J. H. Prynne

Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Yeah I suppose. There has to be something in the poem that attracts you to it in the first place though. Some of the later stuff is really off-putting, but I liked this one for some reason.

Been looking at kazoo dreamboats a little bit today which previously seemed completely impenetrable. I'm thinking the best way to approach it is just dip in at random sections that catch your eye and read a paragraph. Hadn't realised but there are some quite lucid sections in there.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I like the long Mao quote he puts in there which I think helps a bit with Prynne's philosophical outlook. He quotes the whole passage from here: http://academics.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China/Mao/contrad.html

There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another. As a matter of fact, even mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things.
Click to expand...
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Well, that's more or less what he quotes. Might be worth reading that Mao essay in full actually. A lot more readable than Marx at least
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The thing about internal contradiction seems very relevant to some of the thoughts I was having when I was reading white stones. You hate that book as well though don't you, so I guess you won't find it that interesting.
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
I doubt anyone will be interested, but I had a look at a proper edition of On Scissel today and it shares the same printer as the OAP guide to the iPhone 7, and I reckon that there was a mix up at the printers ( Lightning Source UK ltd, Milton Keynes ) and now there is some grandmother who has received her copy of the guide to how to take a photo with her iPhone that contains passages like:

Straw promise to vowel, up then why or be
forward on bind,
advent kind rested fare so
by for, in the by of
leaving over, and must
declare did telluric
agree for the concert partner ahead,
stem will accept as raised to a latch
offended on its ground near equal. The level

.... etc.,

and is now thinking, wtf! Do I use the Grid or not?

I'm in half a mind to complain to the eBay seller that I've been sold a snide Prynne or do I hang on to my copy in the vain hope that Prynne misprints fetch discogs style big bucks....
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
or scissel is his driest book. i quite like it now although i couldnt do a thing with it when i first bought it.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
if you reduce the title and first 3 lines to directions, arrows, cursor keys there's a self-cancelling quality. wait-arrive another-rare pour forth-draw back lavish-retract least-full increase-frustrate full(moon)-crescent invent-advent. one of the things that i found exciting in the olson-prynne correspondence was all this stuff about direction of force eg 'what lies just further than the enclosed notes snatched out of the unknown? vector as gerund perhaps and the universal field an interplay of intentions with the placement of proper nouns.' and the sense of movement steering piloting the craft through the universal field. fwd hit rock backspace

the margins/limits/border/boundaries then become important demarcating the space the drone-atom-sugar glider-craft clatters around in. 'in clatter challenge, against margins by internal shunt horizon'

is there enough pressure generated to overcome an initial set of limits as onrush

do you reach escape velocity and where do you end up if you do
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
themes and words do recur in a mysterious and tantalising way, across this book and throughout all the books. 'ground to scraps in the mincer' the way golf references are scattered through red d gypsum the way this book has repeated references to painting and decorating, the scrap, hay/straw, eye-brow, part, apart, partition, the way forward, flow, birdsong.

trains (platform. tracks. wait to arrive.) and a suspicion that one thing is several things the way root words give rise to an efflorescence of other words, built upon that base.

the first letter to Olson 'KAR WITH A ROOT SIGNIFICATION OF HARD OR ROUGH rock, crab, shell, peel, nut, perhaps cliff, crag, crevice, stone, scarp, cairn, burial-mound, temples, keel, hull, sh

so when you see these favourite words recurring, eg stem you wonder, how many things is this standing for? what fundamental structure expressed in how many different ways eg throat

i think domestic quotidian detail works its way into these poems but gets cut up. the painting and decorating, the train journey

ground to scraps in the mixer
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
It all makes you wonder how he goes about actually writing them. Does he make lists of words, going through the dictionary and following etymological threads, and then set about weaving them together with a specific form in mind? It's hard to imagine it all just flowing out of him (though maybe there exceptions like kazoo dreamboats).
 
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