This is a very short paper which I gave at a one-day conference at the University of Sussex, on what, at the time, we called the ‘late work’ of J.H. Prynne. Eight years ago, his most recent book had been Kazoo Dreamboats, and even that had been two years previous: none of us could possibly have imagined that nearly thirty more books would follow; let alone that twenty-two of them would emerge in the last two years. Perhaps, when everyone who sticks with Prynne’s work has wrapped their head round this new crop of texts, this ‘late work’ conference needs some sort of repeat performance, or rather a sequel. My contribution was published along with eight others in Hix Eros: On The Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Hi Zero & Sad Press, 2014), a volume collecting papers given at the conference, painstakingly edited by Joe Luna and Jow Lindsay Walton.
If I find it alarming to think that this conference was eight years ago — and I do, because it is — isn’t it also reassuring, when reading something you’ve written, bristling at it, mistrusting or disliking its manoeuvres; when thinking, Christ, I’d do that very differently, or not at all, now — isn’t it reassuring to think, Yes, of course you would do it differently. There’s eight years between the author of this paper and the person sharing it now; so I’ve checked the instinct to tinker, and (just about) the instinct to apologize, and — other than clawing footnotes back into the text — I have left it well alone. It is what it is.
Acrylic Tips
Acrylic Tips (2002) is, I think, a truly horrible book, violent, liverish, and unpleasant to read and to write about. Indeed this paper only for a while discusses Acrylic Tips in particular; it presents a personal and sometimes frustrated account of my experience of reading that sequence, and briefly worries, not entirely as a diversionary tactic, at some wider points about my experience of reading more of J.H. Prynne’s poetry, and of reading certain kinds of writing about it. Acrylic Tips itself is garish, lurid, unsettling, and to me full of a vivid and threatening bodily trauma. Not only does it leave me indignant, dumbstruck, and annoyed, it makes me feel unwell.
Acrylic Tips was published in 2002, and it is on the page at least visually familiar if you’ve spent any time in the later stretches of the 2005 collected Poems: a rather dauntingly uniform series of block-stanzas. The original pamphlet was roughly A5, set in an inelegant sans-serif typeface likely intended for screen rather than print, and the cover was two shades of bloody red. There are six stanzas per poem, and there are ten poems, all untitled. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are indented. It is not the case, as for instance with Red D Gypsum (1998), that every stanza ends with a full stop, yet it is the case that every stanza opens with a capital letter. My reading of this sequence attempts an account of their presence later. Rhyme when it occurs seems distant, muted, or inscrutably collateral; at least, it does not overall seem a prominent feature. Metrically, Acrylic Tips seems to be accentual-syllabic with more or less five heavy stresses per line. These observations are not intended to be sarcastically redundant: form in this poem seems to me simply to be a sheer inert fact, or a deathly and totalizing duress, almost never seeming to be a structure against and around which metre and syntax might create changes of tension and emphasis. That is to say: these block stanzas seem not to be connected with more familiar uses or activities of poetic form, of versification, for what might be called expressive potential; the texture of this poem does not seem for instance to admit for any prominence or intensification around line-endings; no rhyme, no enjambment, no metrical elastic put exhilaratingly to the test. Yet neither do I think that this form, or this fact of layout, represents the outright suppression of such potential for expressivity. And neither is this to say that these block-stanzas are arbitrary, or that they might be somehow just a partial viewing of the text through a window or grille, or that this sequence is just a hair’s-breadth away from prose, flowed through some text boxes with word-wrap turned on. They're just there, recalling for me all the sinister menace of things whose apparent inertness must still be called constantly into question.
Acrylic tips, by the way, are partial false nails which do not cover the whole nail but are attached only at the tip, and extend beyond it. That is a piece of information. From poem one:
chomp get hungry for intimate newsy entrances. Get plenty get quick.(J.H. Prynne, Poems, p.537)
It’s familiar to hear talk of ‘ways in’ to such poetry as this. And here literally is one; several of them. ‘Newsy entrances’, whatever they are. ‘Chomp’ is blusteringly playful set against the prevailing tone here. ‘Newsy entrances’ could be a strange, self-descriptive wordplay referring to headlines or leader paragraphs: certainly there is a remarked-upon (even stereotyped) propensity in much late Prynne for a manner at least superficially reminiscent of such compressed bulletins as news headlines, telegrams, or cryptic crossword clues. Direct comparison with these other kinds of language never seems too fruitful, but, for now: in Acrylic Tips there are, throughout, two-word noun-phrases which exemplify just this manner. From the first stanza: ‘lost time’, ‘eggplant prone’, ‘tampered dune’, ‘grievance solitary’, ‘crook pathways’. Of course these aren’t all necessarily noun-phrases; in context, their grammar cannot often persuaded to settle into one of several simultaneous options. ‘[H]ow fast / the grievance solitary’ could be read as if the word ‘becomes’ has been omitted; it could be read as if in surprise at the speed of a ‘solitary grievance’ — the first word ‘how’ means that in either case, we might interpret it as a question — and so on. Such attempts at what feels like decryption, decompression, un-encoding, can seem facile, or stupid; or sometimes they are for a brief time profoundly illuminating; but most often, to me, they feel like a bad scribble, the kind of boring, fruitless vandalization to be denied or rubbed partially out.
Images in Acrylic Tips, as in much of Prynne’s later books, would seem to recur again and again in slightly altered form; structures or shapes of thought apparently unconnected slowly accumulate an obscure or inscrutable similarity, forming networks or constellations of ideas, without of course ever coming truly to coalesce. This paper will look at just one of these, without attempts at contextualization, without analysis of its content beyond the enclosed field of the poem-sequence itself, but concentrating more on the sheer fact of these image-networks, or, to borrow a term from Beckett:
a neuralgia rather than a theme, persistent and monotonous, [which] disappears beneath the surface and emerges a still finer and more nervous structure.
(Samuel Beckett, “Proust,” in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder, 1999, p.33)
To return to my suggestion that this poem’s form is not a site of potential expressivity: we might instead concentrate on those moments in the poem which are remarkable for their seeming — on first or on fifteenth reading, and with however much coercion on our part — not to align with any of these networks, or neuralgias, or constellations of imagery. Perhaps these moments of intractable non-associability could be the operation on a sub- or superstratum of something somehow equivalent to textual formalities; exhilarating enjambments, say, or surprising rhymes or non-rhymes: the poetic tensions of metrical or formal constraint enacted in a different realm, non-metrical and non-vocal. To recognize such a pattern of relations here is unvolitionally to install a new structure — one which it is impossible ever to describe or even fully understand formally, but still a structure against which the rest of the poem might then be tested. Yet supposing any given topology of imagery — whether obvious, tenuous, or even deliberately preposterous or elastic — there will be moments in the poem where however hard we try, however much pressure we apply, an image newly encountered cannot be mapped onto that topology. The image tests the pattern, coaxes from us an instinct of its threshold, but then breaks it or crosses it or falls short, perhaps as a glint beginning the generation of a whole new topology or network; or perhaps merely as an un-illuminating collision, the image simply glancing off and coming to seem to us inexplicable, redundant, even objectionable.
So I will give a brief and inconclusive account of one of these networks of images, but would like to remark first on what I’ve caught myself with some suspicion doing: network, neuralgia, topology, constellation, gantry, metastasis, concordance. This impulse to use a quasi-interchangeable series of metaphors in an attempt as if cumulatively to indicate or describe something is not so unlike the behaviour of the very networks, neuralgias, topologies, I am attempting to indicate or describe — each pseudo-aggregate of similar images has some asymptotic tendency toward comprehensiveness, with what must be an inherent and necessary inadequacy. These image-networks do not describe something beyond what they are; they simply are: not the sum of their parts, even, but the nebulous recognition of an inscrutable likeness between those parts. I am partially plagiarizing John Wilkinson, particularly in my use of ‘metastasis’. In ‘The Metastases of Poetry’ he says:
... my use derives from a brief experience of nursing in a cancer hospice, the way metastatic tumours echo about the body and these nodes define the shape of the body subjectively, through pain. Of course, the location of the primary tumour is outside the poem’s realm; the poem develops around the metastatic nodes, and these gestures come to evoke its physical lineaments. The reticence of the primary helps guard against a reductive essentialism in approaching the poem, that it is about such and such — in fact, there will be a number of extrinsic primaries. Too many indeed for amenability.
(John Wilkinson, ‘The Metastases of Poetry’, in The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess, London: Salt, 2007, p.154)
The network of images I found started as markings on a flat surface, specifically linear markings, however straight. From poem 1: ‘pathways risen up’, ‘The ploughshare has been through / the ground’, ‘riven grove’, ‘incision along a defined track’, perhaps ‘downward streak’ (Poems, p.537). Later ‘rasp channelled’ might be included, ‘ridge pretention’ (p.538), ‘ducted retention’, ‘gradual trellis’, ‘mastic furrow’ (p.539), ‘brave / crevice’ (p.540). More now than a scoring of surfaces, this set of images I was finding also came to include three-dimensional versions of itself: any substances extending as filaments into other substances, rooted or affixed at one end, like veins into an organ. ‘[N]odding milkwort in river-sway’ (p.542) could be an unusually pretty instance of this, plants extending upward into water and gently moving; except that milkwort shouldn’t be underwater, just as a liver shouldn't be flooded with blood (the ‘copious infarct’ of the first poem (p.537): more on that later). These tableaux of interstitiality, capillaries extending across surfaces or through substances, plus the gaps they imply there, form one image pattern in the poem. Perhaps not the most prominent, but the one so far the most accessible to me: and perhaps only workable as a pattern when articulated in a conniving manner, at once specific and vague enough. It must, of course, always be only a part-reading, to speak of such a pattern; and this is not to say those moments in the sequence which bear no obvious relation at all can be discarded or set aside. There is a sentence in the sixth poem which seems as if it could be read in incredulous mockery of an attempt to countenance Acrylic Tips which first recognizes this specific correlation of images:
Who does it now estranged filaments your trick, why not tryOn even broken surface folds.(p.542)
In borrowing Beckett’s term for the recurrence in different forms of things which are nonetheless similar I’m aware that he was talking across and between as well as within texts. These scorings of surface or interstitial demarcations of substance seemed prominent to me in Acrylic Tips, and characteristic to it; but another such neuralgia found in this text has, I’d say, been present in Prynne’s work for years — the image and activity of a boundary, or the movement up to or away from one; the resolution, the irresolution, or even the redundancy of the elastics and tensions and congestions involved. The testing of a limit in such a case might be felt analogous to the heightened syllabic awareness around line-endings in metrical verse forms which I mentioned earlier, as if these moments of tension or torque are operating now on a different layer of this texture, and in a different manner. This probably confuses my earlier suggestion — that departures from or non-adherences to image-networks surrogate moments of quasi-formal variations in tension — by describing a recurrent image-network which consists wholly of these images of perimeter and transgression. The quasi-formal transgression, intensification, stress, of precisely not being relatable to an image-network whose characteristic is transgression, intensification, stress? — the thought seems to wither to nothing. Encountering such a feedback loop probably means that this analysis needs to pause for breath.
At one point in my reading, two two-word phrases on the first page which had seemed unrelated suddenly felt related, an obscure interface between two separate if nebulous species of image-network. I still don’t know what to do with any of this. But the presence of all the limits being pushed up against, the ‘crush horizon’ (p.537) or the ‘perimeter / ailment’ (p.538), seems — via ‘vivid suffusion’, ‘ducted retention’ (p.539), and so on — to meet, in the ‘copious infarct’ of poem one, the scoring and vein-like images of the first pattern described above. But the membranes are bleeding now, not strong enough to withstand the pressure. An infarct is
[A] portion of tissue that has become stuffed with extravasated blood, serum, or other matter
(Oxford English Dictionary)
— and here, copiously, we find the boundary-failure of the veins extending, interstitially, through an organ. Acrylic Tips reads in terms of that specific and terrifying moment as if both pre- and post-, warning and aftermath: a thoroughly nasty alarum for imminent boundary-failure, yet also the artefact of that failure, a nauseating infarcted chunk whose very condition is absolute extravasation.
Briefly and to conclude I mentioned an account of the presence of the capital letters which begin each stanza. Perhaps the capital letters don't have to be countenanced at all. But with ‘riven grove’, ‘mastic furrow’, ‘pathways risen’, ‘pipes to ground’ (p.537, p.539, p.546), that whole interstitial constellation in mind, and the temptation to notice the visual interstices of the block-stanzas in this light: I wonder whether the capitalization at the start of every stanza could be seen as analogous to the root of a new duct, capillary, or channel, through this texture. They would mark the compression or attenuation of this very notion — of distinct threads of tissue within a mass (even one from which they might become indistinguishable) — into the inert fact of a standard marker of the start of a sentence, forced dead, and as if by long-perished formal convention, into the text: yet continuation or growth from this new root is immediately curtailed, disintegrating back into the superordinating homogeneity of form and brutality of expression. My reading of this poem arrives here, ejected at the total shutdown of anything germinant, embryonic, or inflorescent: no new growth can survive this subsuming totality of absolute perimeter-failure. Even ossification is too optimistic a process; it sounds like bone itself cannot fail to bleed back into blood:
each one quickSpinal attempt discarded.
(p.543)
Perhaps these capitalizations are a clanking, limp gesture toward pinning down stanzas which would otherwise be ‘estranged filaments’ or ‘hair roots adrift’; they are, now, just the ‘fissures nailed front and back’ (p.542). These capitalizations feel so materially, substantially separate from the text whose grammar they would claim to flag that they remind me by now of the ‘acrylic tips’ of the title, attached to the already carapaced extremity of the body in question with only a minimum of surface overlap. Such a kaleidoscope of fanciful suppositions continues predictably to melt away into itself: ‘delusive grips / curtailed already’ (p.539). It is tempting to say that the nullifying influence described above seems to apply as much to attempted response as to the sequence itself.
This response is also, toward its conclusion, engaging in another familiar manoeuvre. It seems uncommon to read an analysis of a poem or sequence by J.H. Prynne which does not at some point subside into a pyrotechnic but not always illuminating description of the poem’s behaviour, using a barrage of select quotations from it, as if they guarantee the most incontrovertible account by coming from within. Maybe they do. There is though something unappetizingly reductive about this approach, and it seems to me a little suspect, involving a diminishing circularity: deploying instrumentalized capsules from a poem, because they seem better able to do it than we, to describe or euphemize some or all of the rest; imperfect copies or carriers-in-solution of a fractal whole — as if the poem itself is, in the end, nothing more than a part-occluded scaffold consisting entirely of such self-description, without the reassuringly exegetical prose-cushioning, or is the singular instance of some mutant species of markup-language, whose only referent is itself. Yet perhaps to adopt such an attitude toward a sequence as unrelenting as Acrylic Tips is absolutely fair enough. Certainly it can make you want to give up trying.
On re-reading, everything about the experience I just described may harden into something sharper and clearer, or it may fall away as mockably unconvincing or wayward. For a sequence full of imperative, of the noises of assertion, command, demand, Acrylic Tips seems to turn back on itself and efface itself at every moment. It is obviously a difficult and nasty sequence, but it is much more than that a devastatingly negative one, speaking of and through disfigurement and contusion and laceration. The threats which issue from its heady pulp, which seems to traumatize itself further and with more vigour the more you read it, are that any new beginning is doomed to fail, and that its haemorrhage and infarction are not local and temporary, but are universal, permanent, contagious, and indiscriminate.