You know, the more I think about it, the less valid this "voice" point re
Prynne seems even at the level of defining it simply as consistency. Is
there any poet of his calibre working today who is more internally
consistent, poem after poem, chapbook after chapbook, than Prynne? And could
we ever mistake a single one of his poems (apart from a few of the more
conventional works in his first book) for anyone else's?
Here I'm recalling Linda Crespi's experiment in Snakeskin a few years ago,
where poems by a handful of poets were cut up and thrown in a pot of Java to
percolate into a new "poem," and how striking it was that Prynne's two lines
went right on obsessively doing their thing, utterly self-absorbed and
unaffected by anything Crespi had put in their path from other people's
poems. They were also immediately recognizable as his lines, by contrast to
those of some other poets in that brew. (Is that "voice" or something else,
I wonder?)
Your take here on song in Prynne as "deeply human" but _anonymously_ so
seems exactly right, Alison, and it's a far more useful way of approaching
the voice question re Prynne than Altieri's formulation (IMHO).
Candice
> I liked Candice's half-rendered question on song: the song/voice has
> only tangentially to do with self or selves, and perhaps implicates
> rather an anonymity which can reach beyond the individual to a kind
> of inhumanness (still seems deeply human to me) - even so, there's a
> compassion in the "sweet sport" of the singing self in that sardonic
> poem Triodes, despite the suggestion of "judgment", against the
> "quoting coldly" elsewhere and "the crime of the rational script
> (which) permits a script of crime" -
>
> "more doves make their hazy complaint in season / and save and
> flutter on the wing / and grasp a twig to catch on / for sibilant
> inclusion, soothing the very air / with unavailing news of
> themselves, / of nothing else"
>
> etc, I mean one could go on for hours and I haven't the time. A
> desire for neatness certainly is misleading, I think.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
> --
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