All Jokes Aside
by Jack Barron
Bloodaxe, 752pp, ISBN 9781780376929, £25.00
A while ago, I went to Café Oto in Dalston, North London, to hear some Jeremy Prynne. Not Prynne himself, of course — he very rarely gives public readings of his work, and is too busy writing anyhow. It was, instead, a reading of Kernels in Vernal Silence, a pamphlet published by Face Press in 2020, now re-arranged between four other voices: a quartet that would pass the text between themselves, around the air, severally interlacing the whole. Another reading — of 2022’s At Raucous Purposeful — followed, intercut and overlaying itself with an array of video art and free-improvised violin. The reading, imaging and playing were each eloquently curated and performed; there settled that head-nodding seriousness of the avant-garde; the audience’s deep silence was strictly — and self-imposedly — maintained. And yet, some minutes into the first reading, it became hard not to laugh.
It is not that I think Prynne is stupid or risible or rubbish; nor do I think his poetry isn’t extremely serious; nor do I think those in Café Oto had done anything wrong. But the solemnity — bordering so frequently on reverence — with which we treat Prynne’s verse was, in that moment, fighting against the absurd figurations it demands of our speaking:
: declare lozenge natal exploration unknown
garnet decorate gannet, raucous outcry
talk back even to walk moreover so proudly
ignorant before brisket, first to deny
A raucous chorus of weirdness issued in a tone of faux-pompous declaration that, nevertheless, is inevitably read aloud in that ‘poetry voice’ of which all who attend such readings will be familiar: preposterously impersonal, even neutered, and grave. This vocal incarnation is necessitated, in part, by the radical rhythmic uncertainty of these lines: it is, in every way, a stressful read. But how, then, does such a voice utter ‘lozenge’? It is an affront to our seriousness, a funereal hiccough, and bears within it the balance of gravity and anarchy that is late Prynne: ‘lozenge’ is a sucker by another name, an insult we might swallow — without knowing — in live performance. It is a catty periphrasis that, in Prynne’s hands, summons up a rich and surprising etymological history, as Chaucerian ‘losenger’: ‘flatterer, deceiver’. Such revelation is arrested only by over-reading: an activity that is, itself, both flattering and perhaps deceptive. How could — or should — we take this writing seriously?
Yes, there’s something funny going on here. Prynne’s work, despite its intense complexity and totemic canonical status, has always kept close company with the ridiculous: The Beatles, ever-perceptive, famously parodied Prynne in Yellow Submarine (1968): Jeremy Hillary Boob reviews his books as he’s composing them and writes his footnotes with his feet. Then there are the Wonderlands of Prynne scholarship: prynnebibliography.org, for instance, lists every publication/recording/sighting of Prynne, as though he were a rare bird; this includes the time MasterChef Celebrities came to his college, resulting in this immortal sentence: ‘Prynne may be glimpsed eating a woodpigeon salad made by Les Dennis and Shane from Boyzone.’ It is perhaps because Prynne is so seriously scholarly, and because he wears his learning so apocalyptically, that he invites this kind of response, and the comedy that so often gets overlooked might just be a helpful generic category for approaching his increasingly baffling — and baffled — experiments: a way to get in on the joke.
These experiments, appearing over the last eight years or so in a seemingly endless stream of pamphlets produced by the auspices of Face Press, Critical Documents, Broken Sleep Books, and other heaven-sent and under-appreciated publishers, have now been gathered into an addendum to Prynne’s Poems, which covered everything from Kitchen Songs (1968) to Al-Dente (2014). Both books are collected by Bloodaxe, and, amazingly, boast around the same number of pages. Prynne’s recent output has a mania about it: a sort of Rabelaisian surfeit, a stupefying sublimity in the sheer implacableness that itself might be read and, at the same time, kills any effort to make head or tail. Parnassus has blown its top. We discover texts of worldly derangement — Squeezed White Noise, Torrid Auspicious Quartz, Timepiece in Total — indebted to epigraphic parataxis: None Yet Willing More Told is preceded by quotations from the King James Bible, The Grateful Dead, Liberace, Alban Berg; and elsewhere appear: Shakespeare, James Schuyler, and the website Pianogroove. Prynne is often called hermetic, a poet’s poet; but for one who produces poetry like this, I don’t see how such can be true: his words are utterly, desperately engaged with the world — to borrow a phrase from the man himself — ‘in all its complex variousness.’
And, strangely enough, this can manifest frequently in a sort of childishness, both delighted and dark; an open but satirical wonderment at the total range of language-work, crystallising in an allusive love of nursery-rhyme and nonsense poems: ‘: crack corn several darnel’; ‘one fine day desprez à fleur jaune hangs’; ‘Went to mow a meadow, extended grasses / in scrap cut down.’ These echoes of innocence are clearly important to Prynne, and important to our experience of his verse, perhaps because nursery-rhyme is the form by which we begin our verbal and moral worlds, at our parent’s knee or sat on a classroom’s coarse carpet. It’s a form used by some great antecedents, from William Blake to Christina Rossetti, Stevie Smith to Tom Waits; for Prynne, it reaches its insane apogee in Snooty Tipoffs (2021), a sequence of 281 nursery rhymes helplessly weirded out of true:
Row row watch the stoat
floating down the stream,
many frowns of gleaming teeth
all for you alone. (482)
The missed rhyme is a stab to our inner child: a treat denied, perhaps even a paradise lost: you’ve got to be kidding. In so doing, Prynne alienates our deepest acoustic familiarities and makes a nightmare — ‘gleaming teeth’ and all — of our playroom imaginary. Snooty Tipoffs is therefore a space of endless potential which is also its deepest vulnerability, and Prynne shows the dangers even minor rhythmic manipulation might have for our being in the world.
That is, these poems, extending out on either side of Snooty Tipoffs, take us back to what may be the most political period of our lives: language-acquisition. In his published lecture Stars, Tigers, and the Shape of Words, Prynne discusses what he calls ‘nursery consciousness’ in the poem ‘The Star’: the moment at which the universal-seeming babble which constitutes our first noise on earth falls away, and we are told where we are. This Prynne plays on:
The vast scale and remoteness of phenomena are potentially frightening, as also the imminent loneliness at bedtime; but each word reduces this scale to the friendly and protective charm of little things. Because of the pattern, and within the discourse context of adult language-use directed at a childish audience, one order, that of sound, reads by invitation to another order, that of sense, pointing it up while scaling it down.
Prynne himself calls this a ‘playful over-reading’, but it seems to me a rather good account of Prynne’s later work (and our response to it); childishness and adult language-use are persistently, and with vicious irony, switching scales: ‘pointing it up while scaling it down.’ This can induce wild laughter, but also unbearable gravity:
Reared up surface
past our view in fright-line, low shadow
breath clasp how so how not same to say
give way you think they’d know. Do they,
hard to say even now face frozen unbelief
in mark past all can see to know, agree
without other cue immense for water ours
unlaced and not seen. Set down lock plain
to argue no further well over immobile
by light of life exit let, out. Mit with
this lit, little else child care. (‘Abyss: 3’, 27)
This is from a sequence called OF ∙ THE∙ ABYSS (2017). Here, especially so, the weird childishness that goes some way to characterise these writings is at serious play. Prynne, again in The Shape of Words, discusses ‘the affix-form /le/’, and its signal of diminution in words like ‘twinkle’. In the above passage, we find it used in the last line: ‘little’. But now it is put to violent satiric purpose: attached, awfully, to the crossing of migrants in what the British Government call ‘small boats’, many of whom are children. The ‘vast scale and remoteness of this phenomenon’ is brought home in the smallest parts of speech — ‘light’ to ‘let’ to ‘lit’ to ‘little’ — which utter unspeakable cruelty.
I’m aware that I started this review with laughter; but no one’s laughing now. Such sickening inertia is demanded by Prynne’s sudden, abyss-like drops into seriousness: the ironies of childhood critiquing the near-unimaginable horrors of a rotten polis. It is a poetics — most absolutely — of cradle to grave. Such is the work of true comedy. Our laughter might be involuntary, but it is therefore telling, one way in which a work of art might make us guiltily culpable in its moral pursuit, as we catch ourselves gone haywire. The nonsense to which I responded in Café Oto is, upon closer inspection, more like a super-abundance of meaning: like all great comedians — and I think Prynne might be the great comedian of our age — he makes too much sense. Only such a poetry could be so beautiful (‘Shade in time of its own pass with notably easy care, this is memory at work’) and so silly (‘Diplomat cantaloupe ride a cock horse’). He says what we’re all thinking, whether we know it or not — how else could that possibly look?