Poems: (2015) third edition

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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. Jie ban mi Shi Hu]. From author-holograph, in original Chinese (Cambridge: Poetical Histories, 22; printed and distributed by Peter Riley (Books), 1992). 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. And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements.

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.” 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. 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. 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. Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.Poèmes de cuisine[ Kitchen Poems] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Marseille: Éric Pesty Éditeur. 2019 [reprint of the privately printed 1975 edition]. ISBN 9782917786574. Du Nouveau dans la Guerre des Clans. French translation of News of Warring Clans, by B. Dubourg and J. H. Prynne (Damazan, 1980). Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. 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." 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.

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 work of Prynne is often seen by many as being difficult - both in its language and its apparently hermetic references. Meaning seems to be flexible, speech is destabilised, and readers are confronted with questions concerning their own status - even complicity - in the relationship between the mediated word, the crafted text, and the external world, without which it cannot exist. It's the idea of the self as centre, the so-called lyrical I that's being questioned here. "Rich in Vitamin C" shows how every human interaction, personal reflection, and meditation on time and place involves others, and effects, and is influenced by, macro and micro changes in the social, economic, and political climate. Above and beyond all else, Prynne's concerns are moral and ethical - he believes even that in the intimacy of the lyric moment, we have an obligation to recognise what is happening in the greater world. Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren’t many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn’t want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn’t know anything else, and hadto write that sort of novel . . . The View Contents List tab below links to a complete listing of the texts included in Poems 2016–2024. 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.

Poems 2016–2024

I am not much of a morning person,” Jeremy Prynne warned us, as we made arrangements for this interview. “My natural habitat seems to be the hours of darkness, ad libitum. So I’ll be pretty useless until about ten thirty or eleven a.m. at best: but at the other end of the day I never tire.” 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. This expanded third edition of Poems (2015) includes the complete texts of seven additional works: Refuse Collection (2004), To Pollen (2006), Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage /Artesian (2009), Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), and Al-Dente (2014), all previously available only in limited editions, as well as a group of uncollected poems. Over thirty later texts are included in Poems 2016–2024 (Bloodaxe Books, 2024). 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. A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature.

Poems is a vast slab of a thing, but its luminous and unsettling poems richly repay the attention they demand.’– David Wheatley, Guardian [on the third edition of Poems] It was The White Stones, published in 1969, that gave definitive voice to his concerns of this period. As “The Holy City” makes clear, the sense of language as both the substance and the form of truth made possible a poetry of luminosity and confidence, in which the conflict underlying this alignment of interests was repressed: j) Appendix: Additional Publication Details [print run of editions; name and location of the printer, typesetter, binder, designer, distributor, where known]Poèmes de Cuisine. French translation of Kitchen Poems, by B. Dubourg and J.H. Prynne (Lot-et-Garonne: Damazan, 1975). 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. 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.