Nate said: < Incidentally, talking about bad poems by famous poets,
J.H. Prynne's worst poem is buried in <the pages of _The English
Intelligencer_ -if I remember rightly the title was 'Time to Go'.
Adapting the response to the news of Cal Coolidge's demise, 'How can you
tell?' ( the _worst_). Your comment highlights the issue (_maybe_ the
problem?) of evaluation in the case of poets like Prynne who cross the
threshold from 'comprehensible' to 'incomprehensible' (say _Brass_ (1971)
and beyond), and don't come back. Is indeterminacy an innoculation (or more
troublingly, if it raises the issue of calculation) an insurance against
value judgements as confident as the one you've made, so that we resort to
'rebarbative' and '(relatively) accessible' as substitute terms. Actually
there seems to be a wider choice of positive language in this situation.
I've heard expressions like 'return to form' to distinguish one or
other late Prynne publication from another (or series) but I've never heard
the word 'worst' applied within that quite recognisable and distinct body of
his work.
<<It's the only poem of his from that period that's not in the _Poems_ and I
can see why>>
Since TEI was a 'newsletter' rather than a magazine as such, it would in
fact be worrying if _all_ contributions had survived into later collections,
never mind an--almost-- Collected Poems.
I think you're absolutely right about the pre-1965 poems deserving
re-printing. Long overdue. And Collected Essays?
All best,
John
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