Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

detainment and torture and back again, with some kind of negative erotic energy powering the violence. It is hard, in
this light, not to see the ‘court’ in ‘courtship’, not to interpret the ‘plays’ as power-plays rather than enjoyable
romps and ‘requited’ as carrying a genuine burden of obligation. ‘[A]ppeal’ overlaps the languages of law and
attraction, ‘final’ brings foreshadowings of mortality, while ‘implicit’ suggests the chance for a reprieve is pretty
slim. The sense of over brimming joy that underpins the earlier part of that poem has curdled into a punishable
excess-a proper ‘gorging’-summarised unpleasantly in the nasty bathos of being ‘branded so faintly’. The poem
itself seems to contain reflections on the difficulty of avoided such imposed strictures:
As brood so on
donation true to tint momentous, all is too hardly
much to clear unaided
The sweeping momentum of the first stanza carries the reader well into the second before he or she notices the
darkening tone. It has an almost Blakean air (‘The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom’), with the punitive,
legalistic forces of authority poised at the gates to trim the sky-divers’ wings . . .
That I am only gesturing toward a sea of potential meaning here (and this in just one section-the final one-of the
2001 sequence Unanswering Rational Shore) should not imply that there is any “charlatanry” afoot, simply that this
poetry is particularly rich and open to interpretation on a word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase level. I have given only
my immediate reactions and second thoughts here and feel sure others would reach different conclusions about
what is going on in this poem; given more time and re-readings I’m sure I would too. The poem seems to warrant,
require, even want this type of further investigation and reflection.
Some might (and evidently do) find such indeterminacy questionable and rebarbative: even positive critical
assessments of Prynne often fight shy of actual close engagement with the words on the page. However, I feel this
poetry invites deep and repeated reading primarily because of it. Prynne’s critical output to date-notably the
volumes They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (Parataxis, 2001)
and Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others (Barque, 2007)-suggests the kind of minute analysis he would
probably wish for his own work and the sort of attention he probably applies to its composition. Whether it is
reasonable or realistic to expect any given reader to grant a literary work this kind of attention seems beside the
point: the artist is free to request it; the reader is free to give it, or not. One is put in mind of Joyce’s reported quip
responding to the question “Why did you spend seventeen years writing Finnegans Wake?”: “So you could spend
seventeen years reading it”-entirely serious and playful at the same time. Prynne seems similarly driven in his
artistic ideals and ambitions, even if it isn’t always easy for the onlooker to pinpoint accurately what they are. To
quote Geoffrey Hill, a different kind of poet again to both Heaney and Prynne:
We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other.
And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day
far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed
that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?
That seems more true of Prynne’s work even than it does of Hill’s.
The question of how the difficulty of an ‘ordinary day’ might fit into a poem takes us back to one of the more
interesting asides in Side’s essay: the delineation of “defamiliarisation” as an ‘empirical mode of writing’, something
more grounded and reactionary than radical or transcendent. Despite Shklovsky’s context within the Russian avantgarde,
he had realistic fiction as much in mind when he discussed and defined “ostranenie”, and it is easy to trace the
logic behind Side’s assessment: a two-part process is involved, with the thing depicted presented in artfully
unusually terms, only for the reader’s ah of recognition to sound when memory or imagination supplies the missing
nominalism. “Normality” floods back in, but with (ideally; supposedly) an added freshness. This, it could be argued,
is what metaphor has always done, justifying to some degree Side’s strictures about its conservatism.
The curious thing is that an aesthetics of ‘fidelity to the actual’, of ‘just representations of specific nature’ (to twist
Johnson’s phrasing) can be traced back further than the mainstream defamiliarisations of Heaney and English
“Martian poets” such as Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, to decidedly “avant-garde” roots. Pound’s tenants of
Imagism-and the actual poetic practice of Pound, H. D., Williams, Moore and other first generation Modernists-can
be seen as the wellspring here, continuing through second generation figures like the “Objectivists” Zukofsky,
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