J. H. Prynne

[luka]

there's this persistent use of bright margin/bright rim
it's in that one

 

[luka]

T R U T H

In general known by a quartz vein predicted
as synapse of permission cause to find. Yours
in readiness ever parlance run softly forward,
to this address the bright margin view. How
not yet did you grasp our bright furrow, flex
joined instinct tendon advisor, more careful
joy turned even now in new stitch. Be still
furnish as to rove back, come through it is
the first cause, this now into continuance
Saying your proverb by mouth open previous.
Who can say give over, the night arriving as
it will by cloud cover, as often so needed
for a visage. Expression held in for in half
promise flooded over, no sun so shone more
to fill, find out now for staff simple to see.

and its here too

 

[Benny Bunter]

Looks hard. I don't think I'm ready to start reading Prynne yet.

I probably will have a go at it one day cos it looks really good, but I want to carry on with the cantos and I've just ordered the complete William Blake so that's gonna occupy me this year. I have been enjoying battling with all this difficult modern poetry over the last few months, it's revitalised my interest in reading in general. I'm not sure if I'll ever go back to novels at this rate.

 

[luka]

Blake is not very easy either but maybe easy things are boring

 

[Benny Bunter]

Blake is not very easy either but maybe easy things are boring

Yeah that's why I decided to get the book! I don't want easy any more. I suppose it's best to pick stuff that's just that bit too hard so you have to up your game

 

[luka]

thats what i reckon. but maybe im just kidding myself staring at words i dont understand. hard to say.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Prynne looks about as hard as it gets to me. Do you think there is anyone else you should read to sort of prepare yourself for it first, or is he really just this one-off weirdo genius type? Glancing at his stuff, it doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen before.

 

[luka]

yeah, the latter, pretty much

 

[luka]

but people disagree about how much you should even worry about 'understanding' it

 

[yyaldrin]

Only at the rim does the day tremble and shine.

when i read this line it made me think of the rhythm of the city. there's a gigantic park near my old flat that offers a very wide view, in summer it's filled with people picknicking, rollerskating, dancing and drinking. if you spend an entire day there you can hear the acoustics and intensity of sounds change during the day and there is this moment around sunset when everything glows and when noises seem to get both more muffled and loud, it's the same time people leave their offices, when schools release their students. it's when traffic increases, it's when accidents happen, it's when you hear more sirens. it is when the sun is at the rim of the earth, casting long shadows, making everything tremble and shine.

but in the context of the entire poem it means something completely different, is it a fight between a couple and does it show us what happens in our brains when we get worked up? i like the contrast of the intimate and the abstract.

 

[yyaldrin]

just found this from a book called "internal resistance: the poetry of edward dorn". can't be a coincidence?

 

[yyaldrin]

oh look at this:

INTERVIEWER

You were also in correspondence with Edward Dorn?

PRYNNE

I got to know Dorn through this connection with the American poets of that era. We were very cordial, very close friends for a very long period of time. Fifty years or so. I still miss him very much. The connection was very vivid and very constant and indeed the archive of our correspondence runs to near fifty binders of papers. We made travels together, in England and in the U.S. We spent a good deal of time amusing each other by wickedness and absurdity and all sorts of other fantastical adventures. We talked about politics endlessly in these exchanges, as I recall.

 

[luka]

good find and yes dorn and prynne were very good friends. one edition of the prynne poems is dedicated
to ed dorn: to his luminous shade

 

[luka]

theres lots of geography, geology, topography
in olson who directly teaches dorn and who is also
a major influence on prynne, early prynne in particular

 

[yyaldrin]

oh sounds like something i could like, will try and get my hands on those

 

[luka]

olsons big book is a kind of thorough exploration of the small coastal town he finds himself in.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Loved the few bits of Olson and Dorn I've read. There's a lovely Dorn one that I'll post in the short poems thread

 

[luka]

@woops what are your favourites from The White Stones? Name'em, no stalling.

 

[luka]

Science Sam is claiming there's a break half way through and that they get tetchier, more troubled, more intensely involved and more interesting in the second half. I have yet to verify these claims.

 

[luka]

Die A Millionaire

(pronounced: "diamonds in the air")

The first essential is to take knowledge
back to the springs, because despite
everything and especially the recent
events carried under that flag, there is
specific power in the idea of it

that
what is known can be used to pick up
or more usually to hold on and develop
as what for the econometrist is
"profitable speculation"-the intellect
on the trigger once more, as those
poor seventh century Irish monks (being
sentimentalists) would have believed
if they could.

If there's any need
for proof & it can be kept from
running to violence (to which ex-
tremity it should anyway perhaps
be swooping homewards) the twist-point
is "purchase"-what the mind
bites on is yours

the prime joy of
control engineering is what they please
to denote (through the quartzite window) "self-
optimizing systems", which they like
to consider as a plan for the basic
living unit. And thus "accelerating the con-
vergence of function", we come to our
maximal stance.

Imperialism was just
an old, very old name for that
idea, that what you want, you by
historic process or just readiness
to travel, also "need"-and
need is of course the sacred daughter
through which you improve, by
becoming more extensive. Competitive
expansion: if you can designate a
prime direction as Drang nach Osten
or the Western Frontier, that's to
purify the idea by recourse to History

before it happens. Envisaging the chapter-
head in the historical outline as "the
spirit (need) of the age"-its primary
greed, shielded from ignominy by the
like practice of too many others.

That
of course is not expansion but acquisition
(as to purchase the Suez Canal was merely
a blatant example): the true expansion
is probably drift, as the Scythians
being nomadic anyway for the most part
slipped sideways right across the Russian
steppes, from China by molecular friction
through to the Polish border.

Otherwise it's
purchase, of a natural course, the alteration
or storage of current like dams in the
river: what starts as irrigation ends up
selling the megawattage across the grid.

The grid is another sign, is knowledge
in applique-work actually strangled & latticed
across the land; like the intangible consumer
networks, as the market defines wants from
single reckoning into a social need, graphed
for instance as "contour tangent elimination".
And the drift of that is again to divert the
currency (as now in England

to the north-
east). As, it was actually losing its grip
on the population: real people, slipping off
the face of that lovely ground, leaving the
green and pleasant lands of Northumberland
to be near the belly & catch scraps
with the shit that we set out so grudgingly
on plates for the blind to eat in gratitude.

The grip is purchase again, and the current
chic of information theory will tell you how
many bits of that commodity it takes to
lift one foot/lb. of shit to a starving mouth,
or not starving actually, but just rather
unthinkingly hungry.

And don't let some
wise and quick-faced historical rat tell us about
the industrial north and its misery, since every
songbird since then (& with no honourable
exception for D.H. Lawrence) has carolled about
that beautiful black colour as if
this were the great rot in the heart.

It was not and is not. The twist-point
of this is again power by the grid, putting
lives into strings of consequence into
molecular chains like the pit-ponies we love
to cry over. Coal is so beautiful as I
could weep over the carbon it shines with:
what is scattered over these colliery towns
is not soot or sulphur or coal or foaming
detergent but the waste produced by
mass conversion of want (sectional) into
need (social & then total). All this by
purchase on the twist-point, the system gone
social to disguise

the greed of ambition
swimming in great seismic shocks through
the beds of our condition. All the needles are
twitching frantically across their smoky paper,
but society is "predictably" as we know "in
a state of ferment"-as if that could ever turn
to wine or raise bread, from the sad shit it
is, to that crispy crunchy loaf we shall all
eat only in heaven.

The fact is that right
from the springs this water is no longer fit
for the stones it washes: the water of life
is all in bottles & ready for invoice. To draw
from that well we must put on some
other garment. Do what one can, that's
the gas-and-water talk, which is "do
what we can" and we are the social strand
which is already past the twist point &
into the furnace. We don't burn only
because

we are invisible to each other,
our shoulders no longer so hopeless and
beautiful as they meet at the spine rising
up the dorsal rift: lovely and lonely, until
the whole spread squints into the neck, and
vanishes, into the head.

And unlike Cerberus
we all share the same head, our shoulders
are denied by the nuptial joys of television,
so that what I am is a special case of
what we want, the twist-point missed exactly
at the nation's scrawny neck.

What runs
back, or could be traced upstream by simply
denying that conspiracy of "cause", is the
question of names & the seven tribes,
which are not "predictions" and socially can
be grouped only by the thinnest of
generalising systems. As these are not
economically self-centering, they cannot be
used as designations for targets (like
the gun sight on what "we want").

And the back mutation is knowledge and
has always been so in the richest tradition
of the trust it is possible to have, to repose
in the mysteries. The perversions which
thrust it forward, as a new feed into the
same vicious grid of expanding prospects
(profits) are let through by the weakness, now,
of names.

There is no other break in the
descent, since without that it's all break
anyway. The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.

@william_kent