kevin nolan capital calves
- Thread starter luka
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Benny Bunter
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That was God's work.
But Prynne never really repeated it which is a bit frustrating. He was really good in this mode, then he abandoned it!
Benny Bunter
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Prynne seems to have abandoned the idea of love sometime in the late 60s. Since then, it's hard to think of a less sentimental poet than Prynne. Maybe something terrible happened to him in his private life.
Benny Bunter
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Probably a symptom not a cause
Benny Bunter
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The white stones is very interested in some sort of cosmic love, and then you get Brass
I dunno, the 60s fallout was very big, we're still reeling from it now in a sense
Benny Bunter
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The fallout of the sixties seemed to be terrible, one massive comedown ever since
luka
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The book as a whole constantly conflates the notion of rhetorical investment in certain positions with the economic vocabulary of investment in stocks and shares: hence the “upside of the song” in the lines above, with their ironic allusion to the upward movement of share prices. In fact the poem as a whole filters the rhetoric of lyric transcendentalism through the stock market language of “futures” and “options”. The “bands” of the the book’s title are also “Zero-Coupon Bonds”: “Corporate bonds that do not pay interest periodically (semiannually) in the fashion of conventional types of bonds, but instead sell at discounts of par until their final maturity, when payment of principal at par plus all of the interest accumulated (compounded) at the rate specified at the time of original issuance of the bonds is paid in a lump sum” (Charles J. Woelfel. The Fitzroy Dearborn Encyclopoedia of Banking and Finance 1218). The fact that with such bonds no cash is actually paid out until final maturity is an ironic comment upon the non-stick teflon throat of the lyric which never accounts for its complicities, never counts the cost of its rhetorical privilege. The ever escalating cost, the “upside of the song” that “excites lock-tremors / as the crest gets the voice right by proxy” continues this idea: the “lock-tremors” are both an image of a barely containable flood of lyric intensity, and an acknowledgement that the attraction of zero-coupon bonds for investors is “...the locking in of the prevailing high interest at issuance of the bonds” (Woelfel 1218). Getting the voice right by proxy, seems again to chide at the privileged rhetorical instrument of lyric and its self-elected authorisation to speak for another.
luka
Well-known member
These opening lines suggest to me an ironised contemplation of death and the attendant hope for an afterlife: “a dream to pass on through”. Reeve and Kerridge have also drawn attention to the opening line of “Rates of Return” — “ Here then admit one at a time” — as suggesting “both the gates of heaven and admission to some cultural spectacle” (Nearly Too Much 34). Similarly, the opening lines from “Fool’s Bracelet” give us the contemporary scene as a society of the spectacle imaged as “the day park”, and the souls awaiting possible afterlife are deemed “waiting clients”; satirically extending the 8o’s conversion of all aspects of life into “service industries”, to religion. The irony operating throughout this collection is that both Christianity and investment banking have a vested interest in the “futures market”. Hence the merged vocabularies of hope and expectation: for an afterlife, and rising share prices. Both involve a postponement in the evaluation of the present in favour of future rewards, and so the present — “the day park” — is “shared by advancement”. If “advancement” might signal ironical commentary on the state of civilisation and its discontents as an inventory of financial gain, the fact that it is “shared” brings further poignancy. The term “shared” blurs a vocabulary of reciprocal relationships and communal commitment with the opposite vocabulary of the dvision of a company’s capital entitling the limited few to a proportion of the profits. The blurred registers of hope and expectation continue as: “It is / the next round in the sing-song by treble touches, / a high start not detained by the option / of a dream to pass right on through”.
luka
Well-known member
| The commodification of hope as a religious contract for the future — an afterlife bought into through a slow-maturing policy demanding unquestioning suffering in this world — relates back to the phrase “deterrent hope”. Hope for an afterlife — conditional upon the results of the day of judgement, and therefore a certain quota of fear — acts like a nuclear deterrent in its cementing of the social order by implicit threat: that of Nuclear apocalypse or damnation. Prynne’s introduction of this parallel is characteristically ambiguous and ambivalent in tone: providing the reader with exactly the difficulties in discerning “the difference between the right and the righteous, the pain of loss and the power of pain” amongst the ironical and parodic interplay of tones that he felt problematic in his letter to Andrew Duncan: |
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Benny Bunter
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Kevin certainly has an active imagination.
Benny Bunter
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Active imagination refers to a process or technique of engaging with the ideas or imaginings of one's mind. It is used as a mental strategy to communicate with the subconscious mind. In Jungian psychology, it is a method for bridging the conscious and unconscious minds. Instead of being linked to the Jungian process, the phrase "active imagination" in modern psychology is most frequently used to describe a propensity to have a very creative and present imagination. It is thought to be a crucial aid in the process of individuation.
Benny Bunter
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The range and depth of responses it generates is incredible. Where's that quote you posted the other day. The Borges one
Benny Bunter
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luka
Well-known member
One temptation for a reviewer, at this point, would be to explain the
dazzling array of meanings that can be derived from even a single stanza.
A recent critical book devoted to Prynne’s work focuses on just this sort of
exegesis, and its authors enthusiastically tease out from the poems elaborate
suppositions concerning Prynne’s spiritual, economic, historical, and aes-
thetic concerns. And though the critical readings are both imaginative and
smart, their net effect serves to invent a writer not unlike the one Borges
describes, whose genius lies less in his poetry than in the fantastic arguments
167REVIEWS
to be made for why his poetry should be admired
dazzling array of meanings that can be derived from even a single stanza.
A recent critical book devoted to Prynne’s work focuses on just this sort of
exegesis, and its authors enthusiastically tease out from the poems elaborate
suppositions concerning Prynne’s spiritual, economic, historical, and aes-
thetic concerns. And though the critical readings are both imaginative and
smart, their net effect serves to invent a writer not unlike the one Borges
describes, whose genius lies less in his poetry than in the fantastic arguments
167REVIEWS
to be made for why his poetry should be admired