The 29th Lecture on Everything, Friday 21st May, 8PM at Marsh Barn
A bomb goes off in a MacDonalds in the Green Zone in Baghdad. We know whatever is reported, but what does ‘reported’ mean? In Keston Sutherland’s Stress Position the language we use about the wars we wage is itself subjected to the pressure of what an event like that must really be like. His poem is a controlled explosion carried out on the language itself. Since it is our language, and our complicity, the poetry is meant to disturb and it does.
Jeremy Prynne’s poetry, likewise, is a radical calling back into question of life’s discarded, discordant meanings. His work ‘might locate humankind in relation to geological time scales or to the infinitesimal events of neurochemistry, to the migration patterns of other species or to the systems logic of information technology.’ He also translates from Chinese. His poetry takes seriously what these forms of knowledge are doing to the way we see and speak
And just as we can switch on the news, so we can go on reading Wordsworth as one of English Literature’s Greatest Hits. Or. Not. In a remarkable recent study (Field Notes, 2007) Prynne re-reads The Solitary Reaper through that tissue of absences, elisions and occlusions from which it actually emerged. Through the removal of the poet’s sister Dorothy, say, or the exclusion of recent economic and political history from a scene in which these, or the awareness of them, would have made up a prominent part.
Comparable concerns inform the work of the younger poets he has influenced. Josh Stanley, the youngest writer here, is a poet also associated with what has been termed the ‘New British School.’
This is a rare opportunity to find out about some of the most engaged and sophisticated poetry being written anywhere in English today. The work that will be performed and discussed this coming Friday is uncompromising and challenging. Prynne very seldom reads in public. We are fortunate indeed in this visit.
‘what loneliness/ to be blind in broad daylight-/and deaf, what loneliness/ when the song’s in full swing’
J. H. Prynne I have been writing poems since the 1960's and have published round about 30 collections since that time; there is a near-inclusive edition in Poems, Bloodaxe Books, 2005, and since then, To Pollen and Sub Songs, have appeared, both from Barque Press (DJ: Keston Sutherland). I am a far-flung traveller and have spent much time in China; more recently I have been in Thailand and Nepal, studying the immediately current revolutionary insurgencies in both countries. There are various essays of mine that can be found on the web, including "Mental Ears" (the first website reference, below), and also several critiques of my poems, including an astute overview by Jennifer Cooke of the collection To Pollen, which I shall probably present during my Dorset visit (the second website reference, below). There are many questions about poetry that cannot be well answered by poets, but that's no reason for not thinking about them and exchanging points of view.
J.H. Prynne (Cambridge, May 2010)Keston Sutherland is the author of Antifreeze, The Rictus Flag, Neutrality, Neocosis, Hot White Andy, Stress Position and The Stats on Infinity. He edits Barque Press and the poetics journal Quid. He lives in Brighton and teaches English at the University of Sussex. He is currently editing the collected critical prose of J.H. Prynne and finishing a theoretical study of Marx and Adorno, Uses of Stupefaction, due out in 2011 from Seagull Books.
Josh Stanley has published three pamphlets : & after it is, Glogy and Rad Glucose In Yr Membrane Baby Doll!. A new pamphlet, Contranight Escha Black, is forthcoming from Critical Documents. He edits Grasp Press with Timothy Thornton and Luke Roberts, and the journal Hot Gun! on his own. Right now, he lives in Brighton and is completing an MA at Sussex, but will be moving to the USA this summer to begin a PhD.
They will be reading from their work, answering questions about it and asking other questions back.
LECTURES on EVERYTHING
MARSH BARN, Burton Road, Bridport, DT6 4PS
Telephone: 078 33 79 56 29
(01308) 458 116
Email: eendymion@yahoo.com
