It’s like he saw it coming. “The Numbers,” the first poem in the vast first volume of the Poems of J.H. Prynne, opens:
The whole thing it is, the difficult
matter: to shrink the confines
down.
Prynne died in April, aged 89. Now we can see the whole thing, the size and scope of what he made. It’s not an easy thing to see. The various obituaries—he got a page in most of the reputable British papers—each shrank him down in their own way; all of them, though, made much of his “difficult / matter.” An “erudite and ‘difficult’ poet who became a cult figure to some readers and many Cambridge undergraduates, but made others flinch,” averred the Telegraph. Note the scare quotes: Part of what makes difficulty difficult is not quite knowing how to talk about it. (Note also the faint raised eyebrow of “undergraduates.”)
To be fair, if any poetry counts as difficult, it’s Prynne’s. All the hallmark snags of modernist poetics are on show: opaque allusions, abstruse vocabulary, wayward syntax, sudden and unexplained shifts of register and scene. Often it feels like the snags are the show. And unlike, say, T. S. Eliot, he never softened. The opposite, actually: By and large, the later the poem, the less intelligible. Here’s the first sentence of “Guardian Fitting,” from 2020’s Passing Grass Parnassus:
Sloop clack fissile mockery saviour direct
octane contact beckon tick reptile secluded,
unction rissole actuary stick point moreover
further score; boiling socket power pockets
misfitted behaved implore fraction returned.
I have literally no idea what to do with this. I stare at the block of words as I would an Anthony Caro assemblage or Donald Judd box, waiting stupidly for meaning to dawn. Then, slowly, I start to notice things: the “clack” of constant “c” and “t” sounds, the seeming prevalence of words to do with energy—“fissile,” “octane,” whatever “socket power pockets” are. Then I notice that both “saviour” and “misfitted” seem to speak to, or from, the poem’s title; and I start to wonder what “direct / octane” might have to do with our various angels, real and imagined; and I remember vaguely that “unction” is a kind of rite involving oil. I start to get excited. Maybe this is a poem about the black nectar, about our idols of the fossil-fuel marketplace. “Implore fraction”: Cylinders firing, I open a new tab and look up fractional distillation. But just as I think I’m getting somewhere, a small voice says, Hang on. What about “rissole”? (A kind of meatball.) Or “reptile”? What about that blatantly inoperative “moreover,” its sham of argument—and along these lines, what about the first line’s inescapable “mockery”?
This is, or can be, what it’s like to read Prynne. A sort of lexicographical conspiracy-theorizing, scrolling the OED for obsolete usages, sounding the improbable until it seems inevitable. (The reverse of another modernist procedure, where iteration breeds unfamiliarity.) Unlike conspiracy theories proper, though, you never get to feel you’ve explained everything. There’s always an indigestible remainder—usually, most of the poem. And yet, once you’re acclimated, the impossibility of closure is somehow not annoying. The mysterious achievement of Prynne’s later poetry is that its total impenetrability is identical with its strange generosity. Because there’s no exterior clue or code, no final vantage—although he does supply occasional bibliographies—getting to grips with a Prynne poem is more like falling down a Wikipedia hole than like doing sudoku. We’re used to hearing about textual indeterminacy, the free play of the signifier: Prynne makes you reckon with how it would actually feel if language were at large. I think he would have liked the fact that abandon means both “complete freedom from constraint or convention” and “to leave without help or support.”
Not that helived a notably wanton life. Born in Kent in 1936, Jeremy Halvard Prynne, as he was almost never called—his onetime student Veronica Forrest-Thomson wrote in a poem that the H really “stands for Hah”—went, typically enough, from schools in London to the National Service to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was taught by Donald Davie. There was a yearlong fellowship at Harvard, where he apparently spent most of his time hanging out at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop on Plympton Street; then it was back home to the other Cambridge, where he was appointed to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius in 1962. He taught there for the next forty years before retiring, sort of, in 2005.
When I was at Cambridge, Prynne was, in a vague and mythical way, around. I remember going to a poetry reading given by two of my teachers in late 2019. There he sat, ancient and impassive in the back row, propped on an enormous, gnarled cane. Occasionally (or so I recall) he would thud it gently on the floor, as though to register his approval of particular lines. At the end, someone came over to greet him: “Thank you for coming, Mr. Prynne.” (Old and brilliant enough never to have needed a doctorate, he was always a presidentially plain “mister.” According to legend, his wife, Suzanne Furmston, was known to colleagues only as Mrs. Prynne.) Beyond Cambridge, there were occasional trips abroad, to teach or collaborate on translations—mostly to China, where he’s known as Pu Ling-En, and once, in 2011, to Bangkok, where he shut himself in a cheap hotel room for three weeks to write the long poem Kazoo Dreamboats.
On paper, it’s an unremarkable life, or one remarkable mainly for embodying a vanished sort of career. He never published anything close to an academic monograph, preferring instead to write irregular notes, notices, commentaries. His bravura, book-length, word-by-word close reading of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 94” (“They that have power to hurt and will do none”)—published, like most of his work, in limited numbers by a small press—opens with a knowingly theatrical gesture: “We do not know who ‘they’ are.” From the outside, we don’t really know who Prynne is, either. His life was among books, those he read—which was most of them, as far as I can tell—and those he wrote.
The first, published in 1962, was called Force of Circumstance and Other Poems. He renounced it basically as soon as it came out; never reprinted, it was pointedly omitted from the collected poems. There are rumors of his setting fire to students’ copies. I’ve read Force of Circumstance. It’s fine. But every myth needs a scene of renunciation, just as it needs a transformative venture. For Prynne, the latter turned out to be his encounter with American poetry, in particular the innovations in Donald Allen’s legendary anthology TheNew American Poetry. Discovering O’Hara and Spicer and Duncan and, above all, Ed Dorn and Charles Olson changed everything. He wrote to Olson in 1961, ostensibly to solicit work for Prospect magazine (not that one), but really just to gush to a hero: “You cannot imagine the sense of fabled release, the expansiveness, the new air.”
That new air is the stuff of Kitchen Poems, Prynne’s next collection, which came out six years later. (This is the one that opens with “The Numbers.”) Its tone is a sort of blurred and shimmering philosophy, like hearing someone speak very earnestly underwater:
And the back mutation is knowledge and
has always been so in the richest tradition
of the trust it is possible to have, to repose
in the mysteries.
“Repose” he didn’t. The following year he published The White Stones: Though not a long book, it’s by far his longest collection; it is also one of the best and most important poetry books of the 20th century. In a belated attempt to bring Prynne to America, New York Review Books reprinted it in 2016: Get a copy. Every time I go to a museum and look at their very oldest things—Paleolithic knapped flint, votive figurines—I think of the poem “Bronze : Fish”:
We are at the edge of all that and
can reach back to another
matter, only it’s not back but
down rather, or in some involved
sense of further off. The virtues
of prudence, the rich arable soil:
but why should ever the whole
mercantile harvest run to form
again? The social cohesion
of towns is our newer ligature,
and the binding, you must see, is
the rule for connection, where we
are licensed to expect. That’s
the human city, & we are
now at the edge of it. Which way
are we facing. Burn the great sphere:
count them, days of the week.
That’s the whole poem. I find myself unable to do much more than mutely point at it. And I don’t know many, or any, lines more aching than the last few of “The Holy City”:
I saw it
and love is
when, how &
because we
do: you
could call it Ierusalem or feel it
as you walk, even quite jauntily, over the grass.
I can’t explain the perfection of “Ierusalem” here. Maybe it has something to do with its relation to the “j” we do subsequently get, in that wondrous, impish word “jauntily”; with how a history unfolds, from archaism to the moving present, across orthographies. But I don’t really want to think too much about it. “Good difficult poems,” Prynne wrote in a lecture much later on, “sometimes surprise us so much that we can hardly breathe.” On those occasions I’m not all that interested in analysis.
Things change after The White Stones. Prynne cooled on Olson in the years before the older man died: The Black Mountain School had turned out cultish, and, worse for the Cambridge don, unscholarly. (In one hilarious letter, the younger and still diffident poet pleads on behalf of “even a temporary & patchwork accuracy, knowing where things are (for example).”) Brass, published in 1971, was a turning point. The first person retreats, the language gets steelier, more crowded. There are still moments of wrenching beauty, like the last lines of the last poem of Vernal Aspects (1975):
And for me
all levels are held but the last,
the parting shot I don’t dream of
but see every day. Then you buy
another notebook, scissors vanish
and the spiral binding shews justly
the force of even intervals.
I love “shews”—like “Ierusalem,” a pitch-perfect obsolescence. But in general, lyric forms and cadences (the “even intervals” of that final line’s iambic homecoming) go the way of the lyric “I”; each collection steps further from the familiar, further toward an unknown edge. “Select an object with no predecessors,” barks one poem in For the Monogram (1997).
From there the path to the late style, those slabs of hard words, is clear if not quite straight. The poems always responded to current events, but as time went on the modes of that response became more refracted. Brass’s “The Ideal Star-Fighter” takes fairly obvious aim at the feelgood humanism, the “mawkish regard,” occasioned by the Apollo space program, with its blue-marble photos and talk of giant leaps: “And so we hear daily of the backward / glance at the planet, the reaction of / sentiment.” By the time of 1987’s Bands Around the Throat, the connections are less overt, residing deeper in tone and lexis. “It is riddance from the duct we line, / cheering of high degree”: Without ever naming it, the poems find themselves contaminated by Chernobyl’s linguistic fallout. A break in this tendency of ever-greater obliquity is 2006’s To Pollen, written in the first years of the Iraq War. There, sheer fury can’t help but become explicit: “good cheer brave hearts never in vain as under / starry skies commit acts of stupendous cocky turpitude.”
Somewhere along the way, something essential alters. The source of the poetry, maybe. The writer of the earlier poems starts with a blank page, with composition then consisting in what is and isn’t done to it, the way the rhythms of the mind and body get caught in lines. In the words of “How It’s Done,” from The White Stones: “All the rage of the heart reaches this lifted / point, then: a fashion of spirit, a made thing.” The late work feels different, as though hewn, like Michelangelo seeing the angel in the block of marble, from the totality of language itself. Remixes of the dictionary, a latest haul or trawl from the lexical ocean. Prynne was always prolific, but in his final years the output became absurd. Between 2017 and 2024—the years covered by the second, even fatter volume of Poems—he published thirty-six new collections. (As John Ashbery, another poet whose later decades were ridiculously productive, put it, “Quantity control is our concern here, you see.”) It’s as if, sensing the approach of an end, he set himself the Borgesian task of invoking every entry in his beloved OED exactly once. Or as Luke Roberts writes in his lovely remembrance of the poet: “Sometimes I thought he was trying to use every single word he’d ever known, one last time, like an enormous process of saying goodbye to the language.”
As often happens, the more elusive and single-minded the artist, the more likely they are to amass followers. And Prynne has followers. “He became a land,” as W. H. Auden said of Edward Lear. Shadows of Prynne pop up in unlikely places: Like any cult figure, he lives more in the imagination than the corporeal. Iain Sinclair’s Radon Daughters (1994) features one Simon Undark, “hermit and scribe, the conscience of England”; in Dorn’s Gunslinger, he’s Dr. Jean Flamboyant. The British satirical magazine Private Eye occasionally conjures up an inscrutable poet called A.D. Penumbra.
Still, Prynneland proper covers a modest territory. Its ambit, geographical and mental, has always essentially been Cambridge (or, in one poem, “what / we shall here call north Essex”). A good definition of the constituency of the so-called Cambridge School of innovative British poetry would be “poets whose correspondence with Prynne is held in his archive.” Naturally members of the school like nothing more than to deny that it exists, and to insist that even if it did, they wouldn’t be in it. The editors of 1987’s A Various Art, an important and almost mainstream anthology of the Cambridge scene, insist that although most of the poets featured “have read and responded to one another’s writing,” nonetheless “no claim is advanced here for the existence of anything amounting to a school.” Of course not. Prynne himself, having seen firsthand what the Black Mountain coterie did to Olson’s ego, and vice versa, was always keen to downplay his own influence, while being too honest to deny it outright. “I find the idea that I have offered any kind of arbitrations of experiments in style, or whatever, personally in my own behalf, exceptionally awkward, and unnecessary, and anxiety provoking,” he told the Paris Review. But, yes, there does seem to be a group of poets whose work exhibits “a certain kind of stylistic commonality,” and, ugh, “some of that has to be due, obliquely, to me.”
There’s nothing wrong with being part of a scene, nor with writing in and out of a tradition, made or found. My worry—as a reader, a fan, of Prynne—is about the effect some of the apostles have on the atmosphere around his work. As Emily Witt documented in a 2011 essay for this magazine, the world of Prynne connoisseurship can be a pretty grim place. Men who went to Cambridge, talking to other men who went to Cambridge. (A Various Art includes exactly one woman, Forrest-Thomson, who’d been dead for twelve years when the anthology came out.) The writing can be both smug and faintly bitter, as though the critics can’t decide whether to take their perceived marginality as an affront to their genius or a confirmation of it. There are exceptions: open, illuminating work on Prynne, for instance by Edward Allen, Jeremy Noel-Tod, and Ian Patterson. (All of whom went to Cambridge.) Still, some of what gets written is amazingly unpleasant.
Meanwhile, Prynne’s own prose can be dense, sure, but never nasty. In fact it’s usually and charmingly self-deprecating. The typical Prynne lecture is laced with disclaimers and apologies: “This may be a bumpy ride,” he warned the Chicago audience of “Mental Ears and Poetic Work” in 2010. Bumpy or not, the cluster of talks he gave around this time—all called excellent things like “Poetic Thought”—makes for great reading, as does the hilariously thorough and occasionally hectoring guidance, still available online, he wrote for his students on how to approach their work. “What colour is the royal hue? When exactly and for whom is a passing-bell rung? What was the neck verse? The typical wingspan of a windhover? A mess of pottage? The Raft of the Medusa?”
But none of this—not the cult, not the criticism, not even the great late lectures—really touches the sides. None of it is really what I want; none of it is where I want to place Prynne, or find him. No case for the poems can be made from outside the poems, but inside the poems it can be hard to know where you stand. We have, at last, “the whole thing.” So what do we do with it?
Read it, I suppose. And read it as poetry: as works giving pleasure—even if it is, as Prynne once wrote, “pleasure of the most complex kind possible.” Of the poets writing in some sense “after” Prynne, the ones I most admire take from him not a theory but a practice, an art. (I think of Denise Riley, Andrea Brady, and, more recently, Imogen Cassels. All women, for what that’s worth.) It’s a practice in which the ear plays as much, likely more, of a role than the intellect; in my bourgeois way, I’m far less interested in what Prynne did with dialectics than in what he could do with a comma. (He called himself a “peculiar and extraneous Marxist,” which feels unimprovable.) “How It’s Done” comes to an end with:
the movement to be found, in the
distance is the sound that I too hope for,
here at the rock point, of the world.
Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” is somewhere behind the last line, but Prynne’s punctuation discovers a nervousness lurking in the vatic mode: It’s frightening as well as thrilling to be at the farthest reaches, out on a limb. His ear was impeccable, and it stayed attuned even as the poems got weirder. From 2001’s Unanswering Rational Shore:
Mis-timed by equity trap points
to run and run like colour all down the blade,
this scant fuel thins to vapour in vacant air.
The plosive barrage of the first line tangibly loosens, giving way to liquid Rs and open vowels. And that last line could go toe-to-toe with anything in Stevens or Keats. Many of the later poems are like this, repositories of outrageous, inexplicable verbal music: “do the same aberrance / over silky puff treatment,” “Lutine falsetto belies the gravamen of a loose / quadratic.” They don’t prompt the same gasp and pang as the best bits of The White Stones; it’s more like a headshake of disbelief, a card-trick giggle. And the option is always open to make a project of a given poem or line, to go deeper into the woods of philology or economics or any other of the innumerable discourses Prynne’s language constantly hears. I had no idea what “Lutine” was (“a substance of a deep yellow color found in the yolk of eggs and the ovaries of animals”); I thought I knew “gravamen,” but it turns out I didn’t. You might not want to have to do homework on poems, and—contra the decree in one portentous introduction to Prynne that “a poem requires work”—that’s fine too. It’s not like “work” will find the single solution to lines like “Salmon in virus to / for privative scatter hairstreak bun canopy.” (Probably.) I read Prynne because nobody else would think, would dare, to put those words together; because he reminds me that however big I think poetry or language or knowledge is, it might be bigger. There’s nothing stopping us.
He has stopped, though, and poetry, for now, is smaller for it. It’s always strange to acknowledge that a presiding spirit has gone. In the past few days I’ve found myself returning to “Swallow Your Pride,” the last poem from Bands Around the Throat, as though it might help me understand what he left behind. I doubt it. Prynne’s poems never were about understanding. But its opening lines seem to give one way to remember him: “At work on the potash table / reckoning up for a new song.” Then, in its odd nursery-rhyme way, the poem goes on:
put one, put one, from between the fingers
or at the checkout you are lost to view;
just a little better
making a fresh start
in promise to see all these signs
sit stable and by heart: so long
further to go, about to part.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.