The Paris Review - Fall 2016

With my best and not even particularly advanced critical reading self, I
could see perfectly well that this work was not distinctive. It was imitative,
and it didn’t have much in the way of strong possibilities. I was seeing all this
strong possibility in the Don Allen anthology, but I knew I wasn’t going to
be able to tune into that in a very convincing way because the English nature
of the English language and its English resources inhibited that transfer. It
was not a transfer that could be made just like that. So being a poet at that
stage was very discomfiting.
INTERVIEWER
What were your initial impressions of Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New
American Poetry?
PRYNNE
My copy was paperback and it fell to pieces out of intensive use. It became
a loose-leaf assemblage because the back strip collapsed. It was not by any
means just the star items that I read, I read Robert Duncan, I read of course
all the Creeley items and the Olson items. But there was a lot of other
material there. Kerouac, for example, wrote about automatic writing, and
it was all completely new territory—I’d never seen anything like it before.
What’s more, it was full of energy and wackiness and innovation, and none
of the English writers I had any knowledge of would ever have committed
themselves to behaviour like that. It was not what authors were supposed to
do. Being an author, certainly being a poet, was defensive and traditional
and habit-forming, and Eliot and Yeats were the chief formative presences.
Auden was around the place and was a slightly dangerous author. The Donald
Allen anthology seemed to be a completely different world.
It wasn’t exactly that the ideas or the arguments registered strongly with
me. It was that the energy and innovativeness and newness of outlook, and
the experiments with forms, prosodies, rhythms, and matters of presentation,
including the whole mise-en-page, were completely unprecedented in
English practise at the time. To break up the presence of the word forms
across the page and to distribute them according to rhythm and emphasis
was unprece dented in British habit.
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