to grief, however, when it meets real life: well-meaning small talk in a car accidentally leads to a moment of alienating pain (“He could / have flown off just there as he was… across the / next hedge and into a field”). The temporary “accord” of kindness between two people is broken, and the speaker comes to suspect his notion of “quality” as a mode of romantic solipsism. 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.”