the light in de- / light
J.H. Prynne, “The Numbers” (1968)
I wrote a piece for this week’s Times Literary Supplement about the recently-published letters of the poets J.H. Prynne and Douglas Oliver (The Last Books, 2022), along with some other recent Prynne publications. If you haven’t reached your free TLS article limit — or indeed, subscribe — you can read it on the link at the end of this post.
Every time I write about Prynne, I’m aware of cannon to the left of me, cannon to the right of me, and the suspicion that someone (me) has blundered. On one side, sceptical dismissals of the difficulty of his writing; on the other, evangelical appreciation.
My heart is with the evangelists: Prynne’s writing has given me a lot of pleasure over the years. But it can be — deliberately — hard to love. I feel both these things at the end of his 1979 sequence Down where changed:
sick and nonplussed
by the thought of less
you say stuff it
This has a staccato bitterness that is one of the acquired tastes of reading Prynne. Even hostile critics have conceded there is an art to it: Don Paterson, for example, remarks that
Recently I made a phonetic analysis of a few of Jeremy Prynne’s poems, and the results were rather interesting: Prynne’s default music runs directly counter to all the norms of the English lyric tradition. In every aspect we find him doing what we might caricature as “the opposite of Heaney”.
For me, what makes these lines memorable is exactly their unexpected dissonance. When Heaney, in the same year (1979), writes
This evening, the cuckoo and the corncrake
(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.
It was all crepuscular and iambic.
(“Glanmore Sonnets”)
it is an audibly lovely and self-conscious tribute to the birdsong of Romantic poetry, the onomatopoeic naming sending Keatsian harmonics through the lines that follow (“cuckoo… much, too… -puscu-”).
By contrast, Prynne’s almost-careless triplet of “pluss” / “less” / “stuff” pointedly misses its final stop with… “it” (which snaps back instead to “sick”). Its phrasing, meanwhile, echoes the unromantic present: in September 1978, UK Ford workers went on strike under the slogan “Stuff Your 5%”, thus beginning the “Winter of Discontent”.
All this, however, risks playing into the polarisation I mentioned above. Prynne’s poetry isn’t only concerned with anti-lyricism / left-wing politics / saying “stuff it” (just as Heaney is not only concerned with birdsong, twilight and iambs). As I wrote in the TLS, after calling Snooty Tipoffs (Face Press, 2021) — a 300-page wedge of zany doggerel — “almost offensively facetious”:
Nothing in Prynne is purely ironic […] As he writes to Oliver in 1987: “there is still a shimmer about the durable latency of the common rhymes … as if providence itself resided within these hazards of phonetic accident”. The context of this remark is a despoiled Thatcherite landscape of “yuppies and agribrokers”, and Prynne’s forays into pastoral have always been streaked by awareness of environmental damage. But the idea of a durable, natural “providence” has returned in his recent, rhyme-led verse as a kind of rewilding.
The review then concludes with an appreciation of Not Ice Novice (Face Press, 2022), a short sequence written in the off-key ballad quatrains that Prynne has always done very nicely. There’s even one about the bird that Heaney heard:
Beside corn felt crake
persistently at night
locally for wide awake
was ever their delight
This is not “all crepuscular and iambic”, but I find it moving in its cubist feeling for the candle-lit history of English. “Crake” is a dialect word for crow, leading back to an echoic origin in Old Norse krâka. A corncrake is a field-haunting, night-calling bird, more often heard than seen, whose Latin binomial — Crex crex — is also onomatopoeic. What these lines evoke for me is something like the “felt” history of how such a name arose, among those who lived and worked “beside” a field — or, in early Old English, “-felt”. In the diction of the ballads that later country generations sang, this sound, this name, this awareness of place (“locally for wide awake”) was “ever their delight”. Amid all the difficulty, it’s this sense that poetry can somehow express an almost inarticulate delight in the world that keeps me reading Prynne.
NOTES
You can read my TLS review of recent Prynne books here: