J H Prynne on poetic inspiration
February 16, 2013
J H Prynne gave a lecture at Sussex University last week. I went along with friends who live in Lewes. Two of us walked there over the South Downs, up a long ridge and down a spur. We arrived at dusk with boots whitened by chalk mud. Universities after dark are strange places. 60 or so people in a large, grimly fluorescent lecture theatre, somewhere on an emptied-out campus.
We went out of curiosity, I suppose, and to be entertained... I�d rather have got JHP the poet, but the academic satisfied both motives. One would have cast him for the part: tall, thin, black velvet jacket, energetic, deploying a fair amount of academic wit and charm. One would have cast the audience, too, lots of intense young men (mostly) in an array of woolly jumpers. The faculty didn�t seem to have turned out for the occasion, apart from Keston Sutherland who gave a rather sweetly adulatory introduction.
The lecture was called 'The Poet's Imaginary'. Prynne told us he was floating an idea that he hadn�t tested or researched. His starting point was the imaginary friend that some small children have. Such friendships involve conversation, sometimes out loud, though they may start in the pre-language phase. Could the adult poet�s inspiration come from a similar or successor relationship, an internal dialectic with an inwardly generated other? This other, the imaginary, would come (or not) when the poet sharpens his/her pencils, clearing the mind to write. The relationship would be like a real life one, sometimes friendly, sometimes more difficult, not necessarily life-long. Indeed real life close literary collaborations (Wordsworth/Coleridge etc) might have a similar effect.
That�s a rudimentary account. It may be inaccurate. (I made a few notes on the trains home, by which time I was full of good Lewes bitter, proof against the cold of various station platforms.) Prynne had some fun with his idea; he also clothed it, at times, in the language of lit crit. There was a subtext on class and education. There was politics outside too � somewhere on campus was the student occupation, supported by Prynne, in protest at a plan to privatise various university services and facilities.
I liked the domestic nature of the imaginary. It�s good to bring the muse down from the mountains and, as Prynne said, take the religion and mysticism out of poetic inspiration. I�m not sure he used that latter term at all. I also liked the tracing back to the solitariness of childhood; apparently, elder siblings and only children are more likely to have an imaginary friend. (During questions, it emerged that one young man had had several.)
Beyond that, the imaginary didn�t resonate with me as an explanation for where poems come from. I never had an imaginary friend, and the event of inspiration doesn�t feel like dialectic. It�s more like an underground river surfacing. The river�s usually so far down that I can hardly believe it exists, and occasionally near enough the surface for me to have one ear constantly listening for it.
One questioner quoted W S Graham�s �What is the language using us for?� That resonates.
In the pub afterwards, the imaginary didn�t really work for anyone in an unrepresentative sample of four. One person said it reminded him of a teddy bear relationship he�d had, though � maybe imaginary friends can take various shapes. A couple of people in Prynne�s audience who asked questions about animals could have been thinking of Philip Pullman�s daemons.
I wanted to know why Prynne had come up with this theory. Did he have an imaginary friend himself when small? Does inspiration feel like dialectic for him? I did ask, in the Q&A session at the end, and Prynne gracefully declined my question (twice) and said something else interesting instead. Fair enough. Pocket-sized copies of Pearls That Were were on sale. I asked him to sign mine and got a dedication in the most beautiful black-ink italic script: �This book is for Fiona, who knows how to ask a difficult question�. I chose to take this as charming, rather than patronising. The students were all too cool to ask for a signature; or, as one of my companions thought, too scared.
Anyway, next time I read JHP the poet, his imaginary will be there in the background.
See here for more on the poetry, and some links. This is from Pearls that Were:
So Orpheus tamed the wild beasts
for long night comes down
moving naked, over the wound,
the gem from the crown.
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