that's a very interesting post Christopher. I can't answer the
question it ends with except to say, yes, that's a problem.
I'd emphasise that what I've been trying to negotiate has been the
presentation I sense accompanying Prynne's poems at times, which isn't
necessarily the poems themselves, although it may be. Another open
question.
I'd suggest that language can't be a community of one. I don't know if
that's either pertinent or of use, but it's a shadow that crosses my
mind.
Best
Dave
2008/5/31 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>:
> <snip>
> The useful aspect of that is that the 'appeal to the higher authority', to
> wit science, that some of Prynne's advocates insinuate, is subverted. So
> then Prynne becomes a matter of take it or leave it poetry, which is the
> only demand any poetry has a right to, rather than a poetry somehow
> justified on Higher Grounds. [Dave B]
> <snip>
>
> I see it as the depredations made by a _supposedly_ higher authority being
> resisted. That is, the issue is how to retrieve the connotative
> (expressivity, feeling) from the claims being made upon it, regularly,
> overwhelmingly, by the _denotative_. Although you put stress on *science*
> the sources of what I'm calling depredation are quite various. However, they
> do have this in common, that the denotative is anonymous (owned by steadily
> multiplying disciplines of which it is the expression) and always (eo ipso)
> it fragments; it classifies and sets boundaries. So the lexes of the
> sciences are exemplary. (The connotative, by contrast is owned and
> personal; it aspires to a fullness, or an unboundedness, which it can never
> quite achieve.)
>
> At any rate the opacity with which the reader is presented isn't (or doesn't
> have to be) that of some arcane, hieratic *truth* which now awaits decoding.
> Rather it's the effect of shifting away from an _enforced_ exteriority in
> whose face we (including JHP) are rendered passive and towards a way of
> speaking to which we (the readers) are external simply because we are not
> JHP, and because our own subjectivities are ours (of course) and not his.
>
> I'm tempted to suggest at this point that whereas *privacy* used to require
> the creation of private space by processes of enclosure, it may now require
> the opposite: some sort of breaking down of boundaries which are enforced
> upon one from outside, the creation of commonality from (as it were) within.
> And in that respect there's a problem.
>
> CW
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'To write and eat at the same table' is harder than it sounds.
> (J H Prynne)
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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