The critic Robert Potts' piece from The Guardian is a very good general introduction to Prynne's poetry:
The obstacles to understanding are not simply the disruption of linear order and conventional syntax. After all, these approaches are decades-old, traditionally modernist, and should not alarm readers in a world of cinematic jump-cuts, internet hyperlinks, and quantum physics. . . .
But Prynne's poetry also employs a breadth of vocabulary that takes the reader across the OED and down into its historical layers of accrued meanings, not to mention the specialised jargons and lexicons of disciplines as different as microbiology, finance, astronomy, optics, medicine, neurophysiology, genetics and agriculture. It is work informed by a vast amount of reading and its range and pitch are concomitantly daunting.
The amount of scientific material in the poems would not have seemed so strange even a few decades ago: most of the canonised poets engaged with the scientific activities of their time, including Wordsworth and Shelley.
on Intercapillary Space has a range of responses, largely by other poets on the poetry and prose of Doug Oliver.
does an even better job, with a variety of responses by other poets to Peter Riley's poetry.
This is a very rewarding interview from The Argotist Online, in which Andrea Brady discusses the very information-rich poetry that is a major mode in contenporary innovative British poetry:
information has become a new category of the sublime: apprehensible by the imagination but occasionally terrifying in its extent, it veers over the workstation and distracts every waking hour of the day with episodes in a quest narrative. If poetry is one mode of information management, I could say that in my work, it operates in two ways.
First, my poems retrieve historical and linguistic information with specific and programmatic intentions for the present. These “activist poems”, like the recently-completed poem Wildfire, seek to stimulate resistance through a re-invigoration of complex historical phenomena; or they synthesis disparate narratives in an attempt to shade in some aspect of the totality of relations, to replace contemporary events in the systems of power, money and motion which breed them. These poems are intended to be seductive as well as demystifying. They invite contemplation of complexes of meaning and subversion, and reward that contemplation with the novelty of the phrase.
Second, there are poems which place a person, or people in intimate relations, within a cloud of information, in order to transport them secretly and safely to a vantage where they can observe and be observed. Readers of such poems are required to decide what is true, what is useless, and what obscurity means in relation to the drama of closeness which is being enacted. Are there forms of communication which are not driven by the rhythms of information retrieval? How can my communication of the experience of the particulars of happiness, love, disappointment and so on acquire value for others? Especially now, when there is no reason to believe in humanism, and when the conversion of the self into a node in a network merely pins us fluttering to a bigger wall.
Andrew Duncan in a review on Martin Stannard's Exultations & Difficulties blogzine provides a wonderfully focused discussion on Jeffrey Side's text, available as a downloadable e-book on BlazeVox.
In radically autobiographical poetry, the self is the prison of the poem. The voice of the poet gives the text a deep comforting layer of personality, swaddled in layers of trust, familiarity, witness. But the problem of putting everything in the first person is that in our life we don't experience everything as a first person, we are also able to hear other people’s voices, intuit their experiences, and even lock into a whole cosmos of non-human processes and sounds. If all my poems mean the same thing, in fact mean Me, then they are much less diverse than the world. In order to reach the state of a camera, with its at least passive capacity to take on infinite diversity, the poem has to go through depersonalisation. This may be the point of a poem like this one
The soul of a poem is in its breath pattern, the division of sense coinciding with movements of someone’s sensibility.
A very fine but brief review of Trevor Joyce, What’s in Store: Poems 2000-2007 (New Writers’ Press & The Gig, 2007), which has some excellent discussion of Joyce's techniques (and thus ways of reading the poems):
The effect is to drive home a point about the indeterminacy of language, a point that is made more effectively through the experience of this both bizarre and comic tract, rather than being simply stated.
Elsewhere Joyce again lets the action of language drive his poetry, in the aptly-named “Action Sequence.” In this case, though, he relies on the more familiar poetic devices of alliteration, assonance, rhyme and rhythm:
Great gals gone west
into millions of sunsets,
claiming absence
my presence is,
strangeness my grace,
as whackers and knackers,
sad slackers, court packers,
sundry vatic pragmatics
are with axes and tumbril. . . .
Once more, the meaning is somewhat indeterminate, but this is really about sound and movement. Indeterminacy is, again, the point here, as it is throughout much of Joyce's work. Just as he will not be pigeonholed or restricted in style, neither can he subscribe to a philosophical outlook predicated on certainty. The numerous folk songs and poems that he translates in this volume attest to this.
The poet, editor and critic David caddy is placing on his blog a series of well-written and well thought out essays (with podcasts available from his blogthanks to miPOradio). He has recently turned to considering a number of contemporary poets, with clear explications of his interest in their work, starting with Bill Griffiths, as one of the many obituaries for this poet, much-loved by those who knew him, and since then also Thomas A Clark and Allen Fisher.
Multifaceted long poems such as Place are rare and challenging. They are not elitist per se as time and scholarship wear them down to manageable tenancies. They are adult and awake, moving forward. There are many ways in and out of their ingenuity. Parts of Place Book One echo the connections between the psychogeography of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem and sexuality. There is a sense of fully exploring the relations between the narrator’s body and the body of Lambeth. Place also contributed to the popularisation of pyschogeography in Britain through its emphasis on walking London and its connection with the large body of work produced by Iain Sinclair. One could also examine the way individual poems mark the extent, through fragmentation, to which the narrative self interjects within certain discourses. Place implicitly encourages moral and political thinking, of the need to break out of confined dogmas, peer groups and idioms. It shines as a beacon to show possible ways forward in that endless movement from the natural landscape to the cultural and back again. It makes you consider citizenship, moral responsibility and what it is to live in a place. It makes you think about the limits and thresholds of place, speech, identity and audience.
This deceptively simple poem interjects into an expansive realm of discursive poetics that has been the main path of English poetry and dissent since the nineteenth century. Clark, in common, with J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley, Geraldine Monk and others, has begun to move beyond the Wordsworthian rupture with the pastoral into new territory. Following the poem then we note that the world is reached by setting out, again implying ordering, and is there to be discovered, suggesting our knowledge of the world is partial or incomplete and implying an action and a process. The use of ‘we’ suggests that it is possible for us all to discover the world. The ‘least possible baggage’ suggests that closure of thought and emotional response hinders discovery of the world. Discovery, here, implies making connections as we walk and possibly reconnecting with the physical world and human life before or outside of mechanisation.
Bill’s poetry has a difficult, edgy surface that is oppositional. It employs an array of languages, often in the same poem or set of poems. Colloquial or spoken English, Anglo-Saxon, local dialects collide with Latin, French and Standard English, the written language of power. It his work on the procedures of law and bureaucracy, on prison; his commitment to a locality and its linguistic culture as a base for poetry; his use of ordinary people’s lived experience through a musical ear and cut-up disjunctions; his efforts to write polyphonically and to remove the obfuscation of Victorian language over archaic poetries and his continual movement to offset the structures of power with citizenship and the dialect of poetic language that will survive. Bill Griffiths I miss your stubbornness and cussedness already.
Brother Paul, on his excellent Culture Court website, has a very clear reading and response to Ken Edwards prose text, Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, which discusses many of the allusive and concatenatory precedures of contemporary writing:
Nostalgia, of course, is literally (from the Gk) a “home-pain” – but where’s home? Maybe it’s only on the home-page. And we’re the lost ratty pigeons of post-modernism. . . Or vampires sleeping in doorways. In a lost city of black light. No direction home, boys. . . .
Such are typical neuro-linguistic activities /image-chains generated by the texts of Ken Edward’s new book Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, which appears not long after the re-emergence of Iain Sinclair’s anthology City of Disappearances. For this could be fractal fiction, in which a sentence – take a sentence, any sentence, they’re all good – triggers complex patterns of association, whorl-holes of ambiguities in which a narrative (perhaps even a narrator) might be hiding. Negotiate the narratisations of Ken Edwards, construe the constructions of his consciousness, his cunning kennings. As they used to say in the old variety shows: now yer see ‘im, now yer don’t.
This is a very good introduction, by the Australian poet Laurie Duggan, to Gael Turnbull, but also to the range of his poetic practices, many of which you will find in subsequent innovative British poetry: From a relatively early date Turnbull was also making use of forms that would ultimately desert the conventional book page. His use of the column in some of these pieces carries an awareness of the shifts in concentration, the synapses, that permeate our consciousness.
Within the space of each ‘pause or hesitation’ change occurs as a kind of synaptic leap. What was to be said, or what is to be said is said in exchange for something not said. These poems have a permanence about them that belies their fragility. Some of them even approach that supposed impossibility: the tautology that contains knowledge.
A brief guide to ways of beginning to make sense of the otherwise potentially off-putting work and reputation of this poet, an heroic and exemplary figure to many of the writers of the British avant-garde. Both writers are academics and poets.
Iain Sinclair's poetry is very intelligently and usefully discussed in this wide-raning (Adorno, Wyndham Lewis, post-punk and sound systems all play their role) essay. in a way that so often happens in the writing of London — it is precisely the extreme contemporaneity of this poetry, its grounding in everyday perception and lived historical profanities, which paradoxically generates fervent spiritual qualities and concerns: such as avid hope for the future, a militant obscurity, or a rapt attention to personal singularity.
The Gig hosts this rich and informative listing by Allen Fisher of critical comments, some extended, on his work. A favourite, from City Limits:
. . . a perfect example of the contemporary British Poetry which sends critics into a froth. Seen in a fine art context, constructing and manipulating images, there is nothing inaccessible about this work. 'The Art of Flight' is reminiscent of Marinetti’s assertion that the new poet would describe the movement of electrons. Focus moves from the image itself to the details of its perception. Sound and rhythm give shape to an exercise in colour and form. Some stanzas seem to expand endlessly, as in 'Developing Immanence': 'reflections from night walls rowing light superimposition made/without layer form in silence of sleeping morning cortex'. Like the finest painters, Fisher takes us through a different way of seeing the world, the medium of poetry holding sway over time as well as space.
