Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The 'latency' or delay between an event (like the moment of impact of a wound for example) and the body's/mind's response to it is like a millionth of a second or something, but I think that's the tiny space of time that Prynne is microscoping into and describing.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
So he's making poetry out of the gaps between:

Input/output

Instruction/deployment

Event/response

And on a wider scale, history (pre-event, everything leading up to it) and the aftermath projecting into the future.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Similar to this from one of those Gravity's Rainbow articles I posted.

... the inanimate world is made dynamically animate. A light bulb is given a lengthy biography. Pinball machines rewire themselves. A new polymer is sexualised. Fungus Pygmies sing acapella “on the other side of […] the whole bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle”.

At the deepest level, molecules do not seek independence, but ever more complicated bonds and ties. Fusion, not the fission that detonates over Hiroshima, will out. Life insists on its becoming, even under the mushroom clouds.

[...]

The novel also marks a major moment of transition: from an aesthetic theory based on resemblance (analogy, metaphor, symbolism, etc.) to one predicated on the infinite fungibility of molecular matter and the omnipresence of electronic signals.

The two tribes unite!
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
For anyone sceptical about Prynne and what he does, thinks it's just word soup or whatever, I think him treating "the birth of the mind act" is as good a justification for it being important poetry as any other. It's one of the oldest philosophical/poetic questions and Prynne's contribution is groundbreaking.
 
For anyone sceptical about Prynne and what he does, thinks it's just word soup or whatever, I think him treating "the birth of the mind act" is as good a justification for it being important poetry as any other. It's one of the oldest philosophical/poetic questions and Prynne's contribution is groundbreaking.
When the birth-of-the-mind-acts drive subverbal prompting of full-spectrum generative AI content, then we'll see some masterpieces.

Early. clumsy daubs just dropped

 

william_kent

Well-known member
So he's making poetry out of the gaps between:

Input/output

Instruction/deployment

Event/response

And on a wider scale, history (pre-event, everything leading up to it) and the aftermath projecting into the future.

i'd add:

stasis /movement ( i.e., nomads, migration, explosive dehiscence )

organic / synthetic ( explicated in Not Ice Novice )
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Another thing I get from newer stuff, condensed and microscopic as it is, is the feeling of incredible speed of thought, so fast as to seem almost instantaneous travel from one point in time another, which perhaps explains why these poems are ostensibly just lists of words without commas or grammar or anything - there's no time for that sort of thing if you want to convey how information travels. It has to be ultra-fast, no gaps. They're quite hard to read from beginning to end for that reason, it's like everything is happening simultaneously.

All you can do at first is cast your eye over the thing as a whole to get the idea, and then later pick out bits to investigate with a dictionary or whatever. The 'word soup' text block presentation is a result of the speed at which information travels.
 

luka

Well-known member
\next page of Latency of the Conditional:
Word fettle bronze patch gleam beam
purpose reason verdict, brilliant underside
violet whitebeam nuance once to next along
at cumulative emplacement, refolded azurite
fewer following consequent in attachment
search regulated knit surfactant reluctance
testimonial arranged congested. As ever in
pressure agile informal thermal one converted,
cirrus novice indented fluency bittern owners
pierglass violet invite spectral luminous
spoken wheelbase whinchat motivate bet
saluted; harmonic settlement new con-
clusive figuration pointer accusative intended
blended inflected necessitous hidden, verdant
scruples ridgeway lee acceptance limb

love this page sun on underside of wing
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
'congested' stands out for me in that, especially next to 'arranged'.

You could possibly read it as a snapshot of a mind of someone sitting down to write a poem, rather than a 'poem' itself.

If it's a wing, like you say, that could be a figure for the imagination taking flight, or at least trying to.
 

luka

Well-known member
Norwegia wool with ambien synth setting luxe desert
highlights to met flourish advent lipgloss plush
integer performance durable fabric fit endurance
circuit talcum towel absorbent regime credit fibre ratio
in enzyme breakdown revolutionary display tray
sequence enchanted adjunct taupe to neckline

Adjunct periodicity the pink blush cactus horizon
temperate low gradient run across runway section
pedestal lush regimento mauve cascade grey cashmere
hauteur cost tailoring sexual upholstery interior
aeronautic life jacket the textured lineament of
granite cross section incline cross purposes grapple
limit vortex reached rate at which shear sector
turbine breaks here at intersplice lever expedient
release template expectancy returns forecast arrival.

Neat-lock new bag clean gleam factory outlet warehouse
sale item reduced goods stockpile. Turbine-cyclone
distribute matter make shrapnel shearing
disintegrate shards of spinning light fracture.
Blue glinting gemstones sparkling. O happy
reunion turning spinning whirling earth.
Kellogg's milk name-your-price Sherpa waits with
whatever judgment sealed inside infinite
steady state patience. Shall we make the ascent?
 

luka

Well-known member
Timelike delirium
cools at this crossing, with your head
in my arms. The ship steadies
and the bird also; from frenzy
to darker fields we go.
These lines, from the end of J. H. Prynne’s “diurnal” sequence Into the Day (1972), have been much admired. The American poet George Oppen – an austere judge, his tastes formed on high modernism – wrote to its author: “Can scarcely credit the existence of the last poem … its incredible beauty.” Douglas Oliver, Prynne’s friend and contemporary, told him: “the sequence is patient and … that patience is beautiful”. Beautiful, but also true: “the most considerable thing I can say about the last poem is quite simply that it is correct”.

Being correct has been a passion for Prynne. Appointed a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1962, he spent his career teaching English and feeding his polymathic imagination with late nights in the library. An early correspondent was Charles Olson – another modernist of Oppen’s generation – to whom he sent long, arcane bibliographies. “Prynne is so – he’s knowing”, Olson marvelled, “knowing like mad.”

Prynne’s overwhelmingly generous erudition defines the dynamic of his correspondence with Oliver, which begins in 1967 with the latter tentatively introducing himself as a journalist from the Cambridge Evening News and enclosing poems for “frank criticism”. The next two letters, both from Prynne, comprise photocopies of Renaissance anatomical drawings and a reading list on body perception: “probably unuseful”, he comments, “you might shred it in your soup”.

Thus, as Prynne began to make his reputation with his early masterpieceThe White Stones (1969), Oliver was welcomed into his inner circle and its tone of high inquiry salted with jocularity. (Not coincidentally, the Cambridge of this time also produced Monty Python’s song about boozy philosophers). To anyone who has admired the Romantically ambitious verse that resulted, the recent volume of letters edited by Joe Luna – and produced to the usual fine standards of its publisher, The Last Books – could hardly be more absorbing and valuable.

Epistolary prose, for Prynne, has always been a critical mode. Although private news distantly impinges on the contents of his letters, he has self-consciously used them as T. S. Eliot used the essay: to work through his thinking about poetry, philosophy and politics before an audience. We may reasonably assume that these letters were always intended to be read by others – as Luna notes in his introduction, Prynne kept copies and recently deposited them in Cambridge University Library.

Oliver lived a more freelance life, less methodical but also less hermetic. What he valued in the early Prynne of Kitchen Poems (1968), he told the readers of the Cambridge Evening News, was “honesty in a poetry that can take politics and economics into its strands” – a poetry, that is, of left-wing critique, which attempted to build among the ruins that Ezra Pound’s fascism had made of such a project on the right.

Their friendship over the next three decades negotiated the tension between art and activism, as Oliver’s growing commitment to an ethos of poetic testimony ran counter to Prynne’s grammatically fragmented banishment of the lyric “I”. In the 1990s Oliver worried about how to recover “a direct urgency of speech” that was also politically alert to privilege, and responded to Malcolm X’s call in 1964 for white allies to criticize whiteness with A Salvo for Africa (2000), which “risks prose, a walking measure” to speak of European colonialism. (It appeared just before he died at the age of sixty-two.) Prynne, meanwhile, says of his sequence Word Order (1989): “I have written as directly about physical torture as I know how” – that is, by dark implication (“holding back the parts / of the soul by black thuds”).

Denise Riley, a rare female poet to pass through the world of Cambridge poetry at this time, has written of “men … lulled by music to dreaming their sonic enchantment is virtuously militant”. (Women feature fleetingly here either as personal news or the curious ethical category of “womanliness”.) Luna frankly acknowledges the “generic entitlement” of his double act, while making clear his devotion to both Prynne and Oliver, not least with his necessary, illuminating notes. And what is heartening about the whole volume is how warmly and eloquently each correspondent contests the virtues of the other’s position. They are determined to find common moral and artistic ground.

Prynne, however, remains the cagier of the two, rarely discussing his poetry explicitly, preferring to drop hints during moments of broader reflection. Proposing the prosodic phenomenon of “retrospective” stress, he scrutinizes the first stanza of Thomas Wyatt’s “So unwarely was never no man caught”, concluding that “the contradictory overlap” of meaningful emphasis represents an experience that “cannot altogether coherently be said”. This type of ambiguity, which sparks “the flare of a mind-act”, has long been Prynne’s own ideal: notice how, in the lines quoted from Into the Day, the climactic resonance is retrospectively heard if the reader chooses to reverse-stress “also” to rhyme with “go”. The effect is to echo the uncertain equilibrium of the central image (“the ship steadies / and the bird also”), the moment of hesitant rest between “delirium” and “frenzy”. Readers looking for an introduction to Prynnean dialectics as a mode of literary criticism might begin with Whitman and Truth (2022), an exemplary set of student “reading notes” that leads the seminar room into darkness as it dismantles the apparent eye-witness testimony of a poem about a Civil War hospital from Drum-Taps (1865). Prynne ends by quoting Michael Riffaterre’s claim that “fictional truth” is “poetic” and remarking drily: “There is no Glossary definition for ‘poetic’”.
 
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