The Paris Review - Fall 2016

Edinburgh, all over the place. On the other hand, when people say that some
of this work shows, from time to time, a certain kind of stylistic commonality,
it’s hard to deny that this is the case. On the whole, it’s rather intellectualised.
It’s frequently ironically dramatised, or dramatically ironised. And these
features have a certain range of prevalence in the Cambridge environment.
And some of that has to be due, obliquely, to me. I make this confession with
extreme reluctance, and great unwillingness, because 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. Black Mountain would be a warning against this, or the
New York School!
INTERVIEWER
Are there other elements of your work that were influential?
PRYNNE
My prosodic dispersal of the text around the page space became a feature
that could be copied or modified, and several young writers started to write
blocks of text on the page; they would never have done that if it hadn’t been
for the work that I’d written and published in that mode, often in adapted
response to modernist American practise. But very seldom did anyone who
had read this work of mine master this inwardly enough to find a way of
being usefully like it. External features they could sometimes decorate their
work with, but what was going inside of work of mine was too mysterious
for most of them, fortunately. Much though they might quite have liked to
do so, and have attempted to, it was work that didn’t admit them easily to its
inner features. And that was a great relief, because they couldn’t, you know.
They were kept at their distance and they went their own ways.
INTERVIEWER
Is that an accidental feature of the work, to discourage imitation, or is it a
motivating impulse?
PRYNNE
Well, now, that’s a very challenging question. I don’t know the answer to that.
I mean, there might be a somewhat defensive, or protective implication to
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