Out of the blue: Prynne’s gifts

Abstract

ABSTRACTA couple of years ago a friend presented me out of the blue with a gift: a little brown, blank envelope, and inside it Prynne’s newest poem at the time, Dune Quail Eggs. Any book given as a gift may feel like it belongs to the moment of its giving, but this one seemed to represent a special case, not just because of its surprisingness, but because the object itself in its particularity so obviously influenced the rhythm of my discovery of it. The envelope, though blank, seemed to begin in advance the sequence of alternations by which the text, when I read it later, would withhold and release information. The poem’s meaning needed the envelope; and maybe by implication it also needed my friend’s surprise gesture. But how could it need these features of a contingency belonging only to my personal experience and now to my fading memory? I am curious, in this piece, about the alter ego of the etext: the poem whose manner of being is so intrinsically physical that we never get hold of it.