Placing Homelessness: Reading J.H. Prynne's Wound Response

Abstract

This paper proposes that the concept of place in J.H. Prynne’s Wound Response (1974) is founded on a condition of homelessness. Prynne recognizes the complicity of a humanist idea of home with totalitarian fantasies of foundations and origins. We argue that Wound Response constitutes a homeless geography of place, which becomes an ethical alternative to the politics of exclusion that underlie the process of homemaking. Destabilizing the anchorage of home, the volume encounters both the land and the body in moments of vulnerability. Politicized and territorialized, the wounded body in Wound Response becomes a reminder of the fundamental homelessness that haunts contemporary forms of spatial being. While stressing the severe inadequacy of a concept of place marked by rootedness, security, and permanence, the poems offer transient modes of shelter consistently underlined by a sense of precarity. By analyzing the figures of shelter and ‘human’ configurations of place in Wound Response, this paper maps the alternative geography of place that emerges from an ethically charged commitment to homelessness.