The Huntsman of the Rubáiyat: J H Prynne and Peter Henry Lepus Go to Abu Ghraib" by Simon Eales. Cordite Poetry Review (February 2016). Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. 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. The poem confronts “it,” that which is “less” than the “yes and no” of the dialectic of presence and absence of ontology. The poem can extend “it” only the flatness of a demotic denial. Nonetheless, the very contrast of idioms in the language splits the poem away from the conclusion it seeks to effect: “stuff it.” The subject receives from what is other even the message he emits. The View Contents List tab below links to a complete listing of the texts included in Poems 2016–2024.

The decade since Poems (2015) has been the most productive period of Prynne's life, with over thirty limited editions published between 2017 and 2023. To have added these to a fourth edition of Poems would have doubled the size of that volume. Poems 2016–2024 is therefore a separate, supplementary edition of his later work, including, except for minor corrections, the unchanged contents of 34 texts, from Each to Each (2017), written in 2016, to Hadn't Yet Bitten (2023), as well as the corrected 2023 text of At Raucous Purposeful (2022). The 26 Impromptus comprising Memory Working, originally published by Face Press in three separate editions in 2020 and 2021, appear here as a complete sequence. Lézard de feu[ Fire Lizard] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne: B. Dubourg. 1975. OCLC 1113486452.Sand og Kobber. Norwegian translation of selected poems, by Torleiv Grue (Oslo: Forlaget Oktober, 1989). Long respected as a teacher at Cambridge University and librarian at Gonville and Caius College, J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century. A lyrical experimentalist, his work has mesmerised and attracted readers from around the world for three decades. It has brought some to Cambridge in pursuit of new and unread texts, it has inspired students to develop their own ways of investigating the processes of poetry, to question the prescribed ways of reading, and led translators such as the late and brilliant Bernard Dubourg to dedicate themselves to exploring the nuances and variations in language and potentials of "meaning" that lie in its structures.

Poèmes de cuisine[ Kitchen Poems] (in French). Translated by Dubourg, Bernard; Prynne, J. H. Damazan, Lot-et-Garonne. 1975. OCLC 500082771. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link)Jeremy Prynne lecture on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI". Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #28 (April 1999). See also related review of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1969). The curve of Prynne's career has seen a steady intensifying of this kind of challenge to the reader. After the rationalistic meditations of a first volume that he has decided not to reprint, the oeuvre has been marked by strongly motivated deflections of established reading methods. In The White Stones and Kitchen Poems, the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts for the occasion of utterance. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes. In Brass, the reader is jolted, more rudely and exhilaratingly, from one unruly format to another, and is forced to cope with constant adjustments of tempo and tone, stretching from invective to elegy, not simply within the volume as a whole, but often within each text. Linearity and narrative, if not dispensed with altogether, become increasingly redundant, and in the adoption of the poetic sequence as the most frequent vehicle for Prynne's concerns, the emphasis on recurrent figures and sound patterns begins to tip the balance in favour of "vertical" rather than "horizontal" priorities in interpretation. This tendency is established in the "diurnal" sequences of the 1970s ( Fire Lizard, A Night Square, Into the Day) and developed and complicated throughout the following two decades.

Prynne’s first collection of poems, Force of Circumstance, appeared in 1962. Published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, and omitted from Poems (1982), it was the only publication of Prynne’s work by an established British publishing firm. This collection, influenced though it is by the formal concerns of Donald Davie and the approach to landscape of Charles Tomlinson, constitutes an attempt to move beyond these positions, which at that time represented the most serious attention to poetry easily available in the English poetic milieu. The poems in some instances move beyond meaning toward a foregrounding of the poetic process, so that what is said also implies the position from which the statement is made. Poems such as “Surface Measures” move from a depiction of the concept of the human, as seen in the image of ladders or as “vertical music,” to an evocation of the “latent matrix above / This brilliant music” which is continuous with the sea and “the land where oranges grow.” By the use of paradox, the “latent” matrix that is “above” the brilliant music, apprehended by children in the “ignorance” of their dance, points to a real beyond everyday reality, an above that is also below, to which the poet and the child have comparable access. The poet’s active role in this process can be seen in the high degree of self-consciousness he displays regarding his artifice; his syntactic coherences are strongly marked and his diction foregrounds itself as a play between concretion and abstraction. Thus the poet is established, as the enunciator, in the position of truth, a position reinforced by irony and judgment. “I” is, of course, the vertical letter. The contradictions in this position, between the claim to truth and the displacing effects of the language of that claim, were to provide a tension sustained over much of the later work. Prynne's most productive decade has also seen the publication of three prose works, Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 (2015/2016), Apophthegms (2017) and Whitman and Truth (2022), along with editions of Prynne's correspondence with Charles Olson (2017) and Douglas Oliver (2022). His two-volume Collected Prose is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York). On the Poems of J.H. Prynne. Ed. Ryan Dobran. Glossator 2 (2010). Complete volume dedicated to Prynne. As an advert for Prynne’s work, this would seem to send out all the wrong signals: pellucid, approachable and a world away from our image of Prynne the wilful mystagogue. As Jeremy Noel-Tod has pointed out, the immediate context is a geological controversy on whether the Pleistocene gave way as smoothly as we think to the Holocene, the era taken to mark the beginning of human time. With arch wit, Prynne embroils us in a modernist controversy, but one that played out roughly 12,000 years ago. Finding aid for The English Intelligencer Archive at Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

At the author’s request, online and printed materials relating solely to the university, as well as occasional contributions to online discussions, are not included in this bibliography. The poem comes from The White Stones (1969), a book as central to postwar British poetry as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings or Rosemary Tonks’s Iliad of Broken Sentences. Around the time Prynne wrote it, his fellow Cambridge poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson was developing the theories of “naturalisation” that inspired her critical study Poetic Artifice. To Forrest-Thomson, as a formalist, poems are all about language, whereas “naturalising” readings want to think that poems are really, deep-down, about daffodils or train journeys from Hull to London. The amount of scientific material in the poems would not have seemed so strange even a few decades ago: most of the canonised poets engaged with the scientific activities of their time, including Wordsworth and Shelley. The "two cultures" identified by CP Snow, and the rapid splitting of scientific inquiry into ever-increasing specialisms, have made even less likely Wordsworth's dream that scientific knowledge could be integrated into the unity of life rather than used to portion and control it.

Prynne’s early poems are full of cities, streets and houses. At the same time, they seek to encompass “the formal circuit” of our lives: the invisible forces that shape experience, just as the words of a poem are shaped into verse by its rhythms (“line breaks like tea breaks,” as Prynne quipped admiringly of the poetry of EA Markham). What, these existential meditations ask, is the condition or “quality” that we have in common, moving through the world at the mercy of the elements and each other: Poems(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books; Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999). Travellers’ tales, however, will tell you little about the single-minded devotion of this avant-gardist to his art. Prynne’s statements on poetry have been scattered to the winds as letters, lectures and notes in academic and samizdat publications. Private Eye scored a satirical hit when they informed readers that photocopies of AD Penumbra’s critical essay “Than With Whom What Other: A Challenge to Scansion” could only be obtained “by application to the British Library.” 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.Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. Prynne's name has long been, among poetry readers, oddly totemic: he is demonised by some British poets, idolised by others. He is regarded as obscure in two senses. One, he is not regarded as "well known". The difference, perhaps, between the general obscurity of British poets and the obscurity of Prynne is that he has made few efforts to publicise himself: he doesn't give interviews, is not willingly photographed, produces his barely publicised work through small presses in (rather beautiful) limited edition chapbooks, and rarely features in mainstream publications except as an idle shorthand for a wide variety of avant-garde writing.