from FRED BEAKE re PRYNNE DISCUSSION
I happened to be in Derbyshire, doing poetry intensely at Cromford, while
most of this was going on, so I came back to be handed a huge bundle of
paper by Douglas Clark, who knows my interest in these matters.
I find myself most in agreement with Peter Riley, but my views are perhaps
sufficiently different to be worth recording.
While I was at Cromford we experimented with listening to a piece of music
by Diana Burrell, and writing at the same time. The results were very
various, as one would expect. Nevertheless it was curious how the results
fell into families. Two normally very different poets gave it a pastoral
twist with strange things happening among shepherds. A very distinct group
went for extremes of temperature: hot deserts or jungles, cold tundras.
Ants turned up an awful lot! Two people of very different personalities
came up with railway trains none of the rest of us could hear. Descriptions
varied from the linguistically disjointed to the prosaically exact.
Yet the thing that struck me was that most of the pieces deeply related to
the music.
At the potential risk of being very crude I do wonder if I do not relate
to Prynne in a very similar manner. We seem to follow patterns of direction
within the poet's mind, and these directions strike me as very similar to
a very considerible musician improvising with little preconception, but
with a vast fund of available learning to bounce off. As with such
improvisation it moves much quicker than logical thought.
The result to me is a phenomenon like Music. Patterns, pictures rise when I
read a Prynne poem, which are are perhaps its most natural interpretation.
The logical result of that is I suppose is that there are as many
interpretations of a Prynne poem as there are readings, which is why
attempts to pin him down to absolute meaning tend usually to fall flat.
Yet equally the poem is the center of this, just as the eye wanders about
an abstract painting in a slightly different way every time, but the
patternings are the same, or successive listenings to a Mozart recording.
And there is a pleasure principle in Prynne. I for one enjoy him...
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