J. H. Prynne

[luka]

i've spent the last few hours doing the pages in the photos with the etymological dictionary and you are left with the sense (i had the same thing with or scissel) that you could describe the poem using a series of directional arrows, many of which oppose or cancel one another. all the directional and spatial information buried in words, particularly concealed in prefixes.

 

[luka]

as you can see there is also a lot of splitting words apart. footpath footstep wingnut wellhead swallowtail

 

[luka]

which i took partly as a suggestion to dissect the other words, with particular attention to prefixes.

 

[luka]

'before train follow swallow tail' is a good example of a line where the directional arrows oppose or cancel one another out

 

[woops]

draw us a diagram

 

[luka]

🔚🔜🔚🔛🔜
⬅️➡️⬅️🔽➡️

 

[Benny Bunter]

Impressive work, Luka!

 

[Benny Bunter]

..many of which oppose or cancel one another.

Coming to realise with Prynne that, on all levels of his work- words, meanings, sounds, ideas etc - there are these oppositions/cancellations, which I suppose is what he means by 'dialectical' in describing what he does.

 

[luka]

Coming to realise with Prynne that, on all levels of his work- words, meanings, sounds, ideas etc - there are these oppositions/cancellations, which I suppose is what he means by 'dialectical' in describing what he does.

plenty of doubling as well eg foreswear/abjure
or the way page two starts with gate and ends with wicket, which is a little gate

 

[luka]

all the directional and spatial information buried in words, particularly concealed in prefixes.

History and Etymology for DE​

Prefix

Middle English, from Anglo-French de-, des-, partly from Latin de- from, down, away (from de, preposition) and partly from Latin dis-; Latin de akin to Old Irish di from, Old English tō to — more at to, dis-

ab-​

word-forming element meaning "away, from, from off, down," denoting disjunction, separation, departure; from Latin ab (prep.) "off, away from" in reference to space or distance, also of time, from PIE root *apo- "off, away" (also the source of Greek apo "off, away from, from," Sanskrit apa "away from," Gothic af, English of, off; see apo-).

The Latin word also denoted "agency by; source, origin; relation to, in consequence of." Since classical times usually reduced to a- before -m-, -p-, or -v-; typically abs- before -c-, -q-, or -t-.

 

[luka]

deflect (v.)​

1550s, "cause to turn aside" (transitive), from Latin deflectere "to bend (something) aside or downward," from de "away" (see de-) + flectere "to bend," which is of uncertain origin. The intransitive sense of "to turn away or aside" is from 1610s.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Smashing it with the 'mental ears' method there!

Coming to realise with Prynne that, on all levels of his work- words, meanings, sounds, ideas etc - there are these oppositions/cancellations, which I suppose is what he means by 'dialectical' in describing what he does.

This is what makes his stuff so hard to pin down. Reading kitchen poems, trying to get a handle on all these recurring words like hope, trust, quality, name, number, choice etc, you find they seem to have both positive and negative connotations at the same time. Getting to understand them necessarily means being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head simultaneously, which is very difficult. The poems seem to be arguing with themselves.

 

[luka]

yeah, it's sort of impossible but sometimes it feels like its worth trying, as opposed to just treating it as a reading-surface.

 

[luka]

with something like see by so and other really new things they dont really work as reading surface in any case. they appear so slight and so silly that your only options are to ignore them or pick up a dictionary.

 

[Benny Bunter]

True/trust (which crops up in kitchen poems a lot) would be a good one to analyse by using your dictionary method I think.

'True' / 'truth' having a positive connotation, related to purity and so on. Whereas as 'trust', which is the form it crops up in most often in the book, is mostly negative - perhaps because it's mediated through human behaviour ("we trust") and therefore no longer pure but false, fictitious, misguided or corrupt somehow.

I don't have a decent dictionary though and could well be on the wrong track, but I think that's what he's doing with the word 'trust' in these poems anyway.

 

[woops]

True/trust (which crops up in kitchen poems a lot) would be a good one to analyse by using your dictionary method I think.

'True' / 'truth' having a positive connotation, related to purity and so on. Whereas as 'trust', which is the form it crops up in most often in the book, is mostly negative - perhaps because it's mediated through human behaviour and ("we trust") and therefore no longer pure but false, fictitious, misguided or corrupt somehow.

I don't have a decent dictionary though and could well be on the wrong track, but I think that's what he's doing with the word 'trust' in these poems anyway.

then there's the other sense of trust, that looks after dead stuff, just imagine the JH Prynne Trust, managing the estate of the one and only JH Prynne.

 

[luka]

True/trust (which crops up in kitchen poems a lot) would be a good one to analyse by using your dictionary method I think.

Etymonline - Online Etymology Dictionary

The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet's go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms. It is professional enough to satisfy academic standards, but accessible enough to be used by anyone.

www.etymonline.com

 

[Benny Bunter]

“the names, / do you not / see, are just / the tricks we / trust, which / we choose.”

 

[Benny Bunter]

Choice/choose being another one worth investigating.

Also from The Numbers poem - election/elect

 

[luka]

worth thinking in terms of root metaphors. which is one of the things i was getting at with spatiality and direction.