Hix Eros: On the Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne

Series edited by Joe Luna & Jow Lindsay Walton With an introduction by Keston Sutherland on the late poetry of j.h. prynne. Published in 2014 by Hi Zero & Sad Press. For more information, write c/o Flat 3, 47 Stafford Road, Brighton, bn1 5pe, uk. Copyright © remains with the authors. This work is No. 4 of the reviews periodical Hix Eros. Edited by Joe Luna and Jow Lindsay Walton. Designed and typeset by Robbie Dawson. issn 2056-8908 (Print) issn 2056-8916 (Online) Contents Keston Sutherland Introduction Michael Tencer Pearls That Were Justin Katko Sex — Triodes — Gilgamesh Lisa Jeschke Late Early Poetry: A Commentary on J.H. Prynne’s Unanswering Rational Shore Timothy Thornton Acrylic Tips Joe Luna Dominance Factor John Wilkinson Silicon Versets at Work, Blue Slides at Rest 9 15 43 61 77 87 101 Abigail Lang Translating To Pollen Keston Sutherland Sub Songs versus the subject: Critical variations on a distinction between Prynne and Hegel Robin Purves For-Being: Uncertainty and Contradiction in Kazoo Dreamboats 113 123 143 Introduction: ‘Prynne’s late work?’ The history of poetry in English does not abound in examples of poets whose work has been kept up in unabated intensity into the late stages of life. The meaning of that prospect has very likely been different for every poet. For some it must have been absurd or unintelligible, a transparent case of the displacement of a wish about life into the speculative nebulae of a wishful, sentimental aesthetics. For others the same prospect was capable of being refused as undignified, an old dream best left to erode under the tidal, elegiac pressures of retrospect, whose power is allowed to vanish and maybe sometimes return. Wordsworth, who never gave up addressing the problem how the life of poetical intensity might be extended to comprehend life as a whole, is the original major example of an English poet whose work, almost from its earliest beginnings, is the ardent, perpetual reaching after a logic of late expression that will be hospitable to both the power of originating naivety that first made poetry erupt in and as life, and also the most complex, extended working-out of that power. But Wordsworth could not find in his formulations of that problem, or in his unrelenting efforts to resolve it, nourishment enough to bear poetry, which he once defined in a single word as ‘passion,’ all the way to the end of his life. ‘Strange fits of passion’ grew increasingly strange to life, until eventually the renewal of a ‘glimpse of glory’ in the form of poetic experience was as much just psychological consternation as it was an absolute blessing from nature. Wordsworth has long been Prynne’s acknowledged great poetical teacher. ‘As a final truth,’ Prynne writes in a letter to Ed Dorn on 6th November 1964, ‘if you want to know who we are, just read Wordsworth’s Prelude.’ In his commentary on ‘Tintern Abbey,’ composed in 2001, Prynne returns 9 with unabated conviction to the question of ‘final truth’ and who we are in its recurrent light: What separates at the outset is the apparently divisive effect of years of absence; but just as five years can be mended through echoes marked by repetition, guiding and guarding the genial spirits, so too the intermissions of a lifetime can enhance the vehemence of feeling into the marks of connection restored and held dear. Even the culminations of seasonal cycles, of diurnal rounds and many passing years, intimating a tacit final separation at the close of mortal life, strike no ultimate terrors for the holiness of the heart’s affections, the prospect of a motion and a spirit that, not quite within the boundaries of a traditional theology, shape the oncoming form of a completed life.1 The restoration and holding dear of ‘the marks of connection’ that bind life into a completed whole is more than a matter of confidence, self-persuasion or optimism. It requires a logic of late expression in which ‘the intermissions of a lifetime’ are not counted as sheer loss, or left as blanks in the sequence of personhood or art, but for which those intermissions can be part of the same work of disclosing the unity of life that is purposely done in poetry written in the presence of mind and in the most intense, active grip of ‘strange fits of passion.’ ‘Poetic thought,’ in Prynne’s sense, is located at what he has called the ‘borders and edges’ of language, that is, at the vastest and most nearly untraversable distance from the material corruptions of workaday language, which Prynne in 1986 called ‘the false & corrupted idiom of residual, vernacular commonalty as almost pure cant.’ Some concept of late work would seem to be intrinsic to this idea, too: it is only after the language of ordinary subjectivity (tout court an ‘idiom’) has been exceeded and ruptured at its furthest edge that poetic thought can appear, and the tension experienced on the long passage outward is how the impossibility of simply reproducing earlier forms of truth is felt and can become poetically manifest. Prynne’s account of what poetry is and at what 1. J.H. Prynne, ‘Tintern Abbey, Once Again,’ Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 1 (2009), pp.81-88 (84). 10 only extremity it can be found or reached seems to involve something like a concept of late work as the absolute opposite of the return of the repressed, or Nachträglichkeit. What is reached at that far edge is absolutely original truth, foreign to the poetic subject and its personal life, foreign even to subjectivity itself, and too far out or down merely to be ‘radical,’ in the sense that humanists like Marx used that word. The logic of that oppositional concept suggests that poetry is only real work when it is late work, in the particular sense already sketched. Poetry is real work when it has exhausted all the possibilities of the ‘idiom’ in which life so far has been lived (for some readers the consequence of this commitment for interpretation is that the poetry is ‘unreadable according to any conventional approach to reading,’ as William Fuller has argued is the case with Red D Gypsum).2 But at the same time, as Lisa Jeschke writes in her contribution to this issue, ‘this work is also early work, work written in the frank early morning light.’ What erupts at the edge of language is always the beginnings of the day, no matter how long ‘the night of totality’ that must be exhaustively talked over before it does.3 The symposium for which first drafts of the essays presented here were composed, and which took place at the University of Sussex on Wednesday, 13th February 2013, was prompted and framed by the question whether it makes sense to think of Prynne’s recent poetry as ‘late work.’ The symposiasts were invited to talk about one of Prynne’s books from Red D Gypsum, published in 1998, to the latest, Kazoo Dreamboats, from 2011. Prynne has been exceptionally active during this period, both as a poet and as an essayist and theoretician of poetry. However, much of his poetry from this period has received little or no critical commentary, and the contemporary response to Prynne still now tends to be focused on his early poems, and in particular the earliest of his published poetry that Prynne himself has remained willing to own and acknowledge, Kitchen Poems and The White Stones. These are formidable collections and they are by no means anywhere near seeming to have been exhausted, or even thoroughly summarised, 2. William Fuller, ‘Restatement of Trysts,’ Chicago Review 50:2/3/4 (Spring 2005), pp.241-258 (245). 3. The phrase ‘night of totality’ is from Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p.99. 11 by the criticism that has so far been published; a very great deal remains to be done. But perhaps the interpretation of that early work will be at every stage incomplete and one-sided without some concurrent attempt to track its arguments in thought and music to the ‘unreadable’ extremes of Prynne’s more recent writing, even if that attempt cannot avoid the risk that it will produce a synthetic or downright factitious account of continuity and ‘intermission.’ Not everyone who spoke at the symposium decided to address directly the question about ‘late work.’ Each of the contributions to this issue reflects more broadly or freely on the poetry than a strict thematic constraint like that would allow, and each one determines its own method and chooses its own objects, often without reference to the possibility that the sequence of texts written in the period as a whole could be the context for interpretation of any one of them. The essays are livelier and more actively various for this reason. It may nonetheless be instructive to imagine what points of thematic or argumentative convergence might emerge from bringing together interpretations of Prynne’s recent poetry that are disparate in method, aim, style and sensibility, particularly since it is already a common feature of the essays that none of them straightforwardly proclaims the meaning of its text with anything like altogether positive confidence (and some are, to borrow a word from Timothy Thornton’s essay on Acrylic Tips, even profoundly ‘dumbstruck’). Some possible points of convergence are instantly striking. John Wilkinson gets from Blue Slides at Rest ‘the feel of a moral re-education programme prescribed by an authoritarian regime’; Joe Luna hears in ‘Prynne’s late poetry’ a ‘general tone’ that is ‘relentlessly domineering,’ but adds that ‘its specific content is the microscopic attention to the fine details.’ Wilkinson and Luna also both reflect on the significance of the use of feminine pronouns in Prynne’s work, a question that Michael Tencer elaborates into a complex interpretive drama played out in Pearls That Were, in which Tencer sees the figure of a female reader made to struggle with the overbearance of ‘classic’ literary culture that threatens to suffocate spontaneous interpretive freedom. Robin Purves commends in Kazoo Dreamboats ‘a masterful demonstration of how far you can go in excising traces of emotion from the notion of taking pleasure in cradling your child,’ in the context of a discussion of ‘materialism’ and its sometime putative vulgarity; Keston Sutherland explores similar cutbacks in affect as shifts in the total poetic work of excising ‘the subject’ as a whole. Abigail 12 Lang, who has translated To Pollen into French, draws on Prynne’s own account of the practice of translation to describe ‘Prynne’s late poetry’ as the attempt ‘to reconstruct “some kind of phantasmal intermediary language,” “the linguistic rules for which” the reader both does and doesn’t recognize.’ The pain of frustrated recognition or downright non-recognition is described with extraordinary feeling and even with animosity in Timothy Thornton’s account of trying to read Acrylic Tips, a text that Thornton describes as the very opposite of ‘phantasmal’: Acrylic Tips is embodied in linguistic contusions and haemorrhages, and ‘seems to traumatize itself further and with more vigour the more you read it.’ Justin Katko’s and Lisa Jeschke’s essays look abroad to external, historical literary connections and contexts. In Katko’s essay, the intricate dialogue of Triodes with The Epic of Gilgamesh is explicated in luminous detail, and the central significance of sex to Triodes is pronounced; Jeschke thinks through the possibility that Prynne’s late work, which is always at the same time ‘early work,’ could be read as Trümmerliteratur, the catastrophic, post-Auschwitz ‘literature of rubble, of detritus, of wreckage, of ruins.’ Perhaps common to all of these essays is an attempt, more or less oblique depending on the essay, to reckon with the moralism of Prynne’s late poetry, in the largest and most complex sense. What position does this poetry put readers in, and does it in fact posit a reader at all? What efforts of the interpretive imagination are required to engage with the matter of capitalist history in the forms in which this poetry makes it appear: as markets jargon, as the ventriloquism of the ‘idiom’ of ‘residual, vernacular commonalty,’ as logics of coercion, as the ‘excision’ or blackout of natural pleasure, as philanthropy, as tyrannical grammatical imperatives, and as the commodification and voiding of poetical potential throughout the entire space between language and its extreme edge, at which alone ‘poetic thought’ is at last late enough in the history of poetic exertion to actually erupt? Moralism in Prynne’s poetry seems to extend to every tilt and facet of these questions and to every next question they might yet precipitate. It may be that by reading together the different essays in this issue, it will be possible to start to think more urgently about what moral judgments in Prynne’s late work are right now asking us to do. Keston Sutherland 13 14 Michael Tencer Pearls That Were I’d like to begin with an outrageous contention, and then I will attempt to throw some evidence at it, for good measure. My contention is that Pearls That Were is about something, and that something is quite specific, and it will not flatter just any reading we might find in it – only mine.1 Pearls That Were is about classic poetry, its transformation and potential immortality through contemporary reading, as well as its potential degradation in contemporary usage as academic test material, cultural capital, and status guarantor.2 ‘Classic’ in this case does not necessarily refer to poems based on ancient Greek and Roman forms, but canonical European poems, as taught generally in a homogeneous lump at various fine institutions of higher learning.3 There seems to be in Pearls That 1. Cf. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00460/138553187__4 60069b.jpg. 2. In this essay, citations from Pearls That Were will reference J.H. Prynne’s collected volume Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), both because it is the most commonly accessible for readers and because the original volume was unpaginated. I would direct interested readers to my nerdly bibliographical endnote to this essay for Pearls That Were’s detailed publication history. 3. Or for a more tactful definition, consider Prynne’s discussion of classical poetry in relation to both European and Chinese traditions in ‘What is a Classic Poem’ (EPSIANS 1:1 (2011), pp.83-117). For example, in discussion of Chinese classical poetry, though still apropos here: ‘[S]pecific groups of texts become ‘classical’ in some sense within the selective judgement of critics and readers by being nominated as central to an historical canon, within the evolved habituation of genres of 15 Were particular attention paid to Romantic era poetry, focussing upon its inherent contradictions as a poetry of emotional overflow within an often formal stanzaic structure of rhyme and rhythm. Pearls That Were takes up certain questions particularly relevant to Romantic poetry in relation to its readership: e.g. is the reader meant to feel the emotions described in poetry? Would sympathy denote proper understanding?4 And what would constitute a proper immortality, or simply continued relevance, for such poems, particularly in the contemporary context of academic study? The opposing senses of poetry as potentially immortal and as degraded currency are already evident directly in the book’s title. It comes from a line in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, when the magical spirit Ariel sings to Ferdinand to convince him that Ferdinand’s father Alonso has been killed in a shipwreck: Full fadom fiue thy Father lies, Of his bones are Corrall made: Those are pearles that were his eies, Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a Sea-change Into something rich, & strange: Sea-Nimphs hourly ring his knell. Harke now I heare them, ding-dong bell.5 composition esteemed for excellence and promoted for study as a curriculum for student-readers, as well as being memorised for song and recitation […]’ [p.94]. 4. I only briefly touch on this question in this essay, but I would direct interested readers to Prynne’s nuanced analysis in ‘Poetry and Sympathy: An Example from Coleridge,’ (EPSIANS 2:1 (2012), pp.95-136), particularly the varied discussions in the ‘Background, Points of View’ section [pp.131-35]. The theme is also recurrent in Prynne’s three full-length monographs on single poems by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Herbert (cf. http://prynnebibliography.wordpress.com/publishedprose/). 5. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies [aka First Folio] (London: Printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623) [though likely written/ performed circa 1610-11], 1.2.539-546. 16 While in the context of the play Ariel’s song to Ferdinand is a deliberate deception, the song nevertheless offers a beautiful image of death as ushering in a marvellous unforeseen afterlife, and has tended to be quoted for its imagery rather than for its dissembling use in Shakespeare’s plot. Prynne, I believe, implies both uses in his title: the classic poetry his poem discusses is both immortal and fraudulent, a promise of materials transforming life into something ‘rich, & strange,’ and also something of a sales pitch impossible to fulfil. Whether the texts contain transformative power or lies by which to be beautifully fooled would greatly depend upon the readership and its uses of the texts. Prynne’s use of Shakespeare’s phrase in his title also necessarily (given the subject of classic poetry’s resonance through time in Prynne’s poem) references T.S. Eliot’s use of the same phrase in The Waste Land.6 Eliot references ‘pearls that were his eyes’ twice, in the first and second sections (ll. 48, 125), when discussing the fictional Tarot cards ‘the drowned Phoenician Sailor’ and ‘the one-eyed merchant.’ When the questions are asked ‘Do you see nothing? […] Is there nothing in your head?’ (ll. 122-126) there is an awful intimation that perhaps the merchant has lost his sight entirely through the application of his trade – that is, he’s sold the pearls that were his eyes. As an evidently drowned Phoenician shows up later in the fourth section, ‘Death by Water,’ there’s also perhaps some sense in which death too has become one of the merchant’s wares, connecting the themes of The Waste Land further to the nightmare of war, in which human lives are a form of currency and entire races and cultures are treated as only so much money. While much of Prynne’s poetry, like Eliot’s anti-epic, has already invited more than its fair share of outlandish interpretations over the years, I’m going to argue that this theme too is woven into the mix, as the classic poetry discussed and some of its contemporary readers are also transformed not into something rich, & strange, but rather degraded into currency, something poor, & common. I think the best way to prove these contentions of mine is to begin with what makes Pearls That Were so strikingly anomalous in relation to Prynne’s other work, and his other late work in particular: this book is emulative; 6. First published in The Criterion 1:1 (October 1922), pp.50-64; the Notes were added as of publication in book form: The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, [December] 1922). 17 its structure involves traditional verse forms in symmetric arrangement; there is a traditional use of rhyme and metaphor; and much of the poem may be read as narrative. These features are inherently interrelated, but I’ll attempt to describe each feature to clarify their functions. In saying the book is emulative, I mean that it mimics the experience of reading the classic poetry which features as its subject. It isn’t a parody or a direct imitation of such poetry, but rather traces, as a kind of phenomenology, the effects of reading classic poetry in a contemporary setting. The structure is unique, both in Prynne’s oeuvre and in the poetic canon: following the epigraph, there are six pages of stanzaic verse, four stanzas each, four lines in each stanza, the second and fourth lines uniformly indented, each stanza containing rhymes or part-rhymes; these pages are followed by a page of two stanzas of four lines each, unrhymed and unindented, followed by two indented lines below; then there is a page of, for lack of a better term, a kind of ventilated free verse.7 At this point the regular stanzaic 7. I realise that the use of the term ‘free’ in this context is inadequate, given this verse’s lack of resemblance to material historically termed ‘free verse’ or ‘vers libre’; and for that matter Pearls That Were’s ‘free’ sections are doubled in the symmetry of the book’s structure, the ventilated pattern reproduced line for line from one ‘free’ page to the other. So it should be understood that ‘free’ in this case is only used to mark a difference from the other regularly-structured sections. The term ‘ventilated’ here is simply a description of the spacing of the lines on the page – there are many blank spaces in between and around the lines of poetry. I should also note that in Xie Ming’s essay ‘Reactualising the Unfigurable: Difficulty and Resistance in Translating J.H. Prynne’ (The Cambridge Quarterly 41:1 (March 2012), pp.18096), pp.180-96 [n. 8, 10, 24]), there are direct comments by Prynne on the first of these ‘free’ poems [Poems, p.462]: namely, after Xie Ming’s description of the verse’s ventilation enacting ‘a series of ceremonial gate-structures punctuat[ing] the winding stairway leading to the top of Mount Tai,’ Prynne describes these gates as intimating ‘another kind of logic,’ ‘creating open platforms that interrupt the ascent and descent of the stairs’ [p.184]. We further learn that in fact that particular page of verse was composed on Mount Tai [pp.193-94]. While there remains a great deal to be said about the Chinese influences and poetic thinking in this poem, particularly in relation to the preceding page [Poems, p.461], as partly discussed below, my lack of familiarity with Chinese poetry and language forces me at this time to simply mark the place for further discussion in the future, and to interpret these ‘free’ pages as encounters with different and at least initially difficult kinds of ‘logic’ which ‘interrupt the ascent and descent’ of the reading of Pearls That Were’s primary subject, classic poetry. 18 pattern resumes for four pages; and then the structure is reversed: one page of the ventilated ‘free’ verse; then one page of two unrhymed, unindented stanzas above an indented closing two lines; then a final six pages in the regular stanzaic pattern. The entire structure is thus symmetrical: 6 stanzaic, 1 ‘part-stanzaic, part-free,’ 1 ‘free,’ 4 stanzaic, 1 ‘free,’ 1 ‘part-stanzaic, partfree,’ 6 stanzaic. My contention is that this pattern traces the ebb and flow of a reader’s understanding in the course of reading a long classic poem, wherein the non-stanzaic sections function as moments of difficulty and interruption in coming to grips with the material. The use of rhyme and part-rhyme in the regular stanzaic sections is unusual for Prynne, as is the use of metaphor; in contrast to an essay by Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of pearls titled ‘Pearls That Were,’ this book isn’t about the economics or politics or science of pearls.8 This may seem overly obvious, but it’s worth pointing out because the majority of Prynne’s poetry employs a fidelity to the etymology of its vocabulary, which generally does not result in a frequent deployment of metaphor. So, for instance, we can acknowledge that a poem like Red D Gypsum is at least in part about gypsum; or earlier, a poem like ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved’ does not discuss glaciers as like people, but proposes people as literally the outwash of glacial movement, locating our existence and perhaps to some extent meaning in relation to that geological process.9 In Pearls That Were we find birds and spiders and bees not only in discussions of birds and spiders and bees, but in discussing people, and specifically student readers of classic poetry. I believe the book uses metaphor in this way as indirect reflection of the poetry these people are reading, and the rhymes and part-rhymes are likewise the echoic traces of that poetry.10 8. http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/waltbenj/Pearls.html. 9. Cf. Thomas Roebuck and Matthew Sperling, ‘“The Glacial Question, Unsolved”: A Specimen Commentary on Lines 1-31,’ Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 2: On the Poems of J.H. Prynne (2010), ed. Ryan Dobran, pp.39-78. Online at http://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/g2-roebuck-andsperling.pdf. 10. Cf. Prynne’s ‘Correspondence 14th March 1968,’ from The English Intelligencer, discussing the poetry of Ray Crump: ‘[S]ound in its due place is as much true as knowledge (and all that mere claptrap about information and learning). Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of 19 The narrative conceit I read into the book is of a student reader among other student readers who comes to classic poetry fresh and emotionally open to it, but who is crushed into doubting her own instincts when faced with competing students who seem to know all the ‘correct’ interpretations and parrot the usual critical views.11 The once-open student is scared and confused into ignoring her own ideas when faced with the prospect of failing tests, losing out on the money borrowed to attend the educational institution, and not achieving the status or employment opportunities that partly come from being correct on a regular basis. She loses sleep to struggle through lectures and readings, to interpret each line of poetry correctly and to somehow keep pace with the know-it-alls around her: Catch as catch can, attempted dry loan will fly as yet she’ll call, high and low over wave-like slanted conversation to set a line, to entail and forego Her shadow in channel as were so causing sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe.’ [3rd ser., 6: [n.p.] [pp.13-14]. Reprinted in Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Luke Roberts, eds., Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012), pp.183-85]. I would argue that rhyme in this poem is used in just this way: the classic poetry it echoes in this case is the air we (and the student readers in this poem) breathe. The rhymes as echoes trace the classic poetry’s reverberations in new surroundings, and are ‘no-one’s private property or achievement’: thus, for instance, Shakespeare’s song transforms through time and accumulates new meanings, a new politics even, through its use by Eliot and Prynne. 11. Not incidentally or arbitrarily I interpret this specific student reader of classic poetry as female, due to the overwhelming prevalence of female pronouns throughout Pearls That Were. While there are a few instances of male pronouns and ungendered collective or individual ones (e.g. ‘each,’ ‘them’), the instances of female pronouns, as well as of female-addressed lines like ‘oh madam don’t be coy,’ outnumber all of the others put together, and lead me in this exegesis to identify the unnamed main character as female. While the textual evidence consistently suggests the gender of this specific student reader of the overtly and covertly referenced classic poetry, no particular gender for Pearls That Were’s own readership is implied. 20 a test of infringement, pressing up a case to answer while never sleeping or leave a stain within the cup.12 […] Freely bees awaken, rising to many tasks in jaunty flights forsaken, turning enrolled to occupy their sentimental places and polish off their finer tuning. Trace the residuals, the throng of men who surmount dative assignments as if inching wildly, crazed for upper lights that flood what they want.13 The book enacts a struggle to overcome the economic, institutional and historical pressures blocking a current understanding of classic poetry, to dig deeper into that poetry and the assumptions of gender, race, class and readerly sympathy it makes, to come to grips with the classic work on one’s own terms, not ignoring the issues that have been obstructing a ‘correct’ reading but incorporating them into the full contemporary experience of reading, and finally attempting to synthesise that reading into one’s life. Now that I’ve made some very grand interpretative claims on this book, let me try to unpack some of the references and actual words on its pages, to stand perhaps as evidence for these most likely overreaching contentions. To begin with the epigraph: Over the ferny leaf-blades lying close to the bank and now deeper green from the dry weather a network of bright gossamer threads, woven close together and catching the slant 12. Poems, p.460. 13. Ibid., p.470. 21 evening sun so as to shimmer with a soft, trembling brilliancy; we both remarked on it …14 The day before the Brighton symposium at which this paper was first presented alongside the others in this journal,15 I asked Prynne directly about the epigraph, and he said that he wrote it himself in imitation of his friend and fellow poet R.F. Langley to describe a trip taken with Langley in Suffolk.16 With that determined, I take the epigraph to describe the fragility of finely wrought structures – here, spider webs – and how the measure of those structures is altered depending upon the observer’s placement, the play of light through them, and the effect of the passage of time. Also, given Langley’s career as a poet and English teacher, I take the final phrase of the epigraph (‘we both remarked on it …’) to carry the significance of shared poetic understanding, in appreciation of the natural world as well as the students of English literature the natural world partly metaphorically stands in for in the book. Also, as this epigraph appeared in a holograph of the author’s handwriting the year prior to Pearls That Were’s publication, as the first contribution in the collection Sneak’s Noise: Poems for R.F. Langley, I also take it to act as something of a dedication to Langley.17 The first page of verse begins: On the blush cheek making, to one making to the one, a stealing tear, of blushing as every age betrays the sight, alone.18 ‘Blush’ is an apt description of the transference of emotion through reading, because you can’t literally transfer a blush – both parties, writer and reader, must individually feel something, alone. The promise of sympathetic communion inherent particularly in Romantic poetry, or in any more or less ‘emphatical’ expression, is never fulfilled automatically, but requires a 14. Ibid., p.453. 15. i.e. on Tuesday 12 February 2013. 16. Asking the author being the quickest way of making days of prior research worthless. 17. Cambridge: Infernal Histories / Poetical Methods, 1998 [n.p.]. 18. Poems, p.455. 22 shared language of feeling and attention for a readership of individuals to breathe life into the printed word, and take up the ‘blush’ anew.19 In this regard, I take the first page of verse as a kind of invocation of the Muse of reading, which may in fact be the reader herself. One might compare the Prolegomenon of ‘Book IIII’ of Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger for an opening in a similar mode.20 Also on that first page of verse is a quotation from Ezra Pound, ‘Orpheus tamed the wild beasts,’ from Homage to Sextus Propertius I.21 There is a further Pound quote on the last page of the first stanzaic section, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:22 ‘Newly arise’ [that’s Prynne] ‘the classics in paraphrase’ [that’s Pound].23 The submerged citations act, again like the Shakespeare/Eliot quote of the title, as gradually changing echoes of the subject’s literary studies, ‘the air we breathe.’ On the third page of verse, the student reader’s difficulties in under19. Though William Hazlitt characterises poetry itself as ‘the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind “which ecstasy is very cunning in,”’ his examples of emphatical language consistently highlight poetry particularly rife with exclamatory expressions used to mark a kind of emotional overflow, a feature ‘indeed notable in the impassioned utterance of much Romantic poetry, and in various strands of the dictional and rhetorical tradition making up the repertory of English poetry across its historical development.’ Prynne, ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language,’ Warton Lecture on English Poetry, 1988, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), pp.135-69 [p.136]. The Hazlitt quote is from Lectures on the English Poets (1818); Complete Works, ed. P.P. Howe (21 vols., London: Dent, 1930-34), Vol. 5, p.3. Hazlitt quotes Shakespeare’s The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (London: Nicholas Ling, 1604) [though an alternate version was printed in 1603; the play was likely written and performed circa 1599-1602], 3.4.140. 20. ‘Book IIII’ was first printed in Dorn’s Slinger (Berkeley, California: Wingbow Press, 1975); reprinted in Dorn’s Gunslinger (Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp.143-200; and further reprinted in Dorn’s posthumous Collected Poems, ed. Jennifer Dunbar Dorn with Justin Katko, Reitha Pattison and Kyle Waugh (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012), pp.531-88. The Book was dedicated to Prynne. 21. First published in New Age 25:8 (19 June 1919), pp.132-33 [written 1917]. 22. London: Ovid Press, June 1920. 23. Poems, p.466. Both Pound spottings were noted by Keston Sutherland in J.H. Prynne and Philology (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Cambridge University, 2004), p.11. 23 standing, and the lack of connection to the classic poetry’s intentions and emotions, set in: White matter tracts lying deep down under the code line, clicking on rapid access to a faulted angle dogged, scalene, lacking. The sense of not feeling nor making a hit at the beak, the beak of a crow dark-favoured in passion […]24 The student reader is encountering tracts she cannot decode, and despite working at the matter from a succession of angles she is coming up short, lacking. The crow imagery becomes more explicit later, at p.464, as I will discuss further below, but at this point its relevance is to the student reader’s sense of her own failure to understand classic poetry as well as her peers. On the subject of poetry as code and a reader’s ability to work her way through it, compare the opening of Prynne’s ‘Afterword’ for ORIGINAL: Chinese Language-Poetry Group: ‘Within the great aquarium of language the light refracts variously and can bounce by inclinations not previously observed. Some of the codes will unfold with merely adept connivance, others will swim vigorously into and by circulation inside their own medium.’25 Already by the third page of Pearls That Were a need is flagged up for ‘another kind of logic’ than ‘merely adept connivance,’ though the reader remains not yet confident in her abilities to intuitively seek out such a way through. The racial and gender privilege underlying much of what is deemed classic poetry is critically pointed out on the fourth page of verse: 24. Poems, p.457. 25. Brighton: Parataxis Editions, 1994; as Parataxis 7 (Spring 1995), pp.121-24 [p.121]. Reprinted in Exact Change Yearbook, 1 (Boston and Manchester: Exact Change, 1995), pp.38-40. Reprinted again in Iain Sinclair, ed., Conductors of Chaos; A Poetry Anthology (London: Picador, 1996), pp.355-58. Online at http:// jacketmagazine.com/20/pt-chinese.html#pry-pro. 24 […] new scan over tumults intently, Afric storm scant in hood to undergo. Ascorbic detail in this they ride partly overlooked prior to attitude stormy, defensive shrouding, in a hunt for pitched cornice revealed. Too single! caress fronds as to liberate race hatred’s package tour whose every touch, kiss the rising hand will too bleach-whiten yours.26 The term ‘Afric’ was in use since the late 1500s, and unsurprisingly generally shows up in classic (European) poetry accompanying orientalist perspectives of either abject negativity or idealised sensuality. In Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Canto XII, stanzas LXX-LXXI, it shows up in a play on black and white: Though travelled, I have never had the luck to Trace up those shuffling negroes, Nile or Niger, To that impracticable place Timbuctoo, Where Geography finds no one to oblige her With such a chart as may be safely stuck to – For Europe ploughs in Afric like “bos piger;”27 But if I had been at Timbuctoo, there No doubt I should be told that black is fair. It is. I will not swear that black is white; But I suspect in fact that white is black, 26. Poems, p.458. 27. That is, like a ‘lazy ox’; the Latin phrase is from Horace’s Epistles i. 14.43, ‘Optat ephippia bos piger optat arare caballus.’ [‘The lazy ox covets the horse’s saddle, the sprightly horse would rather plough,’ i.e. everyone wants everyone else’s gig]. 25 And the whole matter rests upon eye-sight. Ask a blind man, the best judge.28 A later editor adds a footnote to the end of stanza LXX, after ‘black is fair’: ‘(Major Denham says that when he first saw European women after his travels in Africa, they appeared to him to have unnatural sickly countenances.)’29 Don Juan makes a witty joke of the suggestion that black is beautiful, with the hedonistic implication that all women are beautiful in the dark. The student reader of Pearls That Were is looking back over the poetry which comprises the canon of Western literature and is thinking critically about what it means for students of such literature when practically all ‘classics’ under review have been written by white men. Regarding ‘attitude / stormy,’ and for a sense of the type of classic works the student readers may be undergoing, compare Prynne’s comment in ‘Romantic Background and Introduction,’ one of his study guides for Cambridge students: ‘If you should be near the top of a high mountain or the shores of a boundless sea, read Blake’s Jerusalem, and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, also Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and ‘Mont Blanc.’ If the mountains should be wild and stormy, read Byron’s Manfred.’30 Prynne is treating the ‘wild and stormy’ emotional content of these Romantic era works with a degree of irony, but he clearly still values them highly, as he nonetheless recommends them to his students. Likewise, though certain emphatical expressions (‘attitude / stormy’) may be viewed critically or even ironically in Pearls That Were (as, for instance, merely ‘defensive shrouding’), such expressions are not thereby altogether invalidated. As the student reader comes to feel later in the course of her 28. Don Juan, Cantos XII, XIII and XIV (London: John Hunt, 1823), p.40. 29. Sir Walter Scott, et al., The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1859), p.725. 30. http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/2/romantic.pdf [July 2006; PDF file created on 15 August 2007], p.1. Note that this is a revision of an earlier guide, http://babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/people/dmh/english/2/romantic. pdf [June 2003], which did not include the sentence about the ‘wild and stormy’ mountains. Both of these documents, as well as Pearls That Were and most of Prynne’s other works, were produced during Prynne’s nearly forty-year tenure at Cambridge University guiding student readers through classic works of poetry as Lecturer and Director of Studies in English. 26 studies (cf. the final section of stanzaic verse), the critical understanding of a work’s slights, flaws, and prejudices can serve to uncover what still-salient qualities exist, and rather than invalidating the text or the pursuit of its meaning, can revivify its examined expressions. On the fifth page of verse, there are lines which I take as possible allusions to John Keats’ ‘still stedfast, still unchangeable’ ‘Bright Star’:31 Shine ahead, cold star like music on the water in the wake of remission from near, from far.32 The student reader confronts an abatement of her interpretive faculties with a kind of prayer for guidance and direction. The possible allusion to Keats would thus be apt, not only for its echoic trace as classic poetry, but specifically in providing a classic image of guidance: the ‘Bright Star’ Keats referred to was most likely the North Star, Polaris, as it remains of all the stars in the northern hemisphere the most fixed (‘stedfast’) in its position. As the North Star has been used as a navigational reference point since antiquity, the student reader treats it symbolically as a guide, wishing for it to provide her with direction when she is lost in her reading of classic poetry. On the sixth page of verse this image is nonetheless transformed in tumult: Causing the charm, the pause never so alertly held abeyantly to flood entire its moderate premium diving like a crashed star in salt water, outbroken fire.33 The student reader is at this point struggling and trying everything within her powers of reason to grasp the elusive meaning of her assigned classic 31. First published as ‘Sonnet,’ The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal (27 September 1838) [written sometime between 1818-20]. 32. Poems, p.459. 33. Ibid., p.460. 27 poem. She attempts to penetrate the poem through both serene reflection and furious passion, but neither seems to provide her passage. Patrick McGuinness, in his brief review of Poems (1999), Pearls That Were, Triodes, and the anthology Other, links this stanza to ‘Star Damage at Home’ in The White Stones:34 […] that we could mean what we say, and hold to it? That some star not included in the middle heavens should pine in earth, not shine above the skies and those cloudy vapours? That it really should burn with fierce heat, explode its fierce & unbearable song, blacken the calm it comes near. A song like a glowing rivet strikes out of the circle, we must make room for the celestial victim; it is amongst us and fallen with hissing fury into the ground. Too lovely the ground and my confidence as I walk so evenly above it: we must mean the entire force of what we shall come to say.35 McGuinness’s reading would have the advantage of treating Prynne’s own earlier poetry as akin to the classic poems that the students are reading. This would open up the possibility that Prynne’s earlier poems are also being re-evaluated through the critical lens of Pearls That Were, a possibility which I explore further towards the close of this essay. However, for the present reference, McGuinness’s reading may not be particularly fruitful, as the uses of the term ‘star’ are so markedly different in these two books. In ‘Star Damage at Home,’ as in so many of the poems of The White Stones, I take Prynne’s use of the term literally – that is, there are actual remnants of stars among us, and, as with the materialist ethics of ‘The Glacial Question, Unsolved,’ we must define ourselves and our purposes in relation to the 34. ‘Going Electric,’ London Review of Books 22:17 (7 September 2000), pp.31-32. 35. First published in The English Intelligencer, 2nd ser., 10, pp.444-45 [1967]; reprinted many times [see the detailed listing at http://prynnebibliography.wordpress. com/published-poems/], it is also in Poems, pp.108-09 [p.108]. 28 actual ground we grow from. In Pearls That Were the stars are metaphoric, symbolic and allusive. While the ‘crashed star’ here could allude back to ‘Star Damage at Home’’s ‘celestial victim,’ as a further echoic trace of poetry as ‘the air we breathe,’ it doesn’t seem to carry with it the earlier poem’s forceful imperative to right living through the scrupulous understanding of natural origins. At the first ‘part-free, part-stanzaic’ verse page there arrives the break from ordinary logic: Lobster-orange, shag in parvo. Peaceful/ pushful kid wants it better, wants sex not fish upfront as well in touch. Spring peaks red-inked, blissful dogged doggerel at joint screaming with rind orange blind-gut36 Though the page carries no title or other paratextual indications, it is in fact a Chinese poem in translation: Che Qianzi’s ‘White Bridge,’ composed around 1995. It is published, in an alternative translation by Zhen Zhen and Jeff Twitchell-Waas, as the sixth poem of Vegetarian Hugging a Rooster: nine poems (Cambridge, UK: Barque Press, 2002): [n.p.]. According to the closing ‘Backdrop’ section of that pamphlet, by Jeff Twitchell-Waas, Che’s stance is situated in the commonplace, even the trivial, which de-emphasises personal style and opens into an unbounded range of language and observation. Compared with most other contemporary poets, Che seems unburdened by Chinese history, both recent traumas and the accumulated mass of past cultural achievements, while avoiding the common antithetical response of derisive cynicism. Younger poets necessarily see themselves as releasing the repressed possibilities of a language that had suffered the extremes of instrumentalization during the period of their childhood, yet few if any have been willing to go as far as Che in giving free rein to the playful possibilities of Chinese. Lacking greater knowledge or insight into Chinese culture, I can only say 36. Poems, p.461. 29 that I read the poem and the subsequent ventilated ‘free’ verse page as a decisive break in Pearls That Were’s student reader’s thinking, an encounter with a different logic and cultural assumption than what she began with, which allows her to return to the work at hand with fresh eyes and a new approach. Che Qianzi’s poem enacts something of what Veronica Forrest-Thomson described in a reading of Prynne’s ‘Of Sanguine Fire’: in ‘refusing to allow its social comprehension,’ it becomes ‘free from thematic oppression.’37 The first page in the second section of stanzaic verse begins with a return to the imagery of stars, spiders and songs of nature. In green return, in demented tribunal as withies flourish and divide for eggs in bold type, eggs still not sold so laid in earth to mark a void.38 The reader takes up where she left off, as in an unfinished essay with ellipses marking an incomplete section (‘a void’), and begins a new attempt to make sense of the work at hand. Already, though, by the following page, all is not well in the vernal institution. all in yellow, all in yellow. But where is the music, the music all on yonder green hill?39 The imagery here alludes to, and directly quotes from, a folk song called ‘The Frog and the Crow,’ sung in England since at least the early 1800s. Given its relative unfamiliarity today and its prominent use in Pearls That Were, I’ll here quote it in full: 37. Poetic Artifice: A theory of twentieth-century poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), p.142, p.144. 38. Poems, p.463. 39. Ibid., p.464. 30 There was a jolly fat frog lived in the river Swimmo, And there was a comely black crow lived on the river Brimmo; Come on shore, come on shore, said the crow to the frog, and then, oh; No you’ll bite me, no, you’ll bite me, said the frog to the crow again, oh. But there is sweet music on yonder green hill, oh, And you shall be a dancer, a dancer in yellow, All in yellow, all in yellow, said the crow to the frog, and then, oh; Sir, I thank you, Sir, I thank you, said the frog to the crow again, oh. Farewell, ye little fishes, that are in the river Swimmo, For I am going to be a dancer, a dancer in yellow; Oh, beware, Oh, beware, said the fish to the frog again, oh; All in yellow, all in yellow, said the frog to the fish, and then, oh. The frog he came a-swimming, a-swimming, to land, oh, And the crow, he came a-hopping to lend him his hand, oh; Sir, I thank you; Sir, I thank you, said the frog to the crow, and then, oh; Sir, you’re welcome; Sir, you’re welcome, said the crow to the frog again, oh. But where is the music on yonder green hill, oh; And where are the dancers, the dancers in yellow, All in yellow, all in yellow? said the frog to the crow, and then, oh; Sir, they’re here; Sir, they’re here, said the crow to the frog, and eat him all up, Oh!40 40. Transcribed by T.I., in Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. 44 (Saturday 31 August 31 The student, in search of the sweet music of poetry and fellow dancers all in yellow, finds that her studies at this dedicated institution are unexpectedly enveloped by hungry crows. The following page contains allusions to still another early English folk song, ‘The Brisk Young Widow,’ at oh madam don’t be coy for all your glory, fear of another day and another story.41 Again, given its unfamiliarity, I’ll quote it in full: In Chester town there lived a brisk young widow For beauty and fine clothes none could excel her She was proper, stout and tall, her fingers long and small She’s a comely dame withall, she’s a brisk young widow. So a lover soon there came, a brisk young farmer With his hat turned up all round, thinking to gain her “My dear, for love of you, this wide world I’ll go through If you would but prove true, you shall wed a farmer.” Says she, “I’m not for you nor no such fellow, I’m for some lively lad with lands and riches. ’Tis not your hogs and ewes can maintain furbelows My silks and satin clothes they’re all me glory.” “Madam, don’t be coy for all your glory For fear of another day and another story. If the world on you should frown, your topknot must come down To a linsey-woolsey gown, where is then your glory?” And at length there came that way a sooty collier 1850), p.222. 41. Poems, p.465. 32 With his hat bent down all round he soon did gain her Whereat that farmer swore, “Whew, that widow’s ’mazed I’m sure I’ll never court no more with a brisk young widow.”42 Here the distance separating the student reader from her colleagues, and perhaps also from the ‘classic’ poetry itself, would seem to be class-based.43 She sees, like the farmer, precisely what she will never gain. She begins now to contemplate discontinuing her task, possibly by leaving the institution, or giving up English studies entirely. Damp top level, checking for a slide away to be even, so we’ll go apart breaking the letter for its flavour grill 42. Sung by George Radford at Bridgwater Union, Somerset, 22 August 1905, transcribed in Cecil Sharp, Folk Songs of Somerset, No. 3 (Novello, 1906). This version, with the line ‘For fear of another day and another story,’ is sung by Peter Bellamy on Voices: English Traditional Songs (Fellside Recordings FECD87, 1992), tr. 10 [the track was recorded live in 1991]. 43. Which should not be surprising, considering the original hierarchical values inherent in that generic term: ‘All these words [‘classic,’ ‘classics,’ ‘classical’] derive from Latin classicus, which is also the origin of the English word class. Latin classicus originally designated those persons belonging to a recognisable class or group, and from there, those belonging to the highest rank or class in Roman society. It was thus from the start a category-idea, to describe common features of those assigned to a social grouping; and it was also a judgement on those features, by implying that the higher the rank in a social order or structure, the more noble or excellent an individual member of this rank would be--by common regard and acceptance. This idea of superior excellence in rank or class was easily transferred from persons to the products of persons, the works of cultural output that define the character of a whole civilisation or some stage in its historical development; in particular, the classification and judgement idea was applied to works of literature.’ (Prynne, ‘What is a Classic Poem’ (EPSIANS, 1:1 (2011), p.84)). Sub-footnote, for what it’s worth: in my copy of the original printing of Pearls That Were, by Ink-In-Print Ltd, Rougham, there are prominent stamps on the paper stock at the edge of many of the pages – at the beginning pages of the poem, on the four stanzaic verse pages at the center, on the page beginning the final stanzaic section and on the final two pages, just prior to the waxy, translucent endpapers. The stamp reads: ‘Classic,’ and there’s a miniature crown dotting the ‘i’. 33 enhanced and near distraught. Yet valid at the counter as on high seas sliding in fresh and salt, evenly mounting now to be awaited, ought soon to be dropped.44 On the final page of the second stanzaic section, the reader seems to have uncovered many of the facts of the poetry she studies (‘with all found’), but no longer feels it to be worth the effort, given the unpleasant snooty competitiveness of her colleagues, and the pitiful prospects of employment (e.g. to be an ‘adjunct’) that she can gain with her English degree. Newly arise the classics in paraphrase, newly precentral in a livid bond to touch daylight and brush its wing fluently, with all found. And slacken its licks at sunrise refusing to uprate glitter at a humid loss of adjunct cupitive desecration, for gloried favour around the house.45 The second ‘part-stanzaic, part-free’ verse page initiates another break, an interruption in logic wherein the student may remain to finish her studies or may leave. The page ends: to spread delicate its random, torrid diploma, her smoothing back for all the world 44. Poems, p.465. 45. Ibid., p.466. 34 like eyes in glance to this, swift departure along that road.46 If the following page of ‘free’ verse is also a translation of another poet’s work, I have yet to locate it. It seems to be equally ‘free from thematic oppression’ as the first ‘free’ verse page, and again I would say represents an alternative logic from what the institution offers. Perhaps, in fact, it signals the reader’s departure. The first five of the following six pages of stanzaic verse are rife with references to the economics underlying poetry and its study. The reader may now be employed, working off student loan debt, or perhaps has to work to support herself while finishing the degree. And gone that road under by a fathom circled with fronds, owing that debt as birds alighting, says she I am all voice and nothing fit to eat. […] It is not there, away, away to last a tax reform, uttermost soaked […] Ever much missed, freedom to make more graces to shade its wildish, loose arraignment under loan to decide. […] Derisive permuted fictions; each one 46. Ibid., p.467. 35 discounting as neatly we can patch a cry, to make clear honours so quickly. […] With pear-drop lips of dew a leap from small tense stranding gets its benefit for the carpet threaded into debit type.47 Much of the mood of this last section is of disillusionment and regret. The student reader attempts to weave the lessons she has learned of poetic understanding into her life with only limited, intermittent success. There may no longer be around her a committed community dedicated to such thinking. There are hints of inspiration hidden in the cracks of quotidian reality – In trivial deep amazement, murmur its song in outward seeming return from a glow foiled to release its wanton, loving primer.48 – yet so much of the capitalist workaday world seems designed to block and belittle poetic thinking altogether, to stymie its natural flow. Thus ‘deep amazement’ appears in this social context ‘trivial,’ there is ‘a glow’ but it is ‘foiled,’ and so many romantic feelings seem to be merely ‘wanton,’ uncalled-for, reckless. On the last page there is an allusion to William Blake, hinting at the possibility for a renewal of poetic energy and emotion even amidst degraded economic or social conditions such as Blake experienced. Much likes waves upon a shore whose day approaches, 47. Ibid., pp.469-473. 48. Ibid., p.473. 36 her time running to meet with joy the face it touches,49 The allusion is to Blake’s four-line poem of Heraclitean wisdom in renewal: He who binds to himself a Joy Does the wingèd life destroy; But he who kisses the Joy as it flies Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.50 It represents only the barest promise of a happy ending, but as an opening onto the possibility of a poetic life, the Romantic life of the poetry the student reader has grown to understand, and perhaps to reach out to with clear-eyed sympathy, it is real. The poem ends: And word upon word, step by next step regaining they’ll walk and talk, wisely flicker some hope remaining.51 There is one precedent for Pearls That Were in Prynne’s earlier poetry which I’ve thus far held back from discussing, and which even now on mentioning I’ll hold back from quoting, no doubt to the author’s relief: both the formal structure of the page (four stanzas of four lines each, with end rhymes on the second and fourth lines), as well as the titular reference back to Ariel’s song in The Tempest, shows up in the poem ‘With Pearls for Eyes’ in Prynne’s disowned first book of poetry, Force of Circumstance.52 Whatever we might make of that earlier poem thematically or in terms of poetic technique, there is clearly no conscious connection drawn in it between the theme of transformed mortality and the historical context – genre, tradition, structural format – of the poetry itself. This is one of the innovations of Pearls That 49. Ibid., p.474. 50. Notebook: Gnomic Verses – Several Questions Answered No. 1, The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. John Sampson (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1908) [written around 1791-92]. 51. Poems, p.474. 52. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p.15. 37 Were. It attempts to renew classic forms of poetry through the transformed content of contemporary reading rather than through superficial allusion or mimicry. There is within the book an inclusive vision of classic poetry as not frozen or untouchable ‘greatness,’ but a critical understanding of its limitations and defects, its uses and abuses in contemporary institutions, and its long-term transformations through historical dialogue. Such critical understanding does not preclude a deep and abiding love. As Michael Haslam wrote, In time I’d understand the pearls that were pure lyrical idealism. […] It’s a mistake, I think, to over-stress the anti-Romantic cynical irony in Prynne. He has as high an appreciation as any poet of the value of ideal glow, the sweet of sweet, the light of light, the rich of rich, the gold of gold. It’s just that he knows you can’t have sweet gold without currency and commodity transactions and beestings. […] We’ve lost the plot: […] the mystical journey from Authenticity to Authenticity via current estrangement, and there’s no Authentic Home. […] And Hope is not much more than that folks like Bush and Bin Laden’ll stop blowing things up, but that cuckoos and larks might revive themselves, and Doug Oliver be remembered, and youth find fresh illusion – all before our day is done.53 I may not have made the case for all my claims about this poem, and I’m certain that I’ve missed some terribly obvious hints and allusions. No doubt a formal training would’ve fixed that… Nonetheless, I think this Haslam quote brings together much of what I contend about the complex relations of Romantic ideals amid the critical realist panorama – what some are otherwise led to read off as ‘disdainful reprimand’ – of Prynne’s lyric voice in Pearls That Were.54 While there are no easy, ideal answers or Authentic Homes on offer, the critical vision of classic poetry here seems not so much a cynical exercise in devaluing Romanticism as an attempt to rediscover 53. ‘Fool’s Bracelet’, in For J.H. Prynne: In Celebration, 24th June 2006, ed. Keston Sutherland (Quid 17 (2006)), pp.56-59. 54. Peter Riley, ‘Lyric, anti-lyric and political poetry,’ The Fortnightly Review (22 January 2014), online at http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2014/01/lyricism/. 38 such values in the midst of contemporary, damaged life. To close, I’d like to offer for consideration a final poem, by way of what I.A. Richards calls ‘documentation,’ to test what ‘pure lyrical idealism’ might feel like after prolonged contact with a critical examination of its historical and socioeconomic mediations.55 Feel free not to peek down at the footnote if you’re up for such a classroom experiment. The Grave and the Rose The Grave said to the Rose, “What of the dews of dawn, Love’s flower, what end is theirs?” “And what of spirits flown, The souls whereon doth close The tomb’s mouth unawares?” The Rose said to the Grave. The Rose said, “In the shade From the dawn’s tears is made A perfume faint and strange, Amber and honey sweet.” “And all the spirits fleet Do suffer a sky-change, More strangely than the dew, To God’s own angels new,” The Grave said to the Rose.56 Can there be in Prynne’s poem, or for the student readers within it, any 55. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd., 1930). 56. The earliest publication of this translation that I can find is in Andrew Lang’s Ballades and Verses Vain (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), p.148 – though it may have been published earlier. Victor Hugo’s poem was published without a title as no. 31 of Les Voix intérieures (Paris: Eugene Renduel, 1837). I found it in Poems for the Millennium Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/London: University of California, 2009), p.435. 39 place still for such a Romantic sense of poetic immortality, despite the commodification, the status impositions, divisions and oppressions, and all associated current degraded uses of poetry in its reified institutional appropriation? When I think of the rose flown in from Italy, plucked by Prynne from the grave of Ezra Pound and placed at the headstone of Edward Dorn in Green Mountain Memorial Park, I discern a proudly Romantic image of poetic immortality, an image unapologetically rich, & strange of a true afterlife in poetry, beyond even the furthest reach of academic crushed spirits.57 Bibliographical endnote: Pearls That Were was originally published in 1999, privately printed in Cambridge, and distributed by Equipage. An excerpt, the first page of Pearls That Were in a holograph of the author’s handwriting, was published the previous year as the first contribution in the collection Sneak’s Noise: Poems for R.F. Langley (Cambridge: Infernal Histories / Poetical Methods), [n.p.]. The full work was reprinted unaltered in Furtherance [alongside Red D Gypsum, Triodes and Unanswering Rational Shore] (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 2004 [printed November 2003]), pp.27-50; and reprinted unaltered, again, in Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), pp.451-74. Pearls That Were was read in full by the author on Zou jin Jian-qiao: er shi shi ji Ying Mei shi ge jingo xuan [Selected Readings of 20th Century English and American Poetry, translated by Zhimin Li; it contains the text of Pearls That Were in English and in Chinese translation, and also includes CD and VCD recordings of Prynne reading this work in the English original]. (Guangzhou [PR China]: Guangdong shoeing yu yan yin xiang chi ban she, 2003), pp.196-237; CD 2, track 15 [16 min 50 sec]; VCD track 16 [unknown timing]. The reading is accompanied, unfortunately, by a light 57. Cf. Jim Sheeler, ‘A Gunslinger of Words: Edward Dorn, 1929-1999,’ Boulder Planet 4:25 (22-28 December 1999), p.1, p.8.. 40 classical soundtrack not of the author’s choosing. Though I don’t read Chinese, I do presume that it is the same Chinese translation of Pearls That Were by Zhimin Li which is later published in World Literature (PR China), 6 (2005), [unknown page numbers]; in 101 Poems [Chinese translation of selected poems, by Zhimin Li (and others?) (bilingual edition)] (Guangzhou: English Poetry Studies Institute, 2008), pp.183-206; and in Pu Ling-en shi xuan: Han Ying dui zhao [Selected Poems by J.H. Prynne], ed. Ou Hong, translated by English Poetry Studies Institute (bilingual edition). (Guangzhou: Zhongshan da xue chu ban she, 2010), pp.190-219. If you know otherwise, please do let me know. Excerpts of Pearls That Were were translated into French by Pierre Alferi and printed in Quaderno, 5 (March/May 2000), [unknown page numbers]; Alferi has since completed the full French translation, and it has just been published as Perles Qui Furent (Marseille: Éric Pesty Éditeur, 2014). 41 42 Justin Katko Sex — Triodes — Gilgamesh Gilgamesh knows how to kill.1 In his essay ‘Faults and Somersaults,’ John Wilkinson writes that “Readers [of Triodes] striving to apprehend this work’s totality devolve rapidly towards a particular sub-system.”2 The sub-system I will devolve towards is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which includes both the standard episodic cycle written in Akkadian cuneiform (ca. 1200 BC) and the constellation of discrete episodes written in Sumerian cuneiform (ca. 2100 BC). Andrew George, translator and editor of the Gilgamesh text studied by Prynne, describes the difficulty of deciphering cuneiform inscriptions upon ancient clay tablets: The tablet and the writing inscribed on it are three-dimensional. A single photograph cannot supply the reader with the different angles of shadow that are needed to read cuneiform, 1. This paper was written for the symposium on the work of J.H. Prynne at the University of Sussex, 13 February 2013. Thanks to Joe Luna for his editorial attention. References to Triodes are given as [Tr x, p.xx/xxx], where the first number is the Book number of Triodes, the number left of the virgule is the page number of the original pamphlet Triodes (Barque Press, 1999), and the number right of the virgule is the page number of the poem’s collection in the second edition of Prynne’s Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005). Citations to page numbers of the poem’s collection in Prynne’s Furtherance (The Figures, 2004) are not made. 2. John Wilkinson, ‘Faults and Somersaults,’ Cambridge Literary Review 3:6 (Easter 2012), ed. Lydia Wilson, Boris Jardine and Rosie Šnajdr, pp.125-134 (131). 43 and also cannot usually show clearly any text that runs over on to the edge of the tablet.3 If Triodes participates in at least three epigraphic dimensions, George’s “different angles of shadow” designate any number of interpretative schemes that may be used to approach it. At least one of them is an inscription upon sexual drama in Gilgamesh, whose primal images and psychological contours are used here to catalyse an attempt to interpret certain lines, verbal tics, and structural elements of Triodes. The poem’s multi-dimensionality is addressed by Robin Purves, in his long review of the poem from 2003, when he describes the title as a metaphor for the work’s “pleiotropic sentences,” an analogy from genetics meaning that individual language-units within Triodes generate multiple parallel semantic chain reactions.4 Prynne says in a 2009 reading of Triodes that the equations used as epigraphs to the poem’s three Books are each a “formula for the operation of the triode-valve, which is an old-style thermionic valve, before the era of the computer alternative.”5 The electronic component known as the triode was used for triggering the opening or closing of electrical circuits in massive pre-personal computers. Purves writes: This is the world as a circuit (and the poem as circuit diagram), a circuit where subtle or brutal measures of control 3. Andrew George, “Appendix: From Tablet to Translation,” The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian [1999], trans. and ed. Andrew George, revised edition (London: Penguin, 2003), p.215. Note also the problem of the specific kinds of ambiguity in deciphering the cuneiform, even after a transcription has been made (pp.209-210). George’s Gilgamesh was known to Prynne by the time of the composition of Triodes, as primarily evidenced by: Prynne, ‘Letter to Dr Andrew George’ [1 August 1999], Quid 5, ed. Keston Sutherland (Cambridge: August 2000), pp.2-7. Triodes was finished on a date no later than 9 September 1999 (source: computer record of J.H. Prynne). 4. Robin Purves, ‘J.H. Prynne’s Triodes,’ The Paper 7, ed. David Kennedy (Sheffield: November 2003), p.48. 5. Prynne, poetry reading with William Fuller, The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Room at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (15 April 2009), video online at: http:// www.saic-media.net/video/saicmedia_video.php?vFile=art_design/special_collections/joan_flasch/PrynneFuller (accessed 15 December 2013). 44 can be exercised at intermediate points, to reduce or amplify power levels: politics by any other name.6 The triode (or vacuum tube) was a major historical advancement in audio amplification technology. By its title alone, Triodes promises an escalating lyrical fury, where through the Gilgamesh bestiary, bird song becomes Thunderbird song. In ‘A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language’ (2000), Prynne writes: “The total scheme, in whatever kind, is the final obstacle, because it interdicts the even possible part-success of dialectical enquiry.”7 It is my sense that the “triode” is Prynne’s image of the mental tool by which “the intense cultivation of dialectical consciousness” must be sustained in order for poetry to be made in a world where language “sits [and has always sat] at the tables where war is planned and social consciousness manipulated.”8 The third stanza-page of the first Book of Triodes invokes the patch cords of mid-century analogue computing and addresses the stakes of a miscalculation in the poem’s composition: Patch a very light, ironical slant beam pervaded with ticket coded, you get a spare on target too. Irene will do it up later, blister none left, or voicemail derogation leaf by leaf so dropped for a sister’s patter return. As from a maiden chamber, shading her brow pray for us lady, our yeast plugging each nostril, spoken Pandora’s file intact. Secondary polished upreach fax by return, she will attenuate nice and easy their shadow caloric tape, outlet for day by day jurisdiction. 6. Purves, ibid. 7. Prynne, ‘A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language’ [5 August 2000], Quid 6, ed. Keston Sutherland (Cambridge: November 2000), pp.25-26. 8. Ibid. 45 (Tr I, p.7/483) The shape of this stanza is unique to Triodes, with its lines alternatively flush-left and indented to a stable, perhaps slightly arbitrary rule. Deviating from the Pindaric model established by the poem’s first two stanza-pages (and continued by all twenty-seven of those remaining), this stanza-page seems to be announcing its special function as commentary: in its escalation to thunder-pitch, the poem must avoid losing its voice to the targets of its own critique. To flinch away from the burn of “first flight over / the Tenter Ground alto” will cause the “hot fuse” of this satirical lyric’s “beam” to be “pervaded / with ticket coded,” or defused by the politically corrective outrage-portions of the liberal news media. Such reactions, taken to global scale, generate only enough power to reheat an opportunistic meal of critical leftovers (“you get / a spare on target too”) so pliant that it will believe in the ‘humanitarianism’ of the conversion of human lives into waste products by the forces of international ‘peacekeeping’ (“Irene will do it up / later, blister none left”). Wilkinson describes Pandora and Irene as agents for “spreading pestilence and bringing peace respectively,” going on to say that “per contra peacekeeping forces attract a jaundiced eye” (p.132). Irene’s forces are accompanied by those of her “sister,” the “return” of whose “patter” is an indelicately understated epithet for the bombing and strafing of civilian populations. * Cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets are not only the means by which The Epic of Gilgamesh is preserved. They also comprise some of the world’s oldest computers: it was in the cuneiform script that the first known algebra was recorded.9 Just as the figure of Irene is commanded to “count up / to base ten” (Tr III, p.35/507) – which is explicitly not to say ‘count down’ (because it is Irene who must ‘count to ten’ and overcome her anger so as not to become her sister), and which is furthermore explicitly not an allusion to 9. For background on the use of cuneiform in the history of mathematics, see Otto E. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). 46 the Babylonian base sixty – we too may count. The first two Books of Triodes each have 166 lines, while the third has 183.10 166–166–183 is isomorphic to the three-part structure of the Pindaric ode (strophe–antistrophe–epode), where each half of the strophic dyad shares a prosodic identity with the other, and the epode as closing third is a prosodical variation on the preceding pattern. The triad’s division into dyad and monad is significant for a consideration of the central dramatis personae of both Triodes and the episode of Gilgamesh to which the numbers 166 and 183 seem to cryptically refer. 183 is the total number of verse-lines which George ascribes to Tablet VI (“Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven”) of the Akkadian Gilgamesh cycle, with the Tablet’s penultimate page ending on line 166 (pp.47–54). The crudest fact of Triodes’ structure, the number of its lines, appears to be determined by laws derived from the central Tablet of this twelve-tablet epic (as also from the epic’s presentation as a product of Western scholarship and book production). The dramatic importance of Tablet VI is described by Prynne in his published letter to George: One reading of the narrative as a whole has to be […] that when Gilgamesh returns in heroic triumph after the conquest of Humbaba [the unslayable guardian of a holy cedar forest] and vaunts himself in all his kingly glory, his superbia fatally attracts the sexual appetite of Ishtar [in Tablet VI], and his scorn for her charms […] sets off the whole chain of events which bring the gods out against him and Enkidu and seal Enkidu’s fate, leaving the survivor with an unsupportable burden of remorse and isolation and sorrow.11 The textual material which Triodes lifts from Gilgamesh is taken entirely from the Sumerian poem-episode in which Ishtar features heavily, called “Bilgames and the Netherworld,” in which episode Gilgamesh is troubled by 10. The numbers 166 and 183 each have only four divisors (respectively: 1, 2, 83, 166, and 1, 3, 61, 183). It’s probably a long-shot, but this fact may possibly be related to Prynne’s triode-valve equations. 11. Prynne, ‘Letter to Dr Andrew George,’ p.6. Following this passage, Prynne goes on to write: “Yet a turning point or fulcrum in such a narrative could be an accident of its formal structure rather than part of its deep causal mechanism.” 47 the anxiety that death will precede his reproduction of sufficient offspring.12 The story of Tablet VI from the later Akkadian cycle is that Ishtar, the goddess of sex and war, falls in love with Gilgamesh, half-mortal king of the city of Uruk, Ishtar’s cult centre. Gilgamesh refuses and mocks her, reminding her of the numerous men her desire has destroyed. “Das war ich mal!” (Tr II, p.26/500).13 Enraged, Ishtar sends a celestial bull to kill Gilgamesh and wreak havok on Uruk. The bull is killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, which further enrages Ishtar, driving her to convince the gods to bring Enkidu’s life to a premature end. Enkidu’s death sends Gilgamesh into prolonged and bitter mourning for his beloved companion, and only after maggots emerge from Enkidu’s nostrils does Gilgamesh end his vigil over his friend’s remains, abdicating his kingship and fleeing Uruk to wander the wilderness, forlorn, half-naked, and delirious with mortal anxiety. In a Sumerian version of the same episode, entitled “Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven,” Ishtar demands that Gilgamesh (known in Sumerian as Bilgames) refrain from performing his civic duties: ‘O wild bull, you shall be my man, I will not let you go, O lord Bilgames, you shall be my man, I will not let you go, in my temple Eanna I will not let you go to pass judgement, in the holy Gipar I will not let you go to render verdicts, in the god An’s beloved Eanna I will not let you go to pass judgement! O Bilgames be you . . . , and I will be . . . !’14 12. The Gilgamesh borrowings in Triodes, sometimes in slightly altered form, are: “the ovens of the land” (Tr I, p.12/488; George, p.179); “after the earth had been separated from the sky” (Tr I, p.12/488; George, p.179); “making the reeds jump and sway” (Tr I, p.12/488; George, pp.179-180); “the son who had a mother, she / brought him bread: / the brother who had a sister, she / brought him bread:” (Tr I, p.12/488; George, p.183); and “As for the tree he tore it out / at the roots and snapped off its branches, / the sons of the city who had come with him / lopped off its branches, lashed them together” (Tr II, p.20/494; George, p.183). 13. “Das war ich mal!” (‘That was me once!’) is a line spoken by the character Schigolch in the final act of Frank Wedekind’s Die Büchse der Pandora (‘Pandora’s Box’) (1904), the second half of his Lulu tragedy, after Erdgeist (1895), upon which pair of plays did Alban Berg base his opera Lulu (1935). Schigolch’s words are subjunctive, projected into the mouth of Lulu, reflecting on the loss of her beauty. 14. George, “Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven,” p.170. 48 But Gilgamesh’s mother warns him: “The gifts of Inanna must not enter your chamber, / The divine palace lady must not weaken (your) warrior’s arm!” Accordingly, Gilgamesh will not let a woman, much less this goddess of love, dictate the schedule of his duties and pleasures. Gilgamesh apparently abstains from the union of any heterosexual domestic partnership, and in the Akkadian version of the epic, Gilgamesh’s friendship with Enkidu is the closest he comes to a stable romantic partnership. As Gilgamesh’s mother prophesies: “Like a wife you’ll love him, caress and embrace him.”15 Gilgamesh and Enkidu first meet when, on his way to take his droit de seigneur with a new bride, Gilgamesh finds Enkidu incredulously barring his way to the bridal chamber; in trial bonding, they wrestle one another in the street, proving themselves an unprecedented equal match. The consequential triangulation of Ishtar (goddess of love and war) and the Gilgamesh/Enkidu dyad has its analogy in Triodes with Pandora/ Irene and the (ostensibly male) “I.” In the interior of Triodes’ final book, this “I” multiplies to “we” and hovers for several stanza-pages, combined with either Pandora or Irene.16 If a diode represents the state in civil war – Israel/ Palestine, England/Ireland – this wavering pluralisation of the first-person pronoun displays a principled political ambivalence. In “Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven,” Gilgamesh and Enkidu bind themselves to one another in a sacrificial rite, filling the severed horns of the slain bull of Ishtar with “sweet oil” and offering them up in the goddess’ sacred temple.17 This image of sexual union, parading the power symbols of Ishtar’s great pet, does not calm the goddess’ rage, but enflames it. Ishtar’s revenge destroys the only true object of Gilgamesh’s love, leading him on a tragic quest for immortality. In his letter to George, Prynne writes: “I am struck by the tremendous pathos of failure and defeat in this story, expressed with the deepest force by the death of Enkidu and the subsequent distressed wanderings of Gilgamesh.”18 An allusion to the failure of the peace agreement forged between Palestine and Israel occurs in the final line of Triodes’ first stanza-page: “with the tatter of a homonymous city” (Tr I, p.5/481). The city of Wye River, Maryland, site of the October 1998 peace talks between 15. 16. 17. 18. George, Tablet I (“The Coming of Enkidu”), p.10. Tr III, pp.35/507, 38-40/510-512. George, p.175. Prynne, ‘Letter to Dr Andrew George,’ p.3. 49 Palestine and Israel, is “homonymous” with the River Wye of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798). The homonym linking Wordsworth and Palestine casts up a dual-image of the ruins of Tintern Abbey and the ruination of Palestine. This dyad becomes a triode by the introduction of a third figure: the contemporaneous English ruin caused by IRA bombs. Triodes does not argue for peace or seek out a means of discovering it. Its starting premise – “Pandora made enlightened states for her sister” (Tr I, p.5/481) – is that war generates peace. The two form a dialectic: as peace has no teleological end-point, there can be no end to the war required to enable it. The final words of Triodes declare the impossibility of effective peace agreements in the wars in Britain and Palestine: Irene are you still out there, you’ll get burned my sweet, uh never the prettiest sight. Time to go in and down, all sore points, and feed unmixed their flame. (Tr III, p.42/514) Prynne suggests to George that in the Introduction to his translation of Gilgamesh, he mistakenly avoids the “ironies in the entire final outcome of the narrative.” George reads Gilgamesh’s return to Uruk and his acceptance of “repute in retrospect as the rebuilder of his city” as adequate compensation for his failure to acquire the status of full godhood by the achievement of immortality. In this way, Gilgamesh restabilises the shaken social order, confirming the divisions between man and god, subject and ruler. In contrast, Prynne agrees with Rilke’s interpretation, which acknowledges that Gilgamesh is a tragic figure, right up to the end of the epic, where “the irony of defeat and the fear of a solitary and pointless end” find no absolute consolation in the “fall-back option” of ‘pride’ in “bricks and cults” (p.4). The catalyst for this tragedy is of course not Gilgamesh’s mortality, but the mortality that he shares with his deceased partner Enkidu. The lost promise of Enkidu’s love connects the tenacious acceptance of tragedy’s endurance 50 (Gillian Rose: “Keep your mind in hell”) with the theme of sexual union which I shall now discuss.19 The grunting we can imagine attending Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s grapple at the threshold of the unnamed bride’s chamber in the centre of Uruk (by which combat “The door-jambs shook, the wall did shudder”) shifts into Enkidu’s weeping as he forges his legendary friendship with Gilgamesh.20 Inversely, the dash of lyrical sugar that is the interjective “oh” is substituted in Triodes for the artificial sweetener “uh.” From the poem’s first “uh,” Triodes would appear to be a lyric history whose will to empathy has been invaded by the luxury un-intensities of boredom, ambivalence, half-carelessness, banality. shock limits, uh Pandora your leading kravatt will rise to the sun with its charade attuned in rampage peccant for geminate rooting, the split double to mark the horizon with the tatter of a homonymous city. (Tr I, p.5/481) The irony of this interjection is brutal, since we know too well that Pandora unwittingly possesses a weapon of perpetual mass destruction. It is not until the first stanza-page of the second Book that we find “uh” used in a syntactical position where it is not immediately legible as pseudo-apostrophe or imperative pseudo-exclamation: “Get ready / to uh shed a tear here” (Tr II, p.19/493). The imperative ‘oh shed a tear’ would not be improbable in a lyric ode, yet here we have just the opposite. This usage is mimetic of linguistic hesitation and the irony of internalised self-disbelief, and so it is only by the second Book that previous instances of “uh” are revealed as spectacular replacements for “oh,” as a series of copy-paste diversionary pranks while the assault-team sneaks in through the textual front door. This is a metonym for “early glory stunts” (Tr I, p.11/487), pre-emptive strikes 19. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: Shocken Books, 1995), p.74. 20. George, Tablet II (“The Taming of Enkidu”), pp.16-18. 51 on an impassioned lyrical subjectivity shown up to be just as obsolete as the OED deems the word “clamation,” whose definition (“A crying out, call, invocation”) makes it a fine generic descriptor of “oh” in both its apostrophic and exclamatory forms. The phrase “in memorial for spent out ekphrastic / clamation” (Tr I, p.8/484) is mock-nostalgia for the self-righteous clamor raised by long-distance bourgeois witnesses to Western aggression in the near East, which Prynne has described as “luxury window-shopping for those normally busy with more important things.”21 This busyness comes at the expense of the lives destroyed by engineered economic melt-downs in the global south. Prynne writes in ‘A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language’: All bystanders are by definition imperfectly observant, and mostly assuage this imperfection by climax outbursts of sanctimony. The complicity with bad consciousness is universal, though it may be argued that societies with more power to elaborate fanciful domains of individual freedom and purity of heart ought maybe to carry more of the guilt for their own self-deception. The only workable alternatives are sainthood (model now discontinued) or the intense cultivation of dialectical consciousness.22 The “uh” in Triodes is a sarcastic imitation of liberal ideology, a stunt which short-circuits the painful transformations wrought by dialectic, mocking the pretence that one may side-step false-consciousness without surmounting it, and scorning the belief that one may arrive at the absolute culmination of all necessary truth. The concluding declaration to Prynne’s lecture ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language’ reads: […] that admission and understanding under such stress of feeling must fully admit false consciousness if the moment of 21. Prynne, ‘A Quick Riposte,’ p.25; quoted in Purves, pp.56-57. 22. Prynne, ‘A Quick Riposte,’ p.25. 52 stress is to locate the possibility of more true and completed forms of culmination.23 Emphatic utterance as prelude to culmination takes us a step beyond lyrical “stress of feeling” and into the domain of what can never flourish in tranquil recollection, though easily the product of “luxury window-shopping.” This is the domain of actual fucking. When the primary activity of desire in manifest physical cooperation is being realised in the sexual act, a lover might very well be suspicious of their partner’s ‘oh’ if it comes out as a wellrounded expressive flourish, dangerously teetering into the inauthenticity of premeditated lyrical performance. ‘Uh’ is an explicit debasement and deformation, a carnivorous grunt in the economy of libidinal collaboration. While the sound identity of ‘oh’ has a kind of downward curve, with the lips moving together at the conclusion of the particle, ‘uh’ is more of a sonic plateau, an ‘oh’ without closure: static because the subject has no need for well-formed lyric speech when desire is so ardently within the act of its own culmination. The groaning lover is at least one identity of the “dope / provoked to neither shout nor sigh” (Tr I, p.8/484). A lover may also groan of a love that is unrequited or sexually unrealised. Once Enkidu’s body has rotted so badly that Gilgamesh can no longer bear to stand mournful guard over it, the narrative of the epic cycle jumps abruptly to Gilgamesh wandering alone in the wilderness, frantic with desire for immortality. To use the words of the final stanza-page of Triodes, Gilgamesh has left behind “a distant city crowned / by a giant classical nipple” (Tr III, p.42/514), which also clearly describes a windowframed background of the painting Eva Prima Pandora.24 and stitched up. This is called ‘The View from the Balcony’, you can download a copy for your own personal use whenever you want. Across the back of Jean Cousin’s portrait of Pandora posing as Eve you can see under the breast-arch 23. Prynne, ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language,’ Warton Lecture on English Poetry, 1988, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988), pp.135-169. 24. Jean Cousin the Elder, Eva Prima Pandora, ca. 1550, The Louvre. 53 of decayed masonry a distant city crowned by a giant classical nipple, real cute but not a patch on a navel to die for. Of course I knew the children were starving, probably, (Tr III, p.42/514) As Gilgamesh wanders in despair, the sexual promise of the metropolis, origin of at least one of the “liquids” which Pandora has “prized” for Irene (Tr I, p.5/481), no longer adorns Gilgamesh. In Eva Prima Pandora, the nipple is also feasibly a mountain, but “having travelled each and every road,” it is at a geological structure greater than a single mountain that Gilgamesh finds himself. Nearing the edge of the world, Gilgamesh arrives at a profoundly erotic geological structure, a pair of “twin mountains” called “Mashu,” described as “daily guard[ing] the rising sun, / whose tops support the fabric of heaven, whose base reaches down to the Netherworld.”25 In order to pass beyond this double world-mountain, Gilgamesh must race Ishtar’s brother (the Sun), for twenty-four hours in the total darkness of a tunnel passing through Mashu’s bowels. This road is recorded on no terrestrial map: it is a cosmological path, “the hidden road where rises the sun.”26 After running for “twelve double-hours Gilgamesh came out in advance of the Sun,” finding himself in an incredible garden whose plants bear jewels and precious stones as their fruit and blossom. As Gilgamesh emerges, he is followed immediately by the dawn, the light of which makes this miraculous place gleam and sparkle around him. Here is George’s translation of the fragments describing Gilgamesh’s emergence into the garden: . . . . . . there was brilliance: he went straight, as soon as he saw them, to . . . the trees of the gods. A carnelian tree was in fruit, hung with bunches of grapes, lovely to look on. 25. George, “Bilgames and the Netherworld,” p.198; George, Tablet IX (“The Wanderings of Gilgamesh”), p.71. 26. George, Tablet X (“At the Edge of the World”), p.80. 54 A lapis lazuli tree bore foliage, in full fruit and gorgeous to gaze on. * * * . . . cypress . . . . . . . . . . . . cedar . . . . . . . . . , its leaf-stems were of pappardilû-stone and . . . Sea coral . . . . . . sasu-stone, instead of thorns and briars there grew stone vials. He touched a carob, it was abashmu-stone, agate and haematite . . . . . . 27 This crystalline vegetation is a promise of the immortality-giving “Plant of Heartbeat” which Gilgamesh will eventually acquire, later in the epic. But it is also a mocking parody of that immortality, and is a forward indication of the banal circumstance by which the “Plant of Heartbeat” will be stolen out from under him.28 Heroic cult worship and human offspring are the only consolations left to Gilgamesh. His consummation with the universe does not extend his life beyond death, but simply gives him more of the material wealth that he already has. And unlike so many other trees that Gilgamesh uproots in his history, he does not fell these “trees of the gods” and plunder their rich fruits. In his letter to George, Prynne notes that “the lacunae in [this tablet] have a suggestive eloquence all of their own,” which I take to mean that the lacunae themselves come to imitate the momentary paralysis of Gilgamesh’s destructive instincts, with his exclamatory but speechless astonishment being a dual function of his great physical exhaustion and the exhilarating beauty of this heavenly garden (p.5). Gilgamesh’s ecstatic paralysis in the garden of jewels is the end of a process of procreative sexual exertion allegorised as a feat of cosmological endurance that begins with his astonishment at Mashu’s front, where he makes no attempt to slay the “scorpion-men” standing guard at the entrance.29 Whereas the sniper-figure 27. George, Tablet IX, p.75. 28. George, Tablet XI, p.99. 29. “There were scorpion-men guarding its gate, / whose terror was dread, whose glance was death, / whose radiance was fearful, overwhelming the mountains – / 55 haunting Triodes with a “Barrett Light 50” (Tr II, p.23/497) kills without moving, Gilgamesh moves through Mashu without killing. His passage through the cosmic mountain is “What makes the rays cry out and rise,” (Tr I, p.14/490), where “rays” is not just the sun, in an Orphic choreography of deliverance and revelation, but also the ‘race’ of mankind (against the gods). Gilgamesh is no longer king once he has quit Uruk; he is mankind’s metonym, enslaved to mortality, “cry[ing] out” for the godly power of immortality. (“Irene, we are the slave market now / not maybe but crying aloud for master suites,” [Tr III, p.39/511]). Gilgamesh’s penetration of Mashu consummates the mountain’s re-integration of the broken Earth/Sky complex (a theme in Assyrian cosmogony referenced in Prynne’s Gilgamesh borrowing: “after the earth had been separated from the sky”).30 The Triodes passage continues with the end of sexual intercourse defined by the male orgasm: “What makes the rays cry out and rise, / to fall with a soft shrinking tremor,” (Tr I, p.14/490). Triodes seems to invert the Gilgameshian monolith of masculine sexual power. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are converted to Pandora and Irene in an uneasy transfer: the sisters are targets of sarcasm and scorn, yet they are also the representatives of a revolt against subservience to patriarchal rule. In “Bilgames and the Netherworld,” we read: “The son who had a mother, she brought him bread, / the brother who had a sister, she poured him water.”31 The context for this passage is that the “young men of the city” are playing a game involving a mallet and ball crafted from the ruins of a demon-possessed willow tree that once grew in Ishtar’s garden. Playing against Gilgamesh (who is “mounted piggy-back on a band of widows’ sons”), the youths are exhausted, and are therefore brought sustenance by their mothers and sisters. In Triodes, the Gilgamesh passage becomes: the son who had a mother, she brought him bread: the brother who had a sister, she brought him bread: all in abundance of necessity setting the strings at sunrise and sunset they guarded the sun.” (George, Tablet IX, p.71). 30. Tr I, p.12/488; George, p.179. 31. George, “Bilgames and the Netherworld,” p.183. 56 tighter to promote the raft of confusion, (Tr I, p.12/488) What is removed from the Gilgamesh borrowing is water. Dry food is double-present, “in abundance of necessity” (just as the post-coital garden of jewels presents Gilgamesh not with immortality, but with more of that with which he is already rich). The water-bearing sister is replaced by one who does just as her mother does, feeding her brother rather than hydrating him. Withholding the foremost “prized liquid” in defiance of the needs of biological replenishment, the sister protests against domestic slavery. The desiccation of the field of play instrumentalises thirst as a weapon in a sex war, and Pandora, on the first stanza-page of Triodes, controls the agricultural water supply. Though water is refused of males, it is given to the seeds in the ground. […] Licking her finger she poured new water into a crevice in the ground for them both so, decurrent cheek facing cheek: catering soft lair now, Irene, plant group mother you infix shock limits, uh Pandora your leading kravatt will rise to the sun with its charade attuned in rampage peccant for geminate rooting, (Tr I, p.5/481) In the fifth line of Triodes’ first stanza-page (“Licking her […]”), it is Pandora who brings forth life from the soil, and by the page’s antepenultimate line (“in rampage peccant […]”), she embodies the Gilgamesh who plunges beneath Mashu’s peaks in search of immortality. The line “in rampage peccant for geminate rooting” can be read as a covert linguistic performance of Gilgamesh’s journey through Mashu. “[G]eminate” means doubled, with a linguistic sense referring to identical adjacent speech sounds (an important sense as regards the poems’ self57 consciousness of its own puns).32 But “geminate” also has a botanical usage, describing the doubling of leaves along a plant stem. Gilgamesh’s fixation of desire upon the erotic geography of Mashu leads him to plow into its subterranean darkness with superhuman ardor, in reward for which he is presented with desire’s crystallised fruition in the garden of jewels (where the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology relates ‘jewel’ to the Latin for ‘pastime, sport’). Further, we might imagine “geminate” as a verb describing the intensive process of bringing a precious stone into existence, as in a jewel’s germination, which speculation leads to the obsolete verb “gem,” meaning “to put forth buds; to put forth a blossom; fruit.” Chambers traces the noun “gem” back through its Latinate senses of “precious stone,” “precious thing,” and “bud or sprout,” then locates its Indo-European ancestor as “*gembh” or “bite.” These bites of jewels will not allow Gilgamesh to break his fast with a thirsty slurp of fructose. And though beyond the garden there is a tavern by the sea, its keeper, Shiduri, locks her gates against Gilgamesh’s entry, refusing him the drink which his ruined appearance shows him so manifestly to require (“‘[why are your] cheeks [so hollow], your face so sunken / [your mood so wretched,] your visage [so] wasted?’”).33 Gilgamesh receives no wine from Shiduri, and he will be unable to drink from the “Waters of Death” over which he must subsequently travel to the island home of the immortal Flood-survivor, Uta-Napishti (from whom he receives the “Plant of Heartbeat”). Gilgamesh’s physical and emotional exhaustion notwithstanding, his reward in the garden of delights leaves its mark in glittering love bites: it is neither milk nor honey that Gilgamesh drinks, but that other “prized liquid,” heroic blood. In its third Book, Triodes presents the union of Pandora and the poem’s “I,” their “hearts racing for a novel pit stop,” their “nipples bleeding” and “mutilated as by fierce bites” (Tr III, p.38/510). The phrase “geminate rooting” is a codeword not just for the budding plant life by which Triodes imagines the twining of its foremost twins, but for Gilgamesh’s allegory of cosmic love: the hero’s astral passage through the bowels of Mashu result in the attainment of a family of love objects so intractable that they draw blood from the mouth of their biter. The precious 32. “whew, those boys act primitive right at / the verbal root with a cap, wind / spun and flying outwards gibber gibber” (Tr II, p.25/499). 33. George, Tablet X, pp.76-77. 58 bites, hanging so tantalisingly and refracting the building aurora, afford Gilgamesh nothing but the taste of his own life-force, sole fuel of a being who has proven himself superior to the Sun. The blood Gilgamesh drinks is finally his own, as “I’s” union with Pandora is the subject’s union with absolute war. Through Pandora, Gilgamesh’s tragic adventure is a “peccant” “rampage”; his careless slaughter results in the death of Enkidu, his one true beloved and comrade. But at the gate of Mashu he is too distracted to draw blood. To fuck Mashu is to fuck the world at and beyond its ‘edge,’ the limit of any subjective order, which act, though drawing the blood of no other, is a symbol of Gilgamesh’s violent history. This supreme self-interest, where peace is defined by the powerful as the decision not to flex the power to kill, is the condition of coercive peace-keeping. It is a solipsism that is possible only in a world where power is driven by the labour of slaves, no matter how sweetly they are spoken to. Whether they are in company towns, prisons, sheds, or homes, it is the discovery of the extent to which we are those slaves’ masters that is one of the essential moral lessons performed in the sarcastic histrionics of Triodes. 59 60 Lisa Jeschke Late Early Poetry: A Commentary on J.H. Prynne’s Unanswering Rational Shore [Trümmerliteratur] Notions of “late work” or of a “late style” risk implying that prior achievement is a given, as if a writer’s work was already a monument. They risk what might be called a touristic approach to academia: petrification as an act of reception. The function of this collection of criticism concerning J.H. Prynne’s late work is certainly not to indulge in such an approach, and in this paper I would like to consider Unanswering Rational Shore (2001) not as a glowing monument, but as an unsightly ruin, the ruin considered as a rubbish product of history. In doing so, I follow a terminological chain spanning Prynne’s own writing over several decades. His 1971 collection Brass is intensely concerned with rubbish; and in his 2008 essay ‘Huts’ he complements this concern with a discussion of architectural and historical ruin, establishing a complex relation between Celan’s visit to Heidegger’s hut in the summer of 1967 and the twentieth and twenty-first century transformation of the hut into the guard towers of concentration camps and of Guantánamo Bay.1 He concludes, qualifying Heidegger, whom he recalls having studied ‘with great ardency more than forty years ago’: 1. Cf. Keston Sutherland, ‘Hilarious absolute daybreak [Brass, 1971],’ in Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 2: On the Poems of J.H. Prynne (2010), ed. Ryan Dobran, pp.115-147 (140 ff.). 61 The house of language is not innocent, and is no temple. The intensities of poetic encounter, of imagination and deep insight into spiritual reality and poetic truth, carry with them all the fierce contradictions of what human language is and does.2 He then goes on to break not only any possible link between ‘the house of language’ and the ‘temple,’ but to erode the very foundations of the ‘house of language’ itself, in favour of a focus on ‘ruin and part-ruin’: As readers we do know, finally, that ruin and part-ruin lie about us on all sides, and so do the poets. It is needful and also better, finally, that this must be fully known. The poets are how we know this, are how we may dwell not somewhere else but where we are.3 To state that ‘ruin and part-ruin’ lie about us is, of course, not quite the same as it would be to state that ‘ruins and part-ruins’ lie about us. ‘Ruins’ and ‘part-ruins’ would signify particular objects, according to definition I.1.a. given by the OED: ‘The state or condition of a fabric or structure, esp. a building, which has given way and collapsed.’ ‘Ruin’ and ‘part-ruin’ on the other hand refer to a more abstract state of something or someone having been ruined – the condition of a person or, for example, of a nation or of a 2. J.H. Prynne, ‘Huts,’ Textual Practice 22:4 (2008), pp.613-33 (630). 3. Prynne, ‘Huts,’ pp.631-32. If the syntax were to be wilfully misread here, the first sentence could be read not only as ‘the readers and the poets do know that ruin and part-ruin lie about us on all sides,’ but also as ‘the readers do know that ruin, part-ruin and the poets [do] lie about us on all sides.’ I mention this misreading not merely as a facile joke, but because it would imply a notion of poets not as redemptive erect figures capable of braving and seeing beyond the ruin around them, but rather as genuinely part of that ruin, as ruined themselves. This would be an image from a slapstick war tragedy: perhaps the poets are quietly groaning, or screaming out their poems, like wasted heroes of an action film or like Beckett characters unable to move for days, or years, if there is a difference. The non-exceptionality of the poets in relation to their surroundings will find further emphasis in Prynne’s ‘Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language’ (2000), briefly discussed in the conclusion to this paper. 62 civilisation. Hence Prynne’s usage seems to correspond to definition I.1.b. given by the OED: The state or condition of a person who or society which has suffered decay or downfall; esp. the condition of a person reduced to abject poverty. Also of a personal attribute, a relationship, a plan, etc. Hence both ruin and the ruin coalesce in the over-arching definition I., ‘The state or condition of collapse or downfall.’ The verb Prynne uses in relation to ‘ruin and part-ruin,’ namely ‘lie about us,’ strongly indicates that he thinks the abstract and concrete meanings, respectively, together – for in the strange formulation of an abstract condition lying about us, we hear the echo of a concrete object lying about us. The relation between ‘ruin’ and ‘ruins’ is not just that of a singular to a plural, but of a moral and/or economic abstraction to a material concretion. The appeal to poetry as that by which we know that ruin and part-ruin lie about us on all sides is striking in two ways. First, it glosses poetry as a category of knowledge, specifically of a social or political kind. Secondly, the appeal seems to set up a contradiction: if we are in the midst of ruins, if ruin and part-ruin really do lie about us on all sides, how can it be that we wouldn’t know this without reading poetry; are we where the ruins are, or are we not? To follow Prynne’s own methodology of a historical-critical form of close reading, it is necessary to frame the claim concerning the relation between poetry and ruin(s) by considering its historical evolution. Celan has already been identified as a writer who wrote poetry after Auschwitz, barbarically. If Celan’s poetry presents a broken Austro-HungarianJewish-emigré lyricism after the concentration camps, it finds itself in an uncomfortable parallel position to the factual and dispassionate objectivism of Trümmerliteratur – which could be translated as the literature of rubble, of detritus, of wreckage, of ruins. This is the writing of what we might have to call the German Germans after the war, keenly aware of their own sense of personal and material loss. The term Trümmerliteratur is primarily associated with the prose of short stories and the radio play, indicating the privileging of an elliptic and paratactic style said to correspond to the destroyed German cities after the bombings. The most well-known example from the genre of poetry, however, is Günter Eich’s ‘Inventur’ (1947), in 63 which a man lists his possessions in the post-war period.4 It begins with ‘This is my hat / this is my coat,’ and the final two stanzas of seven read as follows: Die Bleistiftmine lieb ich am meisten: Tags schreibt sie mir Verse, die nachts ich erdacht. The pencil lead I love most: by day, it writes verse I’ve imagined at night. Dies ist mein Notizbuch, dies meine Zeltbahn, dies ist mein Handtuch, dies ist mein Zwirn. This is my notepad, this my tarpaulin, this my towel, this my yarn.5 The inventory of a limited number of possessions, among them a pencil lead 4. The development of the notion of Trümmerliteratur is closely linked to the first meetings of the Gruppe 47 (Group 47), an umbrella term for those participating in a series of readings and discussions organised by Hans Werner Richter between 1947 and 1967 and aimed at the encouragement and critique of new writing in the post-war era. Günter Eich was awarded the group’s prize in 1950. Heinrich Böll received it in 1951 and went on to assert his commitment to the notion of Trümmerliteratur in the 1952 essay ‘Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur’ (Heinrich Böll, ‘Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur,’ in Böll, Werke. Essayistische Schriften und Reden I: 1952-1963, ed. Bernd Balzer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1979), pp.31-35. The relation between Celan and Trümmerliteratur is uncomfortable not least to the extent that his visit to the Gruppe 47 in May 1952 seems to have been met with an embarrassing or even anti-Semitic response to his poetry. As his biographer John Felstiner notes, Celan ‘recited “A Song in the Wilderness,” “In Egypt,” “Count up the almonds,” and also “Todesfuge,” still virtually unknown [...] afterward some writers went around “sarcastically scanning: Schwarze Milch der Frühe…,” and the Group’s organizer said that Celan recited “in a singsong straight out of a synagogue.” “Oh yes, these soccer players,” Celan later remarked about Group 47, one of whom told him, “You even recited in the tone of Goebbels.”’ (John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp.64-65). Cf. also Klaus Briegleb, Mißachtung und Tabu. Eine Streitschrift zur Frage: „Wie antisemitisch war die Gruppe 47?“ (Hamburg: Philo, 2003). 5. Günter Eich, ‘Inventur,’ Abgelegene Gehöfte (Frankfurt a.M.: Georg Kurt Schauer, 1948), pp.42-43 (43). My translation. 64 and a notepad, is strikingly similar to the inventories carried out in Samuel Beckett’s post-war writing, particularly in Malone Dies (1951), where the narrator repeatedly refers to making inventories, such as when he claims: ‘But should I be short of time, at the last moment, then a brief quarter of an hour would be all I should need to draw up my inventory.’6 It might, indeed, be possible to consider Samuel Beckett’s post-Second World War work as a form of Trümmerliteratur, although there would certainly be a degree of historical perversion in applying German post-war terminology to his work – not least because his decision to write in French, and the radical semantic and syntactic reduction this decision involved, are widely considered a response to the experience of war and of his Résistance activities against the German occupation.7 Prynne’s late work, by contrast, does not allow us to speak of semantic and syntactic reduction. On the contrary, there is a sense of semantic plenitude afforded by the historical-critical study of vocabulary possible within the stable frameworks of scholarly study at Cambridge University. At first sight, Unanswering Rational Shore might appear not as a literature 6. Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (London: Faber and Faber, 2010; first publ. in French in 1951), p.5. 7. Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson argues these experiences moved him away from the display of scholarly virtuosity in a Joycean tradition towards effects of greater simplicity. Cf. Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp.297-358. In terms of the complex of war, huts and ruins, see also Beckett’s essay ‘The Capital of Ruins.’ Written in 1946 for Radio Éireann, it describes the activities of the Irish hospital in Saint-Lô, of which he was a member of staff in the direct post-war period. Beckett writes: ‘[the hospital] will continue to discharge its function long after the Irish are gone and their names forgotten. But I think that to the end of its hospital days it will be called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts, when they have been turned into dwellings, the Irish huts. I mention this possibility, in the hope that it will give general satisfaction. And having done so I may perhaps venture to mention another, more remote but perhaps of greater import in some quarters, I mean the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France.’ (Samuel Beckett, ‘The Capital of Ruins,’ The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), pp.275-278 (278)). 65 of detritus, but of palaces, or indeed of Cambridge Colleges. It is divided into two parts, each consisting of a sequence of seven poems of fourteen lines each; each fourteen-line entity is, again, divided into two halves of seven lines each; finally, the Spanish epigraph ‘lo mismo / lo mismo’ itself consists of two times seven letters and, fittingly, means ‘the same / the same.’8 In its symmetrical order on a macro- and micro-level, the sequence seems to mimic the concept of harmony Prynne scathingly criticises as a desire belonging to a ‘privileged, leisure class’ in his ‘Brief Comment on “Harmony” in Architecture’ (2006). He asserts in this comment that much of the work done in China in terms of the renewal of ‘prestige urban sites’ is driven ‘by the expanding tourist economy.’9 Tourists are described as the classic example of a leisure class, exporting surplus value at beneficial rates of exchange to derive commodity satisfaction from the consumption of spectacle bringing little or no satisfaction to a local populace in any direct way.10 Referring to a Chinese context, he notes that urban development which creates a ‘“palace-garden” style of environment’ must involve ‘the clear historical remembrance of social exclusion and lavish over-consumption.’11 The reproduction of palace-garden styles is certainly also a feature of some of the Cambridge Colleges; and certainly they attract flocks of tourists, as well as, nowadays, flocks of paying student-customers, tourists. [The Corset] 8. Pragmatically, in order to be able to refer to particular points in the series, I will speak of each 14-line-entity constituting a page as “a poem.” This seems warranted not only by the page divide, but also by the clear formal allusion made to the sonnet. Nevertheless, I acknowledge there is an instability to what could be considered as the most basic entity “poem” in this series – indeed, the “series” as a whole could equally be considered as one “poem,” not a series then. 9. J.H. Prynne, ‘A Brief Comment on “Harmony” in Architecture,’ Xi’An, P.R. China, 23 September 2006, babylon.acad.cai.cam.ac.uk/students/study/english/chinese/ harmony.pdf, accessed 11 December 2013, p.2. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p.3. 66 The construct of symmetrical harmony in Unanswering Rational Shore, however, performs a broken and critical parody of its own form.12 A first indication might be found in the fact that the symmetry enacted by the sequence implies formal rupture. If these poems are to be called sonnets, the volta is formally resituated to occur after each seventh line and hence marked as a moment of division. The sonnet stems from a tradition of love poetry that could again be related to leisured classes; on the other hand, its Baroque use as a poetry of vanitas – idleness, mortality – in the context of the Thirty Years’ War might point us to a history of conflict. As Ben Watson has pointed out in his essay ‘Madness & Art’ (2001), the epigraph ‘the same / the same’ probably refers to plate 3 of Goya’s print series The Disasters of War, created between 1810 and 1820 and considered by art historians as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War (1808–14) and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814.13 The division of the poem as a whole into two equal parts recalls the structure of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), a Trümmer-play following the formula ‘the same / the same’: according to the Irish Times from 18 February 1956, ‘nothing happens, twice.’14 Waiting for Godot, like a number of other works by Beckett, has its characters appear in couples of sorts – Vladimir and Estragon, Lucky and Pozzo. Similarly, Unanswering Rational Shore repeatedly refers to the pair – the second poem of the sequence speaks of ‘Each who yet cares to corrupt anterior traverse / settlement by booking in pairs’ (520), and the final poem states: ‘In staple pairs / all so sudden’ (533).15 12. As Linda Hutcheon notes in her Theory of Parody (1985), ‘modern parody’ involves processes of ‘extended repetition with critical difference.’ (Linda Hutcheon, Theory of Parody (New York and London: Methuen, 1985) p.7). This reference is not to align Prynne’s writing with Hutcheon’s politics of postmodernism more generally – yet her definition of parody as a form of critique appears descriptively apt for the analysis of Unanswering Rational Shore. 13. Cf. Ben Watson, ‘Madness and Art,’ paper delivered to Brian Catling’s Ruskin College students in Oxford on 30 October 2001 as part of the latter’s “Art & Madness Circus,” http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/opticsyn/mad.htm, accessed 18 December 2013. 14. Vivian, Mercier, ‘The Uneventful Event,’ The Irish Times, 18 February 1956, p.6. 15. All references indicate page numbers in J.H. Prynne, ‘Unanswering Rational Shore,’ in Prynne, Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe 67 If historically and structurally aligned with an art and a literature of the detritus of war, with Goya and Beckett, the symmetrical order of ‘two’ now seems less like the mimetic reproduction of a harmonious palace than a historical engagement with ruin, or ruins. Symmetry appears only as a lavish mask of itself, something which is underlined by the one explicit mention the poem makes to symmetry when it refers to ‘sexual preening overtly / lavish in symmetry’ (524) in the sixth poem of the series. The symmetry of Unanswering Rational Shore as a sequence of poems is less ‘overtly / lavish’ than overtly tight, or bound; and in that sense it does, after all, employ strategies of reduction. Hence it corresponds to ‘the tight corset yet unknown’ (522) mentioned in the fourth poem. If this phrase were to be read as a statement on poetry, it might imply that poetry corresponds to a certain kind of enforced body architecture particularly associated with the domestication of the female body. The tight corset has historically primarily – though not exclusively – been known by women; at least, women are popularly associated with the knowledge of the corset, especially in representations of the Victorian era. Linking this knowledge to what poetry knows could be said to establish a feminist poetics on a structural level: the poets and the readers do not know only of ruin and part-ruin, they also know of constraint and bondage, and so do the women.16 Is Prynne’s late work feminist, against the frequent accusations of Cambridge poetry as masculinist? Could we conceive of the relation between feminism and poetry as something that concerns not merely the so-called sex and/or gender – or whatever – of the author, but that also concerns a materialist kind of knowledge, the knowledge of constrained form? Unanswering Rational Shore as a sequence that overtly presents and addresses processes of bondage could then be considered an argument questioning the idealisation of agential and volitional “man,” and of “humanity” as a whole, no strings Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), pp.517-533. 16. This is not to simplify the historical complexity of ‘the corset’ as if (1) it could stand for the whole history of the oppression of women and as if (2) wearing it could not be fun or pleasurable or exciting. Rather, I seek to point to bondage as a fact, not as a moral judgement, a fact that concerns poetry. Concerning the relation between poetry and bondage, cf. also Andrea Brady in Chris Goode, Thompson’s Live: Episode 2 (8th October 2012) podcast, http://chrisgoodeandco.podbean. com/2012/10/09/thompson%E2%80%99s-live-episode-2-8th-october-2012, accessed 15 January 2013. 68 attached. Given that the male-gendered terminologies of agency and “freedom” are central to capitalist liberal democracies, Unanswering Rational Shore posits a form of knowledge which contradicts the obfuscation of our radical unfreedom.17 The series knows of war, torture, the imposition of force over bodies, of constraint, and limitation otherwise largely ignored, that is, not known, from the Latin ignorare.18 If a corset binds a body with the aim of achieving a well-structured corporeal form, in this poetry the rigid architecture heightens the fragmentation of meaning in terms of the sequencing of the words themselves. This is neither a palace nor a stable coherent body, but a deformed and trembling mass of separate, and separated words: words which ask of the reader to trace their histories separately and together. The constant self-disruption of syntactical connectivity leads to a focus on the paradigmatic level, on the study of words and groups of words – as bits and pieces, shards, ruins 17. The notion of “freedom” has been subjected to an oxymoronic double movement over the past thirteen years in US-American foreign policy. In a horrific feat of applied poetry, it is precisely the term’s metaphysical promise which has been made use of to justify its pragmatic employment in the “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the umbrella term used for American Forces’ “War on Terror,” launched on 7 October 2001, and still ongoing; note Unanswering Rational Shore was published in the same year. Oxymoronically, “Operation Enduring Freedom” involves the imposition of force over bodies in the name of freedom, and it does so from the self-universalising viewpoint of the agential white man from which Unanswering Rational Shore, as argued above, seeks to distance itself. 18. Given that in ‘Huts’ Prynne claims that it is ‘the poets’ through whom we know that we live among ruin and part-ruin, we might here infer the knowledge of poetry as bondage as presented in Unanswering Rational Shore might also be considered a claim for poetry more generally. This particular poem, or sequence of poems, as any publication of poetry, might be said to stake a claim for poetry as such, in so far as writing exactly this and not something else could be said to imply a decision that it is at this point not possible to write in any other way – all other possibilities, combinations or forms are ruled out simply by virtue of not having been realised. This, then, would be a subjective claim to the universal on the part of the producer, not on the part of the recipient, as in Kant’s theory of subjective universality in aesthetic judgement. It should be noted that such a subjective universalism on the part of the producer must not necessarily constitute an exclusive monolithic universalism, and could rather be conceived of as similar to a qualitative rather than a quantitative superlative: this poetry, alongside other poetries, might each in and of itself be the only poetry possible at this point in history. 69 of history, of the history of language. What might appear as the esoteric tightness of Unanswering Rational Shore is not a form of closure: it is a form of opening towards history. The logical extension of this thought would be to argue that the dense, broken, difficult language in Prynne’s late poetry is relevant insofar as to suggest that all language is dense, broken, difficult. This poetry is not more complex than anything else anyone else might articulate: it is as if we need this poetry to see that we do not need this poetry – we already know what it knows, by virtue of making use of words. All words, whether entirely isolated, or in fragmented, or in normative-syntactical relations, always carry their history, like a load. What is at stake, however, is not a scholarly point, as if we merely needed to be reminded of something we just happen to have forgotten in a kind of mass amnesia stemming from laziness in study. Rather, there is a political necessity to acknowledging the ruined reality of words in an age of accelerated communication, when digital and mobile technologies are sold as easy techniques for overcoming social division on the back of unchanged structures of production and education. By emphasising the struggle of words to mean and connect, poetry in the era of communication technologies can only become more relevant and important than before: as a critique and image of the problems of alienation easily ignored when communication feels so easy on the level of consumption. Prynne’s late poetry is, not least, funny, because it dares to allow words and meaning to crash, continue, crash again, get up again; it is a funny response to the new media communication show spreading the simultaneously naive, cynical and brutal assumption that understanding can be improved and community achieved without any actual change in the organisation of labour and work. In Unanswering Rational Shore, we do not find ourselves on a utopian island; no tempests have calmed. We observe instead words struggling to find a precarious balance – in the clash of syntagmatic relations and paradigmatic juxtaposition (‘To face the page the desk / the sun’ (529)), in the harsh and dense juxtaposition of different registers and parts of speech (‘Ready hands sanction their new ebb, the especial / oratory shunt attachment’ (528)) and by means of the irregular rhyme that appears at odd points, unanticipated (‘the debate for hate’ (520)).19 19. In terms of notions of ‘late poetry,’ the strict formal framing of much of Prynne’s ‘late work’ might recall the mature classicism of Goethe’s late work. The latter’s 70 This degree of linguistic brokenness makes ‘plain sailing’ (521) impossible, a formulation which occurs in the third poem, as part of a cluster of references to various genres of speech and utterance: ‘Bitter anecdotal retro-chic pads out the discount / at the end of plain sailing’ (521). If the ‘tight corset yet unknown’ implies an ominous compression of futurity, the ‘anecdotal retro-chic’ that ‘pads out the discount’ received at the end of ‘plain sailing’ seems to evoke the retelling of a past event to make it seem better than it was, raising the question of whether ‘plain sailing’ was ever ‘plain sailing’ or whether it is not the ‘retro-chic’ which made it so after the event in the first place. The terminology of ‘discount’ reproduces capitalist jargon; and ‘plain sailing,’ pointing to a kind of smooth and easy progress which these poems precisely do not allow for, is, economically thinking, a discount, a way of acquiring an object cheaply. The homophonic ‘plane sailing’ is a ‘simplified form of navigation in which the surface of the sea is considered flat rather than curved,’ something which eases calculation.20 Given that in the seventeenth century, ‘plane’ and ‘plain’ were used largely interchangeably, it seems there is here a reference to the beginnings of sea voyaging as a broad commercial enterprise from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as to the ‘rational shore’ of the title – which, in the case of the poem is ‘unanswering,’ that is, does not provide a discount. [Late Early Poetry] The relation between past and present implied by the formulation ‘anecdotal retro-chic’ is constantly at stake in Unanswering Rational Shore, which mounts a sustained critique of the possibility of immediacy, of unspoilt beginnings, of pure origins.21 A highlighted example of the concern with works from an earlier era of capitalism, however, seem to gesture towards the possibility of reconciled and harmonious society, not least through art and Bildung (formation, education, indicating a belief in possibility of harmonious architectural constructions on a micro- and macro-level, personally and societally) – while Prynne interrogates the problem of ‘harmony’ at a later stage of capitalism, when its usage must risk clouding over social antagonism. 20. Gary Martin, ‘Plain Sailing,’ The Phrasefinder, http://phrases.org.uk/meanings/ plain-sailing.html, accessed 18 December 2013. 21. This concern is an anti-fascist concern, and a concern shared by Marxism and post-structuralism in a rare moment of coalescence. 71 the relation between past and present is the quote from Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) in the second poem, again an allusion to the ‘pair’ and just one of several Shakespearian and theatrical references. It is the only one marked by inverted commas as speech marks: ‘to thee no star be dark’ (520) is the first utterance of Act 1, Scene 4 of Two Noble Kinsmen, the first queen’s address to Theseus. In Unanswering Rational Shore, the possibility of the realisation of future happiness is, however, called into doubt by the expression ‘trickle of futurity’ in the same poem. It is also qualified by the punchy and sarcastic final remark of the first poem: ‘Early grief, late woe ahead’ (519). Light, morning light, daylight are repeatedly given adjectives of exposure or violence. The traditional tropes of the morning and of spring as indices of birth and innocent new life on the one hand, and of evening and winter as indices of old age and death on the other, are inverted. The morning appears not as the early time of the day, but rather as the rubbish product of the night, its light exposing the detritus after the party: in the fifth poem, ‘morning light’ is given the supplement ‘hard’ and linked to sexually transmitted disease: ‘see where on balance / the main chance is blank and chancred so truly / in the hard morning light.’ As a reference to the infantilisation of adults seeking instant gratification or ‘early redemption’ (523) in a capitalist commodity market, the sixth poem states, mocking the tone of trashy nastiness, ‘If it seems too good, / sucker, the pap is surely toxic,’ and emphasises the shadow rather than light as an effect of the sun: ‘Over lush fields / a rising sun pitches out its sulky damp shadow, in / reminder of cost levels in the benefit stream’ (524). The final poem seems to indicate a carnivorous process blocking the succession of generations when describing ‘sky-divers / like swallows gorging their young’ (533). There is a further reference to the morning in the eighth poem of the series, that is, the first one of the second part: You’re with special friends now, indomitable at breakfast, sun again set on fresh glimmer to anticipate new tests for old faults; happy chat display advances to frank daylight in a candid line to be really damaged this once. (527) 72 The participle adjective ‘damaged’ might be said to resonate with the subtitle of Adorno’s Minima Moralia, ‘Reflections from Damaged Life.’22 The image of ‘You’ sitting at ‘breakfast’ with ‘special friends’ involved in ‘happy chat display’ seems to invoke images of leisure time. The damage here might be a form of damage made invisible by the surfaces of ‘garden party convention[s]’ and ‘dinner tickets’ (530), of lavish display and the speech genre of the ‘happy chat.’ In an attempt to draw together questions concerning the ruin, and questions concerning the relation between the early and the late, I will conclude by opening this essay up to two further historical reference points. The first is a quote by Walter Benjamin: in the recent past of the current long present of modern capitalism, in 1935, Benjamin already establishes a dialectical relation between capitalist ruin and literature in his essay ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ stating that it was Balzac who was ‘the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie’ and that ‘Surrealism first opened our eyes to them,’ concluding: Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it – as Hegel already noticed – by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.23 22. In the Dedication to Minima Moralia, Adorno intertwines exactly the questions of emigration and war, (non) knowledge and complicity in speech also raised by Prynne in ‘Huts.’ Adorno writes: ‘The major part of this book was written during the war, under conditions enforcing contemplation. The violence that expelled me thereby denied me full knowledge of it. I did not yet admit to myself the complicity that enfolds all those who, in face of unspeakable collective events, speak of individual matters at all.’ It is as if Adorno here admitted that his own writing, during and after the war and, by implication, during and after the Holocaust, was barbaric. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 1994; first publ. in German in 1951), p.18). 23. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1935), trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Harvard, 1999), p.13. 73 The passage repeats not only Prynne’s construction of a past, present and future containing one another, never individually pure, fresh or early; it also clarifies that this relation is a (Hegelian-)dialectical relation. In doing so, the passage provides further glossing regarding why or how ‘we’ might know or not know of the ruin around us. Benjamin suggests that ‘the monuments of the bourgeoisie’ might be considered not as potential or hidden ruins, but as ruins in and of themselves, in their very erectness, incorporating their past as well as, dialectically, the anticipated pastness of their present, hence their future. This corresponds exactly to the mechanisms by which, as discussed, Unanswering Rational Shore exposes words. Full words, not syllabic cut-ups, might in and of themselves, in their very autonomous glow, be considered as ruins that bear their whole history – a tight corset yet unknown, ruins even before they have crumbled. This is why the ruin around us is so visible and invisible at the same time. Benjamin, a great admirer of Brecht, conducts an anti-illusionist rhetorical move: epistemologically, we can, he suggests, recognise ruins which bourgeois society would misapprehend as monuments. The world is a stage, its architectures cheap, shoddy, and illusionistic, man-made: and hence it is a changeable world.24 Since set-design can be torn down and changed much more quickly than buildings and political structures made for more permanent inhabitation in the non-theatrical world, the theatre could be considered as a technique for an image of dialectics in fast-forward. Anti-illusionism is central not only to Brecht, but to all of Shakespeare’s work and early modern theatre practice more generally, and Prynne’s usage of theatrical tropes and Shakespeare have already been alluded to above. Could Prynne’s own technique not be described as a series of alienation effects – carried out to a degree far beyond Brecht, where alienation is at all points visible and there is never a 24. In considering dialectics as theatrical, I seek to extend and reverse Brecht’s discussion of the theatre as dialectical in his Kleines Organon für das Theater, where he argues for its materialist realisation of dialectics in that it constantly exposes the human labour at work in play, and hence presents the world as (politically) changeable. Note that in his case, the meta-awareness of form by means of techniques such as the alienation effect is not inward-looking, as in much of contemporary institutional art-critique, but outward-looking, seeing in the theatre a model and extension of the outside world. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, Kleines Organon für das Theater, in Brecht, Versuche 27/32 (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1953; Kleines Organon first published in 1949), pp.107-140. 74 moment of non-alienation, of illusion? Language in Unanswering Rational Shore is not allowed to appear innocent. The sequence is Trümmerliteratur far beyond the simple causeeffect structure of what is technically called Trümmerliteratur. This brings me to the final contextual reference point: when the contemporary German writer Peter Handke protested against the NATO air-raids over Bosnia stating that ‘the first victim of war is language,’ Prynne asked, in a ‘Brief Riposte’ written in 2000: Does he then somehow believe that, because he is a writer and lives in close companionship with ‘free’ language, unconstrained by overt pressure from acts done across distant borders by supra-national bodies and their agents, that the idiomatic of his innermost thoughts (Urtext) or of anyone else’s was somehow less damaged before the Bosnian air-raids than after them?25 Again, the vocabulary of ‘damage’ is employed, and it should be emphasised that Unanswering Rational Shore was written a year after Prynne’s ‘Riposte.’ The riposte acts, again, as a specific appeal against any easy notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ in terms of the damage of thoughts and language. And in this sense, it might be possible to consider Unanswering Rational Shore as both early and late work. It is late work in the sense that it carries with it an acute sense of the history of war and capitalism, as pressed into vocabularies, phrases and sentences: it does come after Goya and Beckett, after the Holocaust and after the Second World War, after Heidegger and after Celan. But the preposition “after” itself is inconclusive and not rigidly deterministic. Hence this work is also early work, work written in the frank early morning light, shedding an anti-illusionist light on the detritus which we are in; it allows itself to be fallen and ruined rather than believing in a guiding role of the poet as someone who might have access to more mythic or pure realms of language; and it allows itself to be rigidly bound, to know of bondage. Unanswering Rational Shore is not interested in responding to the detritus around us by rebuilding things into a coherent poetic monu25. J.H. Prynne, ‘A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War and Language,’ Quid 6 (2011), pp.23-26 (25). 75 ment, suggesting instead that monuments themselves are detritus. It can point to no more than a ‘trickle of futurity,’ for it knows that otherwise it would be no better than ‘excused panels advising early redemption’ (523). 76 Timothy Thornton Acrylic Tips Acrylic Tips is, I think, a truly horrible book, violent, liverish, and unpleasant to read and to write about. Indeed this paper only for a while discusses Acrylic Tips in particular; it presents a personal and sometimes frustrated account of my experience of reading that sequence, and briefly worries, not entirely as a diversionary tactic, at some wider points about my experience of reading more of J.H. Prynne’s poetry, and of reading certain kinds of writing about it. Acrylic Tips itself is garish, lurid, unsettling, and to me full of a vivid and threatening bodily trauma. Not only does it leave me indignant, dumbstruck, and annoyed, it makes me feel unwell. Acrylic Tips was published in 2002, and it is on the page at least visually familiar if you’ve spent any time in the later stretches of the 2005 collected Poems: a rather dauntingly uniform series of block-stanzas.1 There are six stanzas per poem, and there are ten poems, all untitled. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are indented. It is not the case, as for instance with Red D Gypsum (1998), that every stanza ends with a full stop, yet it is the case that every stanza opens with a capital letter. My reading of this sequence attempts an account of their presence later. Rhyme when it occurs seems distant, muted, or inscrutably collateral; at least, it does not overall seem a prominent feature. Metrically, Acrylic Tips seems to be accentual-syllabic with more or less five heavy stresses per line. These observations are not intended to be sarcastically redundant: form in this 1. J.H. Prynne, Acrylic Tips (London: Barque Press, 2002). This pamphlet was roughly A5, set in an inelegant sans-serif typeface likely intended for screen rather than print, and the cover was two shades of bloody red. 77 poem seems to me simply to be a sheer inert fact, or a deathly and totalizing duress, almost never seeming to be a structure against and around which metre and syntax might create changes of tension and emphasis. That is to say: these block stanzas seem not to be connected with more familiar uses or activities of poetic form, of versification, for what might be called expressive potential; the texture of this poem does not seem, for instance, to admit of any prominence or intensification around line-endings; no rhyme, no enjambment, no metrical elastic put exhilaratingly to the test. Yet neither do I think that this form, or this fact of layout, represents the outright suppression of such potential for expressivity. And neither is this to say that these block-stanzas are arbitrary, or that they might be somehow just a partial viewing of the text through a window or grille, or that this sequence is just a hair’s-breadth away from prose, flowed through some text boxes with word-wrap turned on. They’re just there, recalling for me all the sinister menace of things whose apparent inertness must still be called constantly into question. Acrylic tips, by the way, are partial false nails which do not cover the whole nail but are attached only at the tip, and extend beyond it. That is a piece of information. From poem one: chomp get hungry for intimate newsy entrances. Get plenty get quick.2 It’s familiar to hear talk of “ways in” to such poetry as this. And here literally is one; several of them. “Newsy entrances,” whatever they are. “Chomp” is blusteringly playful set against the prevailing tone here. “Newsy entrances” could be a strange, self-descriptive wordplay referring to headlines or leader paragraphs: certainly there is a remarked-upon (even stereotyped) propensity in much late Prynne for a manner at least superficially reminiscent of such compressed bulletins as news headlines, telegrams, or cryptic crossword clues. Direct comparison with these other kinds of language never seems too fruitful, but, for now: in Acrylic Tips there are, throughout, two-word noun-phrases which exemplify just this manner. From the first stanza: “lost time,” “eggplant prone,” “tampered dune,” “grievance solitary,” 2. J.H. Prynne, Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), p.537. 78 “crook pathways.”3 Of course these aren’t all necessarily noun-phrases; in context, their grammar cannot often be persuaded to settle into one of several simultaneous options. “[H]ow fast / the grievance solitary” could be read as if the word “becomes” has been omitted; it could be read as if in surprise at the speed of a “solitary grievance” – the first word “how” means that in either case, we might interpret it as a question – and so on. Such attempts at what feels like decryption, decompression, un-encoding, can seem facile, or stupid; or sometimes they are for a brief time profoundly illuminating; but most often, to me, they feel like a bad scribble, the kind of boring, fruitless vandalization to be denied or rubbed partially out. Images in Acrylic Tips, as in much of Prynne’s later books, would seem to recur again and again in slightly altered form; structures or shapes of thought apparently unconnected slowly accumulate an obscure or inscrutable similarity, forming networks or constellations of ideas, without of course ever coming truly to coalesce. This paper will look at just one of these, without attempts at contextualization, without analysis of its content beyond the enclosed field of the poem-sequence itself, but concentrating more on the sheer fact of these image-networks, or, to borrow a term from Beckett: “a neuralgia rather than a theme, persistent and monotonous, [which] disappears beneath the surface and emerges a still finer and more nervous structure.”4 To return to my suggestion that this poem’s form is not a site of potential expressivity: we might instead concentrate on those moments in the poem which are remarkable for their seeming – on first or on fifteenth reading, and with however much coercion on our part – not to align with any of these networks, or neuralgias, or constellations of imagery. Perhaps these moments of intractable non-associability could be the operation on a sub- or superstratum of something somehow equivalent to textual formalities; exhilarating enjambments, say, or surprising rhymes or non-rhymes: the poetic tensions of metrical or formal constraint enacted in a different realm, non-metrical and non-vocal. To recognise such a pattern of relations here is unvolitionally to install a new structure – one which it is impossible ever to describe or even fully understand formally, but still a structure 3. Ibid. 4. Samuel Beckett, ‘Proust,’ Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999), p.33. 79 against which the rest of the poem might then be tested. Yet supposing any given topology of imagery – whether obvious, tenuous, or even deliberately preposterous or elastic – there will be moments in the poem where however hard we try, however much pressure we apply, an image newly encountered cannot be mapped onto that topology. The image tests the pattern, coaxes from us an instinct of its threshold, but then breaks it or crosses it or falls short, perhaps as a glint beginning the generation of a whole new topology or network; or perhaps merely as an unilluminating collision, the image simply glancing off and coming to seem to us inexplicable, redundant, even objectionable. So I will give a brief and inconclusive account of one of these networks of images, but would like to remark first on what I’ve caught myself with some suspicion doing: network, neuralgia, topology, constellation, gantry, metastasis, concordance. This impulse to use a quasi-interchangeable series of metaphors in an attempt as if cumulatively to indicate or describe something is not so unlike the behaviour of the very networks, neuralgias, topologies, I am attempting to indicate or describe – each pseudo-aggregate of similar images has some asymptotic tendency toward comprehensiveness, with what must be an inherent and necessary inadequacy. These image-networks do not describe something beyond what they are; they simply are: not the sum of their parts, even, but the nebulous recognition of an inscrutable likeness between those parts. I am partially plagiarising John Wilkinson, particularly in my use of “metastasis.” In ‘The Metastases of Poetry’ he says: […] my use derives from a brief experience of nursing in a cancer hospice, the way metastatic tumours echo about the body and these nodes define the shape of the body subjectively, through pain. Of course, the location of the primary tumour is outside the poem’s realm; the poem develops around the metastatic nodes, and these gestures come to evoke its physical lineaments. The reticence of the primary helps guard against a reductive essentialism in approaching the poem, that it is about such and such – in fact, there will 80 be a number of extrinsic primaries. Too many indeed for amenability.5 The network of images I found started as markings on a flat surface, specifically linear markings, however straight. From poem 1: “pathways risen up,” “The ploughshare has been through / the ground,” “riven grove,” “incision along a defined track,” perhaps “downward streak.”6 Later “rasp channelled” might be included, “ridge pretention,” “ducted retention,” “gradual trellis,” “mastic furrow,” “brave / crevice.”7 More now than a scoring of surfaces, this set of images I was finding also came to include three-dimensional versions of itself: any substances extending as filaments into other substances, rooted or affixed at one end, like veins into an organ. “[N]odding milkwort in river-sway” could be an unusually pretty instance of this, plants extending upward into water and gently moving; except that milkwort shouldn’t be underwater, just as a liver shouldn’t be flooded with blood (the “copious infarct” of the first poem: more on that later).8 These tableaux of interstitiality, capillaries extending across surfaces or through substances, plus the gaps they imply there, form one image pattern in the poem. Perhaps not the most prominent, but the one so far the most accessible to me: and perhaps only workable as a pattern when articulated in a conniving manner, at once specific and vague enough. It must, of course, always be only a part-reading, to speak of such a pattern; and this is not to say those moments in the sequence which bear no obvious relation at all can be discarded or set aside. There is a sentence in the sixth poem which seems as if it could be read in incredulous mockery of an attempt to countenance Acrylic Tips which first recognizes this specific correlation of images: [...] Who does it now estranged filaments your trick, why not try On even broken surface folds.9 5. John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Great Wilbraham, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), p.154. 6. Poems, p.537. 7. Ibid., pp.538-540. 8. Ibid., p.542, p.537. 9. Ibid., p.542. 81 In borrowing Beckett’s term, neuralgia, for the recurrence in different forms of things which are nonetheless similar, I’m aware that he was talking across and between as well as within texts. These scorings of surface or interstitial demarcations of substance seemed prominent to me in Acrylic Tips, and characteristic to it; but another such neuralgia found in this text has, I’d say, been present in Prynne’s work for years – the image and activity of a boundary, or the movement up to or away from one; the resolution, the irresolution, or even the redundancy of the elastics and tensions and congestions involved. The testing of a limit in such a case might be felt analogous to the heightened syllabic awareness around line-endings in metrical verse forms which I mentioned earlier, as if these moments of tension or torque are operating now on a different layer of this texture, and in a different manner. This probably confuses my earlier suggestion – that departures from or non-adherences to image-networks surrogate moments of quasi-formal variations in tension – by describing a recurrent image-network which consists wholly of these images of perimeter and transgression. The quasiformal transgression, intensification, stress, of precisely not being relatable to an image-network whose characteristic is transgression, intensification, stress? – the thought seems to wither to nothing. Encountering such a feedback loop probably means that this analysis needs to pause for breath. At one point in my reading, two two-word phrases on the first page which had seemed unrelated suddenly felt related, an obscure interface between two separate if nebulous species of image-network. I still don’t know what to do with any of this. But the presence of all the limits being pushed up against, the “crush horizon” or the “perimeter / ailment,” seems – via “vivid suffusion,” “ducted retention,” and so on – to meet, in the “copious infarct” of poem one, the scoring and vein-like images of the first pattern described above.10 But the membranes are bleeding now, not strong enough to withstand the pressure. An infarct is [A] portion of tissue that has become stuffed with extravasated blood, serum, or other matter11 10. Ibid., pp.537-539. 11. OED. 82 – and here, copiously, we find the boundary-failure of the veins extending, interstitially, through an organ. Acrylic Tips reads in terms of that specific and terrifying moment as if both pre- and post-, warning and aftermath: a thoroughly nasty alarum for imminent boundary-failure, yet also the artefact of that failure, a nauseating infarcted chunk whose very condition is absolute extravasation. Briefly, and to conclude, I mentioned above an account of the presence of the capital letters which begin each stanza. Perhaps the capital letters don’t have to be countenanced at all. But with “riven grove,” “mastic furrow,” “pathways risen,” “pipes to ground,” that whole interstitial constellation in mind, and the temptation to notice the visual interstices of the blockstanzas in this light: I wonder whether the capitalization at the start of every stanza could be seen as analogous to the root of a new duct, capillary, or channel, through this texture.12 They would mark the compression or attenuation of this very notion – of distinct threads of tissue within a mass (even one from which they might become indistinguishable) – into the inert fact of a standard marker of the start of a sentence, forced dead, and as if by long-perished formal convention, into the text: yet continuation or growth from this new root is immediately curtailed, disintegrating back into the superordinating homogeneity of form and brutality of expression. My reading of this poem arrives here, ejected at the total shutdown of anything germinant, embryonic, or inflorescent: no new growth can survive this subsuming totality of absolute perimeter-failure. Even ossification is too optimistic a process; it sounds like bone itself cannot fail to bleed back into blood: [...] each one quick Spinal attempt discarded.13 Perhaps these capitalizations are a clanking, limp gesture toward pinning down stanzas which would otherwise be “estranged filaments” or “hair roots adrift”; they are, now, just the “fissures nailed front and back.” 14 12. Poems, p.537, p.539, p.546. 13. Ibid., p.543. 14. Ibid., p.542. 83 These capitalizations feel so materially, substantially separate from the text whose grammar they would claim to flag that they remind me by now of the “acrylic tips” of the title, attached to the already carapaced extremity of the body in question with only a minimum of surface overlap. Such a kaleidoscope of fanciful suppositions continues predictably to melt away into itself: “delusive grips / curtailed already.”15 It is tempting to say that the nullifying influence described above seems to apply as much to attempted response as to the sequence itself. This response is also, toward its conclusion, engaging in another familiar manoeuvre. It seems uncommon to read an analysis of a poem or sequence by J.H. Prynne which does not at some point subside into a pyrotechnic but not always illuminating description of the poem’s behaviour, using a barrage of select quotations from it, as if they guarantee the most incontrovertible account by coming from within. Maybe they do. There is, though, something unappetizingly reductive about this approach, and it seems to me a little suspect, involving a diminishing circularity: deploying instrumentalized capsules from a poem, because they seem better able to do it than we, to describe or euphemize some or all of the rest; imperfect copies or carriers-in-solution of a fractal whole – as if the poem itself is, in the end, nothing more than a part-occluded scaffold consisting entirely of such self-description, without the reassuringly exegetical prose-cushioning, or is the singular instance of some mutant species of markup-language, whose only referent is itself. Yet perhaps to adopt such an attitude toward a sequence as unrelenting as Acrylic Tips is absolutely fair enough. Certainly it can make you want to give up trying. On re-reading, everything about the experience I just described may harden into something sharper and clearer, or it may fall away as mockably unconvincing or wayward. For a sequence full of imperative, of the noises of assertion, command, demand, Acrylic Tips seems to turn back on itself and efface itself at every moment. It is obviously a difficult and nasty sequence, but it is much more than that a devastatingly negative one, speaking of and through disfigurement and contusion and laceration. The threats which issue from its heady pulp, which seems to traumatize itself further and with more vigour the more you read it, are that any new beginning is doomed to 15. Ibid., p.539. 84 fail, and that its haemorrhage and infarction are not local and temporary, but are universal, permanent, contagious, and indiscriminate. 85 86 Joe Luna Dominance Factor “[N]othing curative beyond oppression”: if J.H. Prynne’s 2003 sequence Biting the Air could be said to have a slogan, this would surely be it.1 From the opening demand to “Pacify rag hands,” to the persistent slew of exhortations to recognize, acknowledge and accept, the poem’s dominant tone is a kind of incredulous imperative: incredulous that you don’t already know this, imperative that you now do. The poem’s opening gambit introduces the grammar of domineering instruction that re-appears almost every other line: “Pacify rag hands” is paraphrasable in one sense as simply “Placate the poor,” since hands in rags are a fairly obvious reference point, the cliché image of, most likely, distant, foreign poverty anyone of us might see praying on the welcome mat when we get home from work. But the diction of this opening doesn’t quite fit that ascription, however obvious it might be; 1. J.H. Prynne, Biting the Air (Cambridge: Equipage, 2003); J.H. Prynne, Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), pp.549-64. The phrase “nothing curative beyond oppression” can be found in the fifth and final stanza of the tenth page of the poem (p.562 in the Bloodaxe ed.). Page references for each and every other quotation from the poem are not provided here. The current essay is a slightly revised and expanded version of the paper given on 13 February 2013, then entitled ‘Nothing curative beyond oppression.’ I gratefully acknowledge the influence on both the original paper and the present version of Robert Potts’ useful and informative short commentary on Biting the Air, ‘Yes, why is it like this,’ published in Keston Sutherland, ed., For J.H. Prynne: In Celebration, 24th June 2006 (Quid 17 (2006)), pp.84-87. My thanks to Keston Sutherland and Connie Scozzaro for their helpful comments during the paper’s re-drafting and expansion. 87 the line does not begin “Pacify ragged hands,” for example. Rag hands are bad luck. They are, more specifically, a particularly useless set of cards, or a hand, in a game of poker. “Pacify rag hands” then comes to demand something else – pacify what is nominated as the luck of the draw, or, play the hand you’re given. The combination of these two, equally available readings, operating simultaneously, makes for a curiously antagonistic reading experience: defend the existence of poverty as random and ineluctable. This kind of ugly imperative is hammered home again and again in Biting the Air, a poem which is constantly telling us to do things like “stay there,” “print the bill,” “Be a credit / witness,” “Speak real slow,” “Hold the crowd back,” “don’t go slow,” “append furious // torsion” and “Let them have it”; these are top-down, managerial, paternal demands. But the experience of reading them is antagonistic only if we assume that the proper action of this poem is to defend us from the machinations of a corrupt, mendacious and exploitative world, a world that operates on basic principles which we assume our poetry will resist, refute, expose and denounce. In the spirit of wilful perversity I want to suspend this assumption, even if it is only my own speculative assumption (but I think it is not), because I suspect that a manner of reading Biting the Air that does so, if only temporarily, might fruitfully critique the poem not as the impacted linguistic detritus of the concrete domination of rich over poor, but in fact as the punishing, barbarous Lied of abstract domination itself.2 In the extraordinary recent essay ‘Perfect Capitalism,’ Danny Hayward provides the critical co-ordinates 2. I think the poem tries not to be ours in this sense, and I think it tries (not) to be so for as long as possible, until the point at which it becomes unendurable. To make realism unendurable is true. The exertion is not just present diachronically or laterally across the body of the poem read from start to finish, but synchronically and topologically, through the local ambivalences of phrases like “Pacify rag hands,” and through the intra-stanzaic taxonomies of holding on and surviving. See also Kevin Nolan’s comment regarding Biting the Air, that “[Prynne] seems to acknowledge that, immersed in immanent contradiction, we can never do as we intend, let alone mean what we say, since the action of a poem is never merely an arena for the terror around it but fully a cause of what appals it, finally at one with those impulses that seek to destroy relations even as it tries frenziedly to reconnect them […] Within this savage naturalism, that ‘other’ world once periodically glimpsed in Prynne’s writing becomes this world alone, a limitless passagenwerke of correspondences opening onto new spaces and their outer or immanent forms.” Kevin Nolan, ‘Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview,’ Jacket 24 (November 88 for just such a reading.3 What Hayward calls the “speculative category” of “perfect capitalism” consists of “the absolute resonance in language of a perfect image of reactionary desire.”4 Hayward suggests that “[t]o make in language the absolute resonance of this image, of a capitalism that is actually perfect, would force into this world an idea of absolution which the defenders of the world […] cannot bear.”5 They could not bear it because it would “send into the world a kind of grotesque challenge whose supervention on the category “progressive” would be catastrophically and venomously reproachful.”6 Thus “the attempt to desire in language the realisation of that absolute resonance” is “the only way to wade towards its corruption.”7 Poetry can do this. It may be yet a political function in language, if no doubt a negative function for us to whom positivity is surely denied, to find a way to sing out as a wish what that system [capitalism] would wish us to believe; to be, in short, its best and most perfect representative; and to say in the armour of rapture exactly what it needs. The lyric written to capitalism – not the capitalism that we do get but the one that, as the beneficiaries of the capitalism we do get, is the one we ought to pretend to want […] has not yet been written.8 The sheer perversity of the identity “the one we ought to pretend to want” is matched only by the potential for a caustic détournement of the ideologies of “progressive” politics and infinite accumulation alike that this imagined song might accomplish. Without intending to cauterize Hayward’s speculations by pre-emptively materialising them, I want to ask what it would mean to read Biting the Air in such a mode – to imagine that this song, or rather 2003), http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html.http://jacketmagazine.com/24/ nolan.html. 3. Danny Hayward, Two essays: Best and worst in poetry / Perfect capitalism (London: Veer Books, 2012), pp.24-43. 4. Ibid., p.27. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p.39. 7. Ibid., p.27. 8. Ibid., pp.38-39. 89 something like it (perhaps its B-side) has already been written – and to further question what such a reading would expose, illuminate or identify in the poem Biting the Air by J.H. Prynne. Is it, for example, “venomous[ly] reproachful,” and if so, who or what are the recipients of this reproach? What if the tone of “helpless pessimism” that Robert Potts has identified in the poem were in fact, or was simultaneously, or only threatened to be, that of a murderously ironic optimism?9 What does Biting the Air pretend to want, and for whom? Whose wish does it sing out? Some context. The opening five quatrains set out over a gridwork of contemporary reference the stage of the poem’s drama, introducing the formal pattern of five quatrains per-page which is then replicated over all but one of the poem’s twelve pages, as well as the poem’s major thematic concerns. To be blunt, Biting the Air is about the World Trade Organization, global poverty and life-saving pharmaceutical drugs.10 In August 2003 the WTO implemented paragraph six of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and public health, or in other words, adopted “new rules on exporting generic copies of patented drugs to poor countries.”11 The agreement, which was reportedly delayed for nine months by lobbying from U.S. pharmaceutical companies, emerged as a concession to the world’s least developed nations ahead of the WTO summit in Cancún, Mexico, in September 2003, and to mitigate the possibility of that summit’s collapse; it collapsed anyway amid recrimination over the vast subsidies offered by European and U.S. governments to their respective agricultural industries. Activists lambasted the August agreement as seriously flawed, citing the extraordinary amount of red tape surrounding the application procedure for the so-called “emergency licence” which would allow poor countries to manufacture a patented drug, albeit only, in the words of the WTO decision, “in the case of a national emergency or other circumstance of extreme urgency or in cases of public non-commercial use.”12 It was considered a victory for 9. For J.H. Prynne, p.87. 10. For these facts and some of those that follow I am especially indebted to the pointers in Robert Potts’ essay. 11. John S. James, ‘WTO Accepts Rules Limiting Medicine Exports to Poor Countries,’ http://www.thebody.com/content/art31751.html (12 September 2003). 12. ‘WTO patent rules will still deny medicines to the poor,’ http://www.cptech.org/ ip/wto/p6/oxfam08272003.html (27 August 2003); for the text of the implementa90 developing nations that the U.S. was prevented from restricting the type of drugs that could even be manufactured under such circumstances by eliminating from the final agreement a “disease list,” which would reportedly “have banned all pharmaceutical exports of generic copies of patented drugs for any disease except AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and a short list of others, mostly tropical infections that are not commercially important in rich countries.”13 The collapse of the Cancún summit was treated by some commentators as another “victory” for developing nations, who, shivering nobly amidst the ruins of the negotiations, were understood to be at least standing up to the free-trading agricultural economic monopolies of the West; this kind of idealistic air-punching was swiftly admonished by the eminently more sensible journalists of The Economist: Many poor countries saw the Doha round [of talks in Qatar, November 2001], and its promise to be pro-poor, as an excuse for making demands of the rich world while doing nothing to lower their own trade barriers. They forgot that trade talks require compromise. Egged on by a bevy of activists, too many third-world politicians got carried away by the thrill of saying no—ignoring the fact that poor countries actually have more to gain from lowering their own trade barriers than from persuading rich countries to lower theirs. According to the World Bank, over 70% of the benefits that poor countries might see from the Doha round would come from freeing trade with each other. By refusing to compromise, poor countries have come away with nothing.14 tion agreement see: ‘Implementation of paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and public health,’ http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/ trips_e/implem_para6_e.htm (1 September 2003). 13. http://www.thebody.com/content/art31751.html. 14. ‘Cancún’s charming outcome,’ http://www.economist.com/node/2071629 (18 September 2003); see Biting the Air’s “Egged on to say no” in the second stanza of the eleventh page of the poem; see also ‘The WTO under fire,’ http://www. economist.com/node/2071855 (18 September 2003) from the same issue of The Economist, on the background to these impossibly high hopes: “The launch of the Doha round in the eponymous capital of Qatar in November 2001 was itself a nail-biting negotiation marked by acrimony between rich and poor. The rhetoric 91 I quote this kind of reportage at length because it is the tone of such savvy rhetoric that Biting the Air employs both to abjure the silly slogans of any given “bevy of activists” and to proclaim the sublime, pastoral longing of profit: come now, the poem sternly rebukes the frustrated, despairing reader (or more likely, non-reader) of The Economist, “Don’t make sores if / you can’t pay to dress their origin.” Instead, gaze on the real world, in which everywhere [is] selected at rising cost. Untied, non-brand stay there, by a maternal oversight, glinted horizons so blue and bright forever we say, pinching the promised drip. The real “victory” was, of course, as it continues to be, Big Pharma’s. Biting the Air is the song of the pharmaceutical companies’ triumph over the developing nations; it is their wish, their dream, that composes these horizons, their “pharmaceutical front” that “signal[s] [...] perfection.” Those “glinted horizons so // blue and bright forever” that “we say” whilst “pinching the promised drip” are sourced from the final, ecstatic resignation of ‘Der Abschied,’ the sixth movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde song cycle: Die liebe Erde allüberall Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen, Ewig . . . ewig! [The dear earth everywhere Blossoms in spring and grows green again! Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright and was grand: Doha would reduce trade-distorting farm support, slash tariffs on farm goods and eliminate agricultural-export subsidies; it would cut industrial tariffs, especially in areas that poor countries cared about, such as textiles; it would free up trade in services; and it would negotiate global rules (subject to a framework to be decided at Cancún) in four new areas—in competition; investment; transparency in government procurement; and trade facilitation. These four new areas are referred to as the “Singapore issues” after the trade meeting at which they were first raised.” 92 blue! Forever . . . forever . . .]15 “Always,” in ‘Der Abschied,’ comments Donald Mitchell, “the impulse is towards a greater freedom and the embodiment of the ecstatic moment.”16 In Biting the Air, the freedom is the First World’s, and the ecstasy that of Big Pharma’s shareholders. But ‘Der Abschied’ is of further relevance to Prynne’s poem beyond its function as a source ironically roped into the service of its own corporatized bathos. Mitchell describes Mahler’s adaptation of Hans Bethge’s translations of the Chinese T’ang dynasty poet Wang Wei, upon which the lyrics for the final section of Das Lied are based, in the following terms: […] while it is true that we find in Bethge an implication of earth’s renewal and immortality as contrasted with man’s brief span, it is Mahler alone who spells out what proves to be the clinching philosophy of Das Lied: there is no more pain and weariness, only an ecstatic acceptance of the radiant void, the promise of the continuity of the earth, which transcends mortality.17 In ‘Der Abschied,’ death is “conquered through ecstatic acceptance”; the “pacification” of the “conflict” between life and death “is the work’s objective.”18 In Biting the Air the “pacification” of this conflict is in the specific interest of those who by corporate clout are the arbiters of life magnanimously dealt out to the deserving, as long as not too greedy, poor: “it is easy to make / a country prosperous and blue and bright over / and blindness forever in hand on hand proverb.” The poem’s second iteration in as many stanzas of Mahler’s ecstatic absolution confirms that it is not simply made into grubby, monied bathos; it is materialised as bourgeois philanthropy. Ecstasy, far from being reduced to a bad joke, is elevated into 15. Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death, Interpretations and Annotations (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p.347, p.337; trans. Deryck Cooke. 16. Ibid., p.346. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p.355, p.350. 93 the ideal “hand on hand proverb” of what The Economist calls “compromise.” The “triumph of everlasting security” on the ninth page of the poem, the only one in which the stanzaic pattern is momentarily interrupted, is lifted from Shelley’s Preface to ‘The Revolt of Islam.’ The “triumph” is that which the “oppressors of mankind” are “lull[ed]” into by contemporary metaphysics, “inquiries into moral and political science,” and vain “sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus.”19 As a directly complimentary image to Mahler’s gleaming horizons, the triumph is immediately followed in Biting the Air by: or gravitate to the entrance be steady indigent fastidious report prematurely slant balances. This is the cancerous lace curtain fringing a lake of toxic refuse, waiting to be born. the last two lines of which present one of the few sentences in the poem whose grammar barely escapes the usual imperative commands that characterise the first two, as well as the rest of the poem, and so claims a privileged clarity of declaration. What is named here, in a drama of disgust, is the liminal zone of reproduction of the pathologically contemptible thing. A “lake of toxic refuse” “[waits] to be born” from the “cancerous lace curtain” which currently “fring[es]” it. The process is expressed with a disgusting vaginal metaphor; that is, the object of disgust, i.e., the reproduction of inhumanity, or of that which will reduce humanity to a diseased mutation, “toxic refuse,” is expressed with sickening disgust, and the vehicle of that disgust is the image of a vagina, the “cancerous lace curtain.” The description is inherently misogynist. Elsewhere the poem contains repeated instructions to distinguish between the human and the inhuman, or to take measures to ensure that the distinction can be made. We are instructed to “manipulate its life exemption,” “Copy out the taxon marker,” “Index life expected arrivals” and then finally to “be the shadow unendurably now calibrated” by the resourceful ingenuity of the “pharmaceutical front” and its lobbying muscle, its inviolate ideology. The only thing in the poem which comes gratis is a type of animal, but not necessarily human, tissue. 19. Thomas Hutchinson, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p.34. 94 This is the “epithelial free surface”; biting the air is what dogs do in seizure. The human hands, meanwhile, that occupy nearly every page of the poem in a flurry of exchange, equivalence and agreement (“Enough out of one hand // to grasp another,” “hand on hand proverb,” “one hand washes the other,” “Let them have it // on hand terms,” etc.) bask in the moral sanctity of The Economist’s lauded “compromise.” The relentless hand-imagery also serves as a garish send-up of the Western bourgeois press’s finger-wagging at developing nations for not playing fair, and for daring to want more tariff reductions and life-saving drugs than they should realistically expect to receive. The poetry repeatedly apes and ventriloquizes the success of the Western pharmaceutical giants in securing both patent and profit protection under the guise of magnanimous, philanthropic action, and the continued domination of Western states over third-world agricultural industries in particular, in order to evoke the very natural order in which injustice so ubiquitously and routinely operates: “Soft light // shines evenly over this, sweet plants sway, apply for / a permit.” In Shelley’s Preface the “security of everlasting triumph” is a delusion predicated on falsity and pessimism; the “oppressors of mankind” are merely “lull[ed]” into it; they will soon be given a rude awakening by the clarion call of renewed revolutionary feeling. In Biting the Air such security is the working principle behind an eminently sustainable reality, confirmed by the “hand terms” on which all seemingly democratic agreements are skewed from the start, and by which, Prynne intimates, the human/animal distinction becomes ever more the elective preserve of those whose handshakes determine the lives of millions. Individual lives are screened out of Biting the Air. What is important in this poem is not the social identity of the oppressed populations of the G21 group of developing nations at the WTO summit in Cancún, but the objective fact of their existence as oppressed: that is the field in which the poem operates. There is nothing, curative or otherwise, beyond that condition. Biting the Air is not the image of the machinations of powerful Western states reflected in the broken syntax of poetical resistance, but rather the sublime of domination: “Better power assignments for the moment this / sharing by split singlet to mollify what there is.” The task the poem sets itself is to present the most egregious case possible for mollifying “what there is.” To this end the constant barrage of exhortation, which flares up throughout the poem, is directed: “Do you already know this or yet / allocate sufficiency,” “You didn’t know / that oh really,” “Now watch // 95 the rally tremble,” “You know what this must / mean in forward trading,” “Don’t make sores if / you can’t pay to dress their origin,” “Did you hear that // told to you,” “don’t you / see border dots, no label,” this last in reference to the packaging regulations regarding the manufacture of “emergency” medicines for developing nations laid down by the August 2003 agreement, which state that (ii) products produced under the licence shall be clearly identified as being produced under the system set out in this decision through specific labelling or marking. Suppliers should distinguish such products through special packaging and/or special colouring/shaping of the products themselves, provided that such distinction is feasible and does not have a significant impact on price […]20 “Und ich dachte immer,” wrote Brecht, die allereinfachsten Worte Müssen genügen. Wenn ich sage, was ist Muß jedem das Herz zerfleischt sein. Daß du untergehst, wenn du dich nicht wehrst Das wirst du doch einsehen.21 [And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself Surely you see that.]22 If the ever more precise delineation of “calibrated” exploitation is one remit of Prynne’s late poetry, is it, at base, simply a description of “what things 20. http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/implem_para6_e.htm. 21. Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Vol. 15, ed. Werner Hecht et al. (Berlin, Weimar and Frankfurt a.M.: Aufbau-Verlag and Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), p.295. 22. Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 2000), p.452. 96 are like,” and if so, to what end is this description directed? Hold the crowd back weaker fix agreeable suction, don’t go slow append furious torsion bolster omega blench. Let them have it […] What is the vitriolic imperative to inflict suffering that these lines seem to shine with finally for? In order to herd them into a description that might tear any given reader’s heart to shreds, we must delete the irruptions into grammatical sense that “weaker fix / agreeable suction” and “bolster omega blench” effect, and we must further assume the avowed context of nationstate bullying to the continued advantage of American pharmaceutical companies to be the underlying motivation for every abstract noun and adjective deployed herein. These readerly impositions would disrupt the composition on the page so drastically as to render the poetical effect of their arrangement almost unimportant – the lines will not be transformed into a manifesto except by re-composition. And yet the barrage of demand the lines make does operate, on one level at least, as polemic, a polemic sourced from a regurgitation of the ideology of compromise, equivalence and magnanimity whose glorious triumph is the economic determination of fate itself: “Frame your hand deal it // nothing curative beyond oppression.” The effect is not tragic, because there are no protagonists, and no identifiable sufferer. There is only a “security of everlasting triumph” through which life is either “calibrated” and valued or dismissed, ejected, “batter-coated and deprived.” The poem is a song of wanton disregard for human lives organised at every level around an economic imperative, the profit-motivation understood to lie behind all trade and all transaction. This imperative is translated by the poem into a moral and ethical economy whose primary motivation is to assure assent: “Get clear of some ever bad / muck on your shoes” and ensure “Your profile […] slurs no label.” Before these are the operations which we must feel - by the pressure of the ghoulish irony that they do exert, finally - to be the hateful representatives of inhumanity, they are something else. If the general tone of Prynne’s late poetry is relentlessly domineering, its specific content is the microscopic attention to the fine details, like those of the desperate WTO circus in 2003, out of which universal domination and its lingua franca in bourgeois 97 economic realism are composed. What “we” do throughout Biting the Air is a sort of jolly legal genocide. The poem’s injunctions seem to refuse the register of irony for as long as possible, to refuse a comparative shimmer between two states of being in favour of the “flatline signal glitz perfection” of a single, uninterrupted world market. Irony depends on the influence or existence of a state of affairs beyond that which is immediately expressed. But there is “nothing curative beyond oppression.” It is as if any easier access to potentially life-saving irony would be a concession to Shelley’s kind of “feeling amongst civilized mankind” that must be made by this poetry into a pathetic, gaudy spectacle of idealistic sentiment, or else referred to in the most fleeting of backhanded admonitions: “thus bathos don’t lift or you’ll / break a limit verge.”23 Anything “beyond oppression,” by the poems’ lights, is offensively unrealistic.24 One way of describing the entire experience I have been trying to communicate would be to call the poem a satire. But to try to take the measure of what this might entail must, I think, deny criticism the recourse to categories so immediately certain of their intended outcome. There is certainly language in Biting the Air which sounds satirical to ears that are committed to establishing a clear-cut enemy in the poem. But no such agent speaks, or acts; even the most prominent direct quotation from The Economist is situated in a manner that abstracts it from the equivocal condemnation of nation-state squabbling and appends it to a statement about what we do: “We make a dab list, warm sunny days, cynicism; / delusion and incompetence.”25 What I have tried to articulate as a song of domination, if it resists anything, resists the easy nomination of satire, and the easy identification of a single, discrete object, or even a set of objects of that satire, in direct proportion to the level of crystalline precision with which it ventriloquizes the language of universal domination. Biting the Air is less the “lyric written to capitalism” that Hayward’s essay speculatively defines, than the lyric written by capitalism, its addressees the subjects condemned to carry out instructions to perpetually “manipulate […] life exemption,” 23. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, p.33. 24. When everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst. Right? 25. “[C]ynicism, delusion and incompetence,” as Robert Potts notes, is a quotation from The Economist, descrying the break-up of the Cancún summit; the article in which it appears is, however, dated 18th, rather than the 20th September, 2003. See For J.H. Prynne, p.84, and http://www.economist.com/node/2071629. 98 its victims obligingly mute, whilst further along the supply chain the First World hand-wringing divagations of The Economist regurgitate for its loyal subscribers the remaining moral scraps in wretched parsimonious dismay. The poem’s envoi reads: “Don’t you yet notice / a shimmer on bad zero, won’t you walk there / and be the shadow unendurably now calibrated.”26 The promised drip is pinched, and the song eats itself. The last lines squeeze out of the poem the final residue of humanity. They are a grisly exhortation to recognise - and further to promenade in leisurely complicity alongside - the meticulously planned annihilation of life. The last line-break blurs the line between recognition, complicity and identification with what “you […] notice.” First you “notice” “a shimmer on bad zero,” then “you walk there,” then you are “the shadow” into which that “shimmer” dissolves, or out of which it is burnt. What “you” are enjoined, teased, cajoled and encouraged to become, and which as a result “you” do, almost inevitably, become, is the perfect representative of nothing even recognisably human. Under the terms of the poem, nothing gets better outside the conditions of domination of which it sings. Since all the poem’s “you”s add up to a “we,” the “oppression” is ours and our own. There is “nothing curative beyond oppression,” but only in its midst, since we are the arbiters of our own domination. To search for anything “curative” (let alone a cure) outside of the conditions which the poem tells us we are in, and which we perpetuate, would be, according to the poem’s own logic, the sheerest naïve utopian perversity imaginable. From our current standpoint, from what and when Prynne’s poetry has, for a long time, regarded as “now,” we’re doomed. 26. Potts: “A “bad infinity” of constant economic expansion becomes a “bad zero” of ever more calibrated levels of human poverty; new life arrives already stamped and branded with its value and life expectancy.” For J.H. Prynne, p.86. 99 100 John Wilkinson Silicon Versets at Work, Blue Slides at Rest Recall that the texts collected in Kitchen Poems were offered originally as bulletins in The English Intelligencer, and that the rhetorical formation of The White Stones is as much meditative and sermonising as it is lyrical. From the start therefore an ambivalence around lyric can be discerned in J.H. Prynne’s work – the resources of philosophic song in the English romantic tradition, and later the resources of the European modernist lyric, were not to be deprecated, but have been bent more to cognitive projection and to historical and philological foundation, than open to sensation in a Keatsian or Tennysonian way. The question remains why a master of English lyric prosody as evidenced in books from Brass to Wound Response and in passages of work as late as Triodes should abdicate his own virtuosity in favour of a language fabrication which is determinedly flat and deployed in a syntax of unqualified proposition. Anyone can write flatly through incompetence or misadventure, but the flatness of late Prynne is a sustained and controlled effect. The answer may lie in a radical anti-humanism, not a repudiation of the lyric merely, but a repudiation of the anthropocene era. The White Stones with its big history emergent out of Olson’s Pleistocene can be seen as a first move. Its much-noticed temporal scale, where time extends geologically and galactically, produces an oscillation between human sublime and human diminutive, with Romantic philology substituting for Olson’s mediating recourse to the mythic.1 After the transitional satire and romantic ironies 1. The first chapter of the foundational work of Prynne studies is titled ‘Questions of Scale’; see N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of 101 of Brass and Wound Response what develops is a poetry of systems, initially distinct systems as in the dominant plant biological discourse of High Pink on Chrome and the financial discourse of Down where changed. The diurnal cycles of the early sequences likewise prepare for the succeeding technological cosmologies – High Pink on Chrome engages with the technology of grafting, and the unusually personal first person singular of Down where changed confronts the futility of resistance to the determinations of world financial markets. What then starts to emerge is the poetry of a General Theory, a General Poetic Theory out of which human consciousness can be seen to struggle as a by-product of specific environmental conditions, the chief interest being the interlocking of an array of systems from quantum physics to geopolitics to biochemistry to language. Prynne’s excitement in Kazoo Dreamboats at discovering the operations of the dialectic at the subatomic level in particle physics is consistent with such ambition, and might be a bit comical were it encountered outside the framework of Prynne’s reverse engineering, aiming to reconstruct the universe poetically while incidentally recoding humanity. Language now becomes as much obstructive as generative; Prynne’s work negotiates the anti-humanist dilemma to which deconstructive practice also responded, how to displace human presence from the centre of the medium constituting it. Specifically in the interests of General Poetic Theory lyrical cadence has to be thwarted – for even if the lyric ‘I’ is removed from sight, the resonance of English lyric cadence summons the lyric ‘I’ as a ghostly participant. It even accrues greater authority in being displaced from a potentially identifiable pronoun, maintaining the affective charge of personal experience while representing English-speaking humanity. That Prynne recognises this risk is clear from his commentary on Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper,’ a poem whose force is deemed to connect present-day readers of contemporary poetry with an aboriginal population of these islands in their daily labours. Lyric cadence then places human labour and its shaping power at the centre of the universe, a position the General Poetic Theory aims to cancel. Nor is cadence the only feature of post-Romantic lyric to be cancelled; the line-break is nullified as a site of phenomenological encounter, and a three-beat hammered molossus characteristically concludes sentences, overpowering lines and stanzas shaped by no affective J.H. Prynne (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). 102 or intellectual tremble on the peak metre. Prynne’s earlier poetry had in part relied on Heidegger’s eco-linguistic linkage between the human universe and its environmental matrix to perform the mediations of Olson’s creation myths; but etymologies are weak transmitters between stars and synapses. The political discomfort with Heidegger evident in Word Order extends to the previously avowed tradition of romantic philology, now seeing social Romanticism as potentially as malign as Social Darwinism. Committed politically to a Maoist systematisation whereby the dialectic becomes itself fetishised, abstracted from human labour as a universal principle embedded in the workings of the natural world even prior to the emergence of humankind, Prynne seizes upon intimations of the dialectic as a kind of originary force, linked in his latest poem to the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers – although a monism incorporating its own dynamic divisibility might remind some of the opening of St John’s gospel. An earlier poetic-materialist epic of like ambition (but more recent than Lucretius) may be identified in Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘On a Raised Beach,’ a poem which on reading from the perspective of late Prynne starts to reconfigure as closer to present poetic ambition than ‘The Waste Land’ or The Cantos, in its confrontation with a world systematically indifferent to humanity: All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems, But where is the Christophanic rock that moved? What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?2 The “[d]iallage of the world’s debate” moved by stone in MacDiarmid’s poem proceeds independently of humanity; stones “cannot be hurled” and human consciousness must learn “to participate / In the life of a stone.” A revolutionary ideal of pitilessness is disturbingly present in keeping with MacDiarmid’s bizarre elitist Stalinism; while MacDiarmid does allow parenthetically that “love / Once made a stone move,” the text hastens to add that this Christian concession is wholly beside the point. Not stony enough. Thankfully the metaphorical valence of stoniness is absent from 2. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘On a Raised Beach,’ The Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1985), pp.422-433. 103 Prynne’s dialectical universe of particles and forces; but the question of how the truth of such a universe might be accessible to human experience is no less problematic than for the solitary poet facing universal obduracy on a Scottish island. That is, if truthfulness is not to be contrived by the sleight of a shift from physics to metaphysics. While a General Poetic Theory may engage scholars and those concerned to extend the resources of poetry through new formations – and Prynne’s late poetry does present readers with something new – exactly how a poem written under its auspices could be read, and what follows from its reading, have been little discussed. In reading Prynne’s earlier writing I may feel my limits painfully; but discomfort is palliated through diligence or through a trustful casting off, buoyed here by lyrical cadence, there by philological resonance or discursive association, by a timbral familiarity beneath the strange. On first looking into Prynne’s Into the Day I sat silent in the fens, gobsmacked, and despite the titular invitation, scarcely able to turn a page. A wondering paralysis in the face of enigmatic beauty has comprised a stage in my experience of several of Prynne’s books up to and including Triodes; a stage I must always stir myself to overcome in order to begin following the poem. Beauty is enigmatic because its recognition brings an advance consolation, the sense of something to fall back on that feels quilted with half-memories of cherished (and cherishing) cadences; such is beautiful writing, exactly the consolation, the timbral familiarity this later poetry starts by refusing. It refuses this because one effect of recognised beauty is neither the reader nor the poem remains all there. Both consent to be gathered up and involved, and this piecemeal exchange and identification, along with what a reader adduces from his or her memory and knowledge, leads to a gratifying sense of reintegration whereby the text is fulfilled by the reader’s involvement and the reader fulfilled by the text. The most persuasive short description I have found of reading late Prynne and of the experience’s pleasures is William Fuller’s and contrasts strongly with such involvement; he writes of […] Prynne’s method of seeding the work with clusters of recurrent points of reference – a word, a phrase, a half-word, half-phrase, linking up through coordination of half-sounds or half-meanings: points that unexpectedly expand in and out through successive readings. Transgressions, breaches, 104 elisions are at the same time multiform enfoldings, tightly compressed networks, nodes of reference linking and unlinking across pages and sentences.3 Fuller goes on to describe fascinatingly some star-maps he discerns in Red D Gypsum. Particularly telling is his formulation that “[w]e are immersed and separated” because this switching distinguishes the phenomenology of discernment self-mapped while mapping what it discerns, from that fluid interactive re-formation of world and self promoted by Prynne’s earlier work. This more familiar experience of involvement in reading poetry includes much brought to the poem by way of memories and expectation, and through the poem’s signalling of referentiality – towards things we feel we ought to know and therefore pursue outside the poem and bring back into our involvement, and towards associations we might consider adventitious but nonetheless admit as pleasing. Fuller writes of the referentiality of late Prynne, but as internal to the text; that is how memory works in these poems, through apprehending “recurrent points of reference” in their networks, rather than a shared experience of a rainy day in Wales or lost love. This characteristic “tightly compressed network” is a clue to how it is possible to become immersed and separated at the same time. The description does not sound so much like a lyric poem as like an epic, a theogony. Simultaneous immersion and separation characterises initiation, a disorientated witnessing to a full revelation of a world. What more specifically does encounter with one of these poems feel like? I chose to write here about Blue Slides at Rest because it a poem whose manner of auditory reception was specified by Prynne himself, reading at the Pearl River Poetry Conference in Guangzhou in 2005; while it is also the only one of his books whose first printed appearance was determined by the format of Poems. His oral performance therefore might claim a unique status among Prynne’s presentations of his work. Accepting his instruction to the Guangzhou audience at face value is tricky however, since he addressed people whose English was imperfect and who were little attuned to English poetic practice. But when he asked his audience to shut their eyes and imagine each word as a light, a star that flashed on and then 3. William Fuller, ‘Restatement of Trysts,’ Chicago Review 50:2/3/4 (Spring 2005), p.248. 105 was extinguished, he may have had in mind W.R. Bion’s recommendation to psychoanalysts that they should as far as possible extinguish memory, and resist formulating an interpretation, even silently, while a patient speaks.4 At the same time Prynne may have been alluding to a universe whose resting state is dynamic, a night sky with its stars twinkling, for ‘slides’ can be read as a verb as well as a noun. He may also have thought of a Humphrey field of vision test, where a patient must signal response to faint flashes of light appearing unpredictably in a dark background. Why did this poet refuse for so long to read his poems in public before his epochal readings in China? To address an audience outside the English lyric community, ‘community’ signifying those who might be gathered by the cadences of English lyric into the centre of a human universe, to adjure such an audience specifically to not follow the poem – these are serious precautions against lyric identification. The prosody of the General Poetic Theory greatly reduces the risk of lyric gathering, but not so far as to allow public reading in a native language where connections will always be made. Prynne’s strategy, it should be stressed, is differently motivated from the situatedness which marks cultural, gender and other such contingencies, and that deplores the presumption of speaking for others – for human variation scarcely registers in this cosmological systems engineering. When I begin to read Blue Slides at Rest, at once I encounter countercadence as an obstruction, these slides are intricated, these slides are at rest only in the sense that a circuit is at rest, being as it were “silicon versets,” to plunder ‘Riding Fine Off ’ from Sub Songs; I presume that reading will switch them on and connect them one to another. Each page can be considered a ‘verset,’ a brief verse as well as, in the specialist meaning of ‘verset,’ a musical prelude; each is succeeded rapidly as in a carousel of transparencies or “slides” but also each in itself presents a circuit in posse as well as contributing to a sliding totality. No priority can be assigned to any component, there is no futurity implied, rather “order tracing hold and lock,” the phrase that ends the last slide, proclaims a disturbing kind of consistency. Except that consistency slides, even the seeming fixity of an unclouded noonday sky, an unruffled ocean, or the idea of a colour. That is the title’s negating assertion, after all, that nothing is self-consistent. Blue may not be so indifferent; even 4. W.R. Bion, ‘Commentary,’ Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Jacob Aronson, 1984), p.163. 106 if indifferent to human perception, its sustaining may arise from a play of sliding, of difference – a proposition more tolerable to contemplate than the horror of heaven or implacable stoniness. How far though can such a potentially emancipatory slide within its blue horizon be felt in reading the succession of evidentiary slides? Each of the twenty twelve-line slides feels like a bulletin, a report, a statement, text moved through ratchets like an old dot matrix printer, as though feeding through my mind at a steady pace with the occasional skip between slides; and soon divisions between syllables become as marked as those between words, an effect that will reach its apotheosis in Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage Artesian (2009), and divisions and relations between words proceed uniformly, ungoverned by subject and predicate, there is no hierarchy between full stops and between Print and Stop. What choice do I have but to accept what is delivered as how things are? Blue Slides at Rest may be slides in the sense of photographic transparencies but more importantly in the sense of specimen slides, for instance used in liver function tests to identify Hepatitis C. As specimen slides this text comprises a collection rather than a sequence and the order in which slides are selected may be inconsequential. That is what I find; I can take any slide as the first with no sense of disorder or impropriety, and continue by reading in random sequence. The fact that slides are at rest confirms the absence of a dynamic relationship between them, whether narrative, argumentative or otherwise developmental. But if I follow convention in beginning at the beginning, the first word of the book obtrudes a problem; it is ‘alt,’ which my infant school teacher would have stated is ‘not a word.’ It is a naked syllable or an abbreviation, an alert that what follows may be encoded, that is, potentially performative when run through my mind, as opposed to metaphorical or suggestive. I don’t know what it means. Do I continue regardless and hope for rescue through recurrence, triangulating this word’s significance for this text? If I do the first slide offers ‘Alter’ at the first word of the third sentence, and a recurrence of alt in the slide’s last phrase, “alt mere ingression.” That might encourage me to await further populations of alt, but I would be disappointed. Often the slides appear self-contained, and internal echoes or the intimations of discourse do not carry over. The slides while generically related do not cross-refer so far as I can see. Returning to alt, do I make the working assumption offered by my computer keyboard, a key entic107 ingly also marked Option? Or allow myself to recollect works by Prynne where biochemistry supplies the more recondite vocabulary, and therefore look up alt along with gamma and find alt is the standard abbreviation for alanine transaminase? Here I go again, and in irritable reaching after certainty I have dared to open my eyes. As the structure domain of each slide clicks through my mental carousel, I notice sequence motifs drawn from biochemistry (there seems to be quite a cluster around Hepatitis C), from plant biology, from astronomy and from computer coding (including coding for computer games, therefore coding for worlds and for agents). Sentences overrule poetic lines. A full stop at the end of a sentence marks a delivery completed, but these are verbal chains rather than grammatical sentences, for instance “A sabine spin / on relic viscid seizure patch weeded out yet attempt / spilling food from a mouth.” Spilling food from a mouth indeed – it’s hard to cram in such a mouthful. So now a decision is required; do I work as a decoder, or do I follow Prynne’s paradoxical advice – how can I wilfully suspend mindfulness, not being a bodhisattva? But Blue Slides at Rest decides for me, so long as I abstain from search machines. The decisiveness of this writing is absolute and even bludgeoning. After a while I just let the folds of the sequence tramp through my mind, and as they do so a flicker of fleeting connections plays through their ranks, and also plays back into my involuntary memory of other texts arrayed according to Prynne’s General Poetic Theory. Syllable to word to chain to stanza to circuit to the full array. There is no position for me to adopt hereabouts except in a shelter. Either this is a sky across which summer lightning flickers, or it is a kind of eukaryotic system that a team of exegetes might break down into components. Or it might be run-time and too late to unpick such text as it races through the world-historical mind, leaving our residues scrambled in the fallout. In Blue Slides at Rest there is only very rarely a sense of the propinquity, reaching and reached towards over a charged and never-quite-bridgeable gap, which animates lyric in the direction of its reader, promoting involvement. A ghost of lyric can be heard in the ninth slide beginning “As in gathering onstage sited, plan to fit,” when turning against that command with the cadenced clause “for ever the blue / sky bends fluently over all wand purchased.” My uninterrogated reading of “wand purchased” proposes a barcode reader, so here we have the world of human agency reduced to a world of chosen products, as against an autotelic universal system – not 108 much give in that, but “bends fluently” sounds almost responsive, a registering of proximity, an inclination. A few lines later that ‘she’ which since Her Weasels Wild Returning, perhaps as far back as A Night Square, has been a lodestar for human feeling in Prynne’s work, emerges from beyond a rampart of polysyllables: “Watch her watch: lifted clouds as light / on her cheek arch to fit.” Well there’s a cadential glow and even an operative linebreak, brutally operative; well-judged to cancel in one dismissive gesture the possibility of uplift the clouds adumbrate. So much for that, but the effect depends on light staying unextinguished for just a moment amidst processional code. ‘She’ is the harbinger of the only proper noun in this text, that is ‘Palestine’ in slide thirteen. Readers of Prynne’s Middle Eastern poem Triodes, where the pronoun ‘she’ denotes the figure either of Irene or Pandora, will notice the key word ‘parapet’ from Triodes recur in the final slide. These glimmers might promise to emerge as a constellation, following the rule that in late Prynne all residual humanity is concentrated in the female pronoun. No such luck: “estimate her / paramount select abstain.” To estimate, to select, to abstain – these are the stepping stones of paramount detachment from her. The present response paper largely abstains from glossing and I expect much reward will be gained from that approach. Reading this poem after the quatrain poems preceding it I feel reduced to even less than the hurt doll of my thought. The poem may not be so stroppy-sounding as Unanswering Rational Shore and it doesn’t march with the formidable stride of Acrylic Tips, but it shares with them the feel of a moral re-education programme prescribed by an authoritarian regime. Blue Slides at Rest ratchet through my mental reception chamber, whose little cavity is forced to expand more like a nuclear waste storage facility than the night sky. Because the poem’s glimmers will not decay, and because for all my resistance I remain compelled by this anomalous work, compelled by the question What Is It?, I try to configure animal or divine constellations, or draw lines on the fired but inert surface, coaxing out figures animal or human. This may condemn my humanistic reading practice, but I find the poem’s oracular assertiveness makes Prynne’s instruction to the Guangzhou audience sound defensive or mickey-taking. So I begin to think that resistance is exactly what this poetry is intended to produce: if it is the world as it is and if we were fully to recognise what is going on – well what? Some would become 109 incandescent and some would head for the bar. MacDiarmid concludes “And in death – unlike life – we lose nothing that is truly ours.” Terrific. But seriously, a sense of powerlessness in the face of inexorable forces is exactly what has been inculcated through our culture. From What Is It? I want to know What Follows? And I imagine that uncomfortable question accounts for the sudden urgency of Kazoo Dreamboats. This is the point of exasperation I had reached when something like the foregoing was delivered in Brighton. Returning to Blue Slides at Rest I realise I have no memory of it, unless I step aside and demand that I recover the poem as I read it then. But in approaching its pages I still do not know my way around this poem, pervaded by the presence of a ‘she’ whom previously I had noticed only once or twice. Where did she come from? From A Night Square perhaps? She mostly evaded me when I was looking at the poem a year ago, but now I see her traces in every slide. The words “dog star” come into view and I find myself thinking of the radically non-representational filmmaker Stan Brakhage, called to mind by his film named Dog Star Man, and how William Fuller’s description of late Prynne and J.H. Prynne’s instructions to his audience in Guangzhou might both evoke the experience of seeing a Brakhage film. Brakhage has some helpful things to say about the brain’s processing of visual form, making sense of Prynne’s invocation of the night sky as a guide to processing Blue Slides at Rest: Each brain’s main job is reference (thus re-presentational) but its life unto itself is that of Timed Light. Its electric moves react to input: thus the senses impose wavery particulars upon the contained free-play of illumination. Its physiology (and that of the whole nervous system) composes, the very shapes of cells being something of a fret pattern to contain this all-sensory storm of sparks, to impose, for example, visual form.5 5. Stan Brakhage, ‘In Consideration of Aesthetics (1996)’, Chicago Review 47:4 (Winter 2001) and 48:1 (Spring 2002), p.60. This special issue entitled Stan Brakhage: Correspondences features a full-colour fold out of film sequences depicting, inter alia, some notable blue slides at rest. 110 Brakhage writes in the same essay that he seeks the entertainment of cognition as opposed to re-cognition. Etymologically, to entertain is to ‘hold among’, to be entwined. Entertaining cognition means cognition is understood as a constantly shifting holding-pattern that glimpses its own processes, how its temporary resolutions arise. With this in mind, here is an instance of “contained free-play,” one slide from the Blue Slides at Rest published not long after Brakhage’s death and readable in homage to Brakhage’s work regardless of authorial intent (which would entail recognition from the start): Partition blurred caloric engine his spiral transfusion playful to flex, inherent tuneful quantity. Both recessive to malabsorb, lapse of thought. Neither remembered this, neck flushed allumette profusion, caressment. Up through by a turn in apical thrill conveyed to famish, ingenious breast cured to breathe. Sweet droplets immune in a flurry laid aside get a shift. Her bevelled spectral glide furnish, unusual: maps to gene margin prior frivolous ought soon to lift off ransom by choice, cantilena. Flitting under her breath in catches, bird on bird hydroxy filament he raids a temper vane limit venture payout. Imitate less. Apart low-rent voices motion entire neighbour respite dowel. I am surprised, after the hardship of my earlier reading, by the words “playful” and “frivolous”; these seem apt to a “cantilena” which is a playful, frivolous kind of song allied to gossip, and perhaps to “apical thrill” which sounds like trilling (“apical” refers to sounds made on the tip of the tongue). “[A]llumette profusion” and “[s]weet droplets” are here put under pressure to conform; much as birdsong, the “caloric engine” (of the body with its “ingenious breast”) has an “inherent tuneful quantity” which might be an entertainable shapeliness and pleasure by contrast with the rationing of “conveyed to famish” or “venture payout.” “[L]apse of thought” would be positive in this respect, another call to suspension of mindfulness, akin to the frivolity conducive to the braided presence/absence of “Flitting under her / breath in catches, bird on bird hydroxy filament.” “Catches” are positive as bursts of song, but not to be caught by contrivance of “temper vane limit venture payout” (to temper a vane, I take it, is to stop it flitting or 111 whirling so that it must signify a particular direction), and their cantilena is resistant to “ransom by choice.” How does such entertainment differ from involvement? The distinction is not hard-and-fast, but involvement tends towards merger whereas entertainment, in this specialised sense, demands incessant scanning, with pattern and consciousness of pattern forming from the same cloth. And I find this experience enjoyable after all, understanding that to notice “her bevelled spectral glide” only out of the corner of my eye was a good lapse. But my little cluster-exposition based on one slide from Prynne’s poem is itself an example of re-cognition; recognition of a shape proposed to me by Brakhage’s pattern. What, after all, is an “allumette profusion” but a “storm of sparks”? That match has only just emerged for me. Surely I should observe more vigilantly the injunction to “Imitate less.” But it is impossible to maintain such partitions intact. Sounds and memories seep across. These slides are also rooms, they are stanzas, and voices are heard through the walls. The present slide acknowledges the adjacencies quite explicitly at its beginning and end; I too am one of those “low-rent voices” chattering next door and perhaps I should quiet down now and insert a “respite dowel.” “Order tracing hold and lock” until my next reading of the poem. 112 Abigail Lang Translating To Pollen “To think means, to seek a sentence.” Pierre Alferi I will confine myself to speaking from a translator’s perspective, a comparatively fortunate condition since, to quote J.H. Prynne: “A translator is not in the business of providing explanations.”1 Still, the translator’s comfort is relative when it comes to Prynne’s late poetry and I would venture that there are only two comfortable postures for this translator: the first is one of utter naiveté; the second would be one of thorough understanding – how thorough is the question. I translated the first five stanzas and drafted five more stanzas from the end of To Pollen in 2009 still close to that blessed first state of relative innocence and with the immense benefit of a deadline:2 J.H. Prynne’s reading, together with Pierre Alferi, at the Centre Pompidou on February 11, 2009 at the invitation of Double Change.3 On first reading To Pollen I was struck by the combination of intractable difficulty and the sense of address and urgency the poems convey, 1. J.H. Prynne, ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems,’ Cambridge Literary Review 1:3 (Easter 2010), p.158. 2. J.H. Prynne, To Pollen (London: Barque Press, 2006). 3. And more specifically at the invitation of Sarah Riggs. A 4-part film of the reading is available online at http://doublechange.org/2009/02/11/11-02-09-j-hprynne-pierre-alferi/. The translation of the first four stanzas appeared in the first issue of Ligne 13 in April 2010, pp.29-36. The translation of the last seven stanzas appeared in Écrire l’histoire 12 (Fall 2013), pp.97-102. 113 what John Wilkinson calls their “authority.”4 It is a rare language experience to be riveted by a text one doesn’t understand in the usual sense and it provides a rare insight into how language works. What I learned or rather saw confirmed was that it is possible to translate without understanding or, to be more specific, it is possible to translate what one cannot paraphrase – and I don’t mean Google-translate but engage with the text in the way that is characteristic of translation-work. Let me try to indicate some of the difficulties I was confronted with in my initial state of innocence in 2009 and suggest what it would take to approach these poems more confidently. What did I do? • • • • • • The first poem in the sequence was distinctly enjoining me to listen (“for it now, listen”), to hear and herd the sound particles; to play it by ear (“to a cert play”) and to rise to the occasion by raising-rousing a French equivalent: “Rise alike.”5 I read To Pollen and the material Prynne pointed me to, including Jennifer Cooke’s invaluably well-informed and perceptive review of To Pollen and several of his own essays;6 I read aloud, or at least for the mind’s ear, finding that the meaning had to be apprehended kinetically, in the movement from word to word, in the rush of the phrase; I looked up most of the content words in the OED to assess their possible parts of speech and meanings, arch. dial. and obs. included; I jotted down possible translations for each word or conceivable phrase, trying multiple syntactical bracketings; I made decisions based partly on the projected coherence of the English, partly on the anticipated effect of the French: turning my back on the English and looking at the poem from the front, with a French ear, trying to assemble a poem that does in French something similar – for 4. John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Great Wilbraham, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), p.6. 5. I am aware that these ‘poems’ are really stanzas but because each appears on its own page and their 13 lines approximate the sonnet, I saw them as individual poems as well, in spite of the fact that To Pollen is unmistakably a single poem. 6. Jennifer Cooke, ‘Warring Inscriptions: J.H. Prynne’s To Pollen,’ Intercapillary Space, http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.fr/2007/04/warring-inscriptions-j-hprynnes-to.html. Accessed 31 December 2013. 114 instance to have beginnings of phrases that fork in mid-phrase. I tried to reproduce what struck me so much in these opening poems, the strange feat that they sound unmistakably English but resist any easy resolution. Prynne was entirely supportive of the translation, providing encouragement and contextual material, but he made it clear he would not be providing explanations, which would have been unworkable by email anyway, given the bulk of prose necessary to ascertain a shade of meaning at a distance. In an email I wrote to him in January 2009, in the hope of obtaining general indications, I listed my areas of bafflement: the punctuation which sometimes felt counter-intuitive, a sense that some words were truncated (the occasional elision of the –ed in what seemed preterit or past participle forms), and the immense difficulty of translating prepositions because context is so pared down. As the months go by and I struggle to find the time to complete the translation of To Pollen I realize the “difficulty” of these stanzas has a sociopolitical dimension as well – that it embodies a political stance – in that the amount of time and attention they require from the reader or translator go against the grain of contemporary culture, powerfully reversing priorities. Devoting some twenty hours to a rough draft of thirteen lines is quite unreasonable from the point of view of the prevailing ideology of efficient time-management. In particular, it is important to translate each stanza at one sitting or over consecutive days so that all meanings-in-sufferance are there at hand, ready to settle further down, or up, the lines. These poems have a mineral density but the energy of reading returns them to a multi-sensual and -dimensional molten state. That is the truly exciting, sometimes ecstatic, moment of translation when every phrase, word and syllable bristles with all the meanings that have been brought to the fore and hover, waiting for the best combination to occur. To translate is to make decisions, ultimately. First to call up as many possible candidates for each word or phrase and then, taking the whole compositional unit into account, to make decisions and select. The more one knows the greater the chances that the decision is apt. It is not primarily a question of being right or wrong locally but of how each word considered will contribute to the poem as a whole. Which brings up the question of 115 the compositional unit: • • • • • Obviously enough, this cannot be a word for word translation. However, because French and English are close relatives, the best solution is often the simplest: to retain the same root, even if the meanings have drifted apart to make the words false friends. This is not a homophonic approach, more a trust in the memory traces of diachronic phonology. Clearly much can be done at the level of the phrase in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that it is often unclear where a phrase ends or begins. This is harder to do in French than in English because words in French want to be numbered and gendered thus indicating which word they relate to. But it can be approximated. My treatment of the line remains unsystematic because I am unsure of its value in the original. As a result, I haven’t approached lines as self-contained units or tried to preserve their semantic integrity at all costs. The lines in To Pollen don’t sound metrical, but I couldn’t swear they are only visually isometric, each poem delineating as close to a rectangle as possible without resorting to full justification. Why are some words hyphenated at the line-break: al-ready (p.5); fan-fare (p.9); pro-voke (p.13), up-lift (p.16), retro-grade (p.24), be-low (p.26), for instance? The purpose is not visual isometry (on page 5, “already” would fit at the end of line 11 and still be shorter than line 9), so what form is being enacted? Or is the poet simply taking advantage of the break for a pun or to parse a word in its constituent elements? I would very much like to read more on Prynne’s prosody. The stanza and the poem are clearly decisive units. Decisions made in a later stanza can have retroactive effects. Worryingly of course the conversation going on between stanzas cannot be contained within the covers of To Pollen and extends to all of Prynne’s writings and, I fear, his readings. Not only will the translator gain from a thorough knowledge of his poetics (a collected prose volume would be invaluable) but ought to become acquainted with Prynne’s evolving use of words and syntax. Words carry the echo of their previous uses. The word scrip on page 18 of To Pollen may well resonate with its occurrence in ‘Royal Fern.’ That Bernard Dubourg and the author chose to translate scrip as titres in « Fougère royale » 116 may induce me to translate the scrip in To Pollen by titres.7 Or not, if I decide it is more important to preserve the relation between all the words built on the -scrip root: ascript, inscript, rescript… Among the sources Prynne pointed me to were his own essays on translation, in particular ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems’ written for his Chinese translators and published in 2010. In a related interview, Prynne sums up the advice he gave them, that is: to translate the words of these poems, their activity of language, rather than to resolve what might seem to be the question of meaning and then to render the meaning of the resulting interpretation. […] Doing literary translation is not resolving and closing a dialectic of uncertainty, but keeping this uncertainty open and active.8 This hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who has translated modern and contemporary poetry before. What struck me in ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems’ was the poet’s extremely precise, consistently abstract and strikingly accurate description of the difficulties that beset the working translator. Why would a poet who is not primarily, or even marginally, a translator (at least there is no entry for translation in Michael Tencer’s thorough online bibliography) know so much about the translation process and care enough to write up such a minute account of it? At the beginning of the essay Prynne declares that he has no special training in the field but has made translations and collaborated with translators of poetry from and into French, German, Italian and certain other European languages; and that he has been very closely involved with a current collective project to translate his own poems into Chinese. But more importantly, I think, he continues: 7. ‘Royal Fern,’ Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), p.159. ‘Fougère royale,’ traduit par Bernard Dubourg et l’auteur, Po&sie 98 (2002). 8. J.H. Prynne, and Keston Sutherland, ‘Introduction to Prynne’s Poems in Chinese,’ The Cambridge Quarterly 41:1 (March 2012), p.205. 117 The activity of composing a poem in the first place shares some features with translation-work: pausing to consider exactly which words and expressions to use, building up the form and sound of a poem as if it already exists in your mind and as if you are translating this idea or process of thought into words on the page.9 Later in the essay, one of the features shared by translation-work and composition appears to be poetic thought: the translator may have privileged access to a poem’s poetic thought because the translation-work is akin to the work of poetic thought.10 Having suggested how pattern and patternviolation generate their own tendencies of meaning, Prynne notes: In the close encounter with such features, discovered in the writing practice of difficult poets and different kinds of difficult poem, we may be close to the inner dynamics of poetic thought. The relations of thought to meaning and argument to enquiry lie somewhere within the experience of language structures, but often not along the regular lines of normal sense. So that if a reader or translator can enter the text-space of language used in these intensely non-normal ways, a poem may reveal some of its internal energy, or poetic thought itself.11 In another essay, ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work,’ Prynne describes the first step of composition as a reduction and disintegration: “The poet works with mental ears. Via this specialized audition the real-time sounds of speech and vocalized utterance are disintegrated into sub-lexical acoustic noise.”12 In her own account of translation, Rosmarie Waldrop insists on its destructive features, borrowing a comparison from Haroldo de Campos who describes the translation process as a Dionysian orgy of significa9. ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems,’ p.152. 10. Which happens to be the object and title of another important essay by Prynne: ‘Poetic Thought,’ Textual Practice 24:4 (2010), pp.595-606. 11. ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems,’ p.158. 12. J.H. Prynne, ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work,’ Chicago Review 55:1 (Winter 2010), p.128. 118 tion “dissolving the Apollonian crystallization of the original text back into a state of molten lava.”13 Waldrop notes that the translation process is thus very close to what Wilhelm Dilthey sees in the hermeneutic process. Interpretation of a work consists in “translating the ergon – the completed object – back into the energeia that brought it forth.”14 Bringing de Campos and Dilthey together, Waldrop writes: This would mean that the destructive phase of translating does not just break apart elements and melt them down to a state of lava still contained in a kettle, but that it pushes the work out of the boundaries of the said, down into the tectonic stresses and heat of the volcano, if I want to follow out de Campos’s metaphor, into the nucleus of creative energy where the work was conceived, where the author’s dialogue with the infinite space of (a different) language took place. Only there can it take place again, as a more complex dialogue with the original and its space as well as with the space of the translator’s language. Only there can the translator become “the one saying it again.”15 “There”? Where? Rosmarie Waldrop, like Prynne, speaks about the encounter of two languages in terms of space. An anecdote recounted early in ‘Introduction to Prynne’s Poems in Chinese’ confirms how extensively Prynne’s relation to language is shaped by translation-work and specifies what he means by the text-space of language. Prynne recounts the intense experience of making homework translations as a schoolboy, calling it “the most ardent and intricate point of my serious encounter with the nature of language” – no less.16 He recounts this: 13. Haroldo de Campos, ‘Transluciferation,’ Ex 4 (1985), quoted in Rosmarie Waldrop, Dissonance (if you are interested) (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), p.158. 14. Wilhelm Dilthey, quoted in Waldrop, pp.158-159. 15. Waldrop, p.152. 16. These two adjectives conjure the “hot spots” and “cross-links” that Prynne discusses in ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems,’ note 1 and p.157 respectively. 119 [T]he experience of translation was to my own mentality profoundly formative, and one of the reasons for this – and I remember the sensation very vividly – was the construction of an inner world-space mediating between separate and different languages. I’d be assigned a difficult translation from, say, German into English, or English into Latin, and I’d hunt up all the necessary vocabulary in the dictionaries around me, I’d hunt up all the syntax and grammar constructions, in my reference grammar and all the rest of it, and there’d come a point in doing this work when I’d have all this linguistic information in my head somewhere, or at my fingertips. And at that point the text I was working on was not in German or Latin and not in English, it was in some kind of phantasmal intermediary language which I couldn’t describe, and the linguistic rules for which I couldn’t recognise; it was a kind of metalanguage experience, like being in an area of language as a theoretical structure or mental state that didn’t actually have a specific vocabulary. […] and being somewhere in the experience-space between English and Latin was one of the most amazingly exhilarating experiences I had as a schoolboy. It made me feel what it was like to be in the zone of language as itself a place, indeed almost as a place of awareness, almost in a sense as a place to be: se trouver, sich befinden; ‘mi ritrovai,’ as Dante wrote at the start of the Inferno.17 Again, this is a terribly apt description of translation-work, especially the haptic quality of having everything at one’s fingertip, but it also sheds light on Prynne’s own compositional work. To Pollen and Prynne’s late poetry can be seen as attempts, successful I think, to reconstruct “some kind of phantasmal intermediary language,” “the linguistic rules for which” the reader both does and doesn’t recognize. This would account for the initiallyevoked feeling of being riveted by a language one cannot make sense of and, incidentally, for Prynne’s attachment to the stanza as an enactment of this space. 17. Ibid., p.198, emphasis mine. 120 While there is something discouraging and humbling in translating in the dark, with only partial knowledge of all that is going on at once, there is also great exhilaration in being given to feel and sense this phantasmal intermediary language and trying to reconstruct it for a French reader. Et fussent attache interne attroupés à fins de son en particule l’affixe scanna-t-il à l’ultramont, car qu’importe fauché pourrait niveler tropique cellulaire. Sortant en tête prouvé sous dirige toujours en pli, faille symbolique volonté de racheter ou balisant, un final magistral à l’aise. Front nu à céder, pâte draconienne. Dissémine empoigne ou parie-t-il pour consigner un ou deux plantons, au fond sous couche marque, tente. Rarement cultivés, placement à niveau promut-il recul incident sur-classe. Émet cellule générique timbre fluide ; à son écoute, sois ; pour d’ire joue pour voir apporte placide à un joint, promesse cloîtrée déjà infâme. De même lève-toi, ainsi fais. Le long de l’arête culminant pour brûler au noir ma destruction par intérim. 121 122 Keston Sutherland Sub Songs versus the subject: Critical variations on a distinction between Prynne and Hegel “A Poet’s history, can I leave untold” Wordsworth1 Prynne’s poetry and Hegel’s philosophy share the principle that truth cannot be made to appear except by a conscious, conceptually determinable effort to find it. For both Prynne and Hegel this effort is a movement, and the movement is impossible without loss to, or attrition of, the subject; the movement that creates knowledge destroys subjectivity. For Hegel, the dialectical character of this movement consists in the necessity that the subject thus destroyed by movement in the creation of knowledge is at the same time recreated in a new and different shape, so that every real loss of the subject is also its inaugural restoration. Movement is not out from the subject or away from it, but is a kind of stretching or extension, what one recent commentator on Hegel’s philosophy has called the “enrichment and expansion of the initial Fürsichsein [being-for-self].”2 The subject in 1. From the manuscript (MS.D, Book IV, p.5) of what is now The Prelude. The verse complete with strikethrough is by Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.535. 2. Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p.54. On the important distinction in Hegel’s philosophy between “the expansion and refinement of desire itself,” which is infinite, not excessive, and “the excessive or pathological expansion of desire” that is motivated by greed, vanity 123 the action of this movement must strain: only the “strain of the concept,” die Anstrengung des Begriffs, will really be the kind of thinking that is alone capable of finding truth.3 This account of the dialectical movement of the subject is quite different from Prynne’s. The creation of knowledge by the destruction of subjectivity is not at the same time the restoration of the subject, for Prynne, but movement is backward toward the truth of language conceived to exist “prior to” any subject. This truth is conceived in the geological form of a non-human linguistic “internal agency” sedimented in “the lexis,” which Prynne has described as “the deposits and relationships which comprise words before they are recruited into the action of human agency.”4 These are the words that poetic thought is made from and in which it inheres, whereas words recruited and in action are never far from military use: in virtually all of Prynne’s poetry at least since The Oval Window (1983), the subject that must be destroyed is tracked to its hyperbolic limit-form, which is always the murderous extensions of military agency, from the atom bombs of For The Monogram right over to the peace talks at Camp David in Triodes. Hegel and Prynne both assign the work of movement to a specific identity of thinker. For Hegel it is the speculative dialectical philosopher alone who will avoid the mere flexing of “rigid, dead propositions”; for Prynne it is only the poet whose use of language will and the pressure of fashionable norms, cf. Jeffrey Church, ‘The Freedom of Desire: Hegel’s Response to Rousseau on the Problem of Civil Society,’ American Journal of Political Science 54:1 (January 2010), pp.125-139. 3. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2006), p.43. I retranslate Hegel’s famous phrase familiarly known from Miller’s version as “the strenuous effort of the concept.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.35. I think “strain of the concept” better captures the sense in Hegel that the concept is both work and stress. 4. J.H. Prynne, ‘On Peter Larkin,’ No Prizes 2 (June 2013), pp.43-45 (45). Prynne gives as his examples of human agency that in its use of language gets nowhere toward the internal agency of the lexis “a TV commentator or a politician or any of those people who use language to exert muscular power over or within the development of human social practice.” Cf. Prynne’s letter to Anthony Barnett of the 22nd January 1986, in which is berated the “false & corrupted idiom of residual, vernacular commonalty as almost pure cant: the daily diet of television, say, or the higher newspapers.” The Poetry of Anthony Barnett, ed. Michael Grant (Lewes: Allardyce Book, 1993), p.165. 124 activate the latent lexis, and other uses are prone to be by subjects whose “enrichment and expansion” is best epitomised in the historical image of wholesale imperial butchery. Truth in its relation to thought is, for both Hegel and Prynne, the potential of ardent work; or else it is dead, either by being “rigid, dead propositions,” which Hegel diagnoses are “the corpse which has left the guiding tendency behind it,” or, in Prynne’s words, by being “lazy, dishonest misery,” the conscious fate of the indolently indestructible subject that gets by in the mirror and is content to be constitutively self-alienated, pathological and desperate.5 Prynne’s whole poetry from start to finish unforgivingly repulses and berates this subject, despite how it may also sometimes seem to argue that no other subject is left or will ever be possible. “Yes, why is it like this,” begins a page in Biting the Air, nodding away its own pro forma protest upfront; and mechanically the grievance is matched to its paralysis, hitting the reliable breaks: “The skid marks demonstrate / abrupt redress.”6 The subject defined by its reproach of reality is proof against its own destruction, like Coleridge in ‘A Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ fortifying himself in injured sexual vanity; the subject who does this is lazy and dishonest, for Prynne, and can only wallow in the instrumental because human language of propaganda and lament: the sing-song rubbish of “human agency” in its accommodation to general defeat and victory.7 For Prynne this is a moral corruption and it extends indefinitely into the subject: 5. ‘All the hedges are paid for / but as soap clears on the mirror / the willing helper is there // as herald of lazy, dishonest misery,” J.H. Prynne, Down where changed, Poems (Tarset, Northumberland and North Fremantle: Bloodaxe Books and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), p.303. Misery is dishonest in part because it is reliably always imperfect. In a letter to Charles Olson on the 7th March, 1966, Prynne asks “who wouldn’t be perfectly miserable, if there were such an option?” 6. Poems, p.558. 7. It is worth noting that already in one of his earliest essays, ‘The Elegiac World in Victorian Poetry,’ The Listener (1963), pp.290-91, Prynne had formulated, in both descriptive and ontological terms, the basic distinction between a voice that originates in the individual subject but becomes “anonymous” once it is poetry and one that remains the mere property of the subject as an individual life-history: “performances such as ‘Lycidas’ were essentially public events, monuments crafted out of a shared language, in such a way that the feeling expressed was cogently personal but also anonymous: the voice was human but not inevitably the property of a distinct individual.” 125 it becomes the subject’s “birthright and natal place, our lingo.”8 Our only contact with truth inherent in the lexis is at what Prynne has topologically imagined as the rim of language; language must be ardently traversed in unrelenting vigilance against the comfortable adjustments and inertia that are not the lapses of an occasionally inattentive or mistaken subject, but virtually its whole self-brokerage. Prynne’s disgust with the laziness that prevents and substitutes for this traversal is consistently terminal, to the point where the disgust itself can only be ironized by aggressive displays of specimen impotent imperatives and command prompts: Do this, Act now. The grammar of these demands seems exotically normal in the context of the poems they punctuate or rupture, and the unexpected normality of the grammar intensifies the anxiety that the poems expect will be inflicted on a reader of conscience, namely that demands abandoned to a grammar so manifestly impotent to access the lexis prior to human agency must surely be impossible to satisfy except untruthfully and by means of yet more human agency. The last words of the opening poem of Sub Songs, like the last words of To Pollen, aggressively inflict this anxiety on their reader with foregone impassable imperatives: “Now get out,” demands the first end in Sub Songs, of a poem only now, and suddenly, at the close, prepared to use grammar to make a normal sentence fit for nothing better than human speech, as if you had ever felt in, and as if by any conceivable effort of obedience you could actually leave; “Try doing it now” taunts To Pollen, another normal sentence, as if by any of your available human-agency efforts you could really do whatever this act is that even at this point where reading stops dead is still impossible even to identify, let alone long to avoid having to do. Hegel is disgusted with bad philosophers, who are morticians whose pretence at knowing, “with all its pros and cons […] never gets anywhere, and knows not why.”9 But Hegel’s disgust is nothing like so intensely unsparing as Prynne’s, and in a sense it is not so absolutely radical either, because for Prynne it is not just any individual in pompous getup as the expert at thought who is to blame for the skid marks and the universe of paralysis they index (the “TV commentator” and “politician” are his recent examples of the particularly egregious subject),10 but subjectivity itself, the very form 8. J.H. Prynne, Sub Songs (London: Barque Press, 2010), p.6. 9. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p.18. 10. ‘On Peter Larkin,’ p.45. 126 of the subject we still are whose only direction toward truth is out of itself, and whose intrinsic habitual reckoning with that travel restriction is to ignore it or to settle for the “pious gloss” instead.11 Any more sanguine or indulgent judgment of the subject is the essence of flattery, and will conduce to paralyse language where it has drifted apart from the lexis that is truth.12 The intensity of disgust at the paralysis of the subject is higher in Prynne than it is in Hegel, and for that reason the ontological status of truth is different in either case. In Hegel’s philosophy, where the subject is the infinite reflection of self-consciousness on the world and on itself, however difficult it may prove actually to find truth, nonetheless truth cannot be anywhere other than within the subject, as experience and as the destiny of substance ardently conceptualised. Truth cannot lie outside the subject in wait to be reached by him, or beyond whatever is his reach at full stretch.13 Truth for Hegel is inseparable from and belongs essentially 11. Prynne, Down where changed, Poems, p.302. On the vicissitudes of Prynne’s early moral reaction to our lazy and ignorant shirking of the potential for truth, see Keston Sutherland, ‘Hilarious absolute daybreak,’ Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary 2: On the Poems of J.H. Prynne (2010), ed. Ryan Dobran, pp.115-147. 12. This picture of the subject resembles Hegel’s picture of the subject belonging in “the Oriental realm,” who, in The Philosophy of Right, p.220, is defined as possessing himself in “inner calm” that is “merely the calm of non-political life and immersion in feebleness and exhaustion.” See Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). 13. Hegel implicitly contradicts himself and banalizes his own speculative philosophy of the subject when in the late sections of The Philosophy of Right he promotes “the essence of marriage” above lived experience “in an existing marriage” and can therefore proceed to make monogamy “one of the absolute principles on which the ethical life of a community depends,” conceptually essentialize gender difference, and categorically relegate “bodily desire” to “contingency and caprice.” pp.114-5. But Hegel is profoundly a monogamous thinker of the subject whose philosophy depends on singular fidelity to the absolute, as he acknowledges with psychological sympathy in his portrait of the subject in divine action, the artist inspired to create truth in art: “talent […] shows itself in the driving restlessness to shape a specific sensuous material at once in a lively and active way and to seize this mode of expression and communication as the only one, or as the most important and appropriate one.” Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p.41. But the fact is that since truth belongs to subjectification, “ethical life” and the concept of right cannot depend on 127 to the work of subjectification. For Hegel’s speculative philosophy, it can only be a schematic interference of the understanding, not the strain of the concept, to decide with Prynne in his famous early essay that “difficulty [i.e. the experience of the thinking subject; but also, we could add after reading Prynne’s later essays, language] is cognitively prior to resistance [i.e. the pressure exerted against the subject by real objects; but we could now add, the lexis] but ontologically dependent upon it,” since even the conceptual relation of ontological dependency must itself in turn be made the substance of a new act of conceptual thinking whose destiny at the hands of dialectics is to be transformed into the subject; this destiny is the reach of subjective infinity and it means ultimately the abolition of the difference between subjects and the world.14 For Hegel that abolition is absolute knowledge, the historically unalterable limitation and disciplining of desire, since that “driving restlessness” to give shape to sensuous experience “in a lively and active way” which is the only actual bearing of the subject toward truth will be subjectively infinite and capable of realising truth only if and when desire is as mobile as thought. Or in other words: subjective infinity is infinitely expansive desire as well as infinitely expansive thought, and the strain of the concept is always both at once. As Hegel says in The Philosophy of Right, p.101, “dialectic in the strict sense” is “dialectic as the pulsating drive of speculative inquiry.” Desire might be infinitely mobile and expansive within a monogamous relationship, but then it might not be; and when it is not, driving restlessness to give shape to experience in a lively and active way comes into painful conflict with the ethical sense of duty belonging and owing to a pre-existing stage of right: subjectification itself comes into conflict with so-called “absolute principles on which the ethical life of a community depends.” This is a contradiction that deserves to be speculatively conceptualised, not a mere limit to freedom. The most conservative conceit in Hegel is that every limitation of freedom can be dignified with the conceptual role of a ‘determination,’ while ‘supersessions’ can be found that leave the ideally mobile subject squarely where it is. This conservative tendency appears already in the Phenomenology of Spirit, p.305, when Hegel makes “the point of revolt” against state power a characteristic terminus of unhappy consciousness, rather than recognise that subjectification and the strain of the concept are “the point of revolt”: under capital, always; in marriage, sometimes. 14. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, which more than any other was responsible for establishing the conceptual coordinates for the use and development of Hegelian thinking by French post-structuralist theorists, includes a number of remarks that seem to support and confirm Prynne’s account of “resistance.” “In effect, I do not believe that it is possible to define what is properly speaking the Real otherwise 128 the end and aim of all thinking, whereas for Prynne, the abolition of the subject-object difference would mean the supersession of the contradiction between difficulty and resistance, and this could only be the absolute dereliction of our responsibility to real objects that are permanently and in truth not-you. The work of poetic thought is, for Prynne, the essential practical manifestation of “difficulty,” whose ontological dependence on resistant objects establishes the reality of the world prior to its perception and interpretation by subjects; and the dignity of poetic thinking is an essential dignity, rather than just a matter of reputation, on the basis that poetic thinking is what makes the prior reality of the world (the lexis prior to the recruitment of language into human agency) irrefutable.15 For Prynne, at least from within the ardent perspective of his poetry itself, the subject who engrosses the whole of truth is a disgusting contraption for silencing objects and the lexis and is fundamentally predatory and imperial in its reach, whereas for Hegel the rejection and beratement of the subject at its absolute extension is a symptom of the unhappy consciousness that is definitely already paralytic.16 Hegel’s concept of Geist is in any case inherently a form of optimism about subjects, because it means (what even the than did (among others) Maine de Biran: the Real—it is that which resists.” Then further: “True consciousness—and it is of this that one speaks in general—is impersonal (selbst-los), that is to say, inhuman.” Unlike Prynne, however, Kojève still follows Hegel in interpreting “inhuman” or “selbst-los” consciousness as the stage of the subject where “the subject (thought, the concept, etc.) coincides with the object.” Inhuman consciousness is still the subject, not its abrogation or relinquishment, because contradiction itself, as well as the very possibility of its supersession, is essentially the strain of the concept which nothing besides the subject in active movement can perform or endure. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp.432-3. My translation. The definitive ontological assertion of so-called “vulgar materialist” Marxist philosophy, that physical, chemical and biological processes are dialectical in themselves, is a specific impoverishment of Hegel’s thinking: consciousness is subtracted from nature, and the “strain of the concept” becomes an otiose figure for psychological effort, and is no longer essential to the concept of dialectics. 15. Reference throughout the present essay to “poetic thought” and “poetic thinking” is made in interpretive response to Prynne’s use of those concepts in his essay ‘Poetic Thought,’ Textual Practice 24:4 (2010), pp.595–606. 16. Cf. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p.46: “the unhappy consciousness berates itself 129 affablest pessimism of the intellect must instantly reject) that we are all already moved and directed by the same motive and that the motive will become more ourselves the better we are at thinking (and is therefore not capital). Bad thinkers are, for Hegel, bad versions of a good subject. For Prynne the subject is what must be let go if truth, whose most important form is poetic thought, is to be heard. The subject is a kind of manager (it is “in charge”), an excrescence of consciousness that must be shed for poetic thought to be cohered into: Not all activities of poetry and its composition can be found to work with and through poetic thought. Nor is an end-productive subject-thinker, an identified poet-incharge, required. The activity of thought resides at the level of language practice and indeed is in the language and is the language; in this sense, language is how thinking gets done and how thinking coheres into thought, shedding its links with an originating sponsor or a process of individual consciousness.17 It is worth observing that in his recent critical and theoretical prose, Prynne is never anything like so aggressive in his conceptualisations of the subject as he consistently is in his recent poems. The prose essays are readier to entertain contingencies and to allow contradictions in their account of the subject without expressing anger against either the failure of the subject to destroy itself or the historical consequences of its hyperbolic extension; the negative argument of the prose is not secured by emphatic anger at the unmistakable dereliction of the subject. The passage just quoted seems to risk allowing two contradictions to clearly emerge. The first contradiction is the identity of the “activity of thought.” The “activity of thought” migrates in the third sentence from being resident “at the level of language practice,” to being “in” the language itself (this may be a further specification of what it means to reside at the level of language practice, but the implication is constantly, setting up one part of itself as a pure judge aloof from contradiction and disparaging its changeable part as inessential, although ineluctably tied to it.” 17. ‘Poetic Thought,’ p.596. 130 that it may even be immaterial whether the language is practised or not), and then at last it migrates into the very identity of the thing that had just now been its residence or the substance that accommodated it, language itself. The activity of thought resides in and is in what it is.18 The second contradiction is that whereas no “subject-thinker” is required for poetic thought, the activity of that thought nonetheless progresses to coherence by “shedding its links with” what can only be a “subject-thinker”: “originating sponsor” and “process of consciousness” either mean “subject-thinker,” or at the very least they are identities that require that a “subject-thinker” exist. The energy of these contradictions is speculative. It pushes Prynne’s argument into thinking the non-identical: poetic thought is both identical with language and distinct enough from language to be locatable in it or resident in its practice (and sometimes it will not be there at all); and the subject-thinker is inessential and essential at once, since thinking cannot cohere into thought except by shedding its links with the subject-thinker. For Prynne, as also for Hegel, contradiction emerges when thought is pressed in movement to its present most extreme determination. But for Prynne, that activity of thinking and its pressure toward determination is essentially a moral trial motivated by disgust at subjective indolence in the face of social injustice, on which progress is defined according to the prior condition that poetic truth is truth itself (Prynne has sometimes seemed ambivalent about whether that absolute identification of truth with poetic truth needs arguing or if it is an a priori absolute). Also unlike speculative thinking in Hegel, and in Adorno too, neither of whom ever makes truth depend on the success of its own struggle to shake free of the subject’s process or “sponsorship” (again a hint of justified class animosity: manager or sponsor, the subject is not what does the real heavy lifting), in Prynne the power of thinking as the work of truth is manifest only in 18. Cf. a similar seeming contradiction in Wittgenstein’s remark: “When I think in language, there aren’t meanings going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions; the language is itself the vehicle of thought.” Language must surely convey something in addition to itself for its conception as a “vehicle” to make any sense, and it remains unclear why that thing could not be “meanings.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p.161. 131 movements away from the subject and out of its reach.19 Poetic thought is not self-consciousness, but the truth of things, and poetry in its radical truth is not what humans speak, but the shining of the lexis in its priority to the subject. In what Prynne has called “the dialectic of imagination and real things,” poetic thought is finally contradiction without mediation: it is the reality of things as they are after imagination has been exhausted in the work of writing.20 Writing poetry is, in Prynne’s words, “an occupation that exhausts the person.”21 The “generation of poetic thought” succeeds by “separating from its origins in a life history.” However this separation may submit to be dispassionately conceptualised in abstract by the prose of ‘Poetic Thought,’ the actual work of doing it is compulsorily poetic for Prynne and requires, in his poetry, a commitment to the perpetual renunciation of agency in language and the constant squaring up to daily loss (“cutting down on 19. The contrast with Adorno’s account of the subject is complete: “knowledge becomes fruitful not by excluding the subject but through its utmost exertions, through all its impulses and experiences.” ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ Hegel: three studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), p.7. Hegel describes the effort to produce “the independence of the object” as the work of self-consciousness to “supersede” the dependence of the object on self-consciousness. But for Hegel this work is subjectively infinite: it is the effort through which self-consciousness tries to achieve its own “satisfaction.” “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction [when it produces the independence of the object] only in another self-consciousness.” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.109-110. Poetic thought in Prynne’s sense is categorically not “another self-consciousness.” Nor is poetic thought (what at first sight it may promise to resemble) what Leo Bersani (who, like Prynne, is sceptical of the existence of the Freudian unconscious in the form suggested by a psychoanalytic theory that too much resembles depth psychology) has called a “mode of subjecthood in excess of or to the side of the psychic particularities that constitute individualizing subjectivities.” ‘Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,’ Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), p.139. Poetic thought is not a “mode,” nor is it any other kind of style, iteration, vicissitude or determination, of subjecthood. 20. J.H. Prynne, ‘No Universal Plan for a Good Life,’ Sahitya Ra Jeevan Darshan [A collection of the expressions], ed. Rajan Prasad Pokharel (Nepal, 2010). 21. Letter to Anthony Barnett, 5th January 1986, The Poetry of Anthony Barnett, p.163. 132 flagrant unction”),22 which already, and perhaps still most devastatingly, in Down where changed is a task dictated to the paralytic subject doomed to trivialise it into infantile problem-solving: “You have to work it out / the passion-scribble / of origin swallowed up.”23 You have to: get on with it. In ‘Poetic Thought’ can be heard at least a faint echo of the ruthless attitude to this form of paralytic life that Down where changed teaches us we must perpetually cut “down to size,” in Prynne’s parenthetical specification of “life history” as the four items: “personal beliefs, memory, emotion, and physiology of personhood.”24 “Life history” is here already just about implicitly disqualified from being poetic thought, because it is capable of being itemised. “Of course the thing [life] is / this one [personal beliefs], this one [emotion] too.”25 The echo is amplified if we consider how insufferably superficial Prynne would find the itemisation of poetry into, for example, versification, diction, rhyme and metaphor. The question of the relative powers of poetic origination belonging to the elements of life history specified as beliefs, memory, emotion, and physiology of personhood is, strictly speaking, immaterial to the definition of poetic thought; truth in poetry cannot be owed primarily or above all others to any single element, but all elements are the ultimately indifferent constituents of a life history whose most important poetic purpose is to be separated from thinking so that poetic thought can be generated. Poetic thought is not “the personal history of someone thinking, the efforts of conscious mind-focus as pursued by an individual subject, or even by an individual poet.”26 Nor is it the sublimate or remains of that history, but in its very substance it is not the same thing 22. ‘Both ponder mercy,’ For the Monogram, Poems, p.422. 23. From Down where changed, Poems, p.305. 24. ‘Poetic Thought,’ p.596. 25. Poems, p.305. 26. ‘Poetic Thought,’ p.595. Because poetic thought is not the personal history of someone thinking, it should not be made the reform or the redemption of that history either. Poetic thought “does not belong to the poet,” and it does “not reside in […] visions of a future life.” ‘Poetic Thought,’ p.599. This is one reason why a prayer like the following is unimaginable in Prynne’s work, where poetry is never supplicated to redeem personal history or the life of the poet: “O poetry, visit this house often, / imbue my life with success, / leave me not alone, / give me a wife and a home.” John Wieners, ‘Supplication,’ Selected Poems 1958-1984 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1986), p.125. 133 as a life: poetic thought does not depend on poets, who are only its drivers. Poetic thought and the lexis are both work without the subject. This account of the work of poetic thinking as its own separation from its origins in a life-history is philosophical and anti-psychoanalytic. It contradicts psychoanalysis. The separation of thinking from emotion and physiology of personhood is the familiar doctrine of stoical philosophy, later approved by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right, where intellectual ethical substantiality is distinguished from natural or immediate ethical substantiality, and where progress from one to the other is the only meaning of liberation, which will be achieved only by “the hard struggle against pure subjectivity of demeanour, against the immediacy of desire, against the empty subjectivity of feeling and the caprice of inclination.”27 Prynne, like Hegel, rejects every variety of Rousseauian confessionalism as a distraction of individual human style on the way to the truth of thought, and Prynne’s early poetry shares with Hegel’s philosophy from its first beginnings in theology through to The Philosophy of Right the concept of love not as subjective feeling (or as feelings) but as the manifestation of unity achieved by the fulfilment of an ethical duty: for Prynne in The White Stones, love is the Wordsworthian unity of “one family” of all the human race and it is the unity of the material universe manifest in the arc of the sky.28 The separation of thinking from memory, representatively epitomised as historical memory impaired by modernity (which is another name for forgetting), was suggested before Prynne by the anti-psychoanalytic philosopher Heidegger; and the separation of thinking from personal beliefs is a basic principle for every variety of enlightened or anti-superstitious thinking, from Bacon to you. These need not be distinct facultative separations for Prynne, each with its own purpose of detachment and its own difficulties for poetic thinking; they are aspects of a single separation, the separation of poetic thought from the subject-thinker as a whole by the activity of thinking that sheds its links to the subject. If the separation of thinking from a life is harder because 27. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p.125. This attitude toward desire in Hegel’s late philosophy may have been the germ for Lukács’s attitude toward “immediacy” in expressionist art. The attitude is already retrogressive and conservative in its Hegelian origin, where it functions to establish the ethical necessity of monogamous heterosexual marriage. 28. For Hegel, love is “mind’s feeling of its own unity.” Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, p.110. 134 memory is traumatic, or emotion is overpowering, or personal beliefs are fundamental to practical activity, this may determine the duration and the intensity of the struggle to separate, but it will not determine the shape or content of the truth that appears when thinking coheres into poetic thought, since that truth will be the lexis, the truth of things as they are latently connected in their material reality, regardless of the lives of subjects (as the subtitle of Kazoo Dreamboats states it: “What There Is”). Personal beliefs, memory, emotion, and physiology of personhood are the origins of poetic thought, but they are never the substance of that thought once it is achieved. The manifestation of poetic thought depends on finding a way to discard these origins from language, or to leave them behind as language itself reaches toward the thought immanent in its own extremes. This account of poetic thought is not simply a confirmation of Mallarmé’s famous description in ‘Crise de vers’ of the “disparition élocutoire du poëte.” In Prynne’s argument, not only must the subject be let go from language so that poetic thought can be reached and the lexis heard, but because the work of that separation is a moral trial, it amounts to the intrinsic duty of the subject to try actively to extinguish and discard itself.29 On the extinction of the subject depends more than the success of the poem as art, or the satisfaction of a reader who enjoys being indirectly or impersonally spoken to; the progress from poetic thinking to poetic thought is the essence of what Prynne in another essay from two years earlier calls “the work of enhanced consciousness which is the human task, if not its paramount destiny.”30 This moral duty is absolute in Prynne’s late poetry: it rings and shines throughout the poems in the tone and shape of their judgments, no matter how difficult it may prove actually to specify in the case of any given sentence exactly what judgment is being made, or what specific object, fact or proposition is being judged. The progress from poetic thinking to poetic thought is not possible as abstraction, but it must be made, over and over again, in the language of poems as we make our difficult advance through them. Prynne’s poetry 29. Prynne’s thinking here should not be confused with Nietzsche’s fetishization of the Untergang of the strong subject in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche exhorts the strong subject to disappear so that an even stronger subject will come next. Prynne is not looking for another subject after the loss of this one. 30. J. H. Prynne, ‘Huts,’ Textual Practice, 22:4 (2008), pp.613-633 (621). 135 is written to prove the necessity of this firm conviction, which allies him with Hegel and categorically distinguishes him from our contemporary conceptual poets, who are content to do away with a subject that already has no concept, merely by name, together with the work of technique and all claims for its dignity except whatever is the most facetious. The difficulty of the advance through poems (not how hard they are to understand, simply, but how much of the subject it costs to make it to their extremes) is the experience of thinking becoming poetic thought as the subject is let go. Prynne’s technique and the moral argument of his poems are meant actually to produce that experience, not only by the spur of their explicit disgust for indolence, but by the equally explicit complexity of their dialectical itinerary for reading and comprehension. In most of Prynne’s last eleven books, this complexity could not be more explicit. In each of them the movement of thinking and our advance through language begins at the beginning of the book and must go on with difficulty until the end, returning often under the compulsion of phonetic, prosodic, etymological or grammatical echoes to earlier moments and keeping painfully rough track of how the surface shifts and warps as we make our way uneasily across it. The advance is in this sense dialectical rather than in any narrower sense logical: the poetry not only changes and accumulates its meanings as we go on, but progress is felt only in the accumulation and change of meanings, whereas the stabilisation of meanings feels somehow at odds with the activity of the language. Prynne does not say in his essay, or elsewhere, whether poetic thought, which is the end of poetic thinking, will be found only at the end of the poem. It is clear that poetic thought is not the summary or conclusion of the poem, but the end that every part of the poem works to make heard. But it is less clear whether poetic thought can inhere in the first word of a poem except by its dialectical retrieval from a stage later on in the advance to an extreme of language. The situation of poetic thought as the end that must be approached through and in language would seem to suggest that it cannot be there at the start, before thinking, or innate in the subject (here again Prynne is against both psychoanalysis and Rousseau).31 The following lines appear in the second poem of Sub Songs, ‘Creosote 31. But cf. ‘Huts,’ where Prynne does at least entertain the idea of “man’s first simplicity” which can “be imagined as endowed with the passion and truth of rightfulness” and as “a station for humanity within the ambit of a natural and 136 Damping,’ in what is either the third or fourth ambiguous combination of paragraph and stanza. you will be clandestine will end well enough, it will be taken back transient by sup lip covenant. Nothing in Prynne’s poetry or criticism positively licenses us to read his poetry as a confirmation of his own account of poetic thought. Even if the poetry did make that confirmation, or if Prynne did in person, it might not be pronounced in the meanings of individual sentences, but it might instead be inherent in the movement between and across sentences. That movement might not be movement as an activity of syntax, but a movement that somehow shimmers or is reflected in the musical surfaces and phonetic edges of sentences, the lexis elusive to or even incommensurable with statement or performance in clauses, propositions, words and grammar. Neither should the progress from poetic thinking to poetic thought require in principle to be explained or commented on as it occurs. We do not need to be told that it is happening in order for it to happen; or at least, there is no reason why we ought to need to be told, since surely we could be told only by an expressive instrument belonging to the language of human agency. But a significant part of Prynne’s late poetry does appear to give a deliberate commentary on the progress it is, and we are, making from thinking to poetic thought. Its deliberate commentary tends to stand out most conspicuously in the form of sceptical or violently incredulous observations about the unlikelihood, prevention or sluggishness of the progress. It is difficult not to hear in the three lines just quoted something like the following, consciously irrefutable, accusation aimed at an anonymous subject. “Your way of seeming to extinguish the subject in the poem so that poetic thinking can become poetic thought is really just the pusillanimous attempt of the subject to avoid detection (“you will be clandestine”). The subject conscious of its duty to extinguish itself but too afraid actually to do it instead tries vainly to escape surveillance by going in disguise; and the very predictability of this ruse, expressed in the mingled grammars of command and prediction (“you spiritual emplacement.” The argument of ‘Huts’ does not depend on or assert the historical reality of that condition of life. 137 will be clandestine”), is proof that, in reality, the subject in your keeping will end up nowhere near extinct. But (or and, or therefore) you will “end well enough”: that is, you will die satisfactorily, or turn out OK in the end, or conclude no better than adequately, as a speech tasked with purchasing applause might, and you will also end the poem satisfactorily (both these certainties are trivial enough to fit as content into a statement in the bare indicative). Something called “it,” possibly your end or how well you will certainly make it, will be “taken,” that is, endured or suffered, at least until the line ending, in all likelihood by you, the subject that is stubborn enough to take it or anything else; but after the line ending, whatever “it” is will no longer simply be taken but must also (due to a consciously overfamiliar trick of ambiguity) be taken back, that is, both restored to the possession of its former owner, and denied, rescinded or recanted. “It” will be transient in any case, both in the mode of its denial and the mode of its restoration, and in the form in which it is denied and restored. Its transience will be owed to, and will also be the act of, “sup lip covenant.” “Sup lip covenant” suggests to the subjective ear trained on sensuous sound a supplicant scrambling his words, his whole supplication a slip-up. Crap sound, like crap sense, mutes the lexis. The covenant or promise made in and by the poem is the action of a physiology of personhood, the lip employed to sup, the subjective rim of blubber and monosyllable that encircles the subjective mouth contracted to its action of subsistence.” Here is the complete pair of sentences which this extract concludes. Covering plain remission if on launch this return covers or will or pointer in self pruning leaf after last, if promised enough. In full to set aside a preachment biometric latter high note altered on ready, give in close fit in allowance you will be clandestine will end well enough, it will be taken back transient by sup lip covenant. 138 It is important for our understanding of Prynne’s account of poetic thought that his recent poems have tended to be written in sequences of reiterated, ambiguously stanzaic textual blocks, whose graphic and formal invariance constitutes a field or extent of pressure within and across which the difficult advance to poetic thought must be made. The word Prynne has sometimes used to describe that advance within a sequence is “schedule.” There is a schedule of advance, and so it is essential for our understanding of any single poem or block within a sequence to know exactly where in the schedule it occurs. ‘Creosote Damping’ is the second poem in Sub Songs. Like all of Prynne’s second poems, this one must find its movement out of, and in some unpredictable sense beyond, the boundary or determination of the first. Its motive anxiety, which is the ever-present motive of the whole schedule, is that the extinction of the poetic subject on which progress to poetic thought depends may not really be happening, or that it may be happening too slowly, or even at leisure, harried by too little disgust, at the convenience of language and not at its uttermost exertion. The extinction of the subject may be just “self pruning” again, an idle turning over of new leaves, an ornamental progress fit only to be punned into the drowsy ears of existing human readers, who will enjoy noticing that the leaf scheduled to be pruned is of course a page in the book they are trying to read. The groans elicited by the puns in Prynne’s late work are the groans of the condemned but obstinately not yet extinct subject, the throes of recognition too slow on its way out. The progress risks being retarded into a case of one thing coming “after [the] last”: not the last there is, the end that is poetic thought, but yet again only the last there was, poetic thought’s miserable life-historic backwash. It of course comes, this new leaf, or next station of the contradicted self paring subjectivity like a fingernail, “if promised enough”; again the ambiguity thumps home, as recognition rewards the trivially attentive reader distracted from the lexis by explaining to him the equivalence (or indifference) of a promise often enough repeated and the form of assurance that coerces people into labour, that the remuneration of the subject will meet its humble subjective expectations. The persistence and tenacity of this commentary on the shifts performed by the subject to avoid being exterminated by poetic thinking in its generation of poetic thought produces a moral transformation in Prynne’s late work (in Prynne’s own phrase from ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter,’ a “moral mutation”). Whereas in Brass and still in Down where changed, laziness is a 139 moral failure or lapse of the subject (in both books the failure is catastrophic for the world and not just for the subject), in the late poetry laziness is the subject. The subject is laziness, constitutively; it is neither born free nor is it a system of pre-moral drives, but it exists and is preserved under the intrinsic duress of a moral failure inherent in its very subsistence. Laziness is not just a particular shape of the subject, a rogue Gestalt sleepwalking the warpath to infinity; it is the whole extent and action of the subject in all its shapes, and only when the subject is extinguished, not when it quiets down and defers to its opposite, will poetry fulfil its duty and destiny to generate poetic truth.32 Under the duress of this regime, language, as if recoiling from its lazy exploitation by subjects, grows inhospitable to whatever shapes of thinking are easiest or most habitual for subjects. Easy and habitual thinking is expelled from language in Prynne’s late work, and easy and habitual expression crops up only to state its banality or denaturation; nowhere in Prynne’s late work is poetic thought less likely to inhere than in ordinary or colloquial utterances. What seem like natural types of expression are no longer able to accommodate natural thought, if they ever were. The appearance of the subject being natural in language (“speech”) is really, at least in poetry, the necessary extinction of the subject not being performed. That appearance is a sideshow: not the shedding of links to life, but the strengthening of them by allowing them to set. The rare appearances in Prynne’s late work 32. In making laziness identical with the subject, Prynne remains the comrade of Thoreau who in Kitchen Poems had reminded his fellow citizens that they are not powerless to take a little less, turn down superfluities and do things for themselves. Prynne’s moral disgust at money is like Thoreau’s in ‘Civil Disobedience’: money “comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him […] It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which its puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it.” Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin, 1985), p.400. The subject with money (which is all subjects, though some subjects more than others) is the subject whose questions have been put to rest: it is laziness. Cf. ‘Poetic Thought,’ p.597, where “thoughtfulness,” or the activity of a thinking subject, is distinguished from poetic thought on the grounds that thoughtfulness “is just a colour of discourse, one of its moods or habits, not to be held equivalent to poetic thought in the sense being searched for here; indeed, thoughtfulness may be a kind of conscience-money paid for the tacit avoidance of ardent, directed thought.” See further Kazoo Dreamboats, p.21: “Rule One: people with top pay are rubbish.” 140 of sentences that resemble ordinary language or colloquial utterances are always negatively demonstrative. Their use is as indifferent epitomes of the language of the subject whose manifest untruth demonstrates that all the language of the subject is untrue. This is partly because the subject shapes itself to untrue language, obviously by the use of platitudinous idioms and empty phrases, and implicitly in all uses of language to think that do not contribute to the extinction of the thinking subject. The subject is impotent to generate poetic truth, which can be reached only at the extremes of language where the subject has been exceeded and is no longer required (poetic thought resembles technology in the respect that it makes human activity superfluous). Reading this poetry means learning to hear how human language, stuck in the paralytic subject, revels in dead thought and sensuous appearance. Locked within the schedule of the poetry, human language fights to overturn its exclusion from poetic thinking and tries to prove its own potency to generate the truth of poetic thought, its real contribution to progress within the schedule, issuing imperatives (“Try doing it now,” “go on, do it,” etc.); human language tries to put its own pressure on the managing subject to actualise its redundancy. But the imperatives are demonstratively forever unable to be performed, so that the impotence of human language to generate poetic truth is clearer than ever where it rages most unanswerably after it. The fact that this demonstration of the impotence of human thinking is repeated at every appearance of human language begins to suggest that human thinking is a pathology of the subject (“remorse,” Prynne writes, “is a pathology of syntax”). Nowhere is this so clear as when subjects preserve themselves in the way they know how and in the words they know best: poetry will never be familiar. But this incessant, unsparing exposure of the impotence of the subject to be where truth is, to comprehend the rim within itself, to contain within itself the lexis that is the latent internal unity of the world, or to be itself what shines prior to human agency, is not a catastrophe for the life of the subject, for so long as by its relinquishment or abrogation we do come truly nearer to what exceeds us absolutely, and can become its intimate listeners and companions. One flicker of the lexis is worth more than anything in speech, for Prynne’s poetic thinking: the truth heard there defines how we are, and poetry is how we know this and are given up for it. 141 142 Robin Purves For-Being: Uncertainty and Contradiction in Kazoo Dreamboats Does Mao’s essay On Contradiction extol a ‘dialectics of nature’ and, if it does, does it matter that it does? Mao’s methodology is “centred on the notion that contradiction is a universal characteristic of all things and phenomena in physical nature, human society and man’s thought”; it is also said to be informed by two more qualities which “derive from Chinese rather than Leninist dialectics” – namely, that it “sees contradiction not between things but rather within things, phenomena and thoughts” and that it “sees in the complementarity of opposites a necessary prerequisite for the development of contradictions.”1 If this is a ‘dialectics of nature,’ is it 1. Vsevolod Holubnychy, ‘Mao Tse-Tung’s Materialistic Dialectics,’ The China Quarterly 19 (July–September 1964), pp.3-37 (30). The ‘reference cues’ provided as an appendix to Kazoo Dreamboats include Kung-sun Lung’s Pai-ma Lun (‘On the White Horse’) as it appears in A.C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1989). The equine motif relates to the animals which pull Parmenides’s chariot, but Kung-sun Lung’s notoriously elusive and exasperating exposition of his proof that ‘A white horse is not a horse’ appears also to advertise fidelity to a specifically Chinese dialectics that accords in certain respects to Mao’s position; for example, Graham records that the argument depends upon the division of ‘white horse’ into “two mutually pervasive parts” (Graham, p.86). Holubnychy suggests that presuppositions and attributes intrinsic to the Chinese language embed and explain this predilection for the internal contradiction: “Everyone who knows the difference between logic and dialectics as methods of reasoning will undoubtedly notice that, while “‘being’ and ‘a horse is a horse’ lead straight to the laws of logic, such meanings implicit in Chinese words as that ‘something is becoming, or became what it is’ (it was not always that), or that ‘something has (contains) 143 open to the kinds of objection deployed against Engels’ Dialectics of Nature by Georg Lukács (amongst others)? The Dictionary of Marxist Thought states that [t]he very supposition of a dialectics of nature has appeared to many critics, from Lukács to Sartre, as categorically mistaken, in as much as it involves anthropomorphically (and hence idealistically) retrojecting onto nature categories such as contradiction and negation, which only make sense in the human realm. These critics do not deny that natural science, as part of the socio-historical world, may be dialectical; what is at issue is whether there can be a dialectics of nature per se.2 This position would indict Mao and Engels together, but what Lukács actually argues, citing as evidence a particular passage concerning Darwin in one of Marx’s letters, is that, at any particular time in human history, the conceptual apparatus of scientific knowledge is “determined by the economic structure, by social being.”3 This idea can admit the existence of a dialectics of nature in the sense of an “objective dialectics […] independent of humans [which was] there before the emergence of people” while insisting that “for thinking the dialectic, for the dialectic as knowledge […] thinking people are necessary.”4 Scientific advances can reveal and describe fundamental preconditions for existence, and we also have an obligation to consider the terms of that knowledge as ideological formations which are a function of economic realities: “For the experiment in which the thing-in-itself becomes a thing-for-us is only in-itself dialectical. In order to reveal its dialectical character for-us, something else has to come along, something new – precisely historical materialism.”5 something else in itself,’ or that ‘white horse is no longer just a horse because it is white,’ all correspond exactly to the laws of dialectics.” (Holubnychy, p.6). 2. T.B. Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p.148. 3. Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p.104. 4. Ibid., p.107. 5. Ibid., p.125. 144 That conclusion is Lukácsian and not Maoist, though it may prove intermittently relevant to an investigation into certain passages in J.H. Prynne’s most recent work in poetry, Kazoo Dreamboats or, On What There Is (Critical Documents, 2011) while Mao’s generalizing of contradiction will be more widely pertinent. My own approach hopes to show that contradiction is a feature as well as a theme of Kazoo Dreamboats, since one of the specifically poetic procedures at work inevitably exploits the linguistic potential for (and in) an anthropomorphically constituted dialectics of nature, with its deployment of the shifts and contradictions implicit in the history of a word’s usage. What I mean by this is, when language is the object of the analysis (which is, throughout, a condition for the composition as well as the reception of the text), a term’s semantic and phonological resources are engaged in a way that combines its conventionally independent references, meanings, sounds, systems, fields: the use of metaphor can involve all kinds of retrojected or projected anthropomorphisms. However, this same practice is also contradicted from beginning to end by the text’s demonstration of the general impossibility of, or category error in, accepting this anthropomorphic tendency, especially when considering the quantum plane of existence. In a move which, I think, brings these contradictory aspects of the poem to bear upon each other and extends the contradictions, Kazoo Dreamboats, it can be shown, is keen to ‘trade up’ the contradictions found at the most fundamental levels in the structure of organic and inorganic matter and in the absence of any matter whatsoever, in order to disestablish the idea of a ‘natural’ or ‘harmonious’ relation at any scale and in any circumstance. The poem incorporates a variety of curtailed quotations from, or references to, poetico-philosophical, pre-Socratic sources, fragments of fragments, including texts attributed to Simonides of Ceos, Parmenides and Leucippus. The doctrines of the elementary particles and Parmenides’s thesis that Being could never emerge ex nihilo are set against a quantum theory which establishes that so-called “‘empty space’ is a turmoil of electromagnetic waves of all frequencies and wavelengths”; Kazoo Dreamboats inscribes poetry, philosophy and cosmology inside dialectical continuities across a very considerable historical span.6 All of the discourses thus in6. V. Adrian Parsegian, Van Der Waals Forces: A Handbook for Biologists, Chemists, Engineers, and Physicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p.9. 145 cluded are interrogated in rearrangements designed seemingly to epitomize Mao’s “basic law of materialist dialectics,” which is, in turn, tested against the most advanced formulations of contemporary scientific knowledge. One of the most startling aspects of Kazoo Dreamboats is Prynne’s entirely uncharacteristic over-use of the formula “I saw…” which occurs no less than twenty nine times in a poem twenty-two pages long. The insistence of the phrase nods to Langland’s Piers Plowman as a visionary precursor and, as in Langland, it is used throughout in reference to quantities and qualities which are seemingly ‘observable’ but which cannot be seen as such, though in Kazoo Dreamboats this fact and the use to which it is put promotes Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as an important motif in the poem. The Penguin Dictionary of Physics explains that this principle can be derived exactly from QUANTUM MECHANICS but is most easily understood as a consequence of the fact that any measurement of a system must disturb the system under investigation, with a resulting lack of precision in measurement.7 And John Gribbin has usefully explained Heisenberg’s own illustrative example of the issues which the principle encapsulates, an experiment involving the observation of an electron in order to measure its position and momentum: We can only see things by looking at them, which involves bouncing photons of light off them and into our eyes. A photon doesn’t disturb an object like a house very much, so we don’t expect the house to be affected by looking at it. For an electron, though, things are rather different. To start with, because an electron is so small we have to use electromagnetic energy with a short wavelength in order to see it (with the aid of experimental apparatus) at all. Such gamma radiation is very energetic, and any photon of gamma radiation that bounces off an electron and can be detected 7. John Cullerne, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Physics (London: Penguin, 2009), p.506. 146 by our experimental apparatus will drastically change the position and momentum of the electron – if the electron is in an atom, the very act of observing it with a gamma ray microscope may knock it out of the atom altogether.8 The Uncertainty Principle is named in one of the quotations on page 14 of Kazoo Dreamboats and is referred to more or less directly elsewhere in the text. One of the counter-intuitive findings that the principle has confirmed is that at a quantum level unforeseeable fluctuations of energy occur which have no cause – their “appearance is determined by uncertain spectral data” as the poem puts it.9 Heisenberg, in an essay published in a festschrift for Niels Bohr, defends quantum theory against two Soviet scientist-commentators, Blochinzew and Alexandrow, who tried to use the latest developments in this branch of science to confirm the truth of dialectical materialism. Heisenberg’s account of their scientific errors diagnoses their desire for definitive results, their continual reference to ‘reality’ and their attachment to the “factual” (which proves for him that their approach is no longer “quantum-mechanical”) as evidence of their need “to return to the reality concept of classical physics or, more generally expressed, to the ontology of materialism; that is, to the idea of an objective real world, whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same way as stones and trees, independently of whether or not we observe them” whereas Heisenberg’s own principle and the other tenets of the Copenhagen interpretation have led him to the conclusion that “the classical idea of “objectively real things” must here, to this extent, be abandoned.”10 This controversy may well raise the possibility that an adherence to Mao’s dialectics of contradiction may prove tenable at the quantum level in a way that Engels’ dialectics of nature simply cannot. Whether that notion will gain traction or not, given that 8. John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat (London: Black Swan, 1984), pp.156157. 9. J.H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats or, On What There Is (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2011), p.19. Subsequent page references to the poem are given in the body of the essay. 10. Werner Heisenberg, ‘The development of the interpretation of the quantum theory,’ Niels Bohr and the Development of Physics: Essays dedicated to Niels Bohr on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, ed. W. Pauli (London: Pergamon Press Ltd, 1955), pp.12-29 (17). 147 phenomena at the atomic range must still be described in language, it would seem inevitable that science’s quantum-mechanical concepts must become ever more overtly metaphorical: An experiment that “observes” electrons in atoms, for example, doesn’t show us a picture of little hard balls orbiting around the nucleus – there is no way to observe the orbit, and the evidence from spectral lines tells us what happens to electrons when they move from one energy state (or orbit, in Bohr’s language) to another. All of the observable features of electrons and atoms deal with two states, and the concept of an orbit is something tacked on to the observations by analogy with the way things move in our everyday world […]11 These factors must affect the status of the first person pronoun in the poem: “the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of ” Kazoo Dreamboats.12 Since it is, by and large, a passive ‘observer’ of phenomena estranged from the materialist ontology of “the world around us,” the ‘I’ doesn’t function as the hominid begetter of the forces at play in the sentences of the poem and could more easily represent the aperture of a microscope than the forceful intervening of an implied human speaker.13 Kazoo Dreamboats suggests some obvious limits to metaphorical projection in terms of anthropomorphic examples: “To speak of forgiveness, a cloud may be forgiven yet / not forgive” and “ants make their turbulence / of species but cannot want to pity at any cost to the full / system, clouds above them laden with contaminants” (p.11, p.13). Who stands under the clouds and above the ants, source of the contaminants, forgiveness and pity? The poem also takes the risk of projecting a truth of quantum theory (that what we grasp of the microcosm is, by Heisenberg’s definition, an unremittingly partial knowledge) as an ethical directive applicable at all available values: “Rule Three: you do not see into the life of things, dimension- / less or not, except by harvest of data plotted against uncertainty” (p.21). 11. Gribbon, p.103. 12. Heisenberg, p.22. 13. Heisenberg, p.28. 148 All of the elements so far mentioned are only extricable as stand-alone ‘contents’ with a great deal of difficulty. A passage on pages 15-16, beginning “Yet for not to tell is possible” and ending “to be the driver, powered by love of / the known” introduces an excerpt from a translation of part of the surviving fragments of Parmenides, and goes on to include citations from and allusions to two poems by Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’ and ‘Sunday Morning.’ ‘The Snow Man’ refutes the attitude which sees frost, ice and snow as decorative, a cosmetic applied to the landscape to please us, or that hears “any misery in the sound of the wind” and so it participates in the critique of the practice of ascribing human qualities to inanimate nature, though it is principally utilised here to provide Prynne with a readymade statement on nothingness that he can revise in the direction of Parmenides or Heisenberg equally: For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.14 The citation from ‘Sunday Morning’ – “Downward to darkness” – is made to allude to the perpetual division of matter down to and inside the quantum level of reality and, elsewhere in the poem, Prynne adapts Lear (“Nothing shall come of continuous diminish”) to suggest, along the same lines, that a limit of nothingness might eventually be attained and, more convincingly, to suggest that such a limit could never be attained, since the nothingness the poem has in mind does not function as some super-diminutive vanishing point or the result of a deficiency in perception (p.6).15 One of the poem’s own ambitious vocations has already been announced: This is and must be the thought of nothing that cannot be apart from what is, neither as or by cause, what it is to be, relentless and unsame. (p.6) 14. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p.10. 15. Ibid., p.70. 149 Kazoo Dreamboats will have demonstrated its own necessity, this passage proposes, if it manages to express the dialectic of being and non-being as they operate in their inextricable inter-relation at the quantum level of reality, where the principle of cause-and-effect is not operative. One major strategy for achieving this process is, as I have already suggested, the incessant searching out of analogous or related fields in our ‘actuality,’ together with the self-conscious critique of analogies and relations. The music Christian Wolff has written for prepared piano enables the poem to construct parallels between the sound of the atomisation of musical syntax by aleatoric strategies, and descriptions of the quantum fluctuation or decay of observed particles. This can be considered part of Prynne’s investigations into how far the materials of art-works can be liberated from a discursive frame, and hence experienced as ‘pure’ sonorities or graphic/ phonetic entities which can be experienced as significant without necessarily being revised towards a determinable meaning or paraphrase. The reference cues point us towards Michael Parsons’ inlay note to a compact disc, Christian Wolff ’s Early Piano Music, where Parsons claims that “the effect is as of isolated objects in space, sounds which seem to come from nowhere, and lead nowhere, appearing and disappearing unpredictably, framed by silences.”16 Parsons also refers to the sound of a “microscopic world in close-up.”17 The passage on page 19 of Kazoo Dreamboats, beginning “Rapid decay confirms the sonic void each one in exit” confirms the identification intended between the breaking down of radioactive particles and a succession of pure sounds or tones which need not be periodic, that a mind tries to hear as a melodic sequence or a series of complementary dissonances but which cannot be so arranged. Wolff ’s ‘composition’ allows mutations of certain sound-values over a relatively brief span of time without pursuing any observable regularities. What Prynne’s timely interference here accomplishes is to minimise any risk that the experience of listening to the music might induce transports of Heideggerian Erschlossenheit in the unwary listener. The analogy constructed removes the possibility of an encounter with something unconcealedly itself, the sounds will now be heard as something, or as a something else. 16. Michael Parsons, inlay notes to Christian Wolff, Early Piano Music 1951-1961 (Matchless, 2002). 17. Ibid. 150 Elements of a famous song by the Chinese rock musician Cui Jian are invoked in the poem, so that the lyrics find themselves related to the enquiry into the significance of ‘Nothing’ through a brief allusion in the poem, “axial and suffused means nothing for I / had nothing at all so in such sense contended” (p.22). A Chinese friend, Xue Yuan, translated the original lyrics for me: the song is called ‘Nothing To My Name’ and it involves the singer reflecting upon the persistence with which he pressed his suit on his beloved without success; she just mocked him repeatedly for his poverty. He then reprises his late and unexpected victory when, profoundly moved by his inner strength and passionate fidelity, she finds herself desperately in love and able to forego the attractions of great wealth in order to explore a new world of personal freedom and spiritual meaning with her lover. The song is very famous in China because it is considered on its own to have inaugurated Chinese rock music, a fact that must strike the Western listener as odd because the track is stately, melodic, well-produced and the instrumentation leans heavily on an atmospheric keyboard sound; it is not an elemental noise, it does not come across as prototypical in the way the roots of Western rock music tend to do, almost as if rock and roll had arrived in Tiananmen Square as an unprecedented bolt from the blue in the form of a track by Clannad. What is it doing here beyond the mention of nothing and the task the song performs in reminding Chinese citizens that recent improvements in their material well-being may not bring about their everlasting satisfaction? Perhaps it takes part in the poem’s disquisition against the temptation to mythify and mystify natural phenomena such as the Van der Waals forces as Love. Certain quotations in the main text come from a book on Van der Waals forces and also Altland and Simons’s Condensed Matter Field Theory.18 Van der Waals is the scientist credited with the discovery that “[e]lectrically neutral bodies attract,” and he gives his name to the intermolecular forces which create condensed phases of matter and which are important for the connective energies in the intervals separating cells in living organisms.19 When the poem states that “a molecule with a permanent dipole can also induce / a dipole in a similar neighbouring molecule and cause mutual attraction” it sounds like a civil partnership in 18. Alexander Atland and Ben Simons, Condensed Matter Field Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010) 19. Parsegian, p.3 151 the making, but Prynne is elsewhere on the same page careful to cancel this amorous projection onto quantum reality: “The internal origin of matter / is the negation of its force for proximity, love-strife easily / then promoted into directive estrangement among the mariner’s / one-time asters: astrolabe necrology of murder drones” (p.20). It is the extension outwards and away from an original intimacy in the origin of quanta which gives rise to the material existence of all things, so life would have to be considered as depending upon the negation of that weak force we had been drawn into giving the name of love. And if the inception and promotion of substance is in its own tearing of the forces (Van der Waals, gravity, magnetism, etc.) which hold it together, this is as relevant for the growth of a flower (“asters” refers to a star-shaped flowerhead) as it is for the expansion of the universe. “[D]irective estrangement” is evident in the increasing distance between galaxies, and between the stars Coleridge’s mariner might have navigated by. Perhaps the last phrase of the quotation might revise in our minds Prynne’s much earlier poem, ‘Smaller Than The Radius Of The Planet,’ the couple immersed in “the ethereal language of love” now gazing upwards at UAVs, thinking they are planets and stars.20 A fairly long quotation from Berg’s lecture on his opera Wozzeck relates to the scene of Marie’s death in Act III and shows Berg explaining his attempt to retain a sense of unity across his first operatic work whilst depriving himself of the formal structures based on conventional tonality. This is to be achieved through the motivic deployment of one six-note chord whose unifying consistency will repeatedly be undone by diversification and periodic deconstruction of the chordal motifs which inform each scene and each act, by partitioning, inversion and redistribution of the component notes of the same six-note chord. There is also a curtailed quotation from the libretto in the second scene of Act 1, a scene which takes place in a field where Wozzeck and his friend Andres are hunting: the scene ends when the sunset, translated into what Berg claimed as the sound of inanimate Nature, sends Wozzeck into a frenzy of fearful hallucination: “A fire there, ‘das fährt von der Erde’ / mounting in hot ash consumed from these as so much […]” (p.7). The lines from Kazoo Dreamboats include the Shoah’s industrial-scale machine-translation of life into the elementary particles of ash clouds, Berg’s Himmel being deleted from the crescendo (the original 20. See Poems (2005), p.115. 152 line runs “Das fährt von der Erde in den Himmel”) along with any satisfaction we may be lured into feeling at the petty ingenuity it took to work out this localised interpretation: “you get triple / points if you guess the connection” (pp.7-8).21 The poem also establishes a more developed appropriation of the ancient Greek lyric “Lament for Danaë” by Simonides of Ceos, a work which depicts the desperate plight of the mother and her infant son, Perseus, locked in a black box, floating at night on the storm-tossed sea and thus indistinguishable in the waves, Prynne perhaps proposing the casket and its contents as figure for a single, virtual particle (indistinguishable from a wave) in a vacuum. One of the most amazing sections of Kazoo Dreamboats achieves a speculative and scientifically-informed meditation on the phenomenon of the nursing mother and child while any sentiment immanent to the representation is almost entirely stifled by the argument that there is no essential unity in the particle, or natural rapport in the bond between mother and child: The root for commerce takes from suspended milk colloidal its creamy delinquent pride of decision, curds resonant in whey by opposed nature not 21. James Martin Harding has found and commented upon a passage on Berg by Adorno which addresses the compositional procedures in the opera in terms pertinent to the themes of Kazoo Dreamboats: “Since the sophistication of Berg’s work exhausts the structures of habitual perception, Adorno argues that the technique of atomization reaches back into nothingness: ‘Furthermore, the level of composition proves itself – so superior that today it is hardly still perceived – precisely in the extremely conscious syntactical structure, which reaches from the whole movement to the status of each single note and leaves nothing out. This music is beautiful according to the Latin term formosus, that of the richness of forms. Its wealth in form shapes the music into eloquence, into a likeness with language. But the wealth has a special technique of calling, through their own development, the formed thematic structures back into nothingness.’ For Adorno, Berg’s atomization, his calling themes back into nothingness, has a liberating effect, simultaneously exposing and resisting reification. On the one hand, the music incorporates general terms or themes, which, with development, begin to unravel and falter; in particular, the development of these incorporated themes exposes the contradictions which they otherwise obscure.” See James Martin Harding, ‘Integrating Atomization: Adorno Reading Berg reading Büchner,’ Theatre Journal 44:1 (March 1992), pp.1-13 (4). 153 contradicted because lattice charges are in the separation of milk’s being, conjugate and pre-organic beyond doubt, post-sexual sweet or even sour. The nipple corridor by conductance of care origins completes the pair bonding expressed to the tongue before more than murmur construes the answer: how, then can what is be going to be in the future, coming to this? What is for is without tense, but the corridor conjugates erotic for-being as root derivative as one satisfied to the start of another or many, the harbingers are come by implant of being into the contradiction of hip-on singularity. Joy to hold, the issue of being up close against another heart-beat at best parallel never in unison which never is the natural place of being then and there, to brood out this be generic fortune as yet to cost a cool arm and a leg, orthopedic expense sheet. (p.18) Milk production is a vast commercial enterprise, of course, as well as an intimately sexual circumstance; the Oxford English Dictionary claims that the earliest “actual evidence” for the meaning of ‘commerce’ refers to intercourse between lovers rather than traders and the passage takes as its focus the complex internal chemistry of milk as a “colloid of butterfat globules within a water-based fluid” (Wikipedia) where the globules of fat are kept from coming together by a sheath surrounding each one, formed from lipids and proteins. The negative electrical charge of certain protein molecules in this ‘skin’ means they “repel each other, keeping the micelles separated under normal conditions and in a stable colloidal suspension in the water-based surrounding fluid.” (Wikipedia) Milk separates into other substances because its caseins are not as soluble in water and coagulate into curds, while the other proteins remain suspended in whey, but the industrial homogenization of milk prevents what happens when fresh milk is left to stand, the separation into cream on top and low-fat milk below it. The less fat content there is in milk, the more likely that intermolecular forces will stop this process taking place so “milk is pumped at high pressures through very narrow tubes, breaking up the fat globules through turbulence and cavitation.” (Wikipedia) The Dutch physicists Hendrik Casimir and Dirk Polder conducted experiments in 1948 to try to explain why colloids such as milk were more stable in normal conditions than other substances where particles are suspended in fluids. There appeared to be molecular-level ener154 gies at work “pulling the constituent molecules closer together,” energies which seemed stronger than the previously identified van der Waals forces: Following a tip-off from the Danish quantum doyen Niels Bohr, Casimir calculated that this something could be vacuum action. Working out the effects of vacuum fluctuations in a colloid’s complex molecular brew was impossibly involved. So Casimir considered a simple model system of two parallel metallic plates, and showed that the fluctuations could produce just the right enhanced attraction between them. His explanation was that the two plates limit the wavelength of vacuum fluctuations in the space between. Outside those confines, the fluctuations can have any wavelength they choose. With more waves outside than in, a pressure pushes inward on the plates.22 This seems far away from the plight of Danaë and Perseus, adrift and attached, at the mercy of a different scale and type of wave, but they lie behind the concerns addressed here, including the wonder expressed in the passage at the process whereby the breasts of a nursing mother will express milk before the mother realises that it is required: how can the body know before she knows? “The nipple corridor” can refer to the ducts “connecting the lobules of the mammary gland to the tip of the nipple” (Wikipedia) which carry milk in lactating females, and it may be the distance to be negotiated between mother and child for successful feeding to happen, and also perhaps the stage between attachment and weaning too, since the rest of the quotation is a masterful demonstration of how far you can go in excising traces of emotion from the notion of taking pleasure in cradling your child as soon as that euphoric experience is raised: so quickly does breeding turn to brooding. The sentence beginning “What is for is without tense” raises concerns which Prynne has been addressing across the whole of his writing life (p.18). “For” might be considered to be “without tense” because it is a particle which can encompass all tenses. In the word “before” 22. David Harris, ‘Vacuum packed,’ Nothing: from absolute zero to cosmic oblivion – amazing insights into nothingness, ed. Jeremy Webb (London: Profile, 2013), pp.149-158 (150-151). 155 it expresses the condition of being ‘earlier than’ as well as ‘in front of ’ and ‘in the presence of,’ so the mother said to be ‘before’ her child is “for-being,” being-for her offspring. This “conductance of care” means being present but looking ahead, and, in the past, having been the prior condition for your child’s existence. Simonides’ lyric pre-dates Parmenides’ philosophy. Arguments have raged concerning its significance as a fragment or as completed song and it has been considered to represent the earliest example of a very particular kind of utterance, as the human inauguration of dialectics in Danaë’s contestation with divine injustice. The poem also predates the establishment of the political institutions and laws of the democratic polis, and has been interpreted as part of the interrogation of traditional religious beliefs necessary to this secular development, in terms of the dubious morality of Danaë’s unjust punishment for her unwilled impregnation by Zeus in a shower of gold. Her ‘lost’ protest against her treatment, amongst those critics who assume the poem breaks off before she gives Zeus a piece of her mind, is in its absence cited as one possible beginning to the development of a measure of autonomy in relation to religious authority, but there is a persuasive case for considering the lyric complete as it stands and ending on a note of contrite submission. Kazoo Dreamboats itself ends with these sentences: The corridor is and to be the avenue, from particulate vapour to consign into bedrock, transit of durance it is a formative exit in naturalised permission, solemn grade-one rigmarole, better Wiglaf ’s rebuke and insurance payout. To be this with sweet song and dance in the exit dream, sweet joy befall thee is by rotation been and gone into some world of light exchange, toiling and spinning and probably grateful, in this song. (p.27) Our own eventual translation into the microcosm as elementary particles by cremation, the admission of non-being into being, is a departure from a world of causality into another world of probability. The corridor-to-come is passage to the pyre and beyond, as ash in the air, to settle and recombine, until the poem fluctuates into stinging reaction against superstitious reverence for the dead. Toiling, and still spinning, and possibly grateful, the alert reader observes a Higgs boson pass through the Sermon on the Mount. 156 Does this mean that Mao’s dialectics of contradiction can be extrapolated into the quantum realm where Engels fears to tread? And if so, what happens next? What if nothing happens? What if no new state is configured inside the political vacuum? Such things are only probable, after all, at the quantum level. 157 158 159 160 

academia.edu information sheet Hix Eros #4: On the Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne Nine new essays on the work of J.H. Prynne between 1998 and 2011, plus introduction. Edited by Jo Lindsay Walton & Joe Luna. Designed and typeset by Robbie Dawson. ISSN 2056-8909 (Print). ISSN 2056-8916 (Online). CONTENTS Keston Sutherland: Introduction Michael Tencer: Pearls That Were Justin Katko: Sex – Triodes – Gilgamesh Lisa Jeschke: Late Early Poetry: A Commentary on J.H. Prynne’s Unanswering Rational Shore Timothy Thornton: Acrylic Tips Joe Luna: Dominance Factor John Wilkinson: Silicon Versets at Work, Blue Slides at Rest Abigail Lang: Translating To Pollen Keston Sutherland: Sub Songs versus the subject: Critical variations on a distinction between Prynne and Hegel Robin Purves: For-Being: Uncertainty and Contradiction in Kazoo Dreamboats From the Introduction: “Perhaps common to all of these essays is an attempt, more or less oblique depending on the essay, to reckon with the moralism of Prynne’s late poetry, in the largest and most complex sense. What position does this poetry put readers in, and does it in fact posit a reader at all? What efforts of the interpretive imagination are required to engage with the matter of capitalist history in the forms in which this poetry makes it appear: as markets jargon, as ventriloquism of the ‘idiom’ of ‘residual, vernacular commonality,’ as logics of coercion, as the ‘excision’ or blackout of natural pleasure, as philanthropy, as tyrannical grammatical imperatives, and as the commodification and voiding of poetical potential throughout the entire space between language and its extreme edge, at which alone ‘poetic thought’ is at last late enough in the history of poetic exertion to actually erupt?” Library copies can be ordered at hixeros.wordpress.com. Other buyers, seek out the digital edition, or query by e-mail ([email protected]) for a discount. Hix Eros #1-#3 & #5Hix Eros is an periodical of prose about poetry, with a focus on the UK and North America, and on contemporary, experimental, and political writing. It is mostly published digitally and mostly open access. For more information, see sadpress.wordpress.com/hix-eros/