The Paris Review - Fall 2016

A manuscript page from Kazoo Dreamboats;
or, On What There Is (2011). “Some of the
things I wrote down astonished me. I’d
think, Did I write that? Don’t ask! Did I
mean that? Don’t ask! What does it mean
for what’s going to come next?”
The Art of Poetry No. 101
J. H. PRYNNE
I
am not much of a morning person,” Jeremy
Prynne warned us, as we made arrangements
for this interview. “My natural habitat seems
to be the hours of darkness, ad libitum. So I’ll be
pretty useless until about ten thirty or eleven a.m.
at best: but at the other end of the day I never tire.”
So it proved. For four days at the end of
January, we met after lunch in his rooms at Gonville
and Caius College, at the University of Cambridge,
and talked, with a break for dinner, until we
pleaded exhaustion sometime after midnight. At
the conclusion of each day’s interview, Prynne graciously
walked us out through the sixteenth-century
Gate of Honour before returning to his desk in the
rooms he has kept since he was first appointed as a
fellow, in 1962.
Prynne’s lower room is large and bright and
stocked with English literature, its classical forbears,
its Continental peers. (On the first day of our
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