Still catching up on J.H. Prynne. What, I wondered, on picking up his most recent chapbook, Parkland, had led the British poet to write something about the Florida town where in 2018 a young man murdered seventeen people at the high school where he had formerly been a student? I don’t know what led me to assume that this was the Parkland of Prynne’s title, though one of the work’s three epigraphs, from the libretto to Bellini’s Norma, seemed to confirm it—part of it reading:
Oh, do not cut them down In the innocence of childhood. Remember that I am your blood Have pity on my children.
But then as I began to read Parkland—a (mostly) prose poem in two parts, each then subdivided into eight or nine sections—I began to wonder: it didn’t seem to have anything to do with a school shooting after all. Instead it’s about, well, the Queen of Sheba (there’s biblical epigraph to that effect) and a couple of her retainers, half-brothers, named Peter and Tom, who eventually become just P and T, for the most part, like variables in a math problem. The Queen mainly reigns as an anonymous she (the Bible never named her either). The whiffs of narrative gliding through the text, which encourage the reader through it to a degree unusual in Prynne’s recent writing, never come close to solidifying. The fiction, such as it is, remains in a volatile state amidst Prynne’s pleasantly addled syntax. (I seem to remember someone once speculating that Prynne might be somehow using Chinese syntax, though that seems implausible to me—the results would have to be even stranger than they are.) Diction is mildly archaizing—froward, fulgent, indited, minish, etc.—the last also occurring in the opening poem of Prynne’s previous Of Better Scrap; not quite archaic, just yet, is arbitrament, whose heyday, according to Google Ngram, was 1867—despite Prynne’s usual admixture (his poetic habit?) of technical lingo of various sorts. I was surprised when Yemen was named (and recurrently) until I realized that the unhappy modern nation occupies the territory of the ancient kingdom of Saba, e.g, Sheba. Momentarily, something like a response to Yemen’s present condition comes into view:
How could they know her realm for real is in shattered runs, the pain of destruction and misery enslaved, and yet the bird messengers avouch disaster, the open gate like the mouth of terror, must it be as broken in hunger, her city in hold of rebels, populace at verge of frank starvation.
The reality-effect soon dissipates. Commentators on Prynne’s writing often get far by treating it is a sort of puzzle, in which the words are pieces you have to see how to fit together into a hidden (and preset) structure. At best, the effort to see how these word-pieces might snap together might make you look at and appreciate each of them separately. The commentators must be right but their way can’t be mine; I can’t stand word puzzles—even sudoku irritates me. How to enjoy this writing without fitting it to a thematic interpretation? Can I say that Parkland is about the current disaster in Yemen any more than I could claim its subject to be the shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School? I don’t think so, even though I understand the former as a deliberate reference and the latter as an accidental one. What then? There’s much more, after all, about song, and about songlines—music low and muffled, but little by little the writing gets you listening harder for its Celanian “breath-turn.” Prynne’s poetry is famously resistant—difficult, obdurate—but isn’t the resistance all on the reader’s part? Eventually you let go of your resistance (Stockholm syndrome?) and just listen to the “cantilena in reprise,” until you start missing your bracing struggle with the text and put up some defenses again. Then you’re left like one of Prynne’s elusive personages: “Peter now is all question, in quest to stave off answer from internal assent imitate.”
Addendum: After I announced the imminence of entries on Prynne, Anthony Barnett kindly sent me the brief review of Parkland he’d recently published in PN Review. It turned out that Anthony and I have picked out many of the same points, even quoting many of the same lines—which suggests, no, not that great minds think alike (how unlikely!) but that the salient factors from which any reading of the text is likely to begin (and of course these are mere beginnings) are more or less evident to anyone, even in poetry often pegged as a bafflement.
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J.H. Prynne, Parkland, is published by Critical Documents, Cambridge, UK, 2019 (or London, 2020? The title page and colophon are in conflict).
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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.