'Controlled Amazement'

Abstract

Poems by J. H. Prynne. Bloodaxe Books, 2005. £15. ISBN 1-85224-656-1 ‘N obody can like ... the recent poetry of J. H. Prynne, and those who say they do are elitist scum.’ Sean Bonney reports this entertaining remark in Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology , which ‘unlocks the many hidden secrets behind the genius, inspiration, absurdity and importance of Frank Zappa’. 1 It also conveys the excitement of the music for ‘intelligent and thrill-seeking persons’, to borrow Andrew Duncan’s alternative description of Prynne’s target audience. The new Poems adds over a hundred pages to the first Bloodaxe edition (1999), plus a ‘previously unpublished collection’, like a boxed CD set with bonus tracks. This marvellous book has ‘many hidden secrets’ of its own, but an informal Academy Prynne has been busy unlocking them. The best interpreters are Neil Reeve and Richard Kerridge, who acknowledge its ‘seemingly alienating devices’, but repudiate the position adopted by many critics for whom its resistance to bourgeois consumption, if not its ‘virtual unreadability’, is the whole point. 2 Intriguingly, most critics who take this line, derived from Theodor Adorno, seem to have sought refuge in Prynne’s ‘recent poetry’, conceding the intelligibility of the greater part of forty years’ work. For my money, early or late, his poetry outshines any conceivable product of programmatic ‘unreadability’: