Poems: (2015) third edition

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j) Appendix: Additional Publication Details [print run of editions; name and location of the printer, typesetter, binder, designer, distributor, where known]

The amount of scientific material in the poems would not have seemed so strange even a few decades ago: most of the canonised poets engaged with the scientific activities of their time, including Wordsworth and Shelley. The "two cultures" identified by CP Snow, and the rapid splitting of scientific inquiry into ever-increasing specialisms, have made even less likely Wordsworth's dream that scientific knowledge could be integrated into the unity of life rather than used to portion and control it. Prynne's name has long been, among poetry readers, oddly totemic: he is demonised by some British poets, idolised by others. He is regarded as obscure in two senses. One, he is not regarded as "well known". The difference, perhaps, between the general obscurity of British poets and the obscurity of Prynne is that he has made few efforts to publicise himself: he doesn't give interviews, is not willingly photographed, produces his barely publicised work through small presses in (rather beautiful) limited edition chapbooks, and rarely features in mainstream publications except as an idle shorthand for a wide variety of avant-garde writing. Davie introduced me to the name of Charles Tomlinson. He’d been Tomlinson’s teacher when Tomlinson was a student here. An important starting point for Tomlinson as a poet was Wallace Stevens. I had read a little of Stevens as a student before I came into connection with Davie, but there’s no doubt that my connection with Davie and through him with Tomlinson opened the door to Stevens as an important writer. That was a significant moment, too, because a world that had previously been occupied more or less exclusively by Pound and Williams now opened to another presence of a very different kind, a seriously intellectual poet of cerebral focus, committed to an active intelligence of mind. This was quite distinct from anything that I’d found in Pound, or in Creeley, or in Olson, come to that. They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (privately printed, 2001).At the author’s request, online and printed materials relating solely to the university, as well as occasional contributions to online discussions, are not included in this bibliography. Let’s talk about the development of your practice. You were an undergraduate here at Cambridge. Tell us about your work with the scholar and poet Donald Davie. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, On the Periphery, includes a memoir by Prynne (Cambridge: Street Editions, 1976). Oripeau Clinquaille. French translation of Brass, by B. Dubourg and J. H. Prynne (Paris: Po&sie, 3, 1977), Librarie Classique Eugène Belin. Prynne’s early poems are full of cities, streets and houses. At the same time, they seek to encompass “the formal circuit” of our lives: the invisible forces that shape experience, just as the words of a poem are shaped into verse by its rhythms (“line breaks like tea breaks,” as Prynne quipped admiringly of the poetry of EA Markham). What, these existential meditations ask, is the condition or “quality” that we have in common, moving through the world at the mercy of the elements and each other:

Part of the pleasure for some readers, including myself, is the discovery of fresh vantage points on the world, garnered from chasing references in the poems, whether historical, musical, literary, scientific or economic. As one reader has said, "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, rather than, like my grandfather, finding it out for myself (after work) with great effort and little societal encouragement."I t is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable. His name had become, as The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry put it in 1994, ‘synonymous with all that is most rebarbative in the work of the contemporary English avant-garde’. Considering his obscurity (limited edition pamphlets circulating among those in the know; no publicity, no interviews), it is remarkable how much fear and loathing the mere existence of his work once generated. On the Poems of J.H. Prynne. Ed. Ryan Dobran. Glossator 2 (2010). Complete volume dedicated to Prynne. The poem confronts “it,” that which is “less” than the “yes and no” of the dialectic of presence and absence of ontology. The poem can extend “it” only the flatness of a demotic denial. Nonetheless, the very contrast of idioms in the language splits the poem away from the conclusion it seeks to effect: “stuff it.” The subject receives from what is other even the message he emits. In fact, Prynne has frequently participated in the forming and supporting of literary communities. After a conventional first book, Force of Circumstance (1962, now disowned), he read and lectured in the US, working closely with avant-garde poets such as Charles Olson and Ed Dorn, assisting with Olson's Maximus poems, and contributing to Dorn's satirical magazine Bean News. In Day Light Songs (1968) Prynne worked through formal problems of syntax and subject position that his poetic procedures rendered inescapable, problems fundamentally of self and other and their articulation in a spatial field. The poems are small, dismembered in their line units, and, in their concern with breath, with song, may be related to the Elizabethans, such as Thomas Campion, and to Louis Zukofsky, who had taken up Pound’s concern with the romance tradition of song and related it to an ontology of language. Prynne aligned himself with this work and carried further than his predecessors a recognition of language as the dwelling place of being.