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Sorry if I wreck your thesis, but J.H. Prynne is not deaf. Of recent years he has become somewhat "hard of hearing", but you can still have a perfectly normal (acoustically speaking) conversation with him without raising your voice. PR From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: "Poetryetc: poetry and poetics" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 11:04:55 +0100 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Divided about Prynne I was pondering the other day on what I really do feel about J.H.Prynne's writings, as I must confess they put me in a divided position of not knowing what I think or 'feel', now I know that he sometimes writes poems in Classical Chinese, and I'm very aware of the distance between the written and the spoken in that, so I was thinking is that Prynne is in some ways trying to treat written English as if it were an equivalent in relation between text and sound as Classical Chinese, so I decided to do some searching on the web and came up with something totally different, and unexpected. These three snips following a from a poetry discussion group called Eratosphere: <snip 1>I also wonder whether deafness affects the way he perceives poetry: the only two deaf poets I know of (Jack Clemo and David Wright) were deafened rather than born deaf, but do deaf people perhaps perceive the 'concrete' aspects of poetry rather than hearing a 'voice' in their heads?<end snip 1> <snip 2>I'm with the others, crap like Prynne's work and the incredibly overintellectual posturing that passes for criticism of it is what drove me from the academic/poetic world decades ago and turned me into a photographer. But that's neither here nor there. The reason I'm commenting at all, is that I am total deaf myself, and yet I am a metrical formalist, albeit not as formal a one as some here. For whatever relevance that has to your observations above...<end snip 2> <snip 3>Deafness: my friend became profoundly deaf twenty years ago: most of his friends now are also deaf, he says that he has difficulty in remembering what a word on the page now sounds like and certainly his speech is very obscure. When he lost his hearing in an accident he decided that the best solution was to be deaf rather than deafened. As an argument that this need not affect his love of poetry in what is now an almost forgotten language, there's Isaiah Berlin's account of meeting Anna Akhmatova who began reciting incomprehensibly: it was only afterwards Berlin learned that Akhmatova was reciting Byron in what she thought was English!<end snip 3> all from: www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/Forum3/HTML/000239.html It's a bit different to James Keery's 50-page essay in Jacket on Veronica Forrest-Thompson and a reading of a single poem of Prynne's http://jacketmagazine.com/20/vft-keery.html Now I was for years on a group where Prynne's poetry was held in almost totemic status, but nobody ever mentioned that he was deaf. I don't know why: almost any discussion of Aaron Williamson's poems will begin from the fact of deafness. It effects radically how I see his writing. It also gives a new shade to Prynne's call for a space for innovative reading which: 'can be intelligibly active as a practice of inscribing new sets of sense-bearing differences upon the schedule of old ones'. from 'Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words' a series of lectures by Prynne. Which is a problem for me as I am not deaf, and although I can have an imaginative perception of deafness, I can only read as if I am with extreme difficulty, and I can't take such a way of reading as normative. -- David Bircumshaw Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/ The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk