J. H. Prynne

[woops]

Strong links to a previous poem in the book, Frost and Snow, Falling.

This might be worth a read:

"One of the poems in The White Stones is based on the story of a mediaeval missionary to China printed in a book edited by the historian Christopher Dawson. Dawson was also a friend of David Jones from the 1920s on, and one of the 50 influences cited by him in the introduction to The Anathemata.
The book is The Mongol Missions and it was published in 1955."

Prynne and Christopher Dawson

Dawson and T he White Stones One of the poems in The White Stones is based on the story of a mediaeval missionary to China printed ...

angelexhaust.blogspot.com

Something else that looks worth reading in regard to Aristeas (haven't read it yet either)

Jacket 20 - Simon Jarvis: Quality and the non-identical in J.H.Prynne's Aristeas, in seven years

ive reaed these now and neither is very enjoyable, the 2nd in particular is calculated to annoy @luka with its invocations of P Ackroyd and J Derrida.

 

[Benny Bunter]

And it's from Parataxis magazine

 

[Benny Bunter]

I was reading it earlier too, it's pretty good when he stops waffling on about Hegel and Derrida etc and talks about the actual poem

 

[woops]

since there are no academics on this forum any more i don't think we should read anything we don't enjoy.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I tend to just skim through these things to glean a bit more info, but I have absolutely zero desire to read about Hegel, Deridda or M**x.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Barty might analyse this poem as an example of the central-asian-goatherder-ification of modernist poetry

 

[Benny Bunter]

This cool picture of a Siberian shaman might enhance your enjoyment of the poem

 

[luka]

Woke up dreaming of a note on metal. Fever dream logic making some comparison between baking bread and metallurgy. One of those warped dreams that feel profound at the time but won't resolve into meaning on waking.

As far as quality goes, it's one of the great mysteries. I ask every Prynne reader what quality means and no one knows.

 

[luka]

I've read the Simon Jarvis a few times, this is a good point, one that improves the poem...

Gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic
hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with
the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage (17)

Initially, the ‘he’ referred to in these lines is liable to be identified simply with Aristeas: Aristeas gathered heat to himself for his journey into the north and ‘took himself out’ of the settled civilisation of Proconessus both in the literal sense of removing himself from that city and in the metaphorical sense of staging his own death, as to take a village out in modern warfare is to destroy it. He catches up with ‘the tree, the river’ in his journey north in the literal sense that trees and rivers have already, long before humans, occupied the northward terrain left by the retreating glaciers; the rivers and trees are forms of specifically ‘alien vantage’ upon the land in the sense that they are other than human. But ‘the forms of alien vantage’ are also, for Aristeas, the purchase of alien groups of humans, of non-settled and non-Greek communities, upon the earth. Aristeas seeks to catch up with, to understand, the relation to a place and its qualities that is not determined with reference to a fixed city.

 

[luka]

I particularly like the vision of the trees having colonised the land in the wake of the retreating ice long before humans did

 

[luka]

February, 1967

"Man extending himself into the landscape, as you say; which you are right to consider a crucial question for the subsequent formalities of conduct. My own interest has a different emphasis from yours, however, and as it's clear that a great pressure has to be located behind the Indo European migrations, it can as clearly be shaped to serve quite various though related needs.

So that: I address myself to the primal history of QUALITY, as a designation for accumulations of motive simultaneous with patterns of behaviour as convergence I could take this as place-focus, but just as well in the discretionary image of person, or local convulsions in the sequence of time. And with such a separation from the idea of REGION, it becomes more possible to consider land mass more or less as such: the loess tundra, for example, or boreal parkland, in which brief or semi permanent settlement is possible but not in the figure of large social organisation which makes a region. My instinct is that the distribution of local instances of fact which can be grouped(pot and implement typology, for example) has led to imposed ideas of REGION that are foreign in pre literate landscape and which are(by unacknowledged retrojection) based on common law practice concerning land OWNERSHIP. .."

 

[Benny Bunter]

I have a feeling that ^ is only going to confuse me more, but thanks. Is it from a letter or something?

I still haven't got to notes in metal yet anyway. Just read Foot and Mouth which appears to be making some very serious points about global capitalism, while also making me laugh out loud. There's definitely a sense of humour in some of these.

"..the near prospect of Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup, made I see at King's Lynn, Norfolk. Another fine local craft, you don't need to believe all you read about the New York art industry...

..almost ready for my skilfully seasoned 10 and a half oz treat...

..I am assured by the thought and the freedom it brings, & by the garishly French gold medal won by my soup in 1900."

 

[Benny Bunter]

Haha I like this One Way At Any Time one too, a welcome bit of light relief. You can pull quotes out of stuff like this in the way you can with Mark E Smith.

His regular false teeth gleam like sardines

The driver opposite looks as if from some official car

It is Bristol it is raining I wish I were Greek

 

[william_kent]

Thanks to @Benny B I have now tuned my "inner voice" to the "Mark E. Smith" setting when reading Prynne

Swallow cluck evince sniff compel invest

Imagining Mark E. Smith barking that out is heightening my enjoyment no end

or sneering:

simulate acerbic masquerade

suited critic altitude fine lent filament praise

 

[Benny Bunter]

"The difference between the kinds of intent supporting the movement of bluestones from Pembrokeshire to Wessex, and the Sumerian acquisition of tin from Cornwall or Bohemia, must be obvious."

Yeah, Jeremy, that's obvious, we all know that, get on with it mate!

 

[luka]

it's a weird essay. if you dont think about what it means you can come away thinking youve sort of understood it but if you question each sentence you find it all turns to ashes in your hands.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I wanted to know what 'quality' meant, but it seems I also need to need to know what 'substance' and 'property' mean before I can even get near it.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Possibly the weirdest thing I've ever read

 

[Benny Bunter]

it's a weird essay. if you dont think about what it means you can come away thinking youve sort of understood it but if you question each sentence you find it all turns to ashes in your hands.

This seems to be the primary effect of the poems too, at least what I've read so far in kitchen poems and the white stones. Understanding just out of grasp, or maybe already attained at some deep level, but you would struggle to ever articulate it.

 

[luka]

yeah, like infinitely prolonged edging, as i said the other day