Through the oval window

Robert Potts on why the famously obscure poet Jeremy Prynne deserves wider acclaim in the UK
Poems by JH Prynne
Buy Poems at Public domain

On March 30, the poet Jeremy Prynne gave a rare public reading of his own work in Paris. He prefaced it with a few words in French, including an observation about the brutal violence of the state (he had just witnessed some black youths being beaten up by the police on the Metro). Then, quietly, precisely, with regular and marked variations in pace, he recited a new 10-page poem entitled "Blue Slides At Rest". It was unexpectedly electrifying and moving.

This scarcely publicised event felt both intimate and obscure, marginal yet significant. The last time Prynne read in public, in Bristol, it was at the unrefusable request of an old friend, the American poet Ed Dorn, who was dying of cancer. The last time he refused to do so was at the launch of his collection Poems in 1999, and more recently he said he would never read in England. Asked why he was reading on this occasion, he replied: "That's another question"; but in his introduction he did seem to draw a distinction between "the voice of the poem" and "the voice of the poet" ("an accident of biography... which does not interest me").

Although Prynne has a sizeable following in England, it sometimes feels as if his international reputation is much larger: in France, the US and, markedly, in China. When the French poet Jérôme Game, the reading's organiser, introduced Prynne it was as the most important living English poet: the same claim some critics perceived in Randall Stevenson's recent Oxford English Literary History, and which launched an unlikely flurry of media interest recently.

Prynne's name has long been, among poetry readers, oddly totemic: he is demonised by some British poets, idolised by others. He is regarded as obscure in two senses. One, he is not regarded as "well known". The difference, perhaps, between the general obscurity of British poets and the obscurity of Prynne is that he has made few efforts to publicise himself: he doesn't give interviews, is not willingly photographed, produces his barely publicised work through small presses in (rather beautiful) limited edition chapbooks, and rarely features in mainstream publications except as an idle shorthand for a wide variety of avant-garde writing.

Prynne himself is perfectly accessible, living and working in Cambridge, until recently teaching and lecturing at Gonville & Caius College, and always offering generous hospitality and advice to numerous poets and readers. The Sunday Times had no trouble snatching an impertinent photo of him cycling down the street a few weeks ago, which it published on February 22. His self-exile from the metropolitan literary "scene" is more in the manner of, say, the late novelist William Gaddis, who thought writers' biographies irrelevant, than of the vanishing JD Salinger or the invisible Thomas Pynchon.

In fact, Prynne has frequently participated in the forming and supporting of literary communities. After a conventional first book, Force of Circumstance (1962, now disowned), he read and lectured in the US, working closely with avant-garde poets such as Charles Olson and Ed Dorn, assisting with Olson's Maximus poems, and contributing to Dorn's satirical magazine Bean News.

Back in Cambridge he was heavily involved with The English Intelligencer, a series of circulated works and responses between poets interested in the avant-garde and opposed to the commodification of literature. Non-Cambridge, working-class writers such as Barry McSweeney were also friends. The belittling term "Cambridge School", often applied to Prynne and his contemporaries or protégés, has become a meaninglessly vague label for a wide range of practices, small presses and poets across England.

The other obscurity associated with Prynne is that his poetry is regarded as hermetic, baffling, difficult of access, uncertain of interpretation. To his detractors - and, despite his obscurity, something about Prynne does engender a disproportionate amount of alarmed hostility - he can simply be dismissed as incomprehensible, or near enough: on a recent Today programme, John Sutherland suggested that "only four people... can understand him". He is regarded as having no readership.

Yet the fact remains that he does have a sizeable readership; when Poems (encompassing almost all his work between 1968 and 1997) was published by Fremantle/Bloodaxe in the late 1990s, he was among the best sellers of living literary poets, with Tom Paulin, Don Paterson, Les Murray, Wole Soyinka and Carol Ann Duffy. Thousands of copies were sold. Still stranger is Prynne's international reputation. The collected poems were, incongruously, nominated for a New Yorker book prize. In China, a translation of "Pearls That Were" (only 500 copies of which were produced in England) has sold more than 50,000 copies.

The poems are not immediately inviting: there is no ingratiation and glad hand, no drum roll or enticing McGuffin, no attention-grabbing dramatics. "Profuse reclaim from a scrape or belt, funnel do / axial parenthood block the mustard dots briefly / act forward..."; "Assuming banishment for lost time back across nullity..."; "Pacify rag hands attachment in for muted / counter-march or locked in going to drainage..." are the scarcely attractive openings of three recent poems; little or nothing can be made of them until the whole poem has been read at least once, and preferably several times.

But when, next year, a revised and expanded Poems is published, those who feel the later work has become so shockingly unconventional, looking at first glance like a Dadaist barrage of unconnected words, will have to reckon with the anomalous "Pearls That Were", from 1999, predominantly using highly familiar patterns of cadence and rhyme:

So Orpheus tamed the wild beasts
for long night comes down
moving naked, over the wound,
the gem from the crown.

For years, I found Prynne's poetry repellent, until the work itself changed my mind. (The epigraph to the 1979 poem "Down Where Changed" is ostensibly taken from Practical Crystal Gazing by C Thorpe, and teasingly reads: "Anyone who takes up this book will, we expect, have done so because at the back of his mind he has a half-formed belief that there is something in it." I have always taken this as a disconcerting joke.)

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. More than 90 years ago, Ezra Pound noted: "We no longer think or need to think in terms of monolinear logic, the sentence structure, subject, predicate, object etc. We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hyper-geometric amalgams."

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. The "two cultures" identified by CP Snow, and the rapid splitting of scientific inquiry into ever-increasing specialisms, have made even less likely Wordsworth's dream that scientific knowledge could be integrated into the unity of life rather than used to portion and control it.

In his earliest and most Romantic work (Kitchen Poems 1968, The White Stones 1969), Prynne seemed to pursue, inquiringly rather than naïvely, some primal purity, before history and before language - "to take knowledge / back to the springs", "come off the time-standard", "it may all flow again if we suppress the / breaks". But the later work presents us with the very processes and languages that compete to tear, apportion, oppress, commodify and poison. The later work lacks the passionate and optimistic assertiveness of his first books; it is more a question of whether, from the eternal contestations within language itself, other possibilities might still emerge.

"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.

One begins to appreciate how grossly partial a single viewpoint is, and how political its exclusions. "What can't be helped / is the vantage, private and inert", Prynne writes; but the ambiguities in "can't be helped" call attention to one of the poem's themes; of what constitutes empathy, of how, and how much, we "care".

In the much-later "Triodes" (1999), the title represents both electronics and (though not strictly etymological) "three odes", the poem being broken into three 10-page Pindarics. Although there are overt references to the Middle East, and indeed to the Irish situation, the poem (almost a mock-narrative) does not allow its politics or ethics to slide into dualism; as its title suggests, it simultaneously allows for a plurality of sometimes incompatible readings. Once again, it is for the reader to find their own position, their own judgment, on the basis of these various possibilities.

Not that this amounts to literary anarchy. Prynne's own critical work, and his teaching, make it clear that one's response to an art work or piece of literature must be precisely attentive to the perceptible gestures and decisions of the artist, derived from a thorough-going attention to their work as a whole, and to the contexts of that work; and also that the writer must not be arbitrary or modish in the use of form or language: "the indentation and paragraphing and stanza sequence of verse writing are not arbitrary features, and least so in experiments with form"; "pretentiousness, sentimentalism and expressive disordering (ie muddle dignified as experiment) will not excite your unwilling readers".

In his book on a single Shakespeare sonnet, "They that haue powre to hurte", Prynne produces an exquisite philological study, proceeding word by word, as if to show how dense any such contexts for understanding might be, and to tease out the more plausible options. (Wryly, one epigraph to the book also suggests the lunacy of such an endeavour.) Its first line is (almost amusingly) "'They': We do not know who they are"; and by the end we realise we are still unsure, the poem having become a tense field of public utterance and private secrecy, radiating possible lines of political and personal interpretation.

Context is everything. Language itself (as Prynne's etymological and philological forays suggest) carries residual traces of its historical and literary uses and contexts; it is neither pure nor innocent, and is not simply a coin that can be uncomplicatedly traded for a single meaning. What Prynne's work presents us with is not his opinions, scrambled and awaiting our delighted decryption, but the simultaneous processes and viewpoints of the worlds created in language. As he once wrote, in the closest he has come to a personal statement on his method: "It has mostly been my own aspiration, for example, to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usage; and thereby with the reader's own position within this world."

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.

Part of the pleasure for some readers, including myself, is the discovery of fresh vantage points on the world, garnered from chasing references in the poems, whether historical, musical, literary, scientific or economic. As one reader has said, "the experience I always get reading Prynne, going to the dictionary and the encyclopedia, is the excitement I was cheated out of by my education, having it all served up, rather than, like my grandfather, finding it out for myself (after work) with great effort and little societal encouragement."

This autodidactic pursuit, necessarily different for each reader, is an incidental pleasure rather than the whole point of the poetry, though it does seem unavoidable. One should perhaps note that the contexts implied by Prynne's poems are unignorably part of our world, and part of our language (and in their initial strangeness can induce the same combinations of fear and wonder once associated with the sublime). It may be uncomfortable for us to become aware of these contexts, and to become aware of our ignorance of them, but the artist is under no obligation politely to spare our feelings by reducing his frame of reference to that of a notional "general reader", and would be showing scant respect for such a reader if he did.

The recent controversy over Prynne's merits has made more people aware of his work, at a time when all of it is easily available. It is undeniable that his poetry offers both pleasures and challenges of an unusually complex kind: and it is for precisely this reason that many people will testify, without hyperbole or sentimentality, that his poetry has changed their lives.

· Robert Potts is co-editor of Poetry Review. Poems by JH Prynne is published by Fremantle/Bloodaxe, price £12