219t Mmarc0cnhs h79at 1416:2d4 ·
It is tempting to read many of the poems in _Or Scissel_ and perhaps other recent collections also as concerning the actual process of reading, often via figures of progress, motion and discovery (which we have already touched on in some discussions here). Thoughts?
Vytenis Galvėnas
Sam WM the first time the poems from 'OS' started to have any semblance of sense for me is when I started looking at them as ars poetica. That they're saying what they're doing, writing about writing - quite empty when you're not up for another one of /those/. But I suppose seeing it as writing about reading works as well - where writing itself is seen as reading of the world-text, that old song of the 'logos' etymology, gathering-into-being and setting apart, counting and recounting, etc. Where it does become more meaningful to me is when the poems reach towards these processes as an ethical practice as well - and I've found that 'OS' and 'OBS' both have quite a lot of that, reading others' brows and faces and whatnot. Some stuff here and there where you can read ambiguities in a 'nice' way and a 'mean' one. So you're reading yourself there, fella! And something about all this does make me think of 'The White Stones' more often than not.
Vytenis Galvėnas
e.g. 'in glow/ of like seclusion', with their own 'vested motions' (interests). Hashing it out if it's right to submit or not, coming to the conclusion that it's both (as is usual).
Vytenis Galvėnas
LOVE the phrase 'give/ or be given' (not 'kill or be killed' to spell it out) - again encapsulates what attracts my eye and what I'm on about
Vytenis Galvėnas
'both above each other' - I managed to squeeze out a beautiful image quite like this from one the poems in 'OBS', of raising each other up like sails (on this dauncing boat) - see 'uplift' in this one. Which is of course super cheesy when I put it this…
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Vytenis Galvėnas
It’s a productive perspective though, to take the text as a guide for reading. May I bring your attention to ‘*near* / measurement’ (i.e. with margin of error) and ‘matching settlement’ (both outlook adequate to site and settling in/on a reading). Maybe treat it like a problem of measurement in science, like with some uber physics thrown in there for good, er, measure - like trying to measure the speed of light, with all the famous and to-be-known time-bendy stuff. Woo! The old noggin’s spinnin’! And what’s the ‘concession’: from one’s local idiom to what the text (or vision) is ‘actually’ saying? - or to one’s search for an adequate measure of the text, settling on a partial read? But a-keepin’ on a-rollin’ baby, adjust the gauges, the data’s off and the stone is *glaringly* unmatched - reduce the noise and try again all-over, controls for the heart of the sun.
Sam WM
Author
My other related thought is that these poems are the ‘scissel’ of the ‘or’ of his previous work. Two callbacks that caught my eye this reading were ‘sweet vernal’ (‘sweet vernal abscission’ in _Her Weasels Wild Returning_) and ‘cured bacon’ (‘bring home the flash-cured bacon’ in _Down where changed_). Prynne has a word document that he searches for his own previous uses of words. And his annotations to _Al-Dente_ point out that the title words appear in _Down where changed_.
Dafydd Sndn
Sam WM I like this — it pulls us right back to /The White Stones/, and the idea of language as glacial and geological accumulation, building sedimented meaning through deposit. I’m always struck by Prynne’s capacity to leave individual words open to a dialectical relationship with the competing etymologies buried in them, but also open to future usages of that word — how it might be redeployed as the world system coins new technologies and processes. If Prynne is forging these linguistic and etymological echoes across his own body of work it seems to encourage a similar longitudinal or morphological study of how the valences of that language might have changed.
