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Cambridge academic, ensuring publication and positive critical attention without the messy business of actual
“engagement” with the reading public at large-overlooks the economic realities of the choices he has made.
After a now disowned debut from a trade press (1962’s Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, published by
Routledge), Prynne has actively sought fugitive publication-small presses, limited runs, elegant editions-not as a
way of thumbing a nose at the public, but of circulating work to interested and curious parties without necessarily
imposing it on everyone else. What can seem controlling-such as being picky about what anthologies one’s poetry
appears in-may be an honest, even generous acceptance that modern poetry is now more a matter of occasionally
overlapping tribes than a single monolithic culture. It is, to be crass, a “build it and they will come” mentality, which
is uncommon and odd enough these days to appear radical. It is hard to think of even semi-recent precedents-Emily
Dickinson? Jack Spicer? Hopkins?-and it might be necessary to go back to the model of private circulation popular
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find them. Compared to that, Prynne in fact seems positively outgoing.
Either way, this approach echoes the kind of quiet confidence in poetry’s vitality, relevance and survival odds
mentioned above, irrespective of the growing (and realistic?) pessimism of Prynne’s worldview. It certainly shows
up McKendrick’s snide dig about the ‘queues forming down many high streets’ for “avant-garde” works as the
mercenary-seeming misstep it really is. When has market share ever necessarily equated to any art’s aesthetic value?
Ironically-and it can’t all have been thought out in advance, can it?-this technique hasn’t worked out too badly,
and Prynne is now safely ensconced as the “secret king” of British experimental poetry, a shadowy but permanent
presence and influence, even in the consciousness of the mainstream (hence Heaney’s semi-begrudging name-check).
[3] The most public effect of this situation to date-aside from the Bloodaxe Poems (1999, updated edition 2005)-
was the heated debate which erupted over Ed Randall Stevenson’s The Last of England? The Oxford English Literary
History Volume 12 1960-2000, which suggested that Prynne’s poetry might ultimately prove more durable than that
of Larkin. On the questionable basis that no publicity is bad publicity, the Prynne “brand” has reached a level of
exposure the poet himself may never have intended for it.
John Ashbery, the other “avant-garde” type Heaney mentions by name, offers a promising point of comparison here.
Side is being somewhat disingenuous when he claims Ashbery ‘has yet to receive unreserved approbation by
mainstream criticism’. Although this is true to some extent of the UK, where Ashbery-like Stevens before him-has
never really been embraced wholeheartedly by the critical establishment, a figure who has become the first living
poet to have a collected edition published by the Library of America, who-at the age of 80-was selected by MTV to
be its official laureate, can hardly be deemed obscure. Heaney is spot on when he says his is a ‘voice’ that has now
become central, but dead wrong to imply any corresponding change on Ashbery’s part to make this possible. The
important point is that Ashbery “achieved” his position with zero visible compromise of his aesthetic; the
“mainstream” has simply had to reshape itself to accommodate him, and he has become arguably the most
influential single poet since Pound.
It may take longer for Prynne’s “spikier” poetry to achieve the same result, but everything about his selfpresentation
suggests he has the confidence it will happen eventually. Heaney, coming from the other position
entirely, from a maybe premature absorption, surely doesn’t express his doubts because he senses some avant-garde
“wind of change” a-gatherin’ that will necessarily make him irrelevant (McKendrick’s barbs are more or less on
target here), but because he suspects they communicate something humanly meaningful. They are easy to relate to.
Maybe a little too easy.
The radical incompatibility of the aesthetic represented by Heaney and the aesthetic represented by Prynne, their
respective brands of uncertainty, will not disappear. It is hard to believe in some Blairite “third way” that can select
the best aspects of both and fuse them neatly in the melting pot, despite the popularity right now in America of just
such a concept of “hybridity”. Instead, this is one arena where another of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell-’Opposition is
true Friendship’-may finally hold sway. However, their mutual existence and the value that many see in one or the
other approach should give us pause to ask what poetry is right now, what it should be, who it should be for and why,
and where it is going. Our doubtlessly provisional answers to these questions need not be punitive. Carving out
territories and sticking to your guns is for armies and corporations. The “big, normal world” that Heaney desires to
express is more big than it is normal.
Finally, at root, I think I resent any pronouncement limiting what poetry is and can do, something both Heaney and
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