Poems: (2015) third edition

Product Information

Poems(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books; Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999).

J. H. Prynne was born in Kent in 1936 and studied at Cambridge University; he worked there as a teacher and scholar in the Department of English and is currently a life fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Sussex, and a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, People’s Republic of China. He has published forty-one collections of poems during the period 1968–2015, all now reprinted in the third enlarged edition of his Poems (Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, 2015). I t is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable. His name had become, as The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry put it in 1994, ‘synonymous with all that is most rebarbative in the work of the contemporary English avant-garde’. Considering his obscurity (limited edition pamphlets circulating among those in the know; no publicity, no interviews), it is remarkable how much fear and loathing the mere existence of his work once generated. So it proved. For four days at the end of January, we met after lunch in his rooms at Gonville and Caius College, at the University of Cambridge, and talked, with a break for dinner, until we ­pleaded exhaustion sometime after midnight. At the conclusion of each day’s interview, Prynne graciously walked us out through the sixteenth-century Gate of Honour before returning to his desk in the rooms he has kept since he was first appointed as a fellow, in 1962. On the Poems of J.H. Prynne. Ed. Ryan Dobran. Glossator 2 (2010). Complete volume dedicated to Prynne. With my best and not even particularly advanced critical reading self, I could see perfectly well that this work was not distinctive. It was imitative, and it didn’t have much in the way of strong possibilities. I was seeing all this strong possibility in the Don Allen anthology, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to tune into that in a very convincing way because the English nature of the English language and its English resources inhibited that transfer. It was not a transfer that could be made just like that. So being a poet at that stage was very discomfiting.The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2023. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the unchanged contents of 34 texts, from Each to Each (2017), written in 2016, to Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023), as well as the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence.

At the author’s request, online and printed materials relating solely to the university, as well as occasional contributions to online discussions, are not included in this bibliography. The poem confronts “it,” that which is “less” than the “yes and no” of the dialectic of presence and absence of ontology. The poem can extend “it” only the flatness of a demotic denial. Nonetheless, the very contrast of idioms in the language splits the poem away from the conclusion it seeks to effect: “stuff it.” The subject receives from what is other even the message he emits. As an advert for Prynne’s work, this would seem to send out all the wrong signals: pellucid, approachable and a world away from our image of Prynne the wilful mystagogue. As Jeremy Noel-Tod has pointed out, the immediate context is a geological controversy on whether the Pleistocene gave way as smoothly as we think to the Holocene, the era taken to mark the beginning of human time. With arch wit, Prynne embroils us in a modernist controversy, but one that played out roughly 12,000 years ago. This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century.’ - Adam Phillips, ObserverThere’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it? Prynne’s writing is, undoubtedly, the most audacious of postwar English poetry. In vindicating the tradition from which it emerges, his writing erases that tradition. The attempt to present poetry as what exemplifies a universal and aesthetic mode of cognition, as a direct glimpse of the truth, subverts itself, allowing itself to be read in the terms of a specific practice of writing. By taking language to the limits set by its own assumptions of the poetic, Prynne’s work effects the recognition of those assumptions for what they are: misrecognitions, ideologies. By opening onto an elsewhere, an excess, a beyond, Prynne’s work, in spite of itself, has explored the conditions for the language that speaks always too early, or too late.