‘the medium itself, rabbit by proxy’: some thoughts about reading J.H. Prynne

Abstract

Reading J.H. Prynné s poems, the most striking aspect has often been the sheer lexical variety they display, and the sensation of speed this can induce. The poems are, in a sense, photographs of processes of thought, catching the instant on the wing and flying with it. In this brief account of some of them I want to hover between the penumbral intellectual coherences that give them their substantive form and the processes of writing themselves and some of the difficulties they present.