The poetry of J. H. Prynne is both obscure and difficult; qualities tolerated in canonical and foreign writers (Blake, Mallarmé, Celan, late Beckett), but treated with enormous resentment and suspicion in contemporary English poets. Prynne’s detractors see little else in the work, perhaps being so distracted by the first few words of his collected Poems (“the whole thing it is, the difficult / matter”) that they seem not to have read any further. Craig Raine, for example, recently wrote dismissively of “a postmodern poetic school led by J. H. Prynne whose purpose is to be difficult – emulatively difficult. (Not difficult to be difficult, actually)”. Nonetheless, it is notable that none of Prynne’s critics feels able to wholly ignore him, or the so-called Cambridge School with which he has come to be associated.
The word “Cambridge” in that phrase has ceased to have much geographical or institutional significance; its alleged members work and live in various cities and countries, and employ an uncategorizably wide variety of aesthetic approaches. For the most part, “Cambridge School” is now a pejorative catch-all dismissal for poets who work outside the narrow boundaries established by the Movement poets and their successors. The newly launched Cambridge Literary Review, however, defiantly reclaims the label with pride: its first issue addresses “Cambridge” and “difficulty” head on, perhaps because its editors and contributors are unashamed of the extensive range of their reading and the complexity of their critical thought.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, a discriminating but unsectarian critic, gently corrects the errors of Raine, his old mentor. Elaine Feinstein contributes a reminiscence about Prospect, a Cambridge magazine (1959–62) which she edited before Prynne, and Philip Pettit similarly and entertainingly remembers the Cambridge Review of the 1970s; Richard Berengarten recalls The Cambridge Poetry Festival (1975–85); Gareth Farmer considers the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson and her relation to Cambridge; and Robert Archambeau offers a provocative and critical argument against the larger claims made for “Cambridge” poetry as a political or ethical force; this provokes some spirited debate in the following issue.
There is much else to enjoy, especially a new poem by Helen McDonald, whose Shaler’s Fish was one of the outstanding volumes of poetry in the 1990s, and who (as an expert on falconry) also offers some gripping prose about her falcon Mabel (“Big Trouble in Little Shelford”; “Two Days of the Goshawk”): to have coaxed new work from McDonald is a feather in the cap for the editors, Boris Jardine and Lydia Wilson. There are also high-powered essays, for example from Stefan Collini on the fate of the humanities in an age of bean-counters and budget cuts, Simon Jarvis on Hegel, and Marina Frasca-Spada on David Hume and book-burning. At £8 an issue (each is well over 200 pages long), or £20 for a year (three issues), it is very good value.
And for those seeking a way into the rewarding but intimidating complexities of Prynne’s poetry, there is also some highly valuable material. In CLR 1:3 (which focuses on translation), Prynne himself offers an essay on “Difficulties in the translation of ‘difficult’ poems” in which the footnotes alone give a thorough and learned account of the long history of “difficulty” in poetry, and of its attendant controversies (a helpful corrective to the large number of people who think the trouble started only in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land). Prynne also makes a useful distinction between obscurity and difficulty:
When poetry is obscure this is chiefly because information necessary for comprehension is not part of the reader’s knowledge . . . and finding out this information may dispel much of the obscurity. When poetry is difficult this is more likely because the language and structure of its presentation are unusually cross-linked or fragmented, or dense with ideas and response-patterns that challenge the reader’s powers of recognition . . . . Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728–43) is now obscure but not especially difficult; Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “Sunday Morning” . . . are difficult but mostly not obscure; Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or, in long retrospect the wuit (“no title”) poems of LiShang-yin (c.813–58) are hard for readers because they are obscure and also difficult; indeed, their difficulties are deliberate and integral to poetic method . . . .
Prynne’s poetry is difficult and obscure because his work is both radical and extreme. It is radical because he is a philological poet: when he uses a word, he does so in full knowledge of its etymological resonances, its historical usages, and its literary echoes. As he remarked as far back as 1963, “Once a poem gets written and I have located a word which this poem has given to me – I’ve won out of the English language another word for my small vocabulary of words that really mean and matter to me – back to the etymological dictionary: where does it come from, what does it originally mean, what great hinterland of implications lies behind this perhaps quite ordinary word?”. His poetry is extreme because it is drawn to unsolved and possibly insoluble questions – in economics, biological science, philosophy, and so on – where models of understanding break down, and where uncertainty and paradox emerge; and to extremities of human life, for example inhospitable or polluted environments, medical situations, poverty, starvation, torture and war. Some see the poetry as ethical, in that it has no illusions about “the purity of language”, and no illusions about the poet or reader being somehow apart from those horrors – moral complacency is rigorously challenged on all sides. Indeed, the later work often seems a grim, fatalistic portrayal of inexorable and inescapable violence and pollution, and of human self-delusion and complicity in these catastrophes.
Prynne has written two book-length commentaries (reviewed in the TLS, January 25, 2008) on single poems – Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 and Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” – and the amount of context and analysis which he brings to bear on those short, apparently simple pieces gives a fair idea of what he considers to be a responsible and attentive reading of a poem. They also relate to his practice as a poet: Prynne constantly juxtaposes different framing viewpoints, or runs them together, until each operates dynamically on the others; the result is complex, with elements in each poem relating to each other by a variety of means – metaphor, concept, pun, music, etcetera.
A new magazine, Glossator: The practice and theory of the commentary, edited by Ryan Dobran, Nicola Masciandaro and Karl Steel, has pieces by Prynne in two of its issues, and devotes another entirely to commentaries on his work. These essays demonstrate that Prynne’s poems, far from being surreal nonsense, as some critics would like to believe, are in fact tightly constructed, and densely packed; they bring together daunting amounts of learning, but also seem to propose a way of looking, thinking, and acting which cannot easily be reduced to an existing ideological or philosophical position; they are exploratory and pioneering. In an acute essay on the poem “L’Extase de M. Poher”, Keston Sutherland writes that “Prynne’s poetry of the 1960s is as intellectually ambitious as Milton’s of the 1660s . . . . Prynne set out . . . a prospectus for philosophical song so astronomically demanding that Manilus might have shrunk from it in trepidation”.
“L’Extase de M. Poher” has often been cited by Prynne’s admirers as a post-1968 manifesto piece (“No / poetic gabble will survive which fails / to collide head on with the unwitty circus: / no history running / with the French horn into / the alley-way, no / manifest emergence / of valued instinct, no growth / of meaning & stated order”): Sutherland usefully points out the overlooked political and anthropological background of the poem, the brief ascendancy of Alain Poher (“M. Tout-le-Monde”), who stood for the presidency of France in 1969; but Sutherland, typically, develops this already interesting reading into a wider consideration of Prynne’s volume Brass (1971) as a savage satirical commentary on the more hopeful aspects of his own earlier work.
All the essays in Glossator 2 are invigorating. Two in particular illuminate the astonishing scale and ambition of Prynne’s work: Michael Stone-Richards on “Again in the Black Cloud” from Wound Response (1974) and Justin Katko on “The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts”. These essays track down the scientific symposia and books to which Prynne alludes, and show him working poetically with and around some “celebrated paradoxes” of biological science. Given that “The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts”, even to Prynne’s admirers, has generally been read as little more than a satirical skit on scientific language, Katko’s remarkable scholarship, drawing on a vast range of sources, is something of an event; and he delivers it with a wry wit wholly in keeping with the manner of the poem he discusses.
These rich and sometimes dizzyingly philosophical essays may, of course, merely encourage another standard slur against Prynne’s work; that he is an academic’s poet, and his fans are engaged in an unlikely job-creation scheme (Joyce’s line about keeping the professors busy is generally wheeled out at this point). In fact, there are fewer academic studies of Prynne than of Seamus Heaney or Carol Ann Duffy; and it is noticeable that Prynne’s later work has received little in the way of sustained analysis. The latest poem considered in Glossator 2 is Word Order (1989). As Robin Purves wrote winningly in The Gig back in 1999: “Critical consensus about the ethical centre of Prynne’s poetics manages to struggle on without seeming to have understood anything he has written in the last fifteen years; critical consensus about the ethical centre of Prynne’s poetry flourishes without seeming to have understood anything he has written in the last fifteen years”. One rather yearns for a reading – academic or otherwise – that would start to explain Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994), or the impenetrable STREAK ~~~ WILLING ~~~ ENTOURAGE ~~~ ARTESIAN (2009).
A Manner of Utterance, edited by Ian Brinton, gives a more generous and accurate picture of how and why people read Prynne; it is a collection of appreciative pieces about Prynne’s work, many by artists, musicians and non-academic readers, explaining what it is that draws them to these strange and beguiling poems. It also contains an honest exploration by Nigel Wheale of one of the harder late poems, Red D Gypsum (1998), which weaves together environmental and economic concerns. No poet, in fact, has treated economics with the sophistication and intelligence of Prynne; the epigraph to Red D Gypsum is from Lilian Chew – “the volatility smile is not symmetrical” – which sounds like surrealist poetry, but is in fact a reference by a hedge-fund expert to the behaviour of the options market after the 1987 Crash; it has been argued that the volatility smile, or skew, proves that the standard model for options pricing until 1987 had ceased merely to describe the activities of the market, and had instead begun to influence them. Through the whole history of economic deregulation since the 1970s, Prynne has been alert to mutually influencing models and systems, and their effect on people and environments; his attention to the language of economics, and the economics of language, has been both prescient and pertinent, as recent developments have made all too clear.
His latest volume, Sub Songs, a handsome small press production in a very large format – similar in size to a volume of sheet music – continues to blend his favourite fierce ingredients: ominous developments in biotechnology; political, erotic and philosophical questions about identity and difference; terror and warfare; the role of song in various human and animal contexts; complicity and agency. The criss-cross of contradictory movements and bitten-off phrases resembles late Beckett as much as anything else he has written (“deny for why none or again, nor at / all time-fast”). The title of the opening poem, “As Mouth Blindness”, is a reference to dysgeusia, an alteration or distortion of the sense of taste; this may or may not be a wry reference to his poems’ deliberate departure from mainstream English poetry’s more cautious ironies and ambiguities.
The reason why the late poems are so challenging is that Prynne’s work has increasingly offered a high-speed polyphonic approach, with phrases and quotations overlapping or interrupted (“a dialectic with the laterals marked in” as he once put it); and the astonishing economy with which he now disposes his hard-won words means that even his shortest poems are now carrying alarmingly extensive hinterlands of epic debate. It is still possible to say what these poems are about; it remains unlikely that anyone will or can be sure what they mean.
If the result is therefore sometimes so entangled as to leave no hook or handhold even for a committed and diligent reader, what results nonetheless is still a remarkable sonic and visual construction; words become uncannily palpable as sounds and signs, and the musical or plastic arts become easier (if treacherous) points of reference. Whether this is success or failure is hard to say: de gustibus (or dysgeusia?) non est disputandum. In 1913, Debussy wrote that “the century of the aeroplane deserves its music”; but as “the century of suspicion” ends, aptly and predictably, in a credit crisis, J. H. Prynne’s poetry may – like it or not – be most fully and restlessly the music of our times.