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The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne | Book review | The TLS

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Knowing like mad
The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne
By Jeremy Noel-Tod

April 14, 2023

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Detail of the dustjacket of J. H. Prynne's Sea Shells Told, 2022

| © Face Press

IN THIS REVIEW

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-letters-of-douglas-oliver-and-j-h-prynne-1967-2000-joe-luna-editor-snooty-tipoffs-whitman-and-truth-not-ice-novice-j-h-pr… 1/8

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The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne | Book review | The TLS

THE LETTERS OF DOUGLAS OLIVER AND J. H. PRYNNE, 1967–2000
208pp. The Last Books. Paperback, £24.

Joe Luna, editor
SNOOTY TIPOFFS
326pp. Face Press. Paperback, £29.50.

J. H. Prynne
WHITMAN AND TRUTH
24pp. Shearsman Books. Paperback, £6.50.

J. H. Prynne
NOT ICE NOVICE
16pp. Face Press. Paperback, £9.95.

J. H. Prynne

Timelike delirium
cools at this crossing, with your headin my arms. The ship steadies
and the bird also; from frenzyto darker ﬁelds we go.

These lines, from the end of J. H. Prynne’s “diurnal” sequence Intothe Day (1972), have been much admired. The American poetGeorge Oppen – an austere judge, his tastes formed on highmodernism – wrote to its author: “Can scarcely credit the existence of the last
poem … its incredible beauty.” Douglas Oliver, Prynne’s friend andcontemporary, told him: “the sequence is patient and … that patience isbeautiful”. Beautiful, but also true: “the most considerable thing I can say
about the last poem is quite simply that it is correct”.

Being correct has been a passion for Prynne. Appointed a fellow of Gonvilleand Caius College, Cambridge in 1962, he spent his career teaching English andfeeding his polymathic imagination with late nights in the library. An earlycorrespondent was Charles Olson – another modernist of Oppen’s generation –https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-letters-of-douglas-oliver-and-j-h-prynne-1967-2000-joe-luna-editor-snooty-tipoffs-whitman-and-truth-not-ice-novice-j-h-pr… 2/8

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The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne | Book review | The TLS

to whom he sent long, arcane bibliographies. “Prynne is so – he’s knowing”,
Olson marvelled, “knowing like mad.”Prynne’s overwhelmingly generous erudition deﬁnes the dynamic of hiscorrespondence with Oliver, which begins in 1967 with the latter tentatively
introducing himself as a journalist from the Cambridge Evening News andenclosing poems for “frank criticism”. The next two letters, both from Prynne,
comprise photocopies of Renaissance anatomical drawings and a reading liston body perception: “probably unuseful”, he comments, “you might shred it inyour soup”.

Thus, as Prynne began to make his reputation with his early masterpieceTheWhite Stones (1969), Oliver was welcomed into his inner circle and its tone ofhigh inquiry salted with jocularity. (Not coincidentally, the Cambridge of thistime also produced Monty Python’s song about boozy philosophers). To
anyone who has admired the Romantically ambitious verse that resulted, therecent volume of letters edited by Joe Luna – and produced to the usual ﬁnestandards of its publisher, The Last Books – could hardly be more absorbingand valuable.

Epistolary prose, for Prynne, has always been a critical mode. Although privatenews distantly impinges on the contents of his letters, he has self-consciously
used them as T. S. Eliot used the essay: to work through his thinking about
poetry, philosophy and politics before an audience. We may reasonably
assume that these letters were always intended to be read by others – as Luna
notes in his introduction, Prynne kept copies and recently deposited them inCambridge University Library.

Oliver lived a more freelance life, less methodical but also less hermetic. Whathe valued in the early Prynne of Kitchen Poems (1968), he told the readers of
the Cambridge Evening News, was “honesty in a poetry that can take politics
and economics into its strands” – a poetry, that is, of left-wing critique, whichhttps://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-letters-of-douglas-oliver-and-j-h-prynne-1967-2000-joe-luna-editor-snooty-tipoffs-whitman-and-truth-not-ice-novice-j-h-pr… 3/8

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The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne | Book review | The TLSattempted to build among the ruins that Ezra Pound’s fascism had made ofsuch a project on the right.

Their friendship over the next three decades negotiated the tension between
art and activism, as Oliver’s growing commitment to an ethos of poetic
testimony ran counter to Prynne’s grammatically fragmented banishment of
the lyric “I”. In the 1990s Oliver worried about how to recover “a direct
urgency of speech” that was also politically alert to privilege, and responded toMalcolm X’s call in 1964 for white allies to criticize whiteness with A Salvo forAfrica (2000), which “risks prose, a walking measure” to speak of European
colonialism. (It appeared just before he died at the age of sixty-two.) Prynne,
meanwhile, says of his sequence Word Order (1989): “I have written as directly
about physical torture as I know how” – that is, by dark implication (“holdingback the parts / of the soul by black thuds”).

Denise Riley, a rare female poet to pass through the world of Cambridge poetryat this time, has written of “men … lulled by music to dreaming their sonicenchantment is virtuously militant”. (Women feature ﬂeetingly here either aspersonal news or the curious ethical category of “womanliness”.) Luna frankly
acknowledges the “generic entitlement” of his double act, while making clear
his devotion to both Prynne and Oliver, not least with his necessary,
illuminating notes. And what is heartening about the whole volume is how
warmly and eloquently each correspondent contests the virtues of the other’sposition. They are determined to ﬁnd common moral and artistic ground.

Prynne, however, remains the cagier of the two, rarely discussing his poetry
explicitly, preferring to drop hints during moments of broader reﬂection.
Proposing the prosodic phenomenon of “retrospective” stress, he scrutinizes
the ﬁrst stanza of Thomas Wyatt’s “So unwarely was never no man caught”,
concluding that “the contradictory overlap” of meaningful emphasis
represents an experience that “cannot altogether coherently be said”. This
type of ambiguity, which sparks “the ﬂare of a mind-act”, has long beenhttps://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-letters-of-douglas-oliver-and-j-h-prynne-1967-2000-joe-luna-editor-snooty-tipoffs-whitman-and-truth-not-ice-novice-j-h-pr… 4/8

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The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne | Book review | The TLS

Prynne’s own ideal: notice how, in the lines quoted from Into the Day, theclimactic resonance is retrospectively heard if the reader chooses to reversestress “also” to rhyme with “go”. The eﬀect is to echo the uncertain
equilibrium of the central image (“the ship steadies / and the bird also”), themoment of hesitant rest between “delirium” and “frenzy”. Readers looking for
an introduction to Prynnean dialectics as a mode of literary criticism might
begin with Whitman and Truth (2022), an exemplary set of student “readingnotes” that leads the seminar room into darkness as it dismantles the apparent
eye-witness testimony of a poem about a Civil War hospital from Drum-Taps(1865). Prynne ends by quoting Michael Riﬀaterre’s claim that “ﬁctional truth”
is “poetic” and remarking drily: “There is no Glossary deﬁnition for ‘poetic’”.

Prynne’s proliﬁc recent poetry – more than two dozen small-press pamphlets
since 2020 – also continues to contest the deﬁnition of itself. The ugly ducklingof the brood, Snooty Tipoﬀs (2021), is a sumptuously printed, 300-page wedgeof zany nonsense rhymes. Even to a reader used to Prynne’s ironic refusals oflyric decorum, these throwaway improvisations can feel like a rummage in abox of plastic cutlery: “My breakfast lies over the necklace / These weevils areevil to see”. As always, there is subtlety and eloquence to discover too (“dipﬂow in running current / Where ﬂuted plumes fold slow and elegant”). But analternative title might have been Curate’s Eggs.

What would Oliver, an excellent critic of Prynne’s work, make of it? Heincreasingly believed that poets should “vulgarise [themselves] and join in thechorus more fully”, comparing his own late style with Philip Guston’s turnfrom abstract expressionism to the cartoonishly ﬁgurative. In the almostoﬀensively facetious vulgarity of Snooty Tipoﬀs, Prynne perhaps oﬀers aknowing reply to his late friend.

Nothing in Prynne is purely ironic, however. As he writes to Oliver in 1987:“there is still a shimmer about the durable latency of the common rhymes … asif providence itself resided within these hazards of phonetic accident”. The
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The poetry and criticism of J. H. Prynne | Book review | The TLS

context of this remark is a despoiled Thatcherite landscape of “yuppies andagribrokers”, and Prynne’s forays into pastoral have always been streaked byawareness of environmental damage. But the idea of a durable, natural“providence” has returned in his recent, rhyme-led verse as a kind ofrewilding. His diction once stood at a severe distance from that of Heaneyesque nature poetry; now the “vulgar” names of ﬂora and fauna concatenate instaccato patterns across tongue-twisting parataxis, like the roll call of acacophonous ark. To quote At Raucous Purposeful (2022): “Such watch
nuthatch, acrobatic darting head-down fawn stitchwort. / Patchwork”.

Prynne’s vision of the world is, he tells Oliver, “a patchwork of truths”: “whenPound lamented that the reality of Paradise was spezzato (or “jagged” …), his
mistake was in the lament, not in the recognition”. Hence Prynne’s addiction
to three-word titles that point in all directions, like ﬁngerposts. Is Not Ice

Novice (2022) a meditation on old age (“no man may be wise before / He’s lived
his share of winters in the world”, advises the Old English ele y “TheWanderer” (trans. Richard Hamer)) or the ice-free future of climate change?
Each delicately oﬀ-key, singsong page sets four quatrains in a square, their
meanings circling: mid-sequence the corn crake (in decline since themechanization of farming) appears opposite Babbage’s “diﬀerence engine” orproto-computer. This ominous juxtaposition ramiﬁes into the memorably
cracked later line “Penguin engine splinter”. The anthropocene itself becomesa patchwork of words stitched together by “common rhyme”, as the trappingsof capitalism morph from cowrie trades to Amazon vans:

She sells sea shellson shore before in time
mortal shuttle at swells
ridden even to prime.
Jeremy Noel-Tod is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-letters-of-douglas-oliver-and-j-h-prynne-1967-2000-joe-luna-editor-snooty-tipoffs-whitman-and-truth-not-ice-novice-j-h-pr… 6/8