J. H. Prynne

luka

luka

Well-known member
The relief when you get when you hit Brass is enormous, the book suddenly comes to life. Bee target, viva Ken, khirgiz disasters, all of them so good and inventive and alive and surprising
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
@suspended might enjoy this bit

We decide



that history is irreversible disenchantment, and then witlessly set about extrapolating a figure for our own life from the outline of that conceit, a person whose ecstasies can be nothing but the private shimmer of adrenaline against a spiritless background of forward thinking and existential cutbacks. As Prynne puts it in ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’, “we make / sacred what we cannot see without coming / back to where we were.”8 Whatever we can’t get, we name “sacred”. Lacan is a con, Lukács of Die Theorie des Romans is already the confabulist of the party line: the world they stare at is the “mirror of a would-be alien who won’t see how / much he is at home.”9 Lyric will make him see how much he is.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
This is the bit @craner will most enjoy





Ze central proposition in ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ is given in condensed form by the title of the poem. Simply put, or as simply as possible, at least, the proposition is that modern “political rhapsody”, as the poem later names it, is the latest mutation of the shamanic paroxysm whose performance keeps open a channel to menacing, vengeful and stupefying divinity; and that “M. Tout-le-Monde”, the preeminent incarnation of bourgeois universalism, is today the figure of that channel. In into a model question is tout le monde, scrambled and anagrammatic: voting is the stub of cosmogeny. But Prynne doesn’t ramp up lamentation, he evacuates it. As “poetic gabble” and “the / gallant lyricism of the select” are hurried out the soul’s discursive fire door, the vacuum fills with what in ‘Viva Ken’ is called “the factual remains / of desire”: “rubbish” and “verbal smash-up”. But this is not the poet shoring ruins against his fragments. It is a way to model lyric, to make a language for fact without desire. The poem implicitly announces a shift in the moralism of knowledge away from anything like eidetic phenomenology, with its bracketing of affectivity along with ontic commitments, toward the project of a lyric beyond subjectivity, that is, beyond memory, appetite, greed, and all the other consolations for predatoriness that make up the spiral curve of bourgeois autobiography, a project that would come into full view only much later in Prynne’s work.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
In the recording of that poetry reading that Sufi posted, the audience LOLs when he reads this one and it's great

The rancid power of the continuum
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Reading this today on The Land of Saint Martin, it's absolutely fascinating. Turns out the whole poem is based a really weird English folk tale from the 12th century.

Jacket 24 - Neil Reeve: Twilight Zones: J H Prynne's "The Land of Saint Martin"

jacketmagazine.com

It is a fairly free rendering into English of a passage from a Latin text by William of Newburgh or Newbridge, collected in the Breviary of Suffolk for 1618, recounting the story of the Green Children of Woolpit, a village outside Bury St Edmunds. Sometime ‘in the reign of King Stephen’, as the chronicler reports, two children, brother and sister, appeared one morning in a harvest field, ‘with their whole bodies green and dressed in clothing of unusual colour and material’. They wandered about in amazement, staring at the villagers, speaking in a strange tongue, apparently able to eat nothing but the pith from the inside of bean pods; ‘they lived on this food for some months until they got used to bread. Then gradually their colour changed as the nature of our food affected them and they became like us; they also learned the use of our language’. Once they were able to speak, they explained that they came from ‘the land of Saint Martin’; that one day, while tending herds in the fields, they were overwhelmed by a violent rushing sound (other versions of the story talk of a gentle, bell-like sound and a journye through underground caverns), and found themselves inexplicably transported to Woolpit; that although there were churches in their own country like the ones they saw around them, and Saint Martin was greatly venerated there, many other things were very unlike: principally, that ‘the sun does not rise on our countrymen; our land is little cheered by its beams; we are contented with that twilight ...’ etc. The boy died soon afterwards, while his sister, ‘who now was not much different from our own women’, eventually married a man from Kings Lynn and drifted into obscurity.
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