J. H. Prynne

Last updated

Jeremy Halvard Prynne (born 24 June 1936) is a British poet closely associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Contents

Prynne grew up in Kent and was educated at St Dunstan's College, Catford, and Jesus College, Cambridge. [1] He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He retired in October 2005 from his posts teaching English Literature as a Lecturer and University Reader in English Poetry for the University of Cambridge and as Director of Studies in English for Gonville and Caius College; in September 2006 he retired from his position as Librarian of the College.

Prynne's early influences include Donald Davie and Charles Olson. He was one of the key figures in the Cambridge group among the British Poetry Revival poets and a major contributor to The English Intelligencer . His first book, Force of Circumstance and Other Poems, was published in 1962, but Prynne has excluded it from his canon. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print, beginning with Kitchen Poems (1968), with expanded and updated editions appearing in 1999, 2005, and 2015. 2020 to 2022 has seen an unprecedented burst of productivity, with the publication of over two dozen small press chapbooks and several substantial collections, including book-length poems, sequences and a poetic novel.

In addition to his poetry, Prynne has published some critical and academic prose. A transcription of a 1971 lecture on Olson's Maximus Poems at Simon Fraser University has had wide circulation. [2] His longer works include a monograph on Ferdinand de Saussure, Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words, [3] and self-published, very erudite book-length commentaries on individual poems by Shakespeare (Sonnets 94 and 15), George Herbert ("Love III") and Wordsworth ("The Solitary Reaper"). His long and passionate interest in China (he was a close friend and colleague of Joseph Needham) is reflected in an essay on New Songs from a Jade Terrace , an anthology of early Chinese love poetry, which was included in the second edition of the book from Penguin (1982). His collected poetry includes a poem composed in classical Chinese under the name Pu Ling-en (蒲龄恩), reproduced in his own calligraphy. In 2016, a lengthy interview with Prynne about his poetic practice appeared in The Paris Review as part of its "The Art of Poetry" series. [4]


Bibliography

Poetry

Collected poetry

  • Poems (Agneau 2, 1982)
  • Poems (Fremantle Arts Centre Press/Bloodaxe, 1999)
  • Poems (Fremantle Arts Centre Press/Bloodaxe, 2005; expanded 2nd edition)
  • Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015; expanded 3rd edition)
  • Poems 2016–2024 (Bloodaxe, 2024)

Prose

Correspondence

Translations of works by Prynne

Chinese

French

German

Norwegian

Related Research Articles

Andrew Thomas Knights Crozier was a poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.

Barry MacSweeney was an English poet and journalist. His organizing work contributed to the British Poetry Revival.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Szirtes</span> British poet and translator (born 1948)

George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Robinson (poet)</span> British poet (born 1953)

Peter Robinson is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Briggflatts</span> 1966 long poem by Basil Bunting

Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1966. The work is subtitled "An Autobiography". The title "Briggflatts" comes from the name of Brigflatts Meeting House, a Quaker Friends meeting house near Sedbergh in Cumbria, England. Bunting visited Brigflatts as a schoolboy when the family of one of his schoolfriends lived there, and it was at this time that he developed a strong attachment to his friend's sister, Peggy Greenbank, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was first read in public on 22 December 1965 in the medieval Morden Tower, part of Newcastle town wall, and published in 1966 by Fulcrum Press. Bunting also wrote another poem with "Briggflatts" in its title, the short work "At Briggflatts meetinghouse" (1975).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Reverdy</span> French poet (1889–1960)

Pierre Reverdy was a French poet whose works were inspired by and subsequently proceeded to influence the provocative art movements of the day, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. The loneliness and spiritual apprehension that ran through his poetry appealed to the Surrealist credo. He, though, remained independent of the prevailing "-isms", searching for something beyond their definitions. His writing matured into a mystical mission seeking, as he wrote: "the sublime simplicity of reality."

Nathaniel Tarn was a French-American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. He was born in Paris to a French-Romanian mother and a British-Lithuanian father. He lived in Paris, France, until the age of seven, then in Belgium until the age of 11; when World War II began, the family moved to England. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at several American universities, primarily Rutgers, where he was a professor from 1972 until 1985. He has lived outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, since his retirement from Rutgers.

Jacques Dupin was a French poet, art critic, and co-founder of the journal L'éphemère.

Chris Emery, also known as Chris Hamilton-Emery, is a British poet and literary publisher.

Bloodaxe Books is a British publishing house specializing in poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Maiden</span> Australian poet (born 1949)

Jennifer Maiden is an Australian poet. She was born in Penrith, New South Wales, and has had 38 books published: 29 poetry collections, 6 novels and 3 nonfiction works. Her current publishers are Quemar Press in Australia and Bloodaxe Books in the UK. She began writing professionally in the late 1960s and has been active in Sydney's literary scene since then. She took a BA at Macquarie University in the early 1970s. She has one daughter, Katharine Margot Toohey. Aside from writing, Jennifer Maiden runs writers workshops with a variety of literary, community and educational organizations and has devised and co-written a manual of questions to facilitate writing by Torture and Trauma Victims. Later, Maiden and Bennett used the questions they had created as a basis for a clinically planned workbook.

Douglas Dunlop Oliver was a poet, novelist, editor, and educator. The author of more than a dozen works, Oliver came into poetry not as an academic but through a career in journalism, notably in Cambridge, Paris, and Coventry, before attending the University of Essex in the 1970s. He received a B.A. (literature) in 1975 and an M.A. in 1982. Oliver subsequently lived in Brightlingsea, Paris, New York, and again Paris, usually working as a lecturer.

Peter Riley is a contemporary English poet, essayist, and editor. Riley is known as a Cambridge poet, part of the group loosely associated with J. H. Prynne which today is acknowledged as an important center of innovative poetry in the United Kingdom. Riley was an editor and major contributor to The English Intelligencer. He is the author of ten books of poetry, and many small-press booklets. He is also the current poetry editor of the Fortnightly Review and a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award in 2012 for "achievement and distinction in poetry".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Rodefer</span> American poet and painter

Stephen Rodefer was an American poet and painter who lived in Paris and London. Born in Bellaire, Ohio, he knew many of the early beat and Black Mountain poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Rodefer was one of the original Language poets and taught widely, including: UNM, SUNY Buffalo, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State, and the American University of Paris. Rodefer was the first American poet to be offered a Fellowship at Cambridge University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Manson</span> Scottish poet

Peter Manson is a contemporary Scottish poet. His books include Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse, Between Cup and Lip, For the Good of Liars, Adjunct: an Undigest, Before and After Mallarmé, Two renga, Rosebud, Birth Windows, me generation and iter atur e. Between 1994 and 1997, he co-edited eight issues of the experimental/modernist poetry journal Object Permanence. In 2001, the imprint was revived as an occasional publisher of pamphlets of innovative poetry, and has so far published work by the poets J. H. Prynne, Keston Sutherland, Fiona Templeton and Andrea Brady. He was the 2005-6 Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge.

Keston M. Sutherland is a British poet, and Professor of Poetics at the University of Sussex. He was the editor of the poetics and critical theory journal QUID and is co-editor of Barque Press. His poetry has been compared to J. H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Drew Milne. His poem Hot White Andy was first published in the United States in a special issue of Chicago Review.

Drew Milne is a contemporary British poet and academic.

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016.

Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.

Tony Lopez is an English poet who first began to be published in the 1970s. His writing was at once recognised for its attention to language, and for his ability to compose a coherent book, rather than a number of poems accidentally printed together. He is best known for his book False Memory, first published in the United States and much anthologised.

References

  1. "Cambridge Tripos Results". Times. 23 June 1960.
  2. "Jeremy Prynne lecture on Maximus Poems IV, V, VI".Minutes of the Charles Olson Society #28 (April 1999). See also related review of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1969).
  3. J.H. Prynne, Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words (London: Birkbeck College, 1993).
  4. The Paris Review No. 218, Fall 2016.

Works

About Prynne