What J.H. Prynne does not want, he’s said, are “poems written by a poet,” meaning, I guess, ones beholden to the poet’s sense of self and therefore “trapped in the poetic habits from which they originate.” I suppose this goes some way toward explaining the difficulty that I’ve had with Prynne’s work in recent years. I mean, I understand that it’s no big deal to be whoever one is, even while writing poetry, but I don’t see the point of going out of your way to avoid it either. Could a poem not written by the poet (like an icon described as “acheiropoieton,” made without hand) be one caused by some higher power—or at least by the poet one is not yet, the poet of the future? And therefore maybe for a reader yet to be? It’s easy to feel Prynne’s reader must be someone else, a reader still on the way. I keep thinking that I could become that person, though I’m not sure how. Maybe by being more patient, letting my attention linger over words at their own stubborn pace rather than according to my own haste. I do know that I spend more time with the (online) dictionary when reading Prynne than otherwise. Thus: mafic—“relating to, denoting, or containing a group of dark-colored, mainly ferromagnesian minerals such as pyroxene and olivine.” I’ll probably never get to use that one again. How about parget? That’s to “cover (a part of a building, especially an external brick wall) with plaster or mortar that typically bears an ornamental pattern.” There’s a word that could come in handy someday. Not unlike eximious: “rare, select and distinguished; eminent”—moreover the title of a 1982 album by the jazz guitarist Joe Pass (with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass). Information comes easy these days and can be distracting. Prynne doesn’t make it obvious which of his words’ manifold potential references should be relevant. The uncertainties in his syntactically cockeyed poetry, contrary to Keats, seem aimed at provoking an “irritable reaching”—if not for “fact and reason,” well, for something. The fact is that although I get hung up on his words, Prynne’s recent poems leave me with the feeling that the words are less important than some patterning (variously sonic, visual, and semantic) he is at once making, hinting at, and concealing by means of them, and to which I should be, as the title of one poem here has it, “Attending with Conscience.” Or as another poem “To Them,” tucked loose rather than bound into the book (apparently a late addendum) has it,
Known it is, across forth pattern trust relinquish to claim opportune glimpse, fair brow loft carried, raised between lift to them and them as for now most.
Most of Of Better Scrap consists of blocks of long lines, around fifteen syllables or so, heavily enjambed, with the first word of each line uncapitalized (except when it’s also the start of a sentence—rarely) so that the poems look like prose with the right margin unjustified. Their rhythm is not of prose. Perhaps Prynne has taken the visual line as his measure—not unlike the (usually short-lined) visual metric of James Laughlin; the boxy results are more reminiscent of the “metrical space” of Amelia Rosselli’s Variazioni belliche. But claustrophobic: to enter seriously into one of these poems can feel like crawling through a tunnel. When I come out the other end, I know I’ve experienced something I've perceived but obscurely, and I’m not sure what it was or if I liked it, and it takes me a while to decide I want to venture the next one, yet I do. And then I start to wonder, does what I’ve just done even count as reading? Maybe. Maybe it’s reading of poetry not by a poet as it is not done by a reader.
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J.H. Prynne, Of Better Scrap, is published by Face Press, Cambridge, UK, 2019
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.