-----Original Message-----
差出人 : pain <[log in to unmask]>
宛先 : [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
日時 : 1999年7月9日 12:38
件名 : RE: fancyspeak
>Convert? Ah, this is fun. I do not think I have mischaracterised his verse.
>I responded to those who claim to know what his poetry is about. They are
>the ones who talked about meaning etc. The evidence of this poem suggests
>that they are indulging in creating an intellectual prosthetic to prop up
>poetry that is fairly mundane, and in register very middle of the road.
>It has a NeoGeorgian style to it. Look at the syntax -- and that awful
>"glitter of war" -- probably I did mischaracterise it --maybe I thought it
>was better than this. But if you want to make a Golden Calf out of
Prynne's
>poetry go ahead. I certainly won't dance around it. I would say that from
an
>aesthetic point of view it provides a few minutes of pleasure --but I
>dislike his acquiescence --and that same marmoreal quality found in
>Walter Pater -say in Marius the Epicurean. If that amounts to a prejudice,
>so be it.
>
>the gentility of a shell, so
> fragile, so beautifully
> shallow in the past; I 20
> hardly remember
> the case hardened
> but brittle
>constant to the eighteenth century or the
>strictly English localism of moral candour, 25
>disposed in the copses of those fields
>which bespoke easily that same lightness,
>that any motion could be so much
> borne over the
> top, skimming 30
> not knowing the flicker
> that joins
> I too
>never knew who had lived there. It was then
>a school of sorts, we were out of the bombs 35
>I now do, I think, know that. But the flow
>so eloquently stopped, walking by the Golden
>Fleece and the bus time-table
> ("It is difficult
> to say pre- 40
> cisely what
> constitutes
> a habitable
> country" -- A
> _ Theory of the Earth_ 45
> the days a nuclear part
> gently holding the skull or
> head, the skin porous to the
> eloquence of
>where this was so far! so ice-encased like 50
>resin that whiteness seemed no more, than
>cloudy at that time. The water-pattern is
>highly asymmetric, bonding hardly as proof
>against wealth, stability, the much-loved ice.
> Which I did love, if 55
> light in the field
> was frozen
> by wire
> ploughed up, I
> did not know, that 60
> was the gentle
> reach of ignorance
> the waves, the
> ice
>the forms frozen in familiar remoteness -- 65
>they were then, and are closer now, as
>they melt and rush into the spill-
>ways: "one critical axis of the crystal
>structure of ice remains dominant after
>the melt" -- believe that? 70
> or live there, they would say in
> the shade I am now competent
> for, the shell still furled but
> some nuclear stream
> melted from it. 75
> The air plays
> on its crown, the
> prince of life
> or its
> patent, its 80
> price. The absent
> sun (on the
> trees of the field) now does strike
> so gently
> on the whitened and uneven ice 85
> sweet day so calm
> the glitter is the war now released,
> I hear the guns for the first time
>Or maybe think so; the eloquence of melt
>is however upon me, the path become a 90
>stream, and I lay that down
>trusting the ice to withstand the heat; with
>that warmth / ah some modest & gentle
> competence a man could live
> with so little 95
> more.
>
>>From The White Stones (1969), reprinted in Poems (1982). With grateful
>thanks to J.H.Prynne for his permission to reprint here.
>Click for Lynx: Poetry from Bath
>-
>
>
I have just read Simon's post. The tail end of his posting had a long
quote --from Prynne or one of his apologists? It deserves to be quoted
again.
"...I'd not myself dissent from the project to write out or over the
precursory collusions of representation at the stage of the
implied contract for acts of reading. "
Lejeune has something to say about these contractual relations. But Prynne
says nothing.
"To restore the frontal or phonic accidentalism of speech modalities is
already a transforming act of
intelligence, through use of the page rather than the air-stream, and to
bring back the one across the generic grids of the other can be to set outer
frames around conditions of astonishing concentration
and transitivity."
Sir Ernest Gower will be writhing in his grave now.
" My own practice, however unstable and inconsistent, would scarcely allow
me to deny this, though in fact I can think of instances where I'd still do
what I'd also refute. But in the political question of reference to a world
in which social action is represented linguistically and its consequences
marked out by economic function and personal access to
social goods (justice, freedom, brown bread), the ludic syntax of a language
system is mapped on to determinations and coercions which by invasion cast
their weights and shadows parasitically into the playing-fields. "
Tautological
"I do not believe that 'freedom' from this aspect of the social order is
more than illusory, and this rather flimsy illusion I find in rather many
texts included in, for example, the _American Tree_ collection. No free
signifiers: no unvalorised process: no
free lunch! Your own defence against this foreclosure upon a de-referenced
sign system has been to argue ('a serious entailment', devolving I presume
from Barthes via Silliman) that the text is released from its fixed
displacement
out of a function-relation, its tokenised status as fetish, by being given
over to readers as a class of individuals actively installed in the position
of controlling the choices of their own consumption, to be renamed as
production: the _open_ text, the _inventive, selective_ reader, free to opt
for useful waste or wasteful utility. But my own clumsy
response to this is to press several questions, all disputing the quality
and competence of the freedom claimed to be thus established."
Ah I can't bear it .... is this what people dance around? This botched
semiotics? I suppose one must allow poets greater latitude in these
matters. But if were presented in a conference on semiotics it would be
shot to pieces. But as he admits --it is a clumsy response. This ludic
syntax, playing fields --etc are we to take him at face value? Reading
through the rest of this article one does get the sense of superiority, of
an elitism. How convenient to talk of consumers and thus disenfranchise so
many readers. Perhaps it is from Adorno? Maybe. Whatever the case --there is
a clear disparity between what is written in the poetry and in this text. He
is talking up his poetry, in retrospect, intellectualising something that is
middle of the road. As someone who has read in depth reader reception
theory, semiotics and cultural theory -- and lived to tell the tale, this
apology for his poetry is also mundane. But that is my opinion. Others might
from the evidence of this text and his poetry think otherwise. I would
rather that he let still poetry stand up by itself.
Isn't it the classic freedom to eat cake, to diversify an assumed leisure
and to choose out of a diversity which is precisely the commodity-spectacle
of a predisposed array, clearwrapped in unitised portion control?
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