Hi, John--thanks so much for that earlier and incredibly rich post, over
which I'll be chewing for some time, I suspect! Your mention of the latest
chapbook, _Unanswering Rational Shore_, made me wonder how you read its
tone, especially relative to _Triodes_, from which it certainly seems to
radically depart in all sorts of ways. I gather from Peter Riley that
there's been some disagreement around Cambridge as to its tone (leaving it
to Peter to say more, if he likes), so how does it strike you?

Agree with you on the issue of song and anonymity as suggestive of folk
attitudes--that seems to me the reason why so many of Prynne's song
allusions are to ballads in particular (even that Al Jolson number is Danny
Boy-allusive). And I've had that same experience of excited discovery
mediated by Prynne in both directions. I guess I've internalized so much of
his poetry by now that the recognition more often occurs with one or another
allusive source that I recognize _from_ Prynne rather than in him, and it's
often something I was taught but haven't revisited in years, so it's really
renewed for me when I find it again as one of his reference points. Lately
I've come across stuff in both Pound and Dante--to take two widely separated
examples of how wide-ranging Prynne's allusiveness is--and while mentally
kicking myself for missing them in one or another Prynne poem, it's also
thrilling to recognize Prynne in them for the first time.

Finally, to answer your question about how the lines were handled in the
Crespi experiment: the poems, but not the lines (thank the gods), were cut
up and intermingled. I think this work is still up at Snakeskin, where last
I looked George had a whole Crespi section, so you can go take a look for
yourself. In fact, I won't tell you which Prynne lines she used, as I'm
curious to know whether they leap out at you too
(http://www.snakeskin.org.uk).

Cheers,

Candice


on 1/17/02 4:57 PM, Temple John at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Candice,
> that 'anonymously' for me is the up side of Prynne's impersonality or
> suprapersonality and thoroughly in keeping with any folk attitude to the
> song's primacy over the singer, Lawrence's 'not I, not I... (i was reminded
> of by the Triodes quote from Alison too). I don't these days often hear
> Ruskin mentioned in these contexts but the experience I always get reading
> Prynne, going to the dictionary and the Encyclopedia, is the excitement I
> was cheated out of by my education, having it all served up, not, like my
> grandfather, finding it out for myself (after work) with great effort and
> little societal encouragement. ( 'istorin)
>   Be good to know more about how that poem was chopped up and reassembled.
> Were the (single) line units preserved???
>   On (human) voice, that terrific _couple_ of poems of Wordsworth
> _Stepping Westwards_ and _See her single in the field_ (cain't have one
> widout th'other)
> John
> ----- Oorspronkelijk bericht -----
> Van: Candice Ward <[log in to unmask]>
> Aan: <[log in to unmask]>
> Verzonden: woensdag 16 januari 2002 19:01
> Onderwerp: Re: Freedom
>
>
>>
>> You know, the more I think about it, the less valid this "voice" point re
>> Prynne seems even at the level of defining it simply as consistency. Is
>> there any poet of his calibre working today who is more internally
>> consistent, poem after poem, chapbook after chapbook, than Prynne? And
> could
>> we ever mistake a single one of his poems (apart from a few of the more
>> conventional works in his first book) for anyone else's?
>>
>> Here I'm recalling Linda Crespi's experiment in Snakeskin a few years ago,
>> where poems by a handful of poets were cut up and thrown in a pot of Java
> to
>> percolate into a new "poem," and how striking it was that Prynne's two
> lines
>> went right on obsessively doing their thing, utterly self-absorbed and
>> unaffected by anything Crespi had put in their path from other people's
>> poems. They were also immediately recognizable as his lines, by contrast
> to
>> those of some other poets in that brew. (Is that "voice" or something
> else,
>> I wonder?)
>>
>> Your take here on song in Prynne as "deeply human" but _anonymously_ so
>> seems exactly right, Alison, and it's a far more useful way of approaching
>> the voice question re Prynne than Altieri's formulation (IMHO).
>>
>> Candice
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> I liked Candice's half-rendered question on song:  the song/voice has
>>> only tangentially to do with self or selves, and perhaps implicates
>>> rather an anonymity which can reach beyond the individual to a kind
>>> of inhumanness (still seems deeply human to me) - even so, there's a
>>> compassion in the "sweet sport" of the singing self in that sardonic
>>> poem Triodes, despite the suggestion of "judgment", against the
>>> "quoting coldly" elsewhere and "the crime of the rational script
>>> (which) permits a script of crime" -
>>>
>>> "more doves make their hazy complaint in season / and save and
>>> flutter on the wing / and grasp a twig to catch on / for sibilant
>>> inclusion, soothing the very air / with unavailing news of
>>> themselves, / of nothing else"
>>>
>>> etc, I mean one could go on for hours and I haven't the time.  A
>>> desire for neatness certainly is misleading, I think.
>>>
>>> Best
>>>
>>> Alison
>>> --
>>