JH Prynne is nonsense

and here's why

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while, and this idea has suddenly come to me, so I thought it was worth writing down.

1. I don’t really mean that JH Prynne is nonsense. I don’t think I’m qualified to judge any poet as nonsense or not. This is just one idea, one way of looking at a problem.

2. I’m using JH Prynne to stand for the notion of difficult poetry, as others have done, and as he himself has done.

Now, my idea is this. Prynne is nonsense, not because he is difficult, but because he is not specific. I’m reading his first collection from the 1960s, and I’m not finding much in it that tells me it’s from the 1960s; or that it’s from England; or that it is from any place or time. It’s full of rivers that are general rivers, skies that are Platonic skies. I remember one of his later collections follows a specific river from source to mouth. Perhaps I should go and look at that. But what I’m missing in this collection is a roughness of detail, a sandpapery hook to draw blood or traction me into the scene. Look at this:

Bronze : Fish
We are at the edge of all that and
can reach back to another
matter, only it’s not back but
down rather, or in some involved
sense of further off. The virtues
of prudence, the rich arable soil:
but why should ever the whole
mercantile harvest run to form
again? The social cohesion
of towns is our newer ligature,
and the binding, you must see, is
the rule for connection, where we
are licensed to expect. That’s
the human city, & we are
now at the edge of it. Which way
are we facing. Burn the great sphere:
count them, days of the week.

There’s something in this poem. A reference to cities. A reference to agriculture. I guess that makes it specific to the last 10,000 years. But what else? He’s trying to place us somewhere, on a border of some kind, with a city on one side, and the pastoral past on the other. But where are the emotional hooks that might pull us in either direction? He names the soil as rich, claims that it represents prudence, but this is thin stuff. The towns have ligatures and licenses, but I don’t feel ligatured just because he said it.

What’s gone wrong here is that he’s given us abstraction, not difficulty. Abstraction is not bad, but it’s not poetry. Difficulty can be something we accept in poetry because the poetry is there: because something insistent catches at us. I’ll read a difficult poem if it lures me with rhyme or rouses me with smelling-salt images. But this poem doesn’t do that.

In my Tang poems I rarely have this problem. They are full of specifics (at least the good ones are). I often don’t know what those specifics are, and sometimes have to feel my way into them; but in each case I find gritty nubbins of real experience, which I can then try to reflect in some English form.