‘He drew a distinction between “the voice of the poem” and “the voice of the poet … an accident of biography … which does not interest me”’
in order ‘to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usage.’
‘Although the neurochemistry of the brain, medical operations, the inner structure of the ear, wounds, sutures, and corporeal forms of opening and purchase are all mentioned, the presence of actual human beings is largely absent.’
‘Subjectivity is radically dislocated, with the “I” becoming a largely impersonal pronoun.’
‘For Prynne, poetry only becomes real work when it has exhausted all the possibilities of the common idiom in which life has so far been lived.’
‘According to Keston Sutherland (another ex-student), “poetic thought” in Prynne’s sense of the phrase is located “at what he has called ‘the borders and edges’ of language, that is the vastest and most nearly untraversible distance from the material corruptions of workaday language, which Prynne in 1986 called ‘the false & corrupted idiom of residual, vernacular commonalty as almost pure cant‘.” ‘
Opposing this with something else
‘which he described in a letter to Andrew Crozier as the “retrospective formalism of the occasion.”’
“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.”’
“In Prynne’s poetry, obscurity is combined with excess: there is always more language, more reference, more signification in an expenditure which may or may not be concerned to recuperate some core of meaning from its riot of utterances.”’
‘His is the first poetry to exercise the full potential of the written language. … [It] excises completely the role of the poetic “voice,” whether as a personal or as a synthetic medium of expression, and so it moves beyond the range of purely aesthetic effects. His poetic form offers a writing that calls into question our conventional response to what we think of as “poetic” and what we think of as “non-poetic.”‘
‘Forrest-Thomson offered a similarly salient explication in terms of “the minute attention to technical detail which, together with tendentious thematic obscurity, gives the poet a way of recapturing the levels of Artifice, of restoring language to its primary beauty as a craft by refusing to allow its social comprehension.”’
‘I have found the most productive approach to Prynne’s poetry is simply to keep a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary nearby and to pay close attention to each word as it is laid out on the page, especially the calculated deployment of italics, indentations, line breaks, and punctuation.’
‘Difficult ways of speaking about a complicated world
refracting any easy access to intelligibility with an exasperating beauty.’
marginalamericannotes.com 