J. H. Prynne

[luka]

A Night Square reminds me of '70s Miles

 

[linebaugh]

Returned on To Pollen, hard to believe we ignored the final line from section 1:

Along the seam cresting to burn out black my interim destruction.

why so comparatively lucid? why 'my'?

 

[jenks]

A Night Square reminds me of '70s Miles

That’s a good analogy

 

[luka]

Returned on To Pollen, hard to believe we ignored the final line from section 1:

Along the seam cresting to burn out black my interim destruction.

why so comparatively lucid? why 'my'?

I think partly he's judging how much you need to hang onto. How many toeholds and fingerholds do you need in the rock face to make it seem scalable.

 

[shiels]

“To be in and across all things a poet, in daily involvement with the dialectic of imagination and real things, has been a task giving the profoundest joy and fulfilment. The task in this work has been to maintain the fundamental argument of contradiction, even while opening one’s powers of feeling and knowledge to the largest extent, so that language occupies the entire space of the poet’s self-being and then overflows it.”

 

[luka]

A Night Square is a great deal friendlier and more approachable than To Pollen but I still wouldn't want to have to explain what it means.

What it does is to fairly consistently wriggle away from meaning while at the same time creating a range of conventional if off kilter poetic effects.

 

[luka]

Now if you step down
into starlight you
are here with the cold hem
by the throat so
chill with linen
you gather you are so
falling you are
with us all I will
give you the tag hand
caudal
basket so far he sware, feared


That's the first stanza, without the formatting

 

[luka]

We are familiar with starlight and expect to meet it in poems. We expect to feel exposed to the elements in poetry, to wind to rain, to soft snow. We expect poetry to expose us to the cold, to touch us, by the throat or elsewhere, and to move us bodily around, so we are falling.

 

[luka]

But obviously there's all these elements, the last three lines, which look like autocorrect run amok.

 

[luka]

Definition of caudal

1: of, relating to, or being a tail
2: directed toward or situated in or near the tail or posterior part of the body

 

[shiels]

tell us more. I liked the video you linked because of his precision of thought, the questions and repsonses were quite intimidating. Fuck i really need to sort myself out! read some hegel!

 

[luka]

There is the ten advance
you have
do you, allow him his
warm loft as
he hears us shout
down through the cold
the glass the
passing altogether lost
reticule, as glow afright
me not so
far I do not know

2nd stanza

 

[luka]

tell us more. I liked the video you linked because of his precision of thought, the questions and repsonses were quite intimidating. Fuck i really need to sort myself out! read some hegel!

That has been my experience. Realising how unformed my mind is and how stupid I am. He's the most intelligent man in the world and obviously it's like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you to realise just what that entails and how far we are from measuring up.

 

[luka]

She rings me the dark
she fails
with the larding-pin
do you
let me return that, when
furtive the rain
to
the settled line goes
frost be
low the sill
and will

 

[luka]

Whether of his eyes
or mine now you
cut the ganglion, it flowers
must it must
it not before the hour
goes
with the bivalve and
being
clothed with the swarm
in the pathway, out
towards the monoplane

 

[luka]

But is
the small ensign of love a
street by
the docks past
the screen past
when he sets his wheel by the form
of a per
fected nail in
strcuted second part

 

[luka]

When it is required of
the days while
we wait by the bridge as
if we knew when
we were to
wait we had a
sight of our
hand reaching over
to lift the days while
they stick
like wind against their foil

 

[luka]

Depart by the child
as you hear me then, as wind blows
down the
way for it
leaving what's now the wet
wood of the old pier
for life-long defection
as now as
sold for and given away
each with passion unturned
in the sky

 

[luka]

I am taken in three
out there by
the instant fixed in the grass
by the water by the
path still as
still rising over the
wheel so were it
almost
a part of what you say
you tell me
every third day

 

[shiels]

I wonder was he that smart at 33 or did he just keep getting smarter and smarter and smarter and if so can I keep getting smarter also