Yes, I'm with Peter here. I had a conversation with him about four years ago
and the only amazing thing was the ordinariness of his curiosity about
place. Pwerhaps I had expected him to speak like his poems - but a nice guy
all up.

Andrew

2008/5/30 Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>:

> 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
>



-- 
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aburke/