Poems: (2015) third edition

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They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (privately printed, 2001). The poem comes from The White Stones (1969), a book as central to postwar British poetry as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings or Rosemary Tonks’s Iliad of Broken Sentences. Around the time Prynne wrote it, his fellow Cambridge poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson was developing the theories of “naturalisation” that inspired her critical study Poetic Artifice. To Forrest-Thomson, as a formalist, poems are all about language, whereas “naturalising” readings want to think that poems are really, deep-down, about daffodils or train journeys from Hull to London.

With my best and not even particularly advanced critical reading self, I could see perfectly well that this work was not distinctive. It was imitative, and it didn’t have much in the way of strong possibilities. I was seeing all this strong possibility in the Don Allen anthology, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to tune into that in a very convincing way because the English nature of the English language and its English resources inhibited that transfer. It was not a transfer that could be made just like that. So being a poet at that stage was very discomfiting.

February 2023

The work of Prynne is often seen by many as being difficult - both in its language and its apparently hermetic references. Meaning seems to be flexible, speech is destabilised, and readers are confronted with questions concerning their own status - even complicity - in the relationship between the mediated word, the crafted text, and the external world, without which it cannot exist. It's the idea of the self as centre, the so-called lyrical I that's being questioned here. "Rich in Vitamin C" shows how every human interaction, personal reflection, and meditation on time and place involves others, and effects, and is influenced by, macro and micro changes in the social, economic, and political climate. Above and beyond all else, Prynne's concerns are moral and ethical - he believes even that in the intimacy of the lyric moment, we have an obligation to recognise what is happening in the greater world. Britain’s leading late modernist poet,” as his Poems bill him, nevertheless remains as enthusiastic about his vocation as ever. He has begun to speak more candidly in old age about his work, happily telling a Cambridge audience recently how Kazoo Dreamboats was written in a Bangkok hotel room with a view of a concrete wall (“just what I wanted”) and a physics textbook for company. In a statement from 2010, published in Kathmandu as part of a collection of essays otherwise written in Nepalese (AD Penumbra, eat your heart out), Prynne writes: “To be in and across all things a poet, in daily involvement with the dialectic of imagination and real things, has been a task giving the profoundest joy and fulfilment. The task in this work has been to maintain the fundamental argument of contradiction, even while opening one’s powers of feeling and knowledge to the largest extent, so that language occupies the entire space of the poet’s self-being and then overflows it.” Jeremy Prynne lecture on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI". Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #28 (April 1999). See also related review of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1969). Poèmes de Cuisine. French translation of Kitchen Poems, by B. Dubourg and J.H. Prynne (Lot-et-Garonne: Damazan, 1975). Prynne’s humour in person, delivered with a precise accent over half-moon spectacles, can be disarmingly Wodehousian. The poet and critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson once reported that her doctoral super- visor claimed Cambridge University Library had “got his middle name wrong. / He says it stands for Hah / But there is a limit” (in fact, his given names are Jeremy Halvard). In his poetry, however, the wit is sardonic and satirical, expressing a profoundly sceptical worldview in which English slides every- where on a flood of contamination and corruption—political, financial and environmental. “Make a dot / difference, make an offer; these feeling spray-on / skin products are uninhabitable, by field and stream” advises Unanswering Rational Shore (2001), vamping on the staccato verbalism of shopping channels and rolling news.

For Ben Watson—a former student of Prynne and one of his wittiest critics—the philosophical devotion to contradiction is what has driven this poetry to ever greater obscurities (including, since the 1970s, its general withdrawal from the personal voice). Responding to Kazoo Dreamboats, or, On What There Is, a long poem from 2011 which reads like a raging argument between a research library and an electric fence, Watson writes: “Prynne is a prankster, a trap, a contrary Mary in a blue robe twinkling with kitsch lights… a creator of baroque caves of language glittering with aphorisms and jokes and surprises.”Prynne grew up in Kent and was educated at St Dunstan's College, Catford, and Jesus College, Cambridge. [1] He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He retired in October 2005 from his posts teaching English Literature as a Lecturer and University Reader in English Poetry for the University of Cambridge and as Director of Studies in English for Gonville and Caius College; in September 2006 he retired from his position as Librarian of the College. China Figures," Modern Asian Studies 17 (1983), 671-704; Rpt. rev. as a "Postscript" to New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry, trans. Anne Birrell, Penguin Classics, 1986.

One begins to appreciate how grossly partial a single viewpoint is, and how political its exclusions. "What can't be helped / is the vantage, private and inert", Prynne writes; but the ambiguities in "can't be helped" call attention to one of the poem's themes; of what constitutes empathy, of how, and how much, we "care".Du Nouveau dans la guerre des clans[ News of Warring Clans] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne. 1980. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) Although Prynne has a sizeable following in England, it sometimes feels as if his international reputation is much larger: in France, the US and, markedly, in China. When the French poet Jérôme Game, the reading's organiser, introduced Prynne it was as the most important living English poet: the same claim some critics perceived in Randall Stevenson's recent Oxford English Literary History, and which launched an unlikely flurry of media interest recently. But Prynne's poetry also employs a breadth of vocabulary that takes the reader across the OED and down into its historical layers of accrued meanings, not to mention the specialised jargons and lexicons of disciplines as different as microbiology, finance, astronomy, optics, medicine, neurophysiology, genetics and agriculture. It is work informed by a vast amount of reading and its range and pitch are concomitantly daunting. Not since the late work of Ezra Pound and the Maximus series of Charles Olson have the possibilities of poetry been so fundamentally questioned and extended as they are in the life work of J.H. Prynne. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. Four further collections were added to the second edition of Poems in 2005. This expanded third edition of Poems (2015) includes the complete texts of seven additional works: Refuse Collection (2004), To Pollen (2006), Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage /Artesian (2009), Sub Songs (2010), Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011), and Al-Dente (2014), all previously available only in limited editions, as well as a group of uncollected poems. Over thirty later texts are included in Poems 2016–2024 (Bloodaxe Books, 2024).