J.H. Prynne and the Late-Modern Epic.

J.H. Prynne and the Late-Modern Epic 1 December 2009 http://cordite.org.au/essays/matthew-hall-j-h-prynne-and-the-late-modern-epic/ I: Further Notice: an introduction to the work of J.H. Prynne The poetry of J.H. Prynne has recently come to the attention of an international set of poets and literary theorists. This interest has developed into a recent edition of Jacket, a festschrift from Quid, as well as the publication of many essays dedicated to the critical analysis of his work. This attention has coincided with the release of his updated collected work, Poems, and, coincidentally, with Prynne's retirement from a teaching position at the University of Cambridge and as Fellow Librarian at Gonville and Caius College. The attention that the rerelease of Poems has incited is due partially to a growing awareness of contemporary British Poetry, and marks the first time that Prynne's poetry has been made widely available outside of the small press publications of Cambridge. Further marginalising Prynne from a mainstream audience is the fact that his poetry is some of the most complex and linguistically innovative to be released in recent years. The pursuit of and representation of meaning, are two of Prynne's main initiatives and have led his readers to actively pursue his texts, sources, and ultimately the development of new ways of interpreting poetry and poetic language. The Bloodaxe/Fremantle Arts Centre Press version of Poems has been released in two volumes. The first, in 1999, includes the majority of Prynne's poetry collated from the last three decades, building on the 1982 release. Poems represents a comprehensive collection, with the exception of Force of Circumstance and Other Poems (1962), which were written in a more traditional linear poetics, and which Prynne chose not to include. The subsequent collection, released in 2005, completes a grouping of poems that demand of the reader the utmost scholarship and investigation. All subsequent Prynne quotations in this essay will therefore be taken from this edition, with pagination given in parentheses. Prynne's avoidance of a cohesive reading of the poem displaces singular meaning and leaves the work to be interpreted as an indeterminate exploration of language. This collection, which begins with 1968's Kitchen Poems and concludes with 2004's Blue Slides at Rest, has garnered Prynne's reputation as both a confounding moral lyricist and one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century.1 Prynne has also published a wide range of critical analysis and academic prose. His academic works include a monograph on Saussure, Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words, a book length commentary on Wordsworth, Field Notes: 'The Solitary Reaper' and others, and an analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 94, They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary. His essay on the development of Chinese poetry from the Han Dynasty appeared in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, in 1982. The transcript from Prynne's 1971 lectures on Olson's Maximus Poems presented at Simon Fraser University has been widely circulated and has been reprinted by the Charles Olson Society. His status as an academic has slowly caught up with his mythological status as the hermetic poet-don of Cambridge University. Prynne's reputation as a literary outsider has also added to the lore, and can be seen as reflective of Edward Dorn's reputation in American poetry; a poet with whom Prynne had a long-standing correspondence, and to whom the latest edition of Poems is dedicated. The poetic traditions out of which Prynne is writing are typically contrasted against the lineage of Whitman, Wordsworth, Celan, Bunting, Pound, Olson, and Dorn, all of whom have had a major influence on the development of Prynne's poetics. Prynne's work during the 1970's is detailed by the development of a late-modernist poetics. For the sake of a singular definition this essay will focus on the term as defined by Anthony Mellors, the British literary theorist. Mellors defines late-modernism as it developed out of the ideas of 1930's modernism and details the changes induced by the rejection of subjective rationalism and mysticism that were being purported as poetic devices capable of creating a universalising system of selfexpression.2 A typical characteristic of a Prynne poem contextualises the subjective in a fragmented form and strands him at the periphery of the communicative framework. Prynne forces subjective instances of remembrance and communication towards indeterminacy. Latemodernist poetics represent a resistance to the singular expression of the self, which is based on a denial of early modernist narrative traditions. This ideal developed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, though in oppositional strains. The American model, most easily recognised in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry tradition, ‘espouses a dynamic notion of the objective and seeks radical formal methods, but often undemonstrative diction, to embody it.'3 In Britain, the development of late-modernist poetics was focused around the often mislabelled ‘Cambridge School', a group of writers who engaged with contemporary philosophy within their poems, and focused on the materiality of language and the functional use of poetics as a discourse for the expression of philosophical, scientific and political concepts. The poetry which developed during the British Poetry Revival, and for which The English Intelligencer and the Grosseteste Review were particularly noted, provided a staunch resistance to the conservative mainstream of the British Poetry of the 1960's. For Prynne, the poetry which was created in this late-modernist period, beginning notably with the release of Brass in 1971, obfuscates the nominative perspective of the self, thus creating a paratactic and polyvalent identity, representative of many fragments and defined by a constant conflict of information. The overlay of images and thoughts preclude the reading of a consistent series of ideas and forces the reader to dissect frameworks of definition so as to make cognisant the tacit knowledge of the poem. The overlaying matrices of information which typify the formal structure of Prynne's poetry signal the necessity of connecting each word's outlying referential sources to breach the meaning of language as it is used within the poem. The poetic images of Prynne can, if not fully, be partially unveiled through unearthing the sequences of the naturally occurring interconnections and polyvalent elements in such images. The complexity of Prynne's work is the result of his ambiguous representation of life as a conflux of images and lexical arrangements. Poet and critical theorist Veronica ForrestThompson asserts that, ‘the constant movement from one implied external context to another does not allow consistent development of image-complexes over several lines; they appear momentarily only to disappear again.'4 Prynne's lexical, historical, scientific, philosophic and poetic references add to the obfuscation of a singular identity within the poem. The proposition of reading a text with this multifaceted complexity forces the reader into a structural analysis of history, time, etymology, transcendental philosophy, prosody and the overlaying sources which compromise the authority of the written text. Each of Prynne's poems resist cohesive exaction and align themselves within the possibilities of expression. The Marxist literary theorist and Cambridge Lecturer Drew Milne establishes the reading of Prynne within a definitive framework designed to extol implicit expressions of knowledge, as well as to enable the communication of tacit knowledge presented within the poem. Regarding Prynne's poetic works, he writes: Language is understood as a condition of possibility rather than a site of communicative action. The decisive issue is whether the recognition of expressive contradictions can mediate its inclusion within determinate structures of communication and not remain trapped within the fundamental presuppositions of language which encode experience.5 Prynne's late-modernist writing places itself at the cusp of transgressional traditional representations of knowledge and creates from the poem an open field of inquiry. Adorno states that: ‘form [is] the sediment of content'; and in a separate argument that, ‘form seeks to bring the particular to speech through the whole'.6 These statements replicate Olson and Creely's thought, that ‘form is never more than an extension of content,'7 and thereby an examination of this form can produce meaning. For Prynne, the meaning of any given text is defined through examination and reflection by the reader on his or her relation to the world. It is not the physical form, but the relation the author establishes with the external world which formally situates the subjective, and defines the text. Early on, Prynne defined this intent: ‘It has been my own aspiration, for example, to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usages; and thereby with the reader's own position within this world'.8 This assertion argues that beyond the relatively static sphere of informational derived analysis and the self-generative criticism of a number of Cambridge based critics, there is a relation established between the reader and the poem. It is the basis of this relation upon which the establishment of Prynne's poetic rests. The reader is given the task of establishing an influential portion of the text, and uncovering the references codified and coexisting within their reading of the poem and the contextual, sociohistorical references which constitute and define the object of study.9 It is my obvious contention that to begin to understand Prynne, one needs to work at it, with some rigour: assiduously reading and rereading lines, words and phrases until units of coherence start to form. Readers should be asked to side with Reeve and Kerridge, who ask us to ‘read on, beyond the sense of impasse'10 and expect moments of severe frustration as ideal and even necessary. II: So Beautifully Shallow in the Past: from Olson to Prynne's late-modernist epics The incursion of patterns of travel, trekking, and nomadological pathways invariably register with the reader in reference to Odysseus, Dante, and Gilgamesh, but there are also numerous instances in which this work should be read against modern mythological and epical works. Prynne's nomadic poetry and the sense of exile it imbues in the reader establishes the poems as resting points or contingent moments of thought and reflection. These poems act as a gathering place for a personal assessment of concepts of distance, loss, and the desire to return home. This desire to return to ‘sacred origins' is implicitly unified with the Heideggerian concept of poetic dwelling, as has been highlighted by most modern critics. The late-modernist aspects of Prynne's work often read his work exclusively through modern epics such as Pound's Cantos, Olson's The Maximus Poems, Dorn's Gunslinger, and Zukofsky's “A”. Equally important to the structure and meaning of Prynne's poetic is its placement against the writings of Wordsworth. The patterns presented in Tintern Abbey represent a preliminarily established form of a personal, philosophical and imaginative epic of which Wordsworth never completed, and of which The Prelude, Recluse and The Excursion represent portions. The pastoral themes of Prynne's work aligns itself with a dedicated Wordsworthian analysis. Alongside of this, the reader should also be aware of the pattern of metonymic and metaphoric landscape functions that carry on classical and modern poetic traditions, with a particular affinity to those patterns established in the epics of Olson and Dorn and the manner in which Sauer's On The Morphology of Landscape has impacted these three writers. Building upon the foundation of Pound's arcane knowledge and historicism, a late contemporary of Pound's, Charles Olson, advocated the movement of Objectism. Olson's theory is a of poetics of nature which sought to deny the lyrical position of the individual as ego and reduce the authorial position further, establishing the author as no more than another object in the miasma of the universe.11 Olson's poetic movement represented a decisive move away from the politics of Pound. Anthony Mellors, writes: ‘Olson's best known poem, ‘The Kingfishers', is in part a riposte to Canto LXXIV, which elegises Mussolini by associating his execution at the hands of the Partisans with the flaying of Manes, another martyr to orthodoxy. Whereas Pound laments the death of Italian Fascism, sinking into historical pessimism, Olson sees the birth of a new redemptive era in the form of a Maoist revolution.'12 Olson defines revolutionary leadership as a natural praxis of thought and action, a possibility open to all men, and hence the universal sense of oneness that accompanies ‘The Kingfishers'. Mellors claims this ‘reclamation of the primordial sense of oneness with nature means that it cannot make an ethical distinction between productive and destructive kinds of revolutionary action.'13 The naturalism which Olson embraced throughout The Maximus Poems caused him to relapse into acts of comparison, which detail the natural and human realms but leave the actions of men as impotent to enact change. Olson began to stress that ‘at root (or stump) what is, is no longer THINGS but what happens BETWEEN things, these are the terms of the reality contemporary to us – and the terms of what we are.'14 Anthony Mellors states that Maximus, the Herculean figure of Olson's The Maximus Poems, ‘represents a shift from the isolated lyric ego to a universal poetic self which embraces both the specific facts of history and the archetypes that supposedly underlie and give spiritual meaning to those facts [and objects].'15 Olson fought for a syncretistic unifying system as a means to ‘stay in the human universe and not to be led to partition reality at any point in any way.'16 Prynne also makes an appearance in Olson's Maximus Poems, appealing to Olson to accept the responsibility of his poetry to make a political statement. Olson's acknowledgement of Prynne's request and relapse into the naturalist system of writing disengages him from the political implications and concretises his position as a naturalist, purposefully removed from the situation. The following is ‘(Literary Results)' from Volume Three of Olson's The Maximus Poems: That a cormorant fishes now out my window–that Jeremy Prynne wishes my own poetry–or us, two, as men, should– as Larry Eigner the one day yet, so many years ago I read in Gloucester–to half a dozen people still– asked me why, meaning my poetry doesn't help anyone. The black cormorant, not the gull possesses my eye-view. /_ Oct 18 VII/17 The implication of the poem demonstrates Olson's reticence in accepting the political demands of a socially aware poetics. In this poem Olson also ties his view with an open, projective verse, moving away from the lofty omnipotent view of ‘the gull' and reaffirms for the reader that his viewpoint has been built upon the ground, amongst men and beast. Poet, former student of Prynne, and author of the unpublished thesis ‘J.H. Prynne and Philology', Keston Sutherland, exemplifies the demands placed upon the poet who is giving voice to suffering by using Adorno's condition of truth as informing Prynne's work: ‘Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt warden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit.'18 Sutherland continues to draw divisions between Olson and Prynne based on Prynne's demand that the poet begin to take up a politicised, immutable voice against tyranny, against Pound's Fascism, and against war. Sutherland explains Prynne's utilisation of Adorno in the implicit break between the two poets: The condition of all truth is unavoidably rigged up so as to be met in advance by a proleptic assent posing as ‘instinct,' because our belief in this truth is not a radical act, it is our definition of health. We cannot live without believing that some voice we know (and own) has been given to the suffering of others, and that this voice is truthful; and so what Adorno calls a ‘need' and a ‘condition' are worn through by us to a bare necessity.' 19 In a review of The Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, which appeared in The Park, Prynne relates that only a wo/man, given exulted status through suffering, will be able to make the universal human. Prynne writes that Olson is left at the edge of the abyss where he has created: ‘a lingual and temporal syncretism, poised to make a new order.'20 It was this new order, which Prynne began to demand of Olson, that caused their ultimate associative break and led Prynne into his later, political work. Moving from the mythopoeia of Olson's universal poetic self with Kitchen Poems, Prynne makes one of the most dramatic and affronting changes in his style. Cambridge-critic Andrew Duncan writes that the division between the first two books of Prynne represents ‘a personal revolution, even if the means of production was not transferred.'21 There was a dramatic politicisation of Prynne's work between the publication of Forces of Circumstance in 1962 and the appearance of Kitchen Poems in 1968, poems which had originally appeared in the English Intelligencer as news articles. This politicisation may have been due, in part, to his experiences in America in the 1960's lecturing, reading and working closely with Olson and Dorn, and assisting with Olson's Maximus Poems. With Kitchen Poems Prynne seems to be overcoming ‘his residual allegiance to the Olsonian ethic,' for which, ‘politics … is for one man,' and stating that ‘the true literal has very few names.' but remains stuck oscillating between spleen and ideal.22 With Brass, Prynne broke from the idea of an overarching human immensity containing all human history, myth and ideology, as a means of explanation. Our examination of Prynne's poetic progression will detail the linear fragmentation, circumambient and recursive narrative devices with which Prynne began to experiment; ideas that stem from Olson, but which had not managed to put into practice in his work: That quality of any particular thing or event which comes in any one of our consciousnesses; how it comes in on us as a force peculiar to itself and to ourselves in any of those instants which do hit us and of which our lives are made up. 23 Sutherland formulates his argument on the disassociation of Prynne from Olson because of the fact that: The figure of Maximus grew for Prynne into a more and more diminutive answer to the question of size, more and more grisly with bathos. The figure of our ‘own maximum' is locked most openly with in Wound Response and The Oval Window, back into what Emerson called the custody of the primitive body and the jail yard of individual [political] relations from which Olson had liberated him. He becomes a joke a Gargantua of the homily and lectern, disowned by Prynne repetitively and with extreme semiotic, rhetorical, grammatical and satiric violence.24 The break with Olson comes directly upon the outset of the 1970's, a time which was dominated by political, philosophical thought and explorations of consciousness. It is on this basis of modernist poetry that Prynne creates the unifying establishment of relationships with the world and the reader's position and associations within the world. Both Pound and Olson represents the basis for the late-modernist poetics in which Prynne writes; he refrains from the total dissolution of the poetic self, and creates a voice amongst the vicissitudes of information which accrue fragments of data and intermittently reflect upon these. Mellors writes: Prynne embraces Pound's and Olson's historical eclecticism and mythic ontology (e.g. ‘the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor/ as fact'), but he does not sustain what he calls their ‘fantasy of control' over the past. For Prynne, the mythic method reconstitutes history as an eternal present by refusing to mourn the past as a lost object. [ … ] Prynne, however, sees the recognition of self-loss as a necessary condition for any ‘divine sense' of being in the world, and he treats the history of mythic determinations as a dialectic in which the desire to return to a timeless, organic sense of self-identity cannot be separated from the experience of temporal distance. 25 Prynne's poetic works to functionally, ‘lure the reader's investigation yet suspending the desire for unifying interpretation; [to the point where] the critical project must turn to reflection on its own presuppositions and validity rather than describing its poetic ‘object'.'26 Prynne has repudiated the cosmologic and cosmogenic subject of Olson and moved towards replicating an experience of consciousness. It was this break from the modernist tradition of Olson that established the onset of Prynne's mature work and the creation of images highly philological and laden with eckphrastic references. Prynne's work and correspondence also had a major influence on Edward Dorn, a student of Olson's, at this time. Dorn quotes Prynne verbatim when he writes, ‘We are bleached in Sound, as it burns by what we desire' in the ‘Prolegamenon' at the beginning of the fourth book of Dorn's seminal epic, Gunslinger; a book which is dedicated to Prynne.27 In fact, there are many instances throughout Dorn and Prynne's work where lines pass from one poem and from one poet seamlessly to the other. The interaction between the poems of Dorn and Prynne give rise to the idea that the two should be read in unison, and with a dedicated set of sources. It is hoped that this brief introduction to the modernist tradition of epic poetry has provided a prefatory starting point for the analysis of the works of J.H. Prynne and his own precarious use of epic. III: Truck out Black: pathways towards the epical The interaction between the elemental factions of a Prynne poem are those which define the manner in which the poem need be read, contain those layers of intelligibility and referentiality from which the reader may grasp her own position within the poem. It is the reader's work to establish her own relation between the poem and the world. Prynne's extraordinary use of scientific data, technical language, lyricism and eckphrastic references forces the reader into continual transformative accounts of meaning and to constantly reposition themselves in relation to new poetic objects.28 Prynne's unification of lyricism and informational exegesis create paratactic lines which belie presence and singularly definitive objects. One of the manners in which we can begin to come to an understanding of the historicity and modernity that Prynne is referencing within the poem is to closely examine the syncretism with which he fuses the temporal and the epical references to create meaning. This, according to Jung, is the manner in which archetypal images are given expression through art.29 For Jung, it is the dyadism made manifest in art which supersedes the subject of the artist — in this case, the lyrical ego, or the ‘I' typical of modernist works. In creating his poems Prynne works to unify the archetypal substrates of epic with lyrical expression, as a means to exemplify historical information and give rise to formative contiguities which illuminate meaning. Kevin Nolan writes in 'Capital Calves': His constant redeployment of allusion and mythic reference are thereby not the forms of lamentation for an unattainable pastness but …the instruments of a meta-critical prospect seeking to valorise the prize of understanding even as it authorises the process.30 In taking from Olson, Prynne engages the epic tradition to function as both the instrument of referentiality and functional object of the archaeological discovery, just as each reference may work as the instrument and function of definition. For Nolan, Prynne's articulation of the epic themes in his work is the greatest signal that one of Prynne's central poetical positions is to exemplify the idea raised by Homer: that Language raises questions which Language itself cannot answer.31 Prynne's poems most closely linked with epic include ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years' from The White Stones, and Red D Gypsum, although the same analysis could be executed for other Prynne poems, such as To Pollen and Streak~Willing~Entourage~Artesian: And his songs were invocations in no frenzy of spirit, but clear and spirituous tones (Aristeas, in Seven Years, 91) ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years' represents in itself a minor epic, situated within The White Stones, a collection which represents one of Prynne's striking attempts to question the determinacies and indeterminacies of the world. In ‘Aristeas' the shamanic journey and ritual act as unifying elements conditional to a mystical life, exemplifying the condition of the mythic Prynne notes: ‘The literal is not magic, for the most part' (‘A Note on Metal', 131). The search for mythical origins is one of the main incitement points for Aristeas's continual journey through Central Asia, Siberian and Greek history. As has been pointed out by many critics, this journey back through time is an epical search for the Orphic origins of narrative. The increasingly complex nomadological world of Aristeas demands for a careful examination of layers of referentiality, to sources that include philology, geography, geology, mythology, archaeology, and classical texts; a bibliography has been carefully selected and somewhat sardonically supplied by Prynne. The legend of Aristeas, as read through the Maximus, may help to refresh the history books for those of us less mythically inclined: The soul of Aristeas left his body , as it lay still breathing, just enough to maintain life, and wandered above in the upper air like a bird looking down over everything from above… it then entered his body again and roused it to its feet, using it like an instrument, and recited all that it had seen and heard. 32 From the first lines of Prynne's poem we have an almost replicated version of the story: Gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage (‘Aristeas, in Seven Years', 90) From his bodiless vantage, Aristeas rises to become the mythic eyes for the clan, which remains without its centre (92). The shamanic and cosmogenic position of Aristeas neatly replicates the social condition of the artist (or, as can be argued, the romantic poet) in a society in which, ‘they sit or pass, in | the form of divine song, | they are free in the apt form of | displacement, they change | their shape, being of the essence as | a figure of the extent. Which | for the power in rhyme | is gold in this northern clime' (94). The Scythians, it should be noted, considered gold a sacred metal, and so it is unsurprising that the acts described entail atrocities carried out in the name of acquisition. Carrying on a typical Prynnean trope is the examination and juxtaposition of individual objects in both economic terms and terms of human value. ‘The conquests were for the motive of |sway, involving massive slaughter as the | obverse politics of claim', and so ‘the gold reposed as the divine brillance, | petrology of the sea air, so far from the shore' (95). Outside of ‘Aristeas' an Odyssean journey of a mythic return to origins is maintained throughout The White Stones. In particular, this pattern can be seen as established with ‘Lashed to the Mast', a poem which comes to encompass Nolan's invective to unify language to the call of the Sirens.33 Another particularly Heideggerian instance of poetic dwelling which reflects the Odyssean mode comes from the poem ‘Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform', in which Prynne states, ‘the world converges on the idea | of return … Again is the sacred | Word, the profane sequence suddenly graced, by coming back' (100). The process of the epic journey, as witnessed in these poems is as much about the return ‘home' as it is the return to the personal, to a state of fluid consciousness. The division between internal and external and the reliance on the importance of the threshold that divides the two states and orientates the subject is also deeply characteristic of Prynne's work. These two concepts underlie many of the features of critical discourse surrounding Aristeas, as well as The White Stones. For Nolan, The White Stones is indicative of the, ‘encounter with the Sirens, [which] marks out Odysseus (and not say, Prometheus, or Philoctetes) as the archetype of lyrical subjectivity, a survivor whose predicament consists precisely in not knowing how exactly to relate or dispose the experience and knowledge that he manifests and bears.'34 As with most of Prynne's texts, ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years' and The White Stones do not follow a narrative tradition. The poem carries on its narrative substructure in a recursive pattern, constantly leaving fragmentary clauses, broken lines, as well as references and subjects that are constantly elided and overwritten in polyvalence. Quotations and scholarly text hang within the poem without reference or qualification. For Prynne, this pattern of writing and of forcing the reader into the position of the archaeologist uncovering fragment after fragment and layer upon layer of detailed information, is an annunciation of the interaction he hopes to create between the text and the reader, and therefore with the reader's position within the world. The mythological references and historicity developed within the poems allow for the comparison and placement of artefacts against relevant and semantically determinate archetypes which can help the reader to situate meaning and to begin to embrace a widening manifold of contiguous contextual relations. Poetic language, as exemplified in The White Stones, acts as a process of communication, building, exchanging and receiving meaning exemplified as language, rather than a key to understanding the hermeneutical complexities of his work.34 Prynne's examination and utilisation of indigenous tribal knowledge within the poem, and his general interest in the lineage and tradition of the songs of the world's indigenous groups, adds much weight to the concept of language as a contiguous element which unifies generations through expressive human behaviour.35 For these groups the transmission of epic narrative was just one example of the use of song in customary life, though there were also songs of ritual, sacrifice and war. In the manner of moving beyond ones' self through the reading and coming to understand a poem, Prynne offers us 'What goes on in a | language is the corporate & prolonged action | of worked selftranscendence' (‘Questions for the Time Being', 112). Poetic language, for Prynne, and henceforth for his reader, is unified with the manner in which the mind constructs and dissects meaning and by which we work to situate ourselves within ever-expanding contextual matrices of imagery, scientific data, history, epical narrative and poetry. IV: Red D Gypsum & 'Marzipan' Avail what would clamour so late. Three trammel birds cut-out flat in fury department, have entered denied for terror fallen off the track directly smeared, bilobar hand signals way marking, so giving way over to see the bones in his fingers frothing clapped up at eye to eye birth intervals. Their three gaps gefangen across the doorway, soaking up iron occupant sights for a level palate, hit fresh on a low set at the back. (From Red D Gypsum, 437) In the poem Red D Gypsum, Prynne has worked to establish the pattern of the epic within the structures and references of a geomorphologic context. Alongside of the poem's initial referential patterns is the establishment of patterns of microscopic life, neurological functions, economics, photosynthetic processes, and shifts of register which expand outward to indicate the mapping and study of the cosmos. The layers of interrelation and etymological interaction within the poem have taken on an even greater role in Prynne's late poetic and have caused many a reader to struggle to find points of accessibility within the work. From a provisional reading of the poem, few dictates or resonant meanings easily present themselves. The enjambment of any one of Red D Gypsum's stanzas represents a force of compression and occlusion. The signals for semantic, semiotic or referential invocation are present, and as is often seen, represent a striking together of thematic devices, instances of replication, and obscure, eckphrastic references. The title, Red D Gypsum, initially offers few indications of the poem's thematic intent; nor, from the outset, does the epigraph, a quotation from Lillian Chew, ‘the volatility smile is not symmetrical' (434), offer any preliminary insights into the matters of the poem. From the first line of the poem we are given at least three clear instances of acknowledgeable and translatable image-complexes, thus allowing the reader a preliminary position from which to engage with the poem. ‘Now trek inter-plate reversion to earth buy out' (434), provides the reader with the overlaying matrices of economic, geomorphologic and nomadic references from which to actively assess the interrelations of the coming lines. The commodification of nature suggested by the ‘earth buy out' adds connotations that may seem to suggest the denial of pastoral modes, but the further we progress through the poem the more strongly resurgent the pastoral themes become. This resurgence strengthens the suggestion that the trek – undertaken by one or many, this we cannot yet differentiate – is taking place over great and treacherous distances. The relation of ‘inter-plate' to concepts of tectonic, seismic, or intercontinental plates suggests the subject's macroscopic position within the world, thus situating him within a greater terrain, and by this scale, reinforces the arduousness of the journey. The epical journey expresses lamentation for the commodification of nature and follows this pathway through the woods. Wheale writes that ‘The trek is certainly sustained, often through woods, traditionally the place in which to become lost; in the Middle Ages a wood was allegorically the world of mere matter that betrayed or destroyed higher aspirations.'35 Adding semantic weight to the possible definitions of the trek are Basu's definitions from The Red Shift Trekking, which exemplifies the idea of the trek as historically unified with settling a new area of land with the aim of establishing a new home. Historically the trek is indicative of anthropological treks which sought out new mineral deposits and new social information. The trek also has direct connotations to religious pilgrimages, both monotheistic and paganistic.36 Upon first encounter, the first lines of the poem may seem meaninglessly paratactic though upon careful examination they open up the potentiality of the poem to an epical journey as a return to a greater and simpler past. The annunciative demand, ‘Now trek', displaces the elegiac calm of a return to origins and positions the subject of the poem in a diminutive position, being ordered across foreign terrain. The subject's foreignness to the area is implicitly imbued within the complexity of such a densely packed vocable terrain and is further signified by the reader's unaccustomed response to it. In this manner Prynne is replicating the subject's response with the reader's reaction to the line. The first stanza is packed with demands for action, specifying, ‘set carrier up ready' or ‘rip out brace here' (434), the ambiguity of the lines which align the poem with both the possibility that the subject is part of a military complex, moving temporary barracks and military command centre, or even part of a nomadic tribe, packing up their wares and loading them onto a travois, to begin to undertake their journey. Both military and tribal definitions remain as coherent possibilities throughout the poem, adding a timeless effect to the journey. The movement throughout Red D Gypsum is also mandated through the reading of the lines: their compression, pace, and assonantal pattern. Breaking from the fast commanding pace of the first lines the reader is shown a measure of authorial concern and a meditative shift in perspective is induced by the final line of the first stanza: ‘you may | cover down over, a flawless glucose shimmered sky' (434). This line represents the suppression of an unbridled urgency from which the subjects hide for cover; it is a figural and referential point of retreat. The localised shifts of register from internal to external that we examined in the previous poem are also replicated here. There is a less registered weighing of the transitory threshold between the internal and external and more reliance is placed on the unification and replication of language as linking the descriptions of mineral deposits with anatomic structures of the brain. These two subjects are weighed out against a pastoralist specific discussion of crops and the prospect of growth. In Red D Gypsum the consummate and analogous terms of agrarian life, ‘burning friable stubble already coerced', mesh with the technical diction of geological testing, ‘Did you light furtive aggregate late-flow samples', taken from, ‘lower still to steps | grounded for all rejoinders to miss so new a weave' (439,436, 436). The ‘stolon rising' (439), which appears at the beginning of the ninth stanza unifies the agrarian descriptions with veins of mineral deposit to the rhizomatic patterns of thought, linking the conceptual development of ideas within the poem to many contemporary language and linguistic theories. The connotations of contemporary linguistic theories are also bridged through the poem with reference to the language centres of the brain in ‘Broca's lumen' and ‘fusiform'. As veins of mineral are described so are patterns of growth depicted; the direct linkages to patterns of linguistic development force the reader to begin to question the relation of the subconscious, the germination of ideas and their development as they are depicted throughout the poem. The most obvious pattern linking Red D Gypsum to the epic is the notion of the trek. The plants which the reader witnesses take root, are suddenly trees, those: ‘vivid strips of bark which circle the room'. ‘The bark scripture', and ‘the wood rewound in felt' add differing connotations to the semantic structure of the trees with which Prynne is working with. Early on in the poem the reader encounters the line, ‘Accredit late cut dazing | underside selvage obscure, peltate divided refound as | for holding both cover traps' (436). From this perspective, the epic journey of the poem is read as a recapitulation of the tale of Dante, threading the selvage obscure (the dark woods) at the beginning of The Inferno. The application of Dantean ontology also draws a drastically moral and epistemic thread throughout the poem. The implication of ‘holding both cover traps' seems to imply that no matter which end of the underworld the subject enters, exit is an impossibility. Further explicating the ontological and epistemic connotations is that the bark referenced within the poem may contain scriptures, and this unifies the journey to the biblical ‘Sacred Scriptures,' which were found originally written on bark. The imagery of religious writing on bark (as well as connotations to papyrus) continues to resonate with the scriptures of numerous indigenous tribes, and works to place focus on the moment when the epic tradition of song was transformed into the written word. These concepts unify the epical journey back to midrashic, back to the origins of ritual, as well as the origins of language. The journey, as is seen through Dante, and with the parallel of indigenous customs, represents a quest for salvatory ends. The Dantean imagery forms a resurgent pattern late in the text and the reader finds exemplary discursive indications linking Red D Gypsum to ‘Marzipan' from Bands Around The Throat, ‘wherein this blanching of body politic has becomes a desolate image of spectral existence'.37 The imagery, as pointed out by Perril38, is also strikingly reminiscent of Eliot's Wasteland: We poor shadows light up, again slowly now in the wasted province where colours fall and are debated through a zero coupon, the defunct tokens in a soft regard. (‘Marzipan', 347) In ‘Marzipan', as at the conclusion of Red D Gypsum, the totemic journey traces our steps across the earth, on a pathway which has left us desolate and without much hope. The only possibility of survival offered the reader is the ‘remontant' growth offered in the final lines, and therefore a hope for new beginnings, ‘Vivid strips of tree bark circle the room its introit fading flood | across broken sky reflexed, repelled threads mercuric | took bounds remontant to grasp out along its line' (449). Further connotations to Dante and epic are highlighted by the entrapment of ‘Three trammel birds | cut-out flat in fury department.' Trammel has at least three applicable definitions in this instance: the first designating a net specifically designed for catching fish and birds; second, an object that is impeding activity or progress; and thirdly, an instrument for drawing large circles or ellipses. From this set of image-complexes the reader understands that the subject has entered Dante's shrinking circles of hell and has become an immediate a captive amongst Dante's sinners, who are sought after with ‘fingers frothing clapped up at eye to eye birth intervals' (437). This is the condemnation that Prynne has devised as the end result of the constant metallurgic and agrarian exploitation of the land and has necessitated the epical journey in a hope for new beginnings. Despite the aims of concurring new lands, in the end, he claims, ‘You | know the outcome so to say' (445). The rise of Dantean imagery and the repeated introduction of shades, often represented in the poem as darkened or silhouetted figures, where ‘snake roots break their chain in fighting harvest'; ‘breeding uproar', where 'dark shades clatter', ‘bribing their locks' further implies our pathway amongst the demarcations of hell (447). Where the three books of Dante's epic end, with a glimmering and distant image of stars, Prynne's poem ends with a vision of the ‘broken sky', indicating, perhaps, that we too have reached the end of our own bleak journey. References: 1 Rod Mengham and John Kinsella, An Introduction to the Poetry of J.H. Prynne, 1999, essay, Personal Website and parallel with Jacket Magazine Issue 7, July 1 2008. 2 Anthony Matthew Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne, Angelaki Humanities (Manchester ; New York :New York :: Manchester University Press ; Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2005). 1-44. Edward Larrissy, “Poets of a Various Art: J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Andrew Crozier,” Contemporary British Poetry : Essays in Theory and Criticism Published: Albany : , C1996. Physical Desc.: Viii, 418 P. : Isbn: 0791427676 (Acid-Free Paper) Isbn: 0791427684 (Pbk. : Acid-Free Paper) Link to Record: Http://Nla.Gov.Au/Anbd.BibAn12194447, eds. James Acheson and Romana Huk (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 64. 3 Larrissy, “Poets of a Various Art: J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Andrew Crozier.” 70. 4 5 Peter Middleton, Distant Reading : Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetics (Tuscaloosa :: University of Alabama Press, 2005).Milne essay, cited without reference by Middleton. 171. 6 Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann, Gretel Adorno and Robert Hullot-Kentor, Aesthetic Theory (London :: Athlone Press, 1997). Quotations from page 202 and 190, respectively. 7 Olson, Creeley, Friedlander and Allen, Collected Prose. 138. 8 J.H. Prynne, “A Letter to Peter Riley 15/9/1985,” In lit 1992 (1992). James Clifford, “Notes on (Field)Notes,” Fieldnotes : The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca :: Cornell University Press, 1990). 66. A large selection of Clifford's 9 notes are utilized by Prynne in The Solitary Reaper, to define the manner in which collated ethnographic notes may work to describe the exact conditions of these textualised cultural facts. 10 N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much : The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Liverpool :: Liverpool University Press, 1995). 11 Olson, Creeley, Friedlander and Allen, Collected Prose. 247. 12 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne. 5. 13 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne. 5. 14 Olson, Creeley, Friedlander and Allen, Collected Prose. 138. 15 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne. 7. 16 Olson, Creeley, Friedlander and Allen, Collected Prose. 157. 17 Charles Olson and George F. Butterick, The Maximus Poems (Berkeley :: University of California Press, 1983). 575. Maximus Pagination: [ III.184]. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main :: Suhrkamp, 1966). 29. Theodor W. Adorno and E. B. Ashton, Negative Dialectics (London :: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 17-18. Trans: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.” Keston Sutherland, “Xl Prynne,” Complicities : British Poetry 1945-2007, eds. Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin (Prague :: Literraria Pragensia, 2007). 52. 19 J.H. Prynne, “Review of Charles Olson's the Maximus Poems IV,V, VI. ,” The Park 4/5.Summer 1969. (1969). 20 21 Andrew Duncan, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Cambridge :: Salt, 2003). 121. 22 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne. 125. Quotations from Kitchen Poems, as cited by Mellors, are from 'The Holy City', 43. Olson, Creeley, Friedlander and Allen, Collected Prose. ‘The Material and Weights of Herman Melville' 113-119. 117. 23 24 Sutherland, “Xl Prynne.” 70-71. 25 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne. 9-10. 26 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne. 12. 27 Edward Dorn, Gunslinger (Durham, [N.C.] :: Duke University Press, 1989). 145. 28 N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much : The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Liverpool :: Liverpool University Press, 1995). 120. 120. 29 Anthony Matthew Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne, Angelaki Humanities (Manchester ; New York :New York :: Manchester University Press ; Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2005). 7. 7. 30 Kevin Nolan, 'Capital Calves': Undertaking an Overview, 24, 2003, Essay, Jacket, Available: http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html, Dec.1 2008. 31 Nolan, Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview. E. D. Phillips, “The Legend of Aristeas: Fact and Fancy in Early Greek Notions of East Russia, Siberia, and Inner Asia,” Artibus Asiae 18.2 (1955). 161. 161. 32 33 Nolan, Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview. 34 Nolan, Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview. Nigel Wheale, “Crosswording. Paths through Red D Gypsum,” A Manner of Utterance, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009). 169. 35 36 Peter Middleton, Distant Reading : Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetics (Tuscaloosa :: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 183. 183. ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009). 176. Jay Basu, “The Red Shift Trekking: J.H. Prynne's Red D Gypsum,” The Cambridge Quarterly 30.1 (2001). NOTE: As also should be noted the trek has implicit Marxist connotations to forced labour, a brief overview of which is provided by Basu. 37 Simon Perril, “Hanging on Your Every Word ” A Manner of Utterance, ed. Ian Brinton (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009). 95. 95. {NOTE: Also cognitive are the connotations linking this indigenous Eurasian journey to the African nomadological journeys of Marzipan.} 38