The Oval Window" (1983), for instance, alludes to, and represents, various frames of perception: the "oval window" itself is part of the ear, containing free-moving crystals which allow us to orient ourselves; they represent the impact of the world on our senses, and are also our means of making the world intelligible. But "The Oval Window" also entertains other "views" - "windows" on to financial data, for instance - and as these different frames and their partial vistas tilt and unsettle each other, our own ability to orient ourselves is challenged. Jeremy Halvard Prynne (born 24 June 1936) is a British poet closely associated with the British Poetry Revival.

This book is one of the most inventive, intelligently experimental collected poems of the century.’ - Adam Phillips, Observer Let’s talk about the development of your practice. You were an undergraduate here at Cambridge. Tell us about your work with the scholar and poet Donald Davie. Poems(Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books; Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999). How then might one read Prynne's work? It appears so alien to our habits of reading, so unlike the lyric poetry we are more habituated to; it is only on quite prolonged exposure that its coherent arrangement - sonically, prosodically, thematically and metonymically - becomes evident: though this is, admittedly, a profound and giddying experience. Even then, one is at a loss as to how to naturalise this experience, to make of it something as familiar as "a meaning". It feels more like a painting or a piece of music, or perhaps a sculpture; something to experience both intellectually and sensually. It must ultimately be emphasized that it Prynne’s project is to endorse an aesthetics of reflection. His use of chiasmus is often recuperated as an incarnational aesthetics of mimesis, whereby the high was embodied in the low, the low in the high. The figure of such an aesthetics is paradox, implying circularity and closure. By effectively foreclosing the play of word over word, Prynne was able to reify the structure of his poetry, and make it both subject and object of its own processes. Instead of being viewed as an effect of signification, the poems become things—real entities—in their own right. In this sense of the poem as thing he followed the mainstream of Anglo-American modernism.Perles qui furent[ Pearls That Were] (in French). Translated by Alferi, Pierre. Marseille: Éric Pesty Éditeur. 2013. ISBN 9782917786208. Prynne is refractory yet astonishingly lucid. First poet of the world for some things.’– John Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2015) Recent scholarship on Prynne by Ryan Dobran and Piers Pennington and a forthcoming volume of his letters to Charles Olson all promise to continue the task of response and interpretation this poet so badly requires. Poems is a vast slab of a thing, but its luminous and unsettling poems richly repay the attention they demand.

Finding aid for The English Intelligencer Archive at Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.Something has changed. The number of admirers has grown, spreading far wider than the overlapping circles of avant-garde practitioners. The number of detractors has diminished, and the pitch of the denunciations has (mostly) lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona 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. Prynne’s later tendency, however, to knit words in a mesh of hermetic indirectness has dismayed some poets who might otherwise admire such visionary sentiments. Peter Riley, a close contemporary from the Cambridge poetry scene in the 1960s, writes in his latest book, Pennine Tales: Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. Prynne’s poetry is powerful and dense. Each book is an experiment, made in a concentrated burst of effort: a mode of writing instigated by the academic calendar, with its rhythm of term and break. The poems investigate the languages of economics and the conditions of inequality; Marx and Mao are important influences. The poems also combine a deep knowledge of science with practical expertise in geology and botany: the devotions of a naturalist are frequently audible. And always there is literature: the history of English poetry, and the collective, global memory of the English language.