I've found this discussion interesting and should be sorry if it went out
of this forum. I wish I had read more of Prynne's poems; I haven't seen
enough to form any kind of cogent response. However, the little I have
read prompts me to wonder that he is considered so "difficult", since he
seems to attain a lyric clarity, moment to moment, which compensates (for
this reader) ignorance of a particular aspect. He is full of
resistances, as any poet must be, and clearly mines fields of knowledge
not especially accessible to literature: although a specialised knowledge
and resistance are not necessarily the same thing. Such knowledges seem
to me marginal to the experience of the poem, in that they can be
returned to and examined later, if desire points that way: what matters
more is the body of the poem itself, the particular set of relationships
it sets in vibration.
His resistances run several ways, but in connection with this, one
question that strikes me is that the "difficulty" or resistances of the
poems I have read resonate differently than earlier this century. Yes,
the school of the bleeding obvious: but certain things have bled into
mainstream thinking, as against the kinds of received poetics that, say,
Beckett was situated in, in his time, which open different possibilities.
Perhaps the background noise now permits Prynne's vagrant lyricism as a
possible resistance.
>Personally I worry that willingness to be wrong too often becomes an
>affirmation of one's pleasure in conceiving of reference without
>verification
Sure. But the desire to be right often comes down like a fireblanket on
thinkings...
Why, for example, avoid the aptness of "risk" because someone wrote
something that makes it shakier?
Best
Alison
Alison Croggon
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3015
Australia
Masthead Online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home Page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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