J. H. Prynne

linebaugh said:

I read 'a night square' recently and I enjoyed it, though Im not sure if I enjoyed because I enjoyed it or because I was excited that I approached understanding it. Reading Cinema 2 by Deleuze as well right now and running into the same quandary.

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ive been doing the same thing with cinema 2 coincidently. it does come tantalisingly close to making sense doesnt it

linebaugh said:

I read 'a night square' recently and I enjoyed it, though Im not sure if I enjoyed because I enjoyed it or because I was excited that I approached understanding it. Reading Cinema 2 by Deleuze as well right now and running into the same quandary.

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share us your insights!

ON OCTOBER 3rd 1962 J.H.Prynne sent to Charles Olson a list of 60 surviving port books in English libraries, which registered vessels leaving the ports of London, Poole and Bristol between 1622 and 1646. This was preparatory to an offer to search himself the contents of such books as Olson indicated were important to him. This work continued intermittently for the next three or four years mixed in with a great deal of bibliography on many different subjects, and this function of “feeding information” is probably how this correspondence has been generally characterised.1 Prynne’s role has even been called “Olson’s poetic research assistant”. But what Prynne mainly sent to Olson, on the basis of a perceived affinity, was a complete education, not in “Prynne’s theories” but in the world. This was not a pre-formed programme awaiting an American poet, though the most expository account is in the first two letters. It arose, took body and dispersed again in the exchange of letters and documents for as long as it could, with more give than take but with Olson’s alert ear always there to activate the discoveries into his own poetics. Poems by Olson were conceived and first exercised in these pages, as were, less reactively, the first poems Prynne accepted as canonical.2

I can't remember if you like Olson or not.

craner said:

I can't remember if you like Olson or not.

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he gets on my nerves a lot. i love the projective verse essay and i have read maximus and a lot of other things. lots of his stuff. huge amounts. but hes really annoying. you'll enjoy that peter riley essay though. read it. what is your olson opinion?

Why does he get on your nerves?

I found in the context of verse selections that his work felt like a dead end in a way that, I don't know, Basil Bunting didn't. In the context of a sprawling block like Maximus I understood it a lot better. But I only dipped and never read it closely or completely enough to make a definitive judgement. But I feel like I would like to. There is something concrete in his project that I can intuitively grasp, or relate to. I wish I had brought that big Maximus book years ago when it was in print, I feel like reading it.

I've bookmarked the essay for later.

basically i think he's a blowhard. i dont like the wheezing, puffing voice either

Why do you think he's a blowhard?

Olson and I exchanged comments about all sorts of things, including the linguistics of poetic composition. It was clear to me that he’d been a very *influential and powerful teacher. It was also clear, at one point, that Olson was thinking that if I’d been on the scene ten or fifteen years earlier, he would’ve invited me to join him on the Black Mountain team. Having read enough and heard enough about the way things were done there, I asked *myself if I would have accepted such an invitation. I was quite clear that I would not have done so. It was not an institution that I could have willingly associated myself with, partly because they were such bullies. Olson and the others practised ascendency over the students and dominated their development, and offered themselves as exemplary models to be followed, not as choices to be made. Partly, too, because their knowledge of scholarship, and their understanding of things outside the ambience of personal interest and behaviour, was extremely casual. There were papers in the Black Mountain Review by Creeley that were grossly erroneous with regard to basic information. There was an absurd discussion about someone called Putnam, as I recall. It was meant to be George Puttenham. Creeley had heard the name spoken and he propagated this absurd misidentification. I was incensed by the absurdity. Didn’t they have a library? Weren’t they able to check up on information? No, they weren’t interested in any sort of reliable connection with the data of literary practise. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. I remember thinking, rather priggishly I may say, that it was something I wouldn’t have done. For I was at a serious institute, and I’d been surrounded by serious scholars who had serious habits. And even though I used these habits in my own interest, and explored them in my own way, it was a very stabilising framework.


INTERVIEWER

Could you say something about poetry and scholarly responsibility? What’s the moment at which poetic license reaches the limit of its virtue?



PRYNNE

Well, that’s an extremely important question. It’s very difficult to know when you’ve reached such a boundary. Sometimes if a poet is lucky, he has friends who will take it upon themselves to point a few things out. One of the features of Pound’s isolation in Rapallo was that he separated himself from clever friends who could say, Come off it, Ezra, for heaven’s sake, wise up, pay attention, don’t be so stupid, read a few things, let me tell you what I think as a reader of your stuff. But he isolated himself. He was surrounded by people who believed in these crackpot economic ideas. And none of them told him that he was going off the rails.

I’m afraid the same would have been true with Olson. Some intelligent friend should have said, Look, Charlie, it’s all very well, but there comes a point where you’re answerable for certain uses of material. Your readers and students are going to say, Are we to follow down these roads, and if so, where are they going to take us? If you don’t care about these questions, then you’ve abandoned one of the important things that it means to be a poet. Yeats made a regular ass of himself in his adoption of spiritualist blarney, even if he was mostly just playing with it.

After all, one of the few things that was to be said for Davie and Empson was that they kept their mental equipment at work. And Olson vandalised his intellectual equipment as his career went along. He took all sorts of archaeological material and bungled it around to make these farragoes of Nordic mythology. It was very uncomfortable to me, because not only had I read all these German texts which he couldn’t read, but I’d studied as an undergraduate the Old Icelandic corpus, and I’d learned Old Icelandic as a language. I could just about read these Old Icelandic poems. Olson would go off onto a romance about them and he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. And I would think, Why doesn’t he read this material? Well, he can’t read this material. Why doesn’t he learn to read this material? There are translations he could read. He could start to understand things. But by that stage it was too late for him. The Mayan stuff, for example. He had no real understanding of how glyph languages work. It was a romantic, liberational idea for him, but it took leave of historical record rather early and rather freely.

thats not why i think he's a blowhard thats just corroborating evidence. im quite tired and quite hungover at the moment

You can still easily get a big maximus @craner

woops said:

You can still easily get a big maximus @craner

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Can I? Where from?

Lrb shop stocks it so presumably many places