jenks

thread death
I’ve not looked at any Prynne for a while - I’m going to give him another go this weekend before I consign the great yellow brick to the shelves - the balance between reward and effort has been a bit too skewed for my tired mind recently.
 

luka

Well-known member

The tactic of re-inserting Prynne into a safe body of normal and recognizable writing may have a didactic value; the assumption that because Prynne’s first book is within a Movement ambit his later books are (occultly, invisibly, without material traces) too is just not acceptable. Prynne accomplished no less a stylistic revolution within his own career than he did within the history of English poetry. He is not a kind of jam-jar where influences are kept, rather he accomplished a revolution at the associational level, where different parts of his brain began talking to each other in a new way, creating a new discourse of ideas, borne by a new music, which was self-organizing, did not regress to any pattern norm, and does not resemble any pre-existing discourse. I suspect that an inventory of the ideas in the new Poems (1999) might include the names of a thousand thinkers
 

version

Well-known member
As with Beckett, our responses to these poems lay bare the unfinished legacy of modernism. With cinema or painting, audiences have long grown accustomed to its revolutionary techniques, while Prynne’s reception stays mired in discussions of accessibility and elitism rather an engagement with the actual work.
 

luka

Well-known member
Threshing, by which cereal grains are separated from their chaff, is even more specifically local than agriculture in general, requiring a specially flattened and hardened threshing floor. Crucially, it is also extremely labour-intensive, ‘absorb[ing] as much as a quarter of agricultural labor input’ prior to mechanisation in the nineteenth century.284 This combination of factors creates a relatively novel situation in which humans spend large amounts of time creating value (in the form of edible grains) through a more or less stationary, repetitive activity. This is at the heart of Prynne’s argument about threshing: that the relative complexity of the process and its insertion in a long chain of other processes—sowing, harvesting, milling, etc.—directly encourages the development of ‘a more abstract theory of value’ (¶5), perhaps even an implicit labour theory of value.
 

luka

Well-known member
; for Prynne, metal is not merely a passive object shaped by a pre-existing human will, but rather the motor and determinant of human will itself.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is not only the words as isolated monads, but their ordering; the grammar of feeling: the movement forward speeded or checked by the adverbs, bent, inverted or split by the conjunctions, maintained always by the constant verb.
 

luka

Well-known member
Just reading about the letters Prynne sent to his friend and colleague Francis Crick on the Scientic theory of Panspermia.
 

luka

Well-known member
1. the sense of history as field: the convergence of necessities & the imagination, the shaping of a language
to climate, coastline: process held down firmly enough to yield the substantive kernels of it, the megaliths, the
primary nodes. The spaces are intimate, the reality formal (even for us cartographic), but what shape is there of the
sequence, the order of primary happening & its basic contour? The instant is always paradise if swathed simply in
its own light; but the sentence carries it (history and the whole poetic) and draws us into its passing. History as what
as being precipitates the survival of what was: is the difference of use/value, now?

3. The sea was also of first imaginative importance to the Anglo-Saxons, and I suspect to most of the early
groups with coastal experience and a history of transition from nomadic to settled culture. The rhythms of
thought are bound by the steady recurrence of passage as the prime idiom; the contour of a land economy
mimes out the earlier voyages to the fishing-grounds or the more hopeful shores beyond.

4. hence to this thing, of arrestment, which I do take aslant from your view, since the northern barrow and the
incised megalith are the idiom of culmination, gathering up the pressures of the past and summing them, so
that they may be carried forward (writing in the matrix of process, as the runic inscriptions of Sweden &c.)

From which part of my query about E.P who has set up a great cartographic at the expense of the discovery.
Which is not to say more than elsewhere, BUT the field of force is from above yet another nomination: the
shape of interplay, space as prime metaphor. Further back is Wyndham Lewis' Time and Western Man
where he says of Bergon's musicalised world "as much as he enjoys the sight of things 'penetrating' and
'merging' do we enjoy the opposite picture of them standing apart - the wind blowing between them,
and the air circulating freely in and out of them" Or again, in polemic contra the chronologic conspiracy:
"In your turn, 'you' become the series of your temporal repetitions; you are no longer a centralised self,
but a spun-out, strung-along series, a pattern-of-a-self, depending like the musical composition upon
time; an object too, always in the making, who are your states, So you are a history: there must be no present
for you. You are an historical object, since your mental or time-life has been as it were, objectified."

5. Now, all this there & operative in the Cantos, where the stone temple and the castilian light are the
paradisiac nodes within the great flux of irradiated fluency - vide the importance of "now" as a
breath-counter in the moments of prime certainty (in, for example, the conclusion to Canto 90)
The whole manner of thought operates against the sequential contour of the sentence & its origin
in natural process and human life, in favour of the medallion - history as pivot. And the ambiguity here
extends further and more challengingly: "The objects which occur at every given moment of
composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur
therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to hold, and to
hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet
and them, into being" (quote is from Olson's Projective Verse) So that time is a governing absolute
within the process, the immersal within the poem and its coming to be; but the achieved kinetics of the
thing on the page are tensions, which is the idiom of poem as construct or diagram rather than passage
or transit. WCW is defeated by his history not because of any failings in his reductive machinery, but
becuase his command of the sentence (syntax, Aristotle's notion of 'plot') wasn't firm enough to confer
substance on the great flowing process beneath him.
6. You would know that for me the noun is the holding of all the world's needful substance, it functions as
the world's irreducible fact which as only (as if this is not sufficient) to be disposed into relevant contours
to release what it most certainly is. I hold to that, but qualify: the root image now seems to me the gerund,
since all nouns imply their own continuity, which is what makes them blessed. The entire ambiguity of history
is within that: the gerundial scope, the named happening. This is for me the whole fact of Maximus, as it would
seem that Mexico wasn't at that time for you,as you then saw it.
8.Back to glyph as name, even if there used to record and compute the rate of passing. If Lewis' wind
does indeed play around these final ("random") objects of speech, how is reference back to them not
exercising the ego: the beak as instrument of nostalgia. I have a profound suspicion of this golden
severance of sequence, that the past is idealised by standing beyond the reach of knowledge (not the
reach of science and museum teams, but the passage of the imagination). To travel to the geographic of it
is in pary enactive of retrogression; but how to "come in quite fresh from the other end" to the choking
beauty of inaccessibly remote nouns (that they are so, and survive)? The mass and weight of it, this is
no less than truth; but (from outside & afar) does this exclude the gerund of it: the stone, and also, not
far off, the sea?"
 

luka

Well-known member
"A committed free market apologist would indeed approve the commoditised nature of every consumable advantage; but if it is at all accepted that distributive justice cannot be modelled on a plan of competitive demand management with added cosmetic "choice," then the cosmetics of choice become the most dangerous elements: they destroy all vigilance and all sense of an interconnected general good by seeming to provide a rewarding increase of benefits for those defined as deserving (earning) (aquiring) them."

JH Prynne. ( @woops note semi colon and colon)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Do you think he looks at this thread? It must be the biggest thread on the internet about him.

Plot twist: Prynne is kevinoak.

I've google and dissensus doesn't appear anywhere under 'JH Prynne' for the first 5 pages at least.
 

sufi

lala
i'm not sure,
i think we sometimes show up in search results, but i have blocked the bots

also not sure if that was a clever or stupid thing to do
 

version

Well-known member
How do you decide when something's worth the work? Is it just a gut feeling that yes, there's something here?
 

woops

is not like other people
maybe by doing some basic work and seeing if it pays off but i never do any work, just read the poems 20 times and see if i still like them. i haven't looked up protein bonds or Les Dennis since @luka posted that
 
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