By Law In Sound: J. H. Prynne’s Recent Poetry

Since the appearance of the startling Kazoo Dreamboats in 2011, J. H. Prynne has published a further five volumes: Al-Dente (2014); Each to Each (2017); Of the Abyss (2017); Or Scissel (2018); and Of Better Scrap (2019).[1] None of these books have received particularly sustained critical attention, though each has been met with enthusiasm from the cognoscenti. It’s hard to judge the quality of this enthusiasm, but it seems to rest on: a) the sheer existence of such late-late work, which manifests in a kind of wide-eyed appreciation for Prynne’s poetic stamina; and b) the fact that the fluctuating lyricism of these poems and sequences appears to be less claustrophobic than the punishing phase of writing between Unanswering Rational Shore (2001) and To Pollen (2006). Added to these have been the useful reissues of the 1969 volume The White Stones, an annotated edition of the 1983 work The Oval Window, plus a long interview with the poet by Jeff Dolven and Joshua Kotin, published in The Paris Review.[2] I don’t exempt myself from this enthusiasm. To quote an early line, the night is young / and limitless our greed—to which we might add, these things take time to digest.[3] And yet it seems to me that the critical reception of Prynne’s poetry has stalled. How should we account for this?

The disturbance that Kazoo Dreamboats presents to the schedule of Prynne’s writing can’t be underestimated. If The White Stones and The Oval Window have been tacitly positioned as boundary-markers in the development of his style and method, Kazoo Dreamboats must surely also be nominated as a crucial twist-point in his work of the last two decades. Written during a period of political revolt—the student movement and London riots in the UK, the Occupy movement in the United States, and the Arab Spring—the poem is a visionary work of passion and fervor. For close to thirty pages of long-lined verse, edging towards prose, Prynne details a kind of ecstatic righteousness. Here is a sample from the first page:

                                                                  Always desired by zero option
wide-eyed node employ cloud droplets en masse phantasmal, near in
to scar friable distinct cash-back nexus, on the plate. What’s to
be got contagious dendrite hit conductance ran fast even flash-like,
punished in stupid glory by ever the same to say.[4]

One common critical approach to Prynne’s work, established in the 1990s, has been to identify the various discourses and registers that the language either draws on or refers us to. So in this passage we have the realm of human agency (desire); the structure of power, both juridical and moral (punishment); the ever-present cash-nexus; the human body and cellular biology (the scar and the dendrite); topped off with a détournement of Lenin (“what’s to / be got”). There’s also nature (“cloud droplets”), the economy and game theory (“employ” and “zero option”), and there’s a kind of energetic sweep tying it all together: the contagion, the fast running, and again the threat of punishment. This entanglement is also musical: “desired” leads to “friable” leads to “dendrite,” “cash” glances on “flash,” and the passage is bookended by the rhyming of “Always” with “same to say.” The vowels keep the pulse going in prophetic urgency, the consonants like so much grit in the teeth.

But what was most surprising about Kazoo Dreamboats when it first appeared was its reliance on the formula “I saw,” and the inclusion of what seems to be the direct recall of autobiographical material. These were aspects of composition that Prynne had jettisoned long ago, and have yet to fully surface again. The alibi for the return of this personal pronoun was the poem’s thematic and textual conversation with Piers Plowman—the great Middle English poem of the Peasant’s Revolt—and a genealogy that would also include Milton and Blake. There were other surprises. I remember the night he read from it in an occupied lecture hall in Cambridge during the widespread student protests again tuition fees in 2010-11. The whole thing was amazingly weird, an audience equally puzzled and rapt, the atmosphere crackling with energy. Prynne was an enthusiastic supporter of the student occupiers, going out to fetch ice cream and snacks, writing letters against both the university bureaucracy and the government spokespersons for the free market in higher education. The context for the reading was appropriate. And I remember reading the poem avidly during that period and feeling—a feeling I think I shared with others—that I understood it completely. There was no need to itemise the discourses or to look anything up in the dictionary. The poem felt generous, optimistic, and open.

Readers of Prynne, both casual and dedicated, will appreciate how strange my claim to complete understanding might sound. Part of the prestige of Prynne’s poetry is its much-vaunted (and perhaps equally derided) difficulty, and the usual claim about reading Prynne’s work involves the experience of bafflement, frustration, doubt, and dead-ends, all exhilarating in their own way. But Kazoo Dreamboats, at that time, was different. At the risk of overreaching: in the context of high social disturbance on a local, national, and international scale, the poem skipped right over the problem of comprehension and explication: it just made sense. And the sense it made was reliant, absolutely, on what gets called in critical shorthand the social and historical context. The poem was equal to the turbulence of the time, participating joyfully in the rupture of normal life.

But after ten years of stagnation, the violent absurdity of our present political crisis, the social catastrophe provoked by austerity, and the ever-growing presence of fascism across the globe, it’s hard to recover the turbulent clarity of the poem’s early reception. The central argument of Kazoo Dreamboats is focused on a specific and controversial element of the Marxist tradition: the presence of the dialectic in nature, following Engels, and the inherence of contradiction in all things, following Mao. But that makes it sound too stern and admonitory and solemn. Really it’s a wild work, which goes in excess of any one theme or method. But nevertheless. Western Marxism has tended to follow the example of Georg Lukács, who, writing in a footnote in 1919, dismissed the idea that dialectics could exist or inhere in nature or in things.[5] For Lukács, dialectics are a historically contingent operation of thought, and have little to nothing to do with ontology. The ideas that Prynne explores in Kazoo Dreamboats are about being and non-being, the circulation of forces in subatomic particles, forays into force field physics. Prynne’s adherence to the Engels/Mao branch of the Marxist philosophical tradition is at this point more or less heretical. But perhaps Prynne isn’t a Western Marxist at all. Prynne’s interest in Maoism and in China dates at least to the early 1960s and his friendship with the Cambridge Sinologist and polymath Joseph Needham. But it also emerges from the era of the Vietnam War and liberation struggles across the Global South, to say nothing of the Black Panthers or the prevalence of Maoism in France post-1968. It’s not all that heretical, anachronistic, or unlikely.

I want to set aside the dialectics of nature for the moment. Several essays now exist that dissect that aspect of the poem, and it’s my hope that recent ecocritical approaches to Prynne might take this in new and unexpected ways.[6] In his introduction to the reissue of The Oval Window, Richard Kerridge provides a wonderfully clear account of the dialectics of reading, or at least of reading Prynne, making specific reference to the use of specialized language and unmarked quotations from numerous sources:

These lines, passages, and fragments are mixed together so that their relations are dialectical. That is to say, their poetic effect consists of the interaction of contrasting and opposing elements that continue to challenge and transform each other. The term ‘dialectical’ here should not suggest a progression from the encounter with two opposing elements to a single powerful synthesis that resolves the opposition.… What sort of synthesis could resolve this opposition? All that is available in the present circumstances is synthesis—and song—of the most provisional kind, emerging tentatively and warily in the gaps between thesis and anti-thesis, and always subject to imminent dissolution.[7]

This is, I think, a useful starting point. But the object of Kerridge’s further enquiry is how data retrieval through Google can illuminate the argumentative matrix of the text.[8] By identifying the collaged substrate of the poem and chasing up the manifold allusions and quotations, we enter into a process that proliferates the textual material under discussion. Google sends us to the newspaper, which we bring back to the poem, a little like a well-trained dog. This procedure of reading is undeniably called for in many of Prynne’s poems: the annotations to The Oval Window are evidence enough. But in Kazoo Dreamboats, Prynne seems to anticipate this method: the major quotations from other sources appear as inset blocks of text, and he provides a set of “reference cues” at the conclusion. These might work as prompts, sending us off, for example, in search of the piano music of Christian Wolff. But there’s an uncanny sense, too, that this set of references actually works to stress the finished integrity of the textual object. There’s no need, just yet, to race off in search of who said what. It’s all there.

The books that follow on from Kazoo Dreamboats each seem more resistant to, or less interested in, this type of reading, and I think call for a slightly different conceptual approach. Take this stanza from “Morning” in Al-Dente:

To the or so then for all for on, both for
these an or then, down as before in fond and
too sound by, this. Then from ever bring
along but far but, to under the this better
then to be along, few for some, not of or
at first so. Let by so ever go to, bind with
this the, these given same for him, off far.[9]

What are we supposed to do with this hesitant and mysterious concatenation of articles and prepositions? At a surface level, the closest analogue I can think of is some of the work of the American poet Clark Coolidge, whose The Crystal Text (1986) Prynne has long held in high regard. Perhaps the common progenitor is Beckett. Here there are no “reference cues” and the poem seems almost comically resistant to Google: you are on your own and with the language. If this is song, however provisional, what relation does it have to sound? Do we read it inwardly to ourselves or try it outwardly to the world? Are these divisions so secure? Is it too sound meaning too complete, too whole? All these little word-particles clatter against each other, making the work of representation radically uncertain. With no immediate referent to the world of high finance, of biology, or journalism, the eager scholar is left with little to do but a little head-scratching. Is it too sound because too much sound and not enough sense? What about the strong current of feeling and emotion provoked by the fondness, and the “let by go so ever go to,” the “off far”? Next to the tempests of Kazoo Dreamboats, held together through bravura travesty and aggressive scepticism, what shines through here is sentiment. I can tell you I find the poem moving, but I can’t tell you why this is so. I can’t annotate or seek referent for the delicate catches that happen in the ear or mouth, or how I feel the commas.

After the death of R. F. Langley, Prynne once talked to me about the presence of song within the course of a life. He asked a surprising question: Where do all the songs a person knows and carries go when that person dies? The answer might come readily to the materialist. But since those songs and tunes never wholly belong to the human organism, it’s worth considering that they are released back into the still vibrating world, transformed into some other substance. The books since Kazoo Dreamboats play themes on known tunes, half-rhymes from the history of poetry from Wyatt onwards. Some of these (“Dear heart how like you this?) will be picked up by the antennae of the reader more or less swiftly, with others—say, shreds of Elizabethan lyrics—waiting to be found. This has long been a feature of Prynne’s work, but quotations and allusions used to be brandished with an imperative, or scattered like traps. The quality from Al-Dente onwards is different. A poem like the one quoted above seems to intervene in the region of immateriality—memory and everything lost on the air—and so in the act of writing rematerializes sound, or emphasizes that sound is material.

In the book Apophthegms (2017)—Prynne’s compendium of useful quotations, another addition to the post-Kazoo corpus—he cites the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise of Charles Babbage:

The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered…. No motion impressed by natural causes, or by human agency, is ever obliterated.[10]

Something like this idea forms, I want to suggest, the counterpart to the dialectic in nature for Prynne’s recent work. Here human agency, the history of which is recorded in the language, joins in with the motion of the natural world, right down to the level of the particle. If contradiction does inhere in things, language inheres in things, too, registered as the motion of sound. One way of thinking about Prynne’s recent work is to say it tries to tune into all of this, making song from the scraps he picks up. But maybe that would look more like the NSA than any profound confirmation of the dialectic as worldview. In fact, Prynne has already complicated this whole line of inquiry. His 2010 essay “Mental Ears and Poetic Work” stressed that the poet works with “mental ears” to create a textual intermediary between the sound of actual and potential performances of speech alongside the sounds of “real work in the material world” and also “bird-song, weather sounds, and the cognates,” and “raw phonetic data.” But crucially, Prynne argues that the sounds poems make are not acoustic events, rather “semi-abstract representations of relations and orderings between and across sounds within a textual domain.”[11] To mistake the representation of sound for sound itself is to prematurely short-circuit the tension between song and text.

But the high abstraction of Al-Dente isn’t entirely representative of the prolific work of the past five years. In Of the Abyss, Prynne is quite clearly responding to what is called, in the politesse of the news, the European migrant crisis. The ten poems in Of the Abyss train on the spectacle of the mass death of displaced refugees at the hands of Western border regimes. The first poem begins:

Lead-glance ranking, plank splintered in turn
alone to want living forward, across desert
attending traffic long possible fleet in late
averse to vessel still foremost child penchant,
many after all displayed fluke after, in the roof
cling disbar galena by instance, it must be
flood even so trimmed up as all the rest, flow
all at last better, to crown for sure, for shore
traffic now alight go in open field. [12]

Each poem of the sequence returns us to the outrage of the crowded boat on the open sea and the expanse of desert crossings: these form two poles of constricted movement that the poem variously imagines and charts. In this poem there’s no interest in airy speculation of the kind I’ve just offered above. It is, at its most simple, a poem about paying attention. It proceeds methodically and heavily, frequently landing blows at the line break. The poems run a continual risk of unearned pathos: “to want living forward” is painful compassion, held onto under duress. But Prynne knows this, taking deliberate cheap shots (“for sure, for shore”) and leaving no Western reader exempt from the scene. After 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, critical thinking about Prynne’s work and the work of other Marxist poets in Britain, perhaps especially Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady, tended to focus on complicity. Complicity was the watchword: so much so that the reader might even expect in advance to have their complicity confirmed by the poem.[13] I still find myself reaching for it almost as a reflex, but Of the Abyss resists this by now too-easy payoff by stubborn compassion and patient insistence. Prynne’s internationalism—which extends well beyond European literature—might encourage us at this late stage to think of solidarity as a more useful paradigm.

The title is drawn from Jack London’s socialist masterpiece The People of the Abyss (1903), which documented the wasting of life in the East End slums at the height of the British Empire. So again, this work makes an explicit intervention into the political conjuncture, thinking through the cycle of austerity at home and poisonous racist indifference radiating out from the shorelines and islands of Europe. There is also a link back to Kazoo Dreamboats, via the earlier text’s referential schema. One of the reference cues leads to the fragment by Simonides of Ceos, the “Lament of Danaë” or “Danaë in a Box Upon the Sea” in the version sung by Ed Sanders. This is the mother’s song sung to calm the sleeping Perseus after having been cast out to sea in a wooden box. Children and childcare occur in nearly every poem. This origin-lament seems to set a kind of boundary on Prynne’s own lamentation, checked and checked again. I wonder here about my own investment in Prynne’s work when it is open to more or less direct political commentary. Am I simply hungry for consolation, however specious? If a poem is “about” a crisis that is still developing, does bracketing it off into a discrete sequence present an ethical dilemma? Or would the real moral failure be to say nothing at all?

Yet Of the Abyss, like Each to Each (also published in 2017) and Al-Dente, is not a strongly referential text in the order of Prynne’s earlier work, or at least it isn’t referential in the same way. Thinking about these poems, and thinking about how to read them, I’ve found a concept developed by the Gertrude Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo to be helpful. Dydo writes:

With the words, there enters into her work referential detail that speaks of the world and to herself. Such detail challenges us, as does all referential matter, to read representationally. Pointing out from the composed text to the world, they become centrifugal elements. But joined as words in a text, they become centripetal, creating patterns that point inward, to the composition. Reading Stein becomes both a centripetal, compositional task and centrifugal, referential task, the two in constant, creative opposition.[14]

The dialectic Dydo identifies between centrifugal and centripetal elements comes close to my experience of reading the works at hand. This is perhaps easier to see in Stein, where the nouns are caressed and obsessed by the pull of syntax: but a similar operation is, I think, identifiable in Prynne’s late work. In the passage from “Morning” quoted above, I gravitate to the words I can make reference-meaning with, however few: fond, sound, better, given. They have some centrifugal force. The prepositional phrases and definite articles are centripetal, drawing me back again into the composition. Throughout Of the Abyss, the language that I can make refer to the migrant crisis points me out into the world, but the non-semantic or not yet semantic elements—syntax, the sound, the patterning of vowels and consonants, the falling of stress at the line break, the way the words are joined—push back to the composition.

The idea of centripetal and centrifugal forces as a property of language holds further appeal, because Hegel writes about them at length in The Science of Logic. Marx wrote to Engels about it while sick with flu in 1865.[15] It’s both beyond the scope of this essay and beyond my philosophical competence to offer any summary of these arguments. But it’s one way of registering how the ideas explored in Kazoo Dreamboats have continued to resonate across the books that follow, though the emphasis has shifted. It also suggests a modification of the kind of referential process that Kerridge and many other critics have practiced on Prynne’s writing. That’s to say: before the process, or within the process, of the semantic dialectical argument outlined by Kerridge, there is a contradiction that registers phenomenologically, in the first order of reading. Our attention is subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces. What I’m suggesting here isn’t a call for any kind of formalism, or for the inflection of deconstruction of which Dydo makes such great use. It is perhaps simply a way of acknowledging the scope of what happens in the vivid concentration of reading these poems. The forces as outlined by Dydo work best as an analogy: but perhaps a better term would be imaginary. In a lecture written after Kazoo Dreamboats and before Al-Dente, Prynne raised the possibility that poems are not written by poets but by “a more or less distinct and separate poet-self,” which he terms the poet’s “imaginary.”[16] The corresponding force to the poet’s imaginary must surely be the reader’s imaginary: the self we become when we read, open to disturbance and possibility. When I read a poem I am not entirely myself and my thoughts are not verifiably my own.

Let me try and explain what I mean by this. Hovering near the ledge of such speculation, Prynne has recently offered a quotation from the psychoanalyst W. R. Bion, which serves as an epigraph to Each to Each, and makes an additional appearance in the Apophthegms:

All thinking and all thoughts are true when there is no thinker.

To which I nod my head and knot my brow, wondering if the joke is on me or on my imaginary. An objection might be raised to the poems here: that making qualitative judgements about them becomes close to impossible. Are the poems Prynne has published in the last five years good or bad? What makes one of these poems, considered discretely, better or worse—or more or less successful—than any of the others around it? Perhaps it’s a cop-out to say that this misses the point, being the idle work of the wrong kind of speculation. Yet one of the strange pleasures of Prynne’s writing is the experience of variable readerly incompetence. On the arrival of a new pamphlet sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten how to read, or that I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to do. I may reassure myself that I’m simply being encouraged toward a new or different kind of reading, or, more spitefully, I might think that Prynne has lost it, fucked the whole magnificent project up. In that case I need not be troubled. But what happens next is thought, neither mine nor Prynne’s nor strictly the property of the poem itself. What I want to say is that the poem springs into life, but also that life springs into the poem, and the implication from Bion—that untruth and falsity is the property of the thinker—becomes part of the drama. What in my thinking is true? What in my thinking is false? On what assumptions and habits does my thinking rest? And more, in what social arrangement does this truth and falsity play out? Can it be changed and how is it changing? This is not a process of question and answer, but of uncertainty, testing, humor, and lively play and tracking.

All of this is by way of saying that Of Better Scrap arrives as the luminous climax of a certain recalibration in Prynne’s writing of the past decade. These poems are like high-wire acts: the daring work of putting one surprising word after another to set the mental ears spinning. It calls to mind Lisa Jeschke’s excellent summary in her discussion of Unanswering Rational Shore:

Prynne’s late poetry is, not least, funny, because it dares to allow words and meaning to crash, continue, crash again, get up again; it is a funny response to the new media communication show spreading the simultaneously naive, cynical and brutal assumption that understanding can be improved and community achieved without any actual change in the organisation of labour and work.[17]

Jeschke’s point here not only feels true to the slapstick delight that reading Prynne’s poems can offer; it also usefully historicizes the terrain on which search engine technology rests. Over the past decade any residual utopian vision of the internet has surely been tested out of all consideration: perhaps these even later works, through their marked ambivalence towards the knowledge-form of the search bar, present a distinct noncooperation with Silicon Valley. We turn instead to the vast library of the air. And there’s an improvisatory passion to the poems, a conviction that what comes next is part of the order, an event in space. There are forms Prynne has never used before, strings of words that have never been put together before, joyful in language performance:

It’s not my intention to offer proof by way of close reading. But it’s clear here that the unfamiliar word uncial is centrifugal, and the rhymes of “set,” “metal,” and “yet,” are centripetal. And one thing that I think Prynne’s poetry holds is the further possibility that these forces or positions can be reversed: what was once pointing out to the world now points us into the interior of the composition, and vice versa.

Searching for other analogies for the experience of reading Of Better Scrap, I thought of bell-ringing. Each word seems assigned a musical value that rings out and joins the word next to it and the rest of the words that follow. If this is too close to ceremony or alarm, think of a child’s toy set. But perhaps this model is too static: Prynne is wary of harmony, and the tones must change as we read the poem a second, third, or tenth time, making the tune up for ourselves. What I’m trying to articulate is this: that while the difficulty of Prynne’s poetry has long been acknowledged, we need to find a way of talking about the simplicity of the poems too, the moments of shining clarity activated in reading that are so hard to reconstruct in prose analysis. The book closes with what must be one of Prynne’s shortest poems:

I’m reluctant to add anything to this, except that the “law in sound” flings me centrifugally not only to Charles Babbage, but to Prynne’s claim in a letter from 1968:

Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe.[18]

Prynne gave up on grace long ago, and the air we breathe grows more toxic by the day. The cover of Of Better Scrap, bright yellow, features a gigantic lightning storm. These are Prynne’s noisiest poems yet.

July 2019.