The play with words like something and nothing andanything is part of the way in which these representative abstract pronouns are constructed in discourse; very cogently reviewed in Richard Gale,Negation and Non-Being. Most European languages have structures of this kind. Most Oriental languages don’t have structures of this kind. I’m not quite sure if there’s a Chinese word for nothing—probably, there is. But I’m sure there isn’t a word for anything. And, indeed, it’s not possible rigorously to ask what the relation between nothing and anything would be. They’re just pronoun devices to handle certain options which are going to make reference to one thing rather than to another thing. This is a metaphysically playful series of conjurations with these words and the suggestions that they make.
INTERVIEWER
The poem seems to remember so much—science, literary history, philosophy.
PRYNNE
Well, one inhabits a hall of mirrors, a whole series of echoes from reading, from experience, from life practise and the rest. This becomes richer and denser as time goes on. It’s also complicated by forgetfulness, things that you only in part remember. In the case ofDreamboats, one of my strategic reasons for adopting this isolation-chamber aspect was precisely to disable the *immediate presence of prompts to memory, so as to activate the more remote contents of the memory chamber, because they wouldn’t be impeded by visual cues. My empty crow’s nest, this bland and blank bedroom in the middle of Bangkok, was not going to serve up any distractions. It was an echo chamber.
I remembered, because I had been involved in this poem a lot, that double sestina of Sidney’s, “Ye Goatherd Gods.” I quote from that in this Kazoo poem, from memory. I may have called it up on the laptop in order not to misquote it. But my use of the laptop, aside from getting things like Parmenides and Langland up on the screen in front of me, was to call up *moments that I was tempted to write into this poem, in order not to misquote them from memory. If I had misquoted them, it might easily be later corrected, but the misquoted phrase might start to do some damage and make some connections, and then I’d be stuck with it.
INTERVIEWER
Where does the title come from?
PRYNNE
I didn’t want Kazoo Dreamboats to be an autobiographical work, I didn’t want it to be a theoretical treatise. I wanted it to be an extravaganza, really. When I had nearly completed this work, I thought, What title is it going to have? It’s rather critical, because readers will take a cue from the title as to what kind of work it is, and what kind of reading sense they should adopt. The title had to be provocatively unexpected and at variance with what would be a normal treatise or composition—playful, jocular, fatuous, all those things would suit me very nicely.
I hit on this exotic title, and its hyper-ambitious subtitle, or, On What Is, and I thought, That’s just right. Because it gives the reader an advanced warning not to be prepared for anything, not to expect any reckonable framework for the tasks of reading this work. They’ve got to be sort of fancy-free. Not quite fancy-free, because it’s a serious work, but where the seriousness is, and how that seriousness is reckoned with, is their task more than it is mine.
INTERVIEWER
Would you tell us about your teaching and influence at Cambridge—and the idea of the Cambridge School of poetry?
PRYNNE
Here we touch on a highly contentious subject. It has been held, by various different areas of opinion, that there was, and perhaps is, a Cambridge School. This is a pretty dire description, and one that I find extremely *uncomfortable. But there’s no doubt that if you compare Cambridge with Oxford, there has been a great deal of innovative and experimental, lively writing done in Cambridge, and around, of which there was no parallel at Oxford. Oxford was moribund with regard to seriously inventive and active poetical writing. But the Cambridge world promoted a lot of very lively work, and very lively people doing it.
It was not, by any means, so far as the Intelligencerwas concerned, limited to Cambridge, because that community, which operated through the postal service, stretched out to Bristol, and Birmingham, and Newcastle, and Edinburgh, all over the place. On the other hand, when people say that some of this work shows, from time to time, a certain kind of stylistic commonality, it’s hard to deny that this is the case. On the whole, it’s rather intellectualised. It’s frequently ironically dramatised, or dramatically ironised. And these features have a certain range of prevalence in the Cambridge environment. And some of that has to be due, obliquely, to me. I make this confession with extreme reluctance, and great unwillingness, because I find the idea that I have offered any kind of arbitrations of experiments in style, or whatever, personally in my own behalf, exceptionally awkward, and unnecessary, and anxiety provoking. Black Mountain would be a warning against this, or the New York School!
INTERVIEWER
Are there other elements of your work that were influential?
PRYNNE
My prosodic dispersal of the text around the page space became a feature that could be copied or modified, and several young writers started to write blocks of text on the page; they would never have done that if it hadn’t been for the work that I’d written and published in that mode, often in adapted response to modernist American practise. But very seldom did anyone who had read this work of mine master this inwardly enough to find a way of being usefully like it. External features they could sometimes decorate their work with, but what was going inside of work of mine was too mysterious for most of them, fortunately. Much though they might quite have liked to do so, and have attempted to, it was work that didn’t admit them easily to its inner features. And that was a great relief, because they couldn’t, you know. They were kept at their distance and they went their own ways.