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1.
I pretended I had never read any Prynne before. Which wasn't difficult. I had
not read much.
I also pretended I didn't know that Prynne was what it says on the back of
the book: 'Britain's leading late Modernist poet.' Is he dead? No. Not at
all. It's not that kind of late. Reading can be so tricky sometimes; it's
easy to misunderstand.
And I opened the book at random and read this. It happens to be almost
exactly at the halfway point of thirty-six years of poetry, page 248 out of
nearly six hundred.
Pink star of
the languid
settles by a low window
lap to flit,
give the life
too quickly, the storm
a mere
levelled gaze.
And count the hook by the water,
rely on modest delay;
it is I who
say this, not to
fade or shine out,
to be trusted
and played.
There: heat
rises now
with the bank speckled,
going down to
the point
of noon. Take stock, be
fair while
there's room.
Which is one section of 'High Pink On Chrome' (1975). This is quite nice. An
A-level Literature student could probably do a decent job on it, and tell you
what it means. For me, I have no idea if I should side with whatever the
student comes up with (probably not) or with someone with more jargon at
their disposal, who might argue that Prynne's poetry is about 'the
simultaneous processes and viewpoints of the worlds created in language', as
Robert Potts has put it. This is mainly because I don't know what Robert
Potts means, exactly.
But I do know I think the poem is elegant; perhaps it is even beautiful. And
I know I enjoy reading it.
2.
I took a break, and headed for The Times crossword:
1 across:
Satisfied in the Kodak gantry
3 across: The
rail is interfered with
4 across:
Thanks to the lurid airways
7 across: Go
ahead to the plant rally
15 across:
The sick man polishes his shoes
I wasn't getting very far, so I tried the Down clues:
2 down: A
limit spark under water
4 down: Amy's
lurch gives true colour
5 down: Chill
to the neck
8 down: This
time, the relics turn out in force
I don't know if you ever do The Times crossword. I enjoy it, and if there are enough hours in the day I
can sometimes finish it. Or at least get pretty close. Other days I have
trouble even getting started. The clues can sound like lines out of Prynne
poems: you understand the individual words, they even seem to be strung
together in an apparently sensible way, but your brain refuses to engage with
them or make any kind of sense out of the phrases. And you feel kind of
inadequate and, strangely, a little guilty, because you know you're trying to
make sense of them in absolutely the wrong way. The frustrating thing is, you sort of know what
the right way is but your brain won't go there.
(Oh, and yes, I'm cheating a little here. All the 'clues' above are lines
from Prynne's poems, from the collection 'Down Where Changed'. I wasn't sure
if I should mention this or not, but I decided to err on the side of, um,
caution.)
3.
Poems are not puzzles, of course. Poems are like horses. They have a life of
their own, and challenge you to encounter them on terms about which you
cannot be altogether clear. Having said that, once upon a time I was in a
field with a horse and he looked at me and I looked at him and it was pretty
clear whose field it was.
4.
The poem on page 248 is not the most representative of Prynne's poems, of
course. There is this kind of thing here, in bewildering plenty.
Suddenly in
salt water, some hopeful equine lustre
Folds under
enquiry. Purist's watery bus route
And the bored
plank salesman. Some elite estranged bole,
Slippery on
holiday. Don't touch this. Don't even begin
To touch
this. The movement is easy to the highest temple.
Please note: I said 'this kind of thing'. This is not Prynne I just quoted. I
stumbled across it in a dusty corner of the thing I call my mind.
5.
You know that thing where someone stands in an art gallery and looks at a
piece of abstract art and says, very loudly, My two year old could do better
than that?
Don't you just hate it when you hear someone say that? It's terribly
annoying.
6.
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.
-
J.H. Prynne, September 1985.
7.
The poem on page 248 is not the most representative of Prynne's poems, of
course. There is this kind of thing here, in bewildering plenty.
Ready hands
sanction their new ebb, the especial
oratory shunt
attachment. Overstock digit perverse
deployment
adds a pungent new flavour, stepping
forward to
claim the spoilage; that ragged applause
is for the
assembled strollers with reverse anklets,
their
part in the passion play at consent, on the valve
monitor. The
grading is recognised, no doubts
assail the
ready-to-eat counters of the absentees....
Which is from 'Unanswering Rational Shore' (2001), which just happens to be
the only Prynne book(let) I own, apart from this huge Collected. Mind, it's
probably necessary to say this isn't wholly representative either, because
several poems (and some of them are even in prose) bear much closer
resemblance to conventional methods of discourse. By which I mean, they seem,
almost, to make sense in a conventional way. But Prynne is mainly this: words
strung together in ways that will disorient you, Dear Reader. Oh, and lots of
words you won't know the meaning of without recourse to a dictionary.
8.
I will admit it now. I feel somewhat ambivalent towards these poems. Some
days I warm to the experience they offer, other days I think 'Fuck off'.
Perhaps that's good. I have no idea.
9.
There is, I think, much in Prynne to like. And if not like, admire. The
epigraph to 'Down Where Changed' (1979) says 'Anyone who takes up this book
will, we expect, have done so because at the back of the mind he has a half
formed belief that there is something in it.' A friend of mine who likes
Prynne's work a lot told me that he thought this was a good way into the
poems, and I think he's right. I kind of think there is something in it. I'm
not always sure I know what it is; I'm not always sure I'm even interested.
But even at those times, I'm kind of interested in my own disinterest, and so
the poems have done some sort of a job in spite of me.
I know, for instance, that Prynne's poetry can be argued for on
political grounds, which I'm not too bothered about doing. There is an
argument that goes something like how by saying things the way he does, how
by not sticking to any regular or even consistent way of saying, then he is
resisting oppressive systems of discourse, systems that use language to wield
their power, or such like. Perhaps this is so. I tend to think that even
laying this down as one way of dealing with the poems is itself a pinning
down of poems which actually don't want to be pinned down at all. They rather
prefer to release you from whatever it is ties you down when it comes to words and language and
thinking.
I approach the poems in the only way I know how. I walk into an art gallery
and stand in front of an abstract painting and don't see any figurative
representation, don't see anything I can latch on to and say 'Aha! A parrot!'
(for example). But if I and the painting connect on a level that is by its
very nature unpredictable then I will respond in some way, and I can't say
here in what way, or how, because there is no recipe, but the mind is
excited, ideas buzz, and imaginative life happens. Something unexpected
happens. If art doesn't do this then I worry. This isn't about the
individual, and some vague expression of celebrating the imagination. I think
this is just about the artist doing something true, and the audience
responding to it. Positively or negatively, but responding. The positive is
exhilarating, I think. And bewildering can be good. But you can narrow this
down, and say 'One afternoon I was reading a Jeremy Prynne poem and came
across the phrase Everything is here and is being burned slowly and
is enough and I liked it, and it stuck
with me. I found myself thinking about it on the bus an hour later. Isn't
that good?
10.
The first lines of the first poem in this big book are
The whole
thing it is, the difficult
matter: to
shrink the confines
down. To
signals, so that I come
back to this,
we are
small / in the rain,
open or without it,
the light in de-
light, as
with pleasure amongst not merely
the word, one
amongst them....
I think they are worth thinking about. To start at the beginning has always
been a good idea.
The last lines in the book are
Better broken
keep house
yielding softly gnomic cataract depressed
inwardly sent away. In care from hers
avoidance transit
accept in
strong wardship, order holding trace and lock.
And this morning I can't think of anything useful to say about them at all.
But tomorrow is another day.
© Martin Stannard, 2005
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