The Paris Review - Fall 2016

very different kind, a seriously intellectual poet of cerebral focus, committed
to an active intelligence of mind. This was quite distinct from anything that
I’d found in Pound, or in Creeley, or in Olson, come to that.
Tomlinson was a seriously intelligent poet but he was also a descriptive
poet who wrote about the natural scene in a way that Stevens wouldn’t do. Of
course, that aroused a certain Englishness in me because I knew those landscapes
and was party to them and produced by them. Not from Tomlinson’s
part of the world, but nonetheless, it was a very English kind of activity. So
reading that and reading Stevens and starting to think about composing
poems offered a great number of competing possibilities all converging upon
each other.
My early writing habits were not very distinctive. I would write these
poems. I can’t say they gave me much satisfaction. I wrote them as best I
knew how. When I’d done them, I thought, Well, they’re all I can do, up to
this moment.
INTERVIEWER
These are the poems in Force of Circumstance, your first book?
PRYNNE
Now I’m in danger of confabulating. By the time Force of Circumstance was
being prepared for publication, I’d fallen out of love with it. I would probably
have suppressed it if it had been a practical possibility at the time. It had
some of Davie’s fingerprints on it, it had some of Tomlinson’s fingerprints. It
had a few other facile fingerprints of my own on it. If this was being a poet,
it was not a very inviting idea. Here I’m probably inventing, but I did have
the sense then that if I didn’t start, wherever best I could, I would never go
on. I had to start somewhere. It was going to be uncomfortable, disorderly,
imitative, facile, foolish, childish—but I had to put this stuff down and do
all these things because otherwise I’d never get past the starting block. I just
had to go through the formalities of putting it into the outside world for
readers to look at, and turn up their lips at, as I would, too, if I were one of its
readers. Think of the very young Keats! Because I’d got to get past this point,
and there was no other way to get past it. I had to work my way through,
almost like the psychoanalytic process, and have the extremely uncomfortable
experience of being an incompetent beginner.
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