Prynne’s poetry is powerful and dense. Each book is an experiment, made in a concentrated burst of effort: a mode of writing instigated by the academic calendar, with its rhythm of term and break. The poems investigate the languages of economics and the conditions of inequality; Marx and Mao are important influences. The poems also combine a deep knowledge of science with practical expertise in geology and botany: the devotions of a naturalist are frequently audible. And always there is literature: the history of English poetry, and the collective, global memory of the English language.

For Ben Watson—a former student of Prynne and one of his wittiest critics—the philosophical devotion to contradiction is what has driven this poetry to ever greater obscurities (including, since the 1970s, its general withdrawal from the personal voice). Responding to Kazoo Dreamboats, or, On What There Is, a long poem from 2011 which reads like a raging argument between a research library and an electric fence, Watson writes: “Prynne is a prankster, a trap, a contrary Mary in a blue robe twinkling with kitsch lights… a creator of baroque caves of language glittering with aphorisms and jokes and surprises.” Prynne’s later tendency, however, to knit words in a mesh of hermetic indirectness has dismayed some poets who might otherwise admire such visionary sentiments. Peter Riley, a close contemporary from the Cambridge poetry scene in the 1960s, writes in his latest book, Pennine Tales: In addition to these three principal series, the Prynne papers also contain a great many ‘subject files’ (papers of various descriptions linked by a single theme); diaries, notebooks and commonplace books; and papers concerned with University teaching and administration. There are many papers and documents relating to Prynne’s connections with China, including his periods of residence as a teacher in various Chinese universities. Prynne himself is perfectly accessible, living and working in Cambridge, until recently teaching and lecturing at Gonville & Caius College, and always offering generous hospitality and advice to numerous poets and readers. The Sunday Times had no trouble snatching an impertinent photo of him cycling down the street a few weeks ago, which it published on February 22. His self-exile from the metropolitan literary "scene" is more in the manner of, say, the late novelist William Gaddis, who thought writers' biographies irrelevant, than of the vanishing JD Salinger or the invisible Thomas Pynchon.The work of Prynne is often seen by many as being difficult - both in its language and its apparently hermetic references. Meaning seems to be flexible, speech is destabilised, and readers are confronted with questions concerning their own status - even complicity - in the relationship between the mediated word, the crafted text, and the external world, without which it cannot exist. It's the idea of the self as centre, the so-called lyrical I that's being questioned here. "Rich in Vitamin C" shows how every human interaction, personal reflection, and meditation on time and place involves others, and effects, and is influenced by, macro and micro changes in the social, economic, and political climate. Above and beyond all else, Prynne's concerns are moral and ethical - he believes even that in the intimacy of the lyric moment, we have an obligation to recognise what is happening in the greater world. This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century.’ - Adam Phillips, Observer

Introduction to Prynne's Poems in Chinese," with Keston Sutherland. The Cambridge Quarterly 41/1 (2012). Prynne has, thus, over three volumes, recapitulated the Hegelian project of making consciousness real to itself. It is this project that underlies not only a great deal of romantic verse (Prynne’s interest in Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Trakl, and Paul Celan is marked) but also the dominant tradition of Anglo-American modernism, from the imagists on through the poetry of Olson. The return to romanticism has characterized American post-modernism, as Olson’s refusal of Joyce and Eliot indicates, and Prynne’s work must be seen in relation to this tendency. Prynne's early influences include Donald Davie and Charles Olson. He was one of the key figures in the Cambridge group among the British Poetry Revival poets and a major contributor to The English Intelligencer. His first book, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, was published in 1962, but Prynne has excluded it from his canon. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968), with expanded and updated editions appearing in 1999, 2005, and 2015. 2020 to 2022 has seen an unprecedented burst of productivity, with the publication of over two dozen small press chapbooks and several substantial collections, including book-length poems, sequences and a poetic novel. Let’s talk about the development of your practice. You were an undergraduate here at Cambridge. Tell us about your work with the scholar and poet Donald Davie. In Day Light Songs (1968) Prynne worked through formal problems of syntax and subject position that his poetic procedures rendered inescapable, problems fundamentally of self and other and their articulation in a spatial field. The poems are small, dismembered in their line units, and, in their concern with breath, with song, may be related to the Elizabethans, such as Thomas Campion, and to Louis Zukofsky, who had taken up Pound’s concern with the romance tradition of song and related it to an ontology of language. Prynne aligned himself with this work and carried further than his predecessors a recognition of language as the dwelling place of being.J.H. Prynne, The Art of Poetry No. 101," interview with Jeff Doven & Joshua Kotin, Paris Review 218 (Fall 2016). There’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? Context is everything. Language itself (as Prynne's etymological and philological forays suggest) carries residual traces of its historical and literary uses and contexts; it is neither pure nor innocent, and is not simply a coin that can be uncomplicatedly traded for a single meaning. What Prynne's work presents us with is not his opinions, scrambled and awaiting our delighted decryption, but the simultaneous processes and viewpoints of the worlds created in language. As he once wrote, in the closest he has come to a personal statement on his method: "It has mostly been my own aspiration, for example, to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usage; and thereby with the reader's own position within this world."

One begins to appreciate how grossly partial a single viewpoint is, and how political its exclusions. "What can't be helped / is the vantage, private and inert", Prynne writes; but the ambiguities in "can't be helped" call attention to one of the poem's themes; of what constitutes empathy, of how, and how much, we "care". Poèmes de Cuisine. French translation of Kitchen Poems, by B. Dubourg and J.H. Prynne (Lot-et-Garonne: Damazan, 1975). Prints in the New Snow: Notes on ‘Es Lebe der König’, J.H. Prynne’s Elegy to Paul Celan" by Matt Hall. Cordite Poetry Review (2013). Unsurprisingly, some of Prynne's most significant affiliations are with American and continental writers and thinkers; Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Martin Heidegger and Paul Celan must be included in the list of those who make their presence felt at different stages of his work. And most recently, a commitment to exploring the signifying systems of Chinese poetry has introduced the most profound implications for contemporary reading practices.

Found in 7 Collections and/or Records:

Difficulties in the Translation of 'Difficult' Poems" by J.H. Prynne. Cambridge Literary Review 1/3 (2010). For Prynne, the production of a poem, the production of a book, are as much part of the cycles of commercial fetishisation as the creation of the poem itself. So, it is the responsibility of the poet (and reader) to work at diminishing a degree of moral irresponsibility that overshadows the creation and production of art. Which explains why most Prynne works have been available in small print-run pamphlet forms published by presses for whom profit is not a motive. The forthcoming Poems are being published by a combination of the Australian presses, Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and Bloodaxe, keeping costs down and avoiding, as much as possible, the usual dictates of the market. Brass, published in 1971, indicates the direction Prynne took. “L’Extase de M. Poher” is a sustained and delirious denunciation of the bureaucratic, scientific discourses of technological man. Out of the conflict of these discourses an extraordinary verbal surface is constructed, composed of multifarious idioms, each of which, as it collides with the other, is given as designated by a single sign, “rubbish.” Throughout the larger part of the text, this one sign governs what could be an almost infinite number of significances. “Rubbish” is not bound to any single concept, but can range across the discourses of the modern world. One discourse is interchangeable with any other. In the last few lines, however, there is a crossing over, a chiasmus, which in another context Prynne called the “twist-point.”“Rubbish” is that which gives onto the “essential,”“the / most intricate presence in / our culture.”“Rubbish” alters its status: from being a single sign in the larger field of the poem, it becomes all those signs (actual objects in the real) that can signify the essence of things. In other words, there is a triggering effect, whereby the verbal entity “rubbish” shifts its status in respect of the real, the change in status being the mark of the poem’s access to and participation in the ground beyond it. Prynne’s poetry aims at effecting a disappearance of the ego in an encompassing subjectivity that communicates without intermediary with the essence. Thus the poem conceives of itself as a “model question,” a question both to and of the model that turns the subject, the reader, and opens him to his own access to being.

The View Contents List tab below links to a complete listing of the texts included in Poems 2016–2024.There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure. Yet there is also an enormous relish for the world, and all its “stuff,” which saves this writing from being merely high-minded. “I for my own part,” Prynne has said, “have a positive addiction to the meanest trash and to unmitigated urban pollution.” Over the years he has also immersed himself in the study of shamanism; Chinese; metallurgy; medieval and Tudor music; botany; and geology (which resulted in one of his greatest single poems, “The Glacial Question, Unsolved”). Perles qui furent[ Pearls That Were] (in French). Translated by Alferi, Pierre. Marseille: Éric Pesty Éditeur. 2013. ISBN 9782917786208. In The Making of the Reader, David Trotter proposes a useful distinction between “pathos” and what he terms “anti-pathos”. In any poem the voice of the self and the voice of the text are subtly different. For a Romantic poet their clash results in pathos: the pathos of origins, sincerity and feeling. In modernist poetry, what we frequently get instead is “anti-pathos”, which rejects appeals to origins and insists on dissonance, not harmony, as the defining condition of art.