Keston wrote:
>Peter -- could you perhaps explain a little further why you think that the
growth of a field of Prynne criticism would be socially divisive? Do you
reprehend the prospect of competing claims, purely and simply? Or think
perhaps that what gets written will be obfuscatory?


Not the field as such, but what I foresee it as being is absolutely
university-centred and implying constantly that the entire use of this
poetry is in a special context set aside from secular discourses. Finding
"answers" to the poetry rather than exploring its problems, and thrusting
aside any possible direct approach to the text with a barricade of
justificatory theoretical jargon. So it will be saying all the time, "This
is for us, with our kinds of education and our fields of reference, only we
are qualified to see what it is "really" saying". Claiming definitive
exegesis, which I look upon as an impossibility, and placing the poetry is
part of a technical discourse of scientism. The poetry invites this, but
is more important than it. And as I said before in this context, the one
thing Prynne critics are most reluctant to do is to offer actual help.
(The Reeve-Kerridge book for all its inelasticity, is actually exemplary in
this respect and is likely to remain the first and most useful of them
all.) Eventually there will be encyclopaedias, like the Pound and Olson
encyclopaedias, which will indeed be helpful in detail but will occupy the
point where you begin to wonder why the poetry exists.

Well I don't think this is what you should do with Prynne's poetry anyway.
I think what you should do with it is take it into the garden on a warm
eveningwith a glass of wine and sit under a tree as night falls and take a
poem, or a passage, or a fragment even, and find out what difference it
makes to you, how it stirs the heart. Everyone's response will be
different of course, but equally valid, to stand or fall as the poetry
does, by its results. No one's going to dictate to us how this stuff
should be understood (or not). Actually I think this is how all poetry
should be treated. We need other things too but there are priorities.
When we need too much something has gone wrong, with the poetry or with the
ability of mere human beings to read it.


/PR




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