J. H. Prynne

[Benny Bunter]

Which is what I was saying too, you're the one who just called it 'gibberish'! Lol

 

[luka]

I mean, I've literally just spent three or four days reading a book of eight pages and about a hundred words, looking up every word in the dictionary and etymological dictionary. And it's just a word sequence. There's no sentence structure there at all. Literally just a list. I'm not knocking it I'm just saying in the final analysis it is strictly gibberish.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Right, those later ones that are just lists of words you might describe as gibberish, but I don't think it applies to the one we just discussed, or for quite a lot of the stuff in kitchen poems and white stones for that matter.

 

[luka]

View attachment 10486

Trying to find meaning in this is an exercise in going crazy. Which I think of as a good thing. It's like being a kabbalistic scholar

 

[Benny Bunter]

I had a bit of fun thinking about this daft little one last night:

USE YOUR LOAF

Then part of it fell down.
It was like rain, down was its fall
but partial and to the side.
The side-part fell, if down
then sideways and lay
dying there too, on my side.
Thus parted, own you like it
as eye-pain. You laid it down,
her name your art dies for.
Beside herself you all part then
and her own is not so, known
down there as ways fallen apart

..which if anyone who has tried to bake a loaf of bread before knows, if you don't do it properly sometimes as it rises in the oven, it partially collapses on one side.

From there he's obviously gone off into wordplay and with no real meaning, but he's 'used his loaf' to start the whole exercise off both literally and metaphorically.

Funny one, isn't it?

 

[woops]

I had a bit of fun thinking about this daft little one last night:

USE YOUR LOAF

Then part of it fell down.
It was like rain, down was its fall
but partial and to the side.
The side-part fell, if down
then sideways and lay
dying there too, on my side.
Thus parted, own you like it
as eye-pain. You laid it down,
her name your art dies for.
Beside herself you all part then
and her own is not so, known
down there as ways fallen apart

..which if anyone who has tried to bake a loaf of bread before knows, if you don't do it properly sometimes as it rises in the oven, it partially collapses on one side.

From there he's obviously gone off into wordplay and with no real meaning, but he's 'used his loaf' to start the whole exercise off both literally and metaphorically.

Funny one, isn't it?

Switches over to some stuff about a muse like female figure, lost love in the last 4 lines, perhaps.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Switches over to some stuff about a muse like female figure, lost love in the last 4 lines, perhaps.

Yeah cool, I like that. And then you could link the falling down/apart of a relationship to the first bit about the failed loaf of bread collapsing (on one side, significantly) in the oven. Why not?

Definitely not just gibberish!

 

[luka]

Pastry face

 

[Benny Bunter]

Crispy crunchy loaf

 

[luka]

"Jeremy Prynne isn't your oeuvre rather thin?
Please don't hit me with your rolling pin" etc

 

[luka]

Version wrote this then deleted it

What this tradition calls 'study' and 'reading' requires that any reality be treated as an obscure message addressed by an unknowable or even unnameable agency. As with a verse of the Torah, one must listen to the phenomenon, decipher and interpret it, of course, but with humour, without forgetting that this interpretation will itself be interpreted as a message no less enigmatic - Levinas would say no less marvellous - than the initial event.

 

[version]

I didn't write it. I quoted it.

 

[luka]

I think that it was clever and pertinent (though I don't know who Levinas is) so I've saved it from the cutting room floor

 

[version]

It's another bit from that Lyotard essay.

 

[woops]

What this tradition calls 'study' and 'reading' requires that any reality be treated as an obscure message addressed by an unknowable or even unnameable agency. As with a verse of the Torah, one must listen to the phenomenon, decipher and interpret it, of course, but with humour, without forgetting that this interpretation will itself be interpreted as a message no less enigmatic - Levinas would say no less marvellous - than the initial event.

if you're thick as fuck though you'll think it's just gibberish

 

[luka]

I think you might be missing my point. Possibly cos thick as fuck?

 

[luka]

If I was going to read books to understand Prynne this sort of thing would be far higher on my list than Heidegger

Word-Formation in English

This book is the second edition of a highly successful introduction to the study of word-formation, that is, the ways in which new words are built on the bases of other words (e.g. happy - happy-ness), focusing on English. The book's didactic aim is to enable students with little or no prior...

books.google.co.uk

 

[Benny Bunter]

As an aside, the other day I was reading High Pink on Chrome, and that has loads of culinary/food related words too. I'll type them out:

Take stock/boiled in the pasteurised skillet/reduced almost to a syrup/choice herbs/the carrots need thinning/melon seed, dyed in the grain/bite at breakfast/to be devoured at a sitting/pass the mint sauce/the caustic sheen of that crest rises in the oven/the microwave/field of parsnips/cold lunch/give or take another sandwich/this little biscuit/feedstuff/hold there like butter-fat/choice flavour/the baker's trial

 

[Benny Bunter]

Read another thing linking it to this which I can't be bothered to read. (If you want to track these things down good 'JH Prynne Bruckner'

Frost at Midnight

and as oft With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear Most like articulate…

www.poetryfoundation.org

This poem is fucking amazing, wow! Definitely gonna have to get into some of that Romantic stuff (is it from lyrical ballads?)

And yeah, I can see how it informs the Prynne poem, especially the first section - fireside musings and that.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It's clearly influenced Prynne's Moon Poem too. "Quietly shining to the quiet moon" at the end there.