J. H. Prynne

[Benny Bunter]

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee

 

[Benny Bunter]

I googled that tbh, but there's stuff in the plays too that I can only half remember.

 

[Benny Bunter]

"slant sunlight' and "slanted sunlight" are in both this one and the yyalridins one.

 

[yyaldrin]

do you think this account is prynne? https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/slanted-sun-or-slanting-sun.2608782/

 

[Benny Bunter]

2 Emily Dickinson poems:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

-------------------------------------------------


Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

 

[luka]

ive found and am enjoying an essay about jhp ive not read before. i thought id read all of them

Placing Homelessness: Reading J.H. Prynne's Wound Response

This paper proposes that the concept of place in J.H. Prynne’s Wound Response (1974) is founded on a condition of homelessness. Prynne recognizes the complicity of a humanist idea of home with totalitarian fantasies of foundations and origins. We argue that Wound Response constitutes a homeless...

poetry.openlibhums.org

 

[Benny Bunter]

ive found and am enjoying an essay about jhp ive not read before. i thought id read all of them

https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/id/6331/#![/URL

[QUOTE="Benny Bunter, post: 78580... threshold" "fleet memory" Good essay so far

 

[Benny Bunter]

Aww fuck, I just wrote a fairly long post there and dussensus mangled and lost most of it, fucking hell

 

[Benny Bunter]

I'll try again.

Might be worthwhile having a look at the first poem in the book to get some some clues about what he's up to regarding the memory - this one seems relatively clear.

View attachment 21414

Just read the first few pages of that essay, but note that here we have an "open point in memory" which ties in with the open wound in Wound Response, and that sense of "fundamental homelessness that haunts the experience of space and place" (and the body/mind) from the essay. Here, there is "no plaza" with a "communal spring or fountain at its centre". Temporary refuges, but no fixed home.

So the graft metaphor from Shakespeare is a way of combating the ravages of time on the memory, and preserving it - that's what most of the sonnets are about aren't they? Time the great destroyer, and the poet's power to immortalise through his words.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Not the most coherent of posts, but I haven't finished the essay yet, or read the poem properly so it'll have to do for now, a possible path to go down in the future

 

[Benny Bunter]

"fleet memory grafting"

 

[luka]

I've got a lot of sympathy with the position. It's why I like those kind of deep readings you see in that shining documentary. And no author would claim they are aware of everything their work implies. The idea of the unconscious alone makes that impossible. But at the same time I can't personally completely dismiss the notion that although there might not be a single right way to read a text, there are numerous wrong ways.

another consideration is how the work interacts with time for instance RAW finds (fairly convincing) references to hiroshima and nagasaki in the wake, written before the events occured. sign of a magical work. keeps interacting with the present.

 

[version]

I call this one Luka's Pantheon.

So much great art by me littered across the internet.

 

[luka]

sublime

 

[version]

another consideration is how the work interacts with time for instance RAW finds (fairly convincing) references to hiroshima and nagasaki in the wake, written before the events occured. sign of a magical work. keeps interacting with the present.

What Baudrillard calls a 'strange attractor'. A work which draws things to it and fosters coincidence.

 

[version]

Finished Oxen... last night and within maybe the last ten pages or so, if that, it kept throwing things at me which I'd recently noticed or mentioned elsewhere. I saw someone refer to accelerationism as "acc/kali" ("kali" presumably meaning Kali Yuga) then the term Kali appeared in the book. I made a joke about Leo being Geriatrix from Asterix then it said "old man Leo". I was reading about the ongoing Trump shitshow and the book referred to "Trumpery insanity". I read Matthew's Quietus piece where he mentioned different forms of yoga, one of which was the path of knowledge, the intense study of books, then Mulligan said "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods."

The Trump one was the last which popped up and I did actually say something out loud at that point. I can't remember what though. Think it was just like "Fucking hell. What?!". Felt as though the book had been observing me and kept dropping hints.

 

[version]

Has there been any further word on that prose collection of Prynne's that was slated for publication?

 

[luka]

no. it's a mystery. i think i read he was misbehaving.

 

[sus]

another consideration is how the work interacts with time for instance RAW finds (fairly convincing) references to hiroshima and nagasaki in the wake, written before the events occured. sign of a magical work. keeps interacting with the present.

Ian Champion and I were just discussing this last night. We said, How do you distinguish between the good kind of text-enchanting interpretation. And the bad kinds, for instance, znore seeing twin towers on page 119 of the Wake

 

[sus]

My contention is that something like the p119 twin tower has no predictive value on the rest of the text. It is a one-off isolated island. Whereas a good reading of a detail makes it luminous, in the Pound sense. Turns the detail into a key that lights up the whole text.