luka

Well-known member
Prynne’s prolific recent poetry – more than two dozen small-press pamphlets since 2020 – also continues to contest the definition of itself. The ugly duckling of the brood, Snooty Tipoffs (2021), is a sumptuously printed, 300-page wedge of zany nonsense rhymes. Even to a reader used to Prynne’s ironic refusals of lyric decorum, these throwaway improvisations can feel like a rummage in a box of plastic cutlery: “My breakfast lies over the necklace / These weevils are evil to see”. As always, there is subtlety and eloquence to discover too (“dip flow in running current / Where fluted plumes fold slow and elegant”). But an alternative title might have been Curate’s Eggs.

What would Oliver, an excellent critic of Prynne’s work, make of it? He increasingly believed that poets should “vulgarise [themselves] and join in the chorus more fully”, comparing his own late style with Philip Guston’s turn from abstract expressionism to the cartoonishly figurative. In the almost offensively facetious vulgarity of Snooty Tipoffs, Prynne perhaps offers a knowing reply to his late friend.

Nothing in Prynne is purely ironic, however. 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. His diction once stood at a severe distance from that of Heaney-esque nature poetry; now the “vulgar” names of flora and fauna concatenate in staccato patterns across tongue-twisting parataxis, like the roll call of a cacophonous ark. To quote At Raucous Purposeful (2022): “Such watch nuthatch, acrobatic darting head-down fawn stitchwort. / Patchwork”.

Prynne’s vision of the world is, he tells Oliver, “a patchwork of truths”: “when Pound lamented that the reality of Paradise was spezzato (or “jagged” …), his mistake was in the lament, not in the recognition”. Hence Prynne’s addiction to three-word titles that point in all directions, like fingerposts. Is Not Ice Novice (2022) a meditation on old age (“no man may be wise before / He’s lived his share of winters in the world”, advises the Old English elegy “The Wanderer” (trans. Richard Hamer)) or the ice-free future of climate change? Each delicately off-key, singsong page sets four quatrains in a square, their meanings circling: mid-sequence the corn crake (in decline since the mechanization of farming) appears opposite Babbage’s “difference engine” or proto-computer. This ominous juxtaposition ramifies into the memorably cracked later line “Penguin engine splinter”. The anthropocene itself becomes a patchwork of words stitched together by “common rhyme”, as the trappings of capitalism morph from cowrie trades to Amazon vans:

She sells sea shells
on shore before in time
mortal shuttle at swells
ridden even to prime.
 

version

Well-known member
This is a nice line and seems a worthy project,

– 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.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Would have been nice if pound wasn't fascist I suppose but it is what it is, doesn't have that much bearing on the quality of the poetry itself. Well, maybe sometimes it gets a bit ugly, but he always had that mean spirited tendency even in the early stuff before he went full Mussolini.
 

catalog

Well-known member
This is a nice line and seems a worthy project,

– 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.
i was talking with my friend at the weekend and he was explaining the basil bunting position about what went wrong after pound went mad (bunting continued to write to pound when he was in the asylum).

bunting thought that english poetry after ww2 went the wrong way, in the sense that high modernism had been reached and was doing well, but then somehow it went into "sensible" poetry that was dowdy, like larkin.
 

version

Well-known member

Now singing through thin clouds the high lattice
is crusted with fear at eye level in irritant chronic
spasm report. Nothing to credit song-like modular
clastic deformity, to make a cage structure called
hunt the stunt, clathrate denial. By inversion of
subject the grammar yields to novel clamour, days
pass spilled like water. Flow chants, name the way
after loyal sons. Retro tamp down phosphate bridges
or on a beach exploded. Tenacious each voice placement
seeded direct wrapped, rule of law. Braided up like
floss to a seizure named like water. As ligand spike
as now forever, waged against us, forever we shall
walk the path in fear of empty hope, shunned pat.
 

version

Well-known member
Encouraging flipping through this thread last night and feeling my reading's loosened up a bit since three years ago. I still like to know what things mean, but I don't tend to feel the furrowed brow and emphasis on literalness I once did. Words, sounds, effects and style carry more weight than they used to and I'd credit that partly to discussions on here and just having seen and read more.
 

luka

Well-known member
Encouraging flipping through this thread last night and feeling my reading's loosened up a bit since three years ago. I still like to know what things mean, but I don't tend to feel the furrowed brow and emphasis on literalness I once did. Words, sounds, effects and style carry more weight than they used to and I'd credit that partly to discussions on here and just having seen and read more.
i think youre wrong about white chapel though. im really enjoying it this time round but i am helped a lot by knowing everything about sinclair and all the jobs he's had, all his little mates like joblard(catling) and being very familiar with the parts of london he's writing about.

have you read from hell?
 

version

Well-known member
I've pulled the Sinclair out of the charity shop pile with a mind to giving it another go. And, nah. I haven't read From Hell. I've just seen the film.
 

luka

Well-known member
i dont know how faithful the film is to the comic, not seen it. but being famliar with from hell would definitely help given its the same story in a way. plus the usual sinclair reminsicences of old jobs eg
at trumans brewery on brick lane, and the book dealing
 

version

Well-known member
i dont know how faithful the film is to the comic, not seen it. but being famliar with from hell would definitely help given its the same story in a way. plus the usual sinclair reminsicences of old jobs eg
at trumans brewery on brick lane, and the book dealing

The film's pretty streamlined. Sinclair said it was a failure.

 
Top