In message <[log in to unmask]>,
"K.M. Sutherland" <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Does anyone here agree that
>
>2. The treatment of Prynne has been incoherent, characterized by robust
>blundering and quick thrills in put downs which are presented as if both
>radical and common-sensical, but which are in fact merely the nervous
>reflexes of the latter attitude.
>
Nothing sillier than the Prynne-Murdoch business, which simply ignores
the context. Pretty clear I think that Prynne was doing no more there
than dissassociating himself & his work from adherence to the
doctrinnaire application of the notion of the arbitrariness of the
signifier, which he sees or saw as the guiding principle of early
'language' poetry. & by comparison saying that in his own work
vocabulary etc is used in non-arbitrary reference to the areas of
discourse to which it belongs or from which it came. This seems quite
Wittgensteinian in its way, without any suggestion that Prynne reckons
he controls his 'meaning' in any reader's mind in the way that Murdoch
controls the sources & presentation of news. The wider context,
speculatively, is that Prynne is mindful of various published 'readings'
of his work, some coming from a 'language' perspective. There was one I
remember in Poetics Journal, a review of Poems 1982: perhaps somebody
can remind me who wrote it? - interesting, in fact, regarding Prynne
from the off as a language poet - and struggling with the resulting
problems quite coherently. But not at all the way I'd read Prynne. For a
much bizarrer account I recommend the article by Martin Seymour-Smith
which used to appear in the Macmillan Contemporary Poets megareference
book, 3rd or 4th edition, presenting Prynne as a stream-of-consciousness
practitioner. Now luckily replaced by a useful piece by Nigel Wheale.
There was a reference the other day to a remark by Marjorie Perloff,
that British readers have read much more 'language' theory than poetry.
Here I'm the one who might be stepping out of context since I don't
where this was said: but it interested me in that it seemed to sidestep
the fact that the breaking down of the demarcation between theory and
practice has been a feature of the work of many of the 'language'
writers, so that to read the one is to read the other in any case. I'd
say in fact that it's one of the characteristics which distinguishes the
North American work from British work with a family resemblance. Not
that British poets don't write with obvious awareness of the theoretical
issues but I can't think of any who incorporate theory into practice &
back again in the manner of, say, Bernstein or McCaffery or Watten. I'm
not saying if I think this is a good or bad thing. Different ironies
either side of the Atlantic, maybe.
By way of postscript: during the last fortnight I've seen myself
referred to as a Language Poet and a Cambridge Poet. I've never thought
I was either, although I grew up in Language & have been to Cambridge a
few times. Worth mentioning only in so far as it shows how useless these
terms have become.
Alan Halsey
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