J. H. Prynne enjoys a unique position in the landscape of British poetry. In the mainstream, he has become a symbol of late modernism, experimental and obscure, pitted against a commonsense Philip Larkin; in the offstream, his work continues to be cherished by a relatively small circle of dedicated readers. The tomes of Prynne’s poetry published by Bloodaxe Books have been crucial in ferrying between these two poles. Reviewing the 2015 edition of Prynne’s Poems, Robert Potts remarked the “ever fattening” Bloodaxe volumes have been collecting his poetry and making it accessible for a wider audience.[1] Poems: 2016–2024 is fatter still, gathering more material than all of his previous poetry combined, mostly from small presses such as Face Press in Cambridge, Broken Sleep Books in Talgarreg, and Slub Press in Seoul. The sheer volume of poetry here takes on a daunting gravitas. Unlike the levity of a pamphlet, this feels like a commitment, as if the reader owed it a lifelong exegesis. In fact, within the first few pages, the text acknowledges its own magnitude:
Prolific comes to this, system joined across
because it has to equalise, match both sides
in casting overhead, filter. (21)
The proliferation of Prynne’s poetry over the last decade is systematized in Poems: 2016–2024 and “joined across” to the 2015 volume.
However, this pressure “to equalise, match both sides” of Prynne’s corpus produces a collection that also works upstream against the patterns that the previous collection brought into focus. The process of “gradual (and not smoothly continuous) disintegration of conventional linguistic usage” that Potts identified in Poems (2015) has become more intensely discontinuous: the unconventional syntax and specialized vocabularies still abound, but so do clearer narratives, larger pockets of conventional lyricism, and new formats.[2] In the prose poetry of Parkland (2019), a narrative surrounding Yemen readily emerges, which then fractures into a question of whose narrative this is; snatches of regular syntax materialize from the verbal storm of Kernels in Vernal Silence (2020); and Not Ice Novice (2022) tessellates the page with stanzas that implicate the reader in controlling the degree of unconventional grammar. Prynne’s work since Brass (1971) has involved quotations from the news jostling with scripture, Shakespeare with neuroscience lingo, pregnant etymologies, metacommentary, threads of self-reference—all of these features are recombined and remembered differently in Poems: 2016–2024. The Paris Review interviewed Prynne in 2016, and his response to their observation that Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011) “seems to remember so much—science, literary history, philosophy” sets the tone for the new era of his work:
Well, one inhabits a hall of mirrors, a whole series of echoes from reading, from experience, from life practise and the rest. This becomes richer and denser as time goes on. It’s also complicated by forgetfulness, things that you only in part remember.[3]
Taking up the thread of memory in a hall of mirrors, I want to illuminate how Prynne has richly amplified and diversified his poetics. What is at one level simply a more accessible, chronological collection of pamphlets becomes on another level a kaleidoscope.
Reviewing the 2005 edition of Prynne’s Poems, Forrest Gander registered the difficulty of summarizing Prynne’s work and the temptation to explain the “dazzling array of meanings.”[4] Turning to Parkland (2019), the temptation remains, and the difficulty is mollified by guiding phrases, “Now to see to sweep, over the parkland.” We are introduced to “half-brothers,” Peter and Tom, whose songs work in counterpoint to “their chosen royal queen,” the “Sheba lady” (165). As the idyll progresses, the Queen of Sheba becomes “the scope for darker thoughts, imminent Yemen lately memory” (170). What was known to antiquity as Arabia Felix is contrasted to the “Arabia Infelix” that the ongoing Yemen crisis has produced (177). Despite the clearer narrative of the poem, the questions of whose historical narrative Prynne is working with and the status of Yemen in that narrative are suspended: Yemen is imminent and lately in the memory, always on the brink of mass famine, but also lately remembered, already passed, already in the past. Surveying Parkland begins to feel like a ramified typology, struggling to “match both sides” of contemporary history and the Abrahamic tradition (21).
I am, I confess, at risk of what Gander warns against: attempting to find Prynne’s genius “less in his poetry than in the fantastic arguments to be made for why his poetry should be admired.”[5] But part of the genius of Prynne’s poetry seems to lie in its ability to make you question whether what you are seeing is actually “in” the poetry or in your fantasy. Critical responses to Prynne are thus apt to wax lyrical: The difficulty of pinpointing what lyric becomes in Prynne’s hands drives criticism to take up the baton. If we want to speak of Prynne’s genius, it might involve the way in which his poetry makes you think with it, at once critically and poetically. Prynne’s own poetic theory and criticism, from Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words (1993) to the essay “The Poet’s Imaginary” and beyond, can guide us through a negotiation of what is “in” his poetry.[6] In “Mental Ears and Poetic Work,” Prynne develops an etymological poetics: He theorizes a “specialised audition” allowing a “reconstruction of raw phonetic data, in particular across precedent historical eras.”[7] So, when Peter, Tom, and the Queen of Sheba listen to a “limpid slight stream hereby” and “hear the soft / chuckle of small sounded stones, as in lavish memory,” we can join them with specialized ears (165). It is not just the lavish gifts the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon in a precedent historical era that are faintly echoed. Rather, the flow of time across eras has ground down the Old French etymon lavasse, a deluge or torrent, into “lavish,” suggesting how the “lavish memory” of the prosperous kingdom of Sheba has been turned by attritive warfare into “small sounded stones” in a water-scarce stream. Focusing on “precedent historical eras” reveals how we might begin to connect contemporary history and the Abrahamic tradition. Refocusing on the “raw phonetic data” of “imminent Yemen lately memory” draws out how the trickle of consonance between “memory” and “small” heard above is amplified into an all-too-recent “memory” that combines the present sounds of “imminent Yemen” with the endangered end sounds of “lately.”
Admittedly, unless you have the Oxford English Dictionary at hand and the Targum Sheni learned by heart, lines of Parkland may remain cryptic. The experience of roughly following the drift of Prynne’s poetry but flailing a little when it comes to specific words or lines characterizes the entire volume. One might object that the cryptic verse that Prynne’s specialized ears produce cannot handle topics as politically fraught as the Yemen crisis with sufficient care; his use of intertext seems to acknowledge these concerns. Quotations from the “day upon day news wave unrelenting” (192), from the BBC to the Islamic Post, are scattered across Parkland. For example, Prynne paraphrases from UN News, “10 million people across Yemen remain ‘just a step away from famine,’” to produce “ten mil a few steps away from death by hunger” (177).[8] The casual reduction of “million” to “mil” underscores how the UN condenses the fates of ten million Yemenis into one figure’s “few steps.” The nebulous attribution of “just a step away from famine” in the UN source is dilated to the level of Prynne’s paraphrase, unmarked in the poem. Unlike “famine,” “death by hunger” has a crushing, personal note that the UN cannot sound. Prynne’s use of intertext here not only critiques the UN narrative but also recapitulates its failures: As a snippet lost between the “unrelenting” magnitude of the Bloodaxe volume and the kaleidoscope of Prynne’s other poetic techniques, Prynne’s text notes its reluctance to produce a perspective that can respect “death by hunger” at a level any more humanly individual than the UN’s diplomatic abstractions.
Most of the quotations throughout Prynne’s corpus are unmarked, and since the scholiasts are yet to be unleashed on Poems: 2016–2024, there is no ossified appendix that might overwrite the dynamic contest of language sources. We might relish in the resultant opportunity to find and probe footnotes, but in Hadn’t Yet Bitten (2023) Prynne short-circuits this process by incorporating a reference into the body of his verse:
Mitchell, T. M. et al, ‘Predicting human brain activity associ-
ated with the meanings of nouns,’ Science, 320, 1191–1195
(2008); lobelia slice gap cantaloupe brightness from the air
alliance insurgence, vale truncate privilege withered (678)
Finding poetry in footnotes, Prynne slices up the “associ-/a[tive]” procedure between brain scans and language, the source preserved but with its parts not only remembered, but also re-membered. The paratext that ratifies the epistemological authority of scientific discourse is redeployed as head rhyme (the date 2008 and “ated”). Perhaps this truncation of a scientific paper causes its epistemological privilege to wither, but Prynne finds other ways to nourish its research. Where Mitchell and his team predict the brain map of “celery” through “intermediate semantic features” such as “eat,” Prynne takes a lobe and lets it flower into lobelia. The “lobelia slice” has been fertilized by the proximity and metrical similarity of “2008”: an intermediate sonic feature of the associ-ate-d paper’s date. Prynne’s experimentation suggests that Mitchell needs to incorporate sound into his methodology for it to make more sense. It’s not that Prynne is arguing that history and science are merely texts, but rather that by playing on their textual mediation he can contextualize their perspectives—from pragmatically impersonal bureaucracy to models of language that neglect sonority.
Unsurprisingly, the richer and denser intertextual hall of mirrors Prynne is working with later in his life leads him to the most radical feature of Poems: 2016–2024: its intratextual play. Three concentric levels of intratext materialize: (1) between Poems: 2016–2024 and the 2015 Poems; (2) between Poems: 2016–2024 and the original pamphlets it reprints; and (3) within Poems: 2016–2024. John Wilkinson has discussed how throughout the 2000s, whenever Prynne’s collage method moved toward self-reference, his texts became “rife with bitten-off and damped-down memories of earlier writing whose cadences felt deeply compelled.”[9] At the first level, the texts of Poems: 2016–2024, such as Kernels in Vernal Silence (2020), have become rife with memories remembered differently:
: the clouds I care for, reminded me of you
curl succeeds to frond, needle to storm
but just for now skies are turning blue
to keep the vault of image lockets warm (374)
In Blue Slides at Rest (2004), echoes of The Tempest circulate among cloudy skies “in storm” and “blue by starts”; Kernels in Vernal Silence sees those skies still cloudy but turning blue with amped-up romanticism. Some fragments are still bitten off with their characteristically jaunty syntax, “needle to storm,” but they are threaded back into a context of conventional linguistic usage. Reading later Prynne texts therefore involves a recalibration between affect and syntax: It is possible to hear sarcasm rather than optimism in skies turning blue, but that sarcasm can no longer be mapped unequivocally onto either conventional or unconventional syntax. Whether these cadences still feel deeply compelled—and who exactly is feeling—has been “complicated by forgetfulness.” The contingency of the lyric “I,” what it knows and how it feels, reflects on Parkland: “Memory” is clouded with so many sounds and sources that the present slips away.
While working through Balzac’s Sarrasine, Roland Barthes looks to the sky as he looks down at the text:
The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations.[10]
The mass of Poems: 2016–2024 creates a similar sort of reader: not only divining citations but trying to expand their imaginary rectangle. Not Ice Novice (2022) can be read as a dramatization of Barthes’s imaginary rectangles, “zones of reading” that, working at the second intratextual level, join together differently in Poems: 2016–2024 than they did in pamphlet format. The original Earthbound Press pamphlet printed four quatrains arranged two by two on each page, creating a rectangular window of stanzas: