constant escape
winter withered, warm
Transmitting through apeiron.
J. H. Prynne
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- 100 god damn pages butchering sontag cooking with propane corpsey why are you so thick deaths from bromo-dragonfly enjoy your journey enjoy! everyone! gravity bong happy to help! jamaican voodoo gang from predator 2 lads vs. dudes martin anus shaun from delaware stoned modernism teat. the albert ayler of the recorder the bee is the messiah the path clears by the use it gets thick as fuck to pollen traitor cow-juice west coast dudes
How to read Prynne
Readers who do start to engage with Prynne's work will find themselves thoroughly absorbed by and immersed in the most important work currently being produced. This importance is due to the fact that Prynne is about transforming the way poetry is produced and received. The reaction against him is probably an indication that he has succeeded.
I approach this with some trepidation because I am not yet anywhere near the peak of Mount Prynne but thought a few words may encourage others to undertake the climb.
Readers who do start to engage with Prynne's work will find themselves thoroughly absorbed by and immersed in the most important work currently being produced. This importance is due to the fact that Prynne is about transforming the way poetry is produced and received. The reaction against him is probably an indication that he has succeeded.
I approach this with some trepidation because I am not yet anywhere near the peak of Mount Prynne but thought a few words may encourage others to undertake the climb.
- The first thing you will need is regular access to the OED. It isn't so much that the poems are packed with hard and difficult meanings but Prynne likes to use secondary definitions that you may not be aware of.
- Increasingly reliable, Wikipedia is your friend because it often gives a useful overview of terms or concepts that may be new to you and frequently gives links to more in-depth information. Google doesn't always point to the best resources, it's as well to use the 'exact phrase' feature in the advanced search option.
- Know that early on you will decide either that the poems are just a bunch of words which you don't have either the time or the inclination to 'engage' or you will be intrigued and want to go further. Both decisions are entirely valid.
- Start with the second of the Bloodaxe editions. A lot of people start with the earlier stuff in the hope of following a chronological progression. This is a mistake. Beginning with the poems that interest you most. Also try to obtain the work published after 2004 which is very varied indeed.
- Prynne has no interest in making things easy for his readers. There is no single 'key' to any of the poems after 'White Stones'. The perspective of each poem moves about and there are often multiple things going on in the same line. He's also said that he doesn't see the pursuit of meaning as an essential part of his work.
- Learn to think laterally, to consider what language can do rather than what it does. Know that Prynne is deeply distrustful of the western consensus view of reality and the role that language plays in that view. According to him, language is never either innocent or neutral
- At first try not to read too much of what others say about Prynne. This is often a case of academics trying to impress other academics with their erudition and doesn't provide any kind of help for us readers. It is best to try and make some progress in terms of your own personal response to the poems first.
- Read as much prose by Prynne as you can find. The latest books are George Herbert, Love III and Field Notes which is a close reading of Wordswoth's The Solitary Reaper The first of this is still available from is available from Barque Press but Field Notes has now sold out. Both of these are incredibly detailed word by word readings and provide invaluable idication of the way that this remarkable poet read and thinks about poetry. An ealier volume in a similar vein is They That Haue Powre to Hurt: A Specimen of Commentary on "Shake-speares Sonnets," 94 which is available on at least one disreputable free book site.
- It will soon become clear from the poems that Prynne's politics are based on a marxian / leftist analysis and that he's against most of the things that most of us class warriors are: any form of capitalism; imperialist adventures in far flung places; neoliberal economics and the fraudulence of bourgeois culture. This stuff won't hit you like a sledgehammer but it will crop up from time to time. You may find some of Prynne's comments on the workings of capital markets to be quite quaint.
- It is eminently possible to over-read Prynne. I've spent more than a little time reading To Pollen and am almost convinced that it refers to his readers as 'the resilient brotherhood' and asks whether he is the one 'inclined' which I am currently taking to be a reference to Celan's Meridian Address. I see this as extraordinary but am also well aware that I may be barking up the wrong tree. The word 'ultramont' from the opening of the first section I'm taking to be a reference to CERN's particle accelerator because it is the only way that the rest of the sentence can 'work'. Early on, I spent a lot of time worrying about "gross epacts" but have now happily given up.
- Prynne likes ambiguity and is careful with his word choice so that nouns could also be verbs and vice versa. He also is prone to Latinity which is about constructing phrases according to Latin rather than English grammar. Great poets have been doing this for centuries- Milton was a major culprit.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
The bee is the messiah to the flower?
linebaugh
Well-known member
lets say the poem is behaving like the very process it is describing (form mirroring content):
Conspicuous word choice- I think you could make several groups of similarly suggestive words, but for brevity lets just consider the overtly scientific sounding group: cell, particle, fluid, tropic. Lets call these words particles of pollen. Each suggest back to an original body of knowledge but scattered we have what constant was on about:
Conspicuous word choice- I think you could make several groups of similarly suggestive words, but for brevity lets just consider the overtly scientific sounding group: cell, particle, fluid, tropic. Lets call these words particles of pollen. Each suggest back to an original body of knowledge but scattered we have what constant was on about:
linebaugh
Well-known member
oh thank god
constant escape
winter withered, warm
How might that change things, in your mind?
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Interesting - and reordering them could have ramifications on the body?
Initially baffling as To Pollen is, there are nevertheless enough lines to trace across its smoothly-chiselled surface to render closer analysis promising. Indeed, the experience of reading the sequence sparked, at least in me, an awareness of instinctive pattern-tracing, of dots here and there being connected. Even trying to read this poetry with such self-consciousness at a minimum, it is impossible to hide from the difficulty of its poetic. Since an interpretation must initially address this poetic, engineer a key to the poems’ encryption, before turning to the matter itself, there is a temptation to write on Prynne’s procedures rather than his poetry, to explain why we must read him like this. Such criticism, like Field Notes, would imply a thesis on what it is to read – but would it constitute a reading?
[...]
To Pollen is an allusive text, though this is not its primary difficulty. A few points of repair give us a dim sense of location (Iraq) but do not bring us close to clarification. The two epigraphs, one from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, another from Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Sa’id’s The Pages of Day and Night, form a kind of signpost. Hints of Hamlet and Lear, placed in parallel at the end of the first two poems, foreground the question of bringing an action into being:
[…] Along the seam
cresting to burn out black my interim destruction.
[…] Or while at loading
to stare plan off by ripeness event be done bluntly.
On the same theme, there is an (academically) hilarious swipe, via Kant, at the possibility of universally-justified action: “under / starry skies commit acts of stupendous cocky turpitude.” A reasonable interpretation of To Pollen could probably play off the various kinds of action involved in the poem, whose difficulty performs the disenfranchised reader’s sense of futility in active political resistance. The final lines have an action collapse in on itself: “Diminish the haft affix loosely proponent span / blood group indexical self-cut. Try doing it now.” We do not know what “it” is, other than an indexical (deictic, dependent on context) self-cut, the command’s mutilation of itself by lack of unambiguous reference. Besides taking part in a persistent botanical metaphor, the second epigraph also shows To Pollen as commenting on its own difficulty: “Sometimes the field sprouts nails, / so much does the field long for water.”
Pollen is clearly a fascinating subject for Prynne, representing life both systematically, as a bearer of genetic information, and poetically, as a metonym for nature. Perhaps here it also suggests the transplantation of troops. Biological scholarship, whilst only one of the various scientific discourses deployed by Prynne, nevertheless has the particular value of tightly tying conscious, bodily experience, to an abstract view of life that admits no personal agency. It is hence also animated by Prynne’s more recent turn towards systems and information-processing theories, prominent first in The Oval Window (1983) and used effectively to construct an entire poem (“Select an object with no predecessors. Clip off its / roots, reset to zero and remove its arrows […]”) in For the Monogram (1997). The poetic of To Pollen has in turn developed from this interest.
lexipenia.wordpress.com
[...]
To Pollen is an allusive text, though this is not its primary difficulty. A few points of repair give us a dim sense of location (Iraq) but do not bring us close to clarification. The two epigraphs, one from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, another from Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Sa’id’s The Pages of Day and Night, form a kind of signpost. Hints of Hamlet and Lear, placed in parallel at the end of the first two poems, foreground the question of bringing an action into being:
[…] Along the seam
cresting to burn out black my interim destruction.
[…] Or while at loading
to stare plan off by ripeness event be done bluntly.
On the same theme, there is an (academically) hilarious swipe, via Kant, at the possibility of universally-justified action: “under / starry skies commit acts of stupendous cocky turpitude.” A reasonable interpretation of To Pollen could probably play off the various kinds of action involved in the poem, whose difficulty performs the disenfranchised reader’s sense of futility in active political resistance. The final lines have an action collapse in on itself: “Diminish the haft affix loosely proponent span / blood group indexical self-cut. Try doing it now.” We do not know what “it” is, other than an indexical (deictic, dependent on context) self-cut, the command’s mutilation of itself by lack of unambiguous reference. Besides taking part in a persistent botanical metaphor, the second epigraph also shows To Pollen as commenting on its own difficulty: “Sometimes the field sprouts nails, / so much does the field long for water.”
Pollen is clearly a fascinating subject for Prynne, representing life both systematically, as a bearer of genetic information, and poetically, as a metonym for nature. Perhaps here it also suggests the transplantation of troops. Biological scholarship, whilst only one of the various scientific discourses deployed by Prynne, nevertheless has the particular value of tightly tying conscious, bodily experience, to an abstract view of life that admits no personal agency. It is hence also animated by Prynne’s more recent turn towards systems and information-processing theories, prominent first in The Oval Window (1983) and used effectively to construct an entire poem (“Select an object with no predecessors. Clip off its / roots, reset to zero and remove its arrows […]”) in For the Monogram (1997). The poetic of To Pollen has in turn developed from this interest.
J H Prynne: To Pollen / Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others
This review essay appeared, lightly redacted, in Oxford Poetry 2008, ed. Benjamin Mullen and J.C.H. Potts. The following year I was fortunate enough to hear Prynne read 21/22 of ‘To Pollen…
lexipenia.wordpress.com
linebaugh
Well-known member
I also think weve gotten to why the poem is worded the way it is. The pollen lands, germinates, colors the land around it- meaning seems to be forming the same way, the words are forming spheres of influence on their immediate surroundings. Youre reading the poem like a geography
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linebaugh
Well-known member
Ive got this feeling that we could find in these poems 4-5 groups of words/phrases/sentences that fit uniformly together in their suggestions (e.g. cell, tropic, fluid and etc. all suggest science), which I think fits with the cut up theory. Maybe he formed multiple banks of suggestion and the message delivered by the actual poem is the result of these banks cut up, scattered like pollen, and excersing influence on each other in geographic relation. Even if he didnt literally use the cut up method I think were getting at something.
linebaugh
Well-known member
- He's also said that he doesn't see the pursuit of meaning as an essential part of his work.
- Learn to think laterally, to consider what language can do rather than what it does. Know that Prynne is deeply distrustful of the western consensus view of reality and the role that language plays in that view. According to him, language is never either innocent or neutral
True, I think we are working with what's there and not just pulling the stuff out of thin air.
linebaugh
Well-known member
To take it back to the earlier conversation- texts like these, texts that pretty much demand an almost academic type of investigation/interpretation to reach them, if we are to keep with Sontag's mantra that form must mirror content, do works of these type always take meaning/communication/information as a primary concern?
what are the big indecipherable works? The Wasteland, The Sound and The Fury, Gravity's Rainbow- those all fit the description above. I havent read Joyce, does he do that?
what are the big indecipherable works? The Wasteland, The Sound and The Fury, Gravity's Rainbow- those all fit the description above. I havent read Joyce, does he do that?