I'd like to intervene rather obliquely in the discussion called
"J.H.Prynne".  Firstly to insist that it's not some provincial academic or
corner-cupboard routine, but it's actually very important for the future of
poetry. The whole question of what to do with difficult poetry and what's
going to happen to it has got to be sorted out. Of course it's not all that
goes on and perhaps it does get too much attention compared with other
kinds of discourse, but it raises acute problems of what poetry is
for/about which we can't afford to shunt aside.

So I've said that. But the longer this Prynne-Derrida-talk goes on the more
dissatisfied I feel about it  and that it isn't getting anywhere and the
more it makes me wish I wasn't a poet. Because to me poetry isn't about
these things at all, it's about daffodils, you know, the merry green hills,
the lambs in the trees, the dust-bowls of Suffolk, the moon over the
slaughter-house, the desert butterflies, the nature of virtue and what
humans are meant to be here for--- all that kind of thing. And I have a
sneaky kind of feeling that those or similar things might be what poetry's
about for Jeremy Prynne too.

I'm perfectly serious about not wanting to be a poet in this kind of
structure. It just takes the world away from people, you're left with
nothing. You either join the church (and what is there to show it would be
worth the fee, which is enormous?) or you're right out of it--you're
ignorant, outdated, disempowered, inferior, incapable, an outcast and a
failure. This is what evangelical religions are like, this is what they do
to people. They convince you that they unlock the new dispensation, at
which you either subscribe or are damned. I think this is what nearly all
"persons interested in poetry" (whatever kind of a crowd they are) would
feel encountering these epistles. The whole thing is indeed deeply
undemocratic.

I'm not being anti-intellectual here. I'm just saying this is a
particularly catholic and zealous faith which colonises swiftly because
being centred on language it has a virus-like access to all other
disciplines (such as poetry and criticism). It's like Europe's answer to
Islamic fundamentalism. The only zones it can't take over are those which
need to use language for practical purposes. And I don't actually find it
any help at all, in understanding JHP's poetry or any other. The idea that
he deliberately enlisted his poetry into French philosopho-linguistic and
high-scientific debates is fairly horrific--I thought better of him, or I
mean he may well have done but I would expect there to be any number of
escape keys. And wouldn't that be a very strange thing to do?-- to expect
international scientists philosophers astro-physicists and linguists to
attend to a poetical discourse which by the very fact of enlisting became
impenetrable, and also untranslatable, even deliberately unreadable. But
certainly something fairly drastic happened to his poetry from around the
early 1970s onwards. Either he threw himself into those fields with
circumspect commitment to transcending or what has become of his poetry is
the price we have to pay for his curateship. That's not criticism, just a
kind of wave of the hand.

I say nothing against modern French philosophy here; I don't know very much
about it and wouldn't dream of entering into its field. If I feel a
distrust of it that's mainly because of the devastating effect it has had
on Anglo-American poetry, almost destroyed it. French poetry doesn't seem
to have suffered in the same way at all, which is really very odd and there
must be reasons for this which go back to the establishment of the
Paris-New York axis in the inter-war years. Derridism has become essential
dogma of all the advanced Transatlantic literature departments now, that
was obvious at Exmouth: you take a poem and you Derrida it and that's
almost all you do, ever, with any poem. Maybe good, maybe bad, I don't
know. The effect seems to be to confirm Derridaism rather than to
illuminate the poem, since they all conform to its requirements. My
suspicion is that the whole thing is parochial.


The expositions of Prynne texts we've had have been of a high quality, but
there are abiding problems with "interpretation" of late Prynne which these
superior examples don't escape.

Always in Prynne debates and criticism there is a more or less evident
unease on the part of the critic about what he/she is doing, a barely
concealed sense of failure in the very act of expounding. I've seen no
Prynne criticism free of this, except that which pretends there are  no
problems. What Robin Purves said at the beginning about how again and again
you can see Prynne critics taking the text like a bitter medicine (he
didn't say that exactly) was spot-on. He hit brilliantly the typical
positions of the Prynne performer. In almost all the commentary I've seen
on Prynne and most other difficult poetry, there has been a stratum of
emptiness, a vacuum, between the poem and the comment.  The comment floats
above the poem without really engaging with it. And it predicates a
peculiarly fragmented or actually inattentive way of reading in which you
grasp the notion of what-kind-of-thing-it-is but skate over almost all the
detail, or alternatively you nibble at bits of the text and launch from
there into large claims without taking on the text's movement at all.
Normal reading processes are precluded (e.g. quite fast, looking for
messages, urgently moved to know what follows...).

What we get is justification, we get  reasons why, ethical claims, moral
claims, aesthetic claims, there is talk of morality and virtue; what we
never get is indication as to how these things are actually evinced in the
text or worked out of it.  We get a lot of negative appraisal (the
conventional pre-something writing that it isn't).  We get tiny fragments
of it held up as self-evidently significative tokens.  We actually don't
get any help, which is the one thing we really do need: no explanations, no
practical demonstration: just exhortation, adoration, or a smug kind of "We
professionals don't actually have any problems with this kind of poetry at
all." ---but we're not going to show you what the terms of our
understanding of it are. We just insist that the world has entered a
condition whereby such poetry is needful. We make no attempt to prove this.



I think it's probably wrong to treat Jeremy Prynne as a world-compendium,
as the author of quasi-divine text which will if prodded hard enough
release a totalized cultural ointment, attunement to the new revelation of
space-time or access to higher ground.

So much of our commentaries beg the question -- if that is what you make
out of the poetry, why isn't it what the poetry manifests? Why does it have
to be teased out by a combination of inspired guess-work and intelligent
deduction?  Why can't it be evident?  Robin's method very intelligently
makes a kind of abstract of the processes of the poem, which is very
helpful but again if that is what we get why isn't it already there?  Doug
dives into the swimming-pool poem and comes up clicking his fingers --"I
got it! it's a motor-cycle-race!"  But I never saw a motor-cycle race.  Did
the race come from inside the poem or from inside Doug Oliver?  We'll never
know. Even if the author stood up and declared, pro/contra motorbike race,
we'd still never know. And anyway, if it was there why was it concealed?
Is this truly what we want of our poetry, that it offer us an intransigent
barrier  from which we pull out what bits of truth or beauty we can, always
in terms of  "Perhaps there is..." "It seems that..."  "We might
envision..."  "Isn't this a..." "Possibly we could say..."  always in
doubt, always asking, always guessing. Always defeated.

For the degree of difficulty is greatly underestimated. Doug says, "If I'm
reading the poem wrongly, someone will correct me in due course."  Oh no
they won't! They'll just come along with their own version. There'll never
be a complete correct or final reading as if it were a cryptographic
exercise of unusual depth, as if it were set there to worry people and the
author lurks round the corner tee-heeing at everyone's attempts. If that's
what it were I wouldn't want to know a thing about it.

I don't think you get anything out of this poetry. I don't think you're
meant to, that's not what it's for. Anything you get out of it you bring to
it..  Jeremy isn't an evangelist, he's a 20th century author of poems
straight in line with the inherited function of that object but developed
in a very unusual and challenging way. In line in that most of the detail
comes from his own private life, that's how it gets there, that's where
most poets get their detail.  What he does with the stuff is handle it
strictly as words. The words then stand there as whatever-they-are in a
sequence which is determined entirely by what-they-are, in the fullest
conception of what-words-can-be.  What they do then is defeat themselves.

Which is pretty bleak but that seems to be the way it works out. I'm sure
there's a very logical process ruthlessly and honestly pursued which brings
language to this pass.

Look at those "twins" for instance, about which we have had speculation.
Its the word, "twins", that what we're talking about: anything else we
bring is our own. And this is so because the word is set in an isolating
denial of specifying context.  ---

                The twins blink

That's actually all we've got, those three words, of which "The" is the
biggest problem because it's the one that makes you want to ask "What
twins?" to which there's no answer.  The twins blink. No two separate
sentient  beings can blink at one moment so immediately we have an impasse,
and we keep on having them, from word to word. We're not even entitled to
think of the twins as persons necessarily. The blink is impossible or
far-sought in most contextualisations.  But the word "twins" can blink,
easily. We have two eyes, which blink as one. Why invoke primordial
twin-creators?  Why not? What's the French for "binoculars"? Why not invoke
the Dioscuri: the twin stars that echo our eyes and guide us across
uncharted wastes. Via Schubert/ Mayrhofer, Lied eines Schiffers.... D360,
would be my preference,  so clearly and movingly built across a delay. The
blink could be clouds passing over the stars so we loose our guiding
light.... But that's ME constructing a story out of the words, it's what I
bring to it. I suggest that Robin's "Two related products of a single
conception intermittently signal and receive signals" is what he brings to
it, though he strives valiantly to be objective  Twins of beginnings too.
If you want, yes, if you don't, no. All you got is twins that blink, and
twins don't, just this word (here) does.

                hands set to thread out

Not "their" hands -- that word's not there. Some hands, probably theirs.
Which hands? No answer. Set: meaning immobile or journalistic future tense
[a little sneer creeping in here].  Which or both? Hands of beginnings?--
Ready Set Go. Robin sees a radio (hand-set) I don't. You pays your money
and you takes your choice. All you've got is the word, "set", not
necessarily a verb, and in the last analysis that's all you have too:
"set", meaning "set", which is to say, "set", as opposed only to "not set".
Fourth word fourth impasse.

and set to---  thread out.  How do you thread out?  if the author meant
something like "reel out" he would doubtless have said it.   No, the Out
they move to is strictly threaded, not anything else. And it's something
you can't do, thread out. Threading is inner, through. Well you could just,
get the word thread into a verbal phrase with Out, it's just about within
threadness. But then it turns out to be transitive, what you "thread out"
is "a dipper cargo". This is where most people chuck the sponge in. But
it's only words, it's only dipper (a bird etc.) + cargo, that gets threaded
out by the twins.  [How? Where? What? no answer] [But this is where this
kind of poetry risks collapsing if it ever does; while a kind of Beckettian
sparseness keeps the impasse alive it's quite safe but when the vocabulary
extends towards the recherché the impasse gets twinned with or twined with
latent absurdities. The pure words, "dipper cargo" include a ridiculous
notion of a ship or lorry full of dippers, something totally
unentertainable. If you ignore it you're retreating from the word-basis
into a secondary preference for the possible referent. And this kind of
poetry does  let itself enter this condition again and again, Wilco's is
particularly prone to it]  Anyway a dipper cargo can't exist, that's
obvious.But its words can. All this can happen as word, even to the lithium
grease (enhanced) and the catastrophe (if it is a catastrophe, there's no
way of knowing) where it breaks (what breaks?) under heat stress (what heat
stress?) (and why should heat stress? it could as easily relax depending on
what occasion of heat it were, but we can't be told that). This is not
difficult poetry. This is impossible poetry.

Which is a quite different thing. Two thousand expositors working for two
hundred years wouldn't get anything out of it but another wretched Bible.

But it's not abstract, it's not symbolic (except in origin) it's not
mythological, It's words, doing what they and they alone can do.  I.e. kind
of nothing really, as it seems to me, but obviously doing it with great
finesse and reverb.

Anyway that's the way it is. There's no way of knowing, there's no entrance
to this poetry, it's closed, as closed as a bricked-up door in a demolished
wall. It's exactly constructed thus. Every move is blocked. Every possible
attaching particle is eradicated. Every entity that's introduced into the
discourse invites the question "what:/which" but refuses to be identified,
and stands there purely as its name. What can you do with names? You can
make stories, of another world. What other world? No answer. Out for Lunch,
Clum back Fliday. Word world.


I guess I'm saying that we must be defeated by this poetry, that that's
part of its purpose. The words defeat each other and together they defeat
reading. The finest attempts not to be defeated (Robin's, Doug's, the
Reeve-Kerridge book) are forms of squirming. Sometimes it makes me angry.
Not because it fails -- failed poetry is not much of a problem, it just
doesn't carry, you can forget it.. You can't forget this poetry, it weighs
on you. It follows you around. I sometimes hate it because it succeeds, in
denying me every slightest refuge I have at my command in the verbal
landscape of life. Every corner I could possibly creep into, including the
cosy little corner known as "openness". It insists absolutely, that the
slightest knowing of where you are, the slightest connective construct of
recognition, is a comfort which you're not entitled to and which lapses you
from worth. I don't believe that for a moment, but I notice how faithfully
and with what devotion the guidance of the text follows it.

That anyway, as far as I'm concerned, is its function. I mean there are no
answers. That dismay which the critic thinks to research away is the very
gift of this poetry, it is precisely what it offers: dismay, impasse,
refusal, impossibility. And these also are emotions and strong ones and
indeed if it is a disdain it is a passionate one. To think that some right
philosophy or linguistic theory will unlock it is the sheerest folly. It is
the frozen inertia of the highest discourse, where the poles meet, don't
ask me why.

If it's a disaster it's a willed disaster, it's exactly the disaster he
wanted. It's not for me to say whether it's a disaster or not. It's almost
the only thing in experimental poetry I find worth a glance.  To interpret
it into a knowable discourse is like trying to make an optimist out of
Beckett.

If people say they're happy with it and it's no problem to them and we can
cope with this sort of stuff easy, five before lunch, I say they're lying
in their teeth. The principal academic response to this kind of material
has been to ask it no questions, swallow it whole and build a career on the
resulting opportunities.

We can also take it perfectly simply by not asking the questions, by
understanding this is a construct of poetry out of a life as it happens, as
it undoubtedly is, and letting it be that. But even then we are bringing
something to it, negatively, rather than finding something in it.  We are
also free to attach it. I'm very sympathetic to Doug's remark about HWWR:
"The whole sequence seems to be [note "seems to be" again] addressed to a
woman who has undergone serious health problems." I myself have read the
sequence as [seeming to be] a father's lament on the departure of a loved
daughter. In both cases we agree on a need to attach, and some kind of
concern towards a female 2nd person, but the material of the attaching
remains ours, not JHPs. I actually don't think it would do any harm if the
author supplied an attachment himself, but presumably he fears a reduction
of word-ness to circumstance, or the kind of thing people are doing to
Celan's poetry because of the author's history. I don't think it would
necesarily have that result, or would matter if it did.

What could be analysed, and I'm not attempting it here because I don't know
how, is how there is a coherence (if there is) which makes sense and
purpose of what people bring to the poetry. How "The twins blink" does set
up a not-specific movement which is not just any movement.  It would be
very hard and would need a technical vocabulary which I'm not aware of.
Keston's promise of a "hands-on" criticism looks promising-- pity his essay
didn't appear at CCCP (if there was a CCCP).


I'm apologetic for having used up so much K.  If anyone knows a better and
more positive account of this poetry, and there must be such, I'd dearly
love to hear it.


Peter Riley, Spring Bank Holiday 1998. Quite cold with an easterly wind,
the blossom showing, but fearfully, some of it possibly trapped too late.







%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%