Luke Roberts

‘nonsense in grief:–’

The first time I met J.H. Prynne was in autumn 2007. He’d just come back from a teaching stint in China, and when I first arrived at his office – he was always, always late – he gave the strong impression he hadn’t been there in months. He did a circuit of the room, straightening pictures with his umbrella, inspecting piles of books with apparent surprise. Very theatrical. Eventually he noticed a trinket from his mantelpiece had fallen down, a little glass bottle filled with coloured sand. The opening was chipped. Prynne produced a cork from somewhere in his desk, a scalpel from somewhere else, and proceeded to whittle a new stopper while I sat and watched.

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Even in Cambridge – a place which tolerated, even encouraged a certain kind of eccentricity – I had never met anyone like him. He was very tall – maybe 6ft 5 – with a broad frame, half-moon glasses, white hair neatly-combed which came down to his collar. He wore a black corduroy jacket, which I later found out had a Mao badge inside the lapel. Later still, he took to brandishing a flashing LED version, purchased in Hunan. He was in his seventies and moved calmly and deliberately, but he could also become very animated, fierce, real glints of passion and anger.  

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My introduction to his work had come via a friend, Josh Stanley, the only other poet I knew at the time. He’d marched me to Heffers bookshop, read aloud from a sequence called Fire Lizard, and forced me to buy the collected poems. I was baffled and embarrassed by all this. Cambridge was an alienating place, and I was a bad student: didn’t attend any lectures, barely went to the library, spent most of my time drunk and depressed. But Josh seemed to know the lay of the land, so I trusted him: ‘I hear the front of your / visited wish’. Okay, this must be it. 

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Josh and I used to bring him our poems for inspection, printed on special paper. Our model was Peter Riley’s Poetical Histories series, where all our new heroes had appeared. We’d discovered these boxes of silk-woven 90gsm-whatever on sale in W.H. Smith, and I guess we were announcing the seriousness of our intent. Prynne thought it was hilarious, affectionately teasing us: ‘Oh, yes yes. Very expensive stuff. I see.’ He would give gnomic feedback – I remember something once about the weight of a car battery in relation to a linebreak – and go off in search of things to show us. Often he’d fetch a dictionary to make us think more carefully about the words we were using. ‘Language is as old consciousness,’ Marx wrote in The German Ideology, ‘language is practical.’

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One time as I was leaving I pulled on my duffel coat and he told me a story about being in Germany on national service in the 1950s. It was freezing cold, so he went to a department store and in his best schoolboy German said: ‘I would like, very much, to purchase a thick coat, made of wool, with a hood, and pockets on the front, and… bones for opening and closing. Bone-buttons.’ The lady looked at him like he was crazy until she said: ‘Ja! Ein duffel coat!’. Prynne laughed and laughed, and I did too. I couldn’t get enough of his anecdotes. Once I asked him his earliest memory, and he said it was of his sister throwing stones into his pram. 

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He spoke in long, quite complex sentences, which seemed to venture off in several directions before arriving, with sudden inevitability, at their destination. His ‘yes yes’ – which punctuated his conversation – was especially elastic, and he could draw it out with great sarcasm or enthusiasm, even tenderness. He had a terrific lisp. At the first poetry reading I ever did, Prynne stepped in after one of the other readers pulled out. He read Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, and it was wild to hear him doing lines like: ‘Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, / Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?’. I had no idea what to make of it. 

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Prynne would sometimes heckle poetry readings a little bit, give impromptu talks. We were under the impression that he never slept, but he would sometimes show up and quite brazenly nod off. I guess in Cambridge we all knew who he was, enjoyed his presence. Later we met poets from California who told a story about him coming to a reading in Oakland and lecturing them all about Whitman while wearing a sprig of grass behind his ear. Or was he holding a leafy twig from a lemon tree? Either way: they did not appreciate this so much. 

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Every surface in his office seemed to be stacked with books and papers. The walls were crowded, too: a big green Julia Ball painting, R.F. Langley’s self-portrait, a print by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Dozens more. He told me once that the trick was to place a page of newspaper across your desk every once in a while, so that when you were digging you would at least know what month, what year you were in. Once he arranged to meet a bunch of us in the days after Christmas, and we showed up as usual to talk, drink wine, read poems. Prynne started to make a big deal when it was nearing midnight, and slowly we realised he thought it was New Year’s Eve – but it was December 30th. He was too avant-garde for the calendar.

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The only time I ever remember him being early for one of our appointments, I arrived to find him at his desk, trying to fix a light-up plastic wand his grandchild had got at the pantomime. He seemed exasperated and pleased, happy to be doing this thing. It’s like Dr Jean Flamboyant – the stand-in for Prynne – says in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger: ‘I was the flame of my Lyceum / I can fix anything’. Prynne once watched me ineptly trying to light a fire at Justin Katko’s place: took over, crouched down, blew on the kindling, and soon it was taken care of. Practical knowledge. Basic skills. Like knowing the names of flowers, how things work.

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And had he really thrown the manuscript of Peter Riley’s novel on a fire? For sure he set fire to Keston Sutherland’s copy of Force of Circumstance, his awkward, disavowed first book. He could certainly be scathing, caustic, sometimes even about himself. There were also shortcomings I don’t think he could see. Even as he seemed to open up a counter-space within it, he was shaped by the institution he belonged to. He’d been to a boy’s school, he’d been in the army, an all-male college. Maybe it’s like George Oppen said of Ezra Pound: ‘Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women.’ But things are rarely as simple as that. 

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Often serious talk, about morality and integrity, how writing was a special kind of duty, severe. Once he read from Lu Chi’s Wen Fu, an ancient treatise on composition: ‘Where truth and virtue are threatened / I must surrender / even my favourite jewels.’ He nodded his head, deeply and slowly, read out the passage again. And I remember, more than once, his insistence: ‘You must never forget, sitting here in the warmth, that there are people a mile outside Cambridge on their hands and knees digging through cold soil to harvest beetroot.’

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He had a sweet tooth. Sometimes, if you were out and about, he would produce a snack from his jacket pocket, always at the right moment. I remember being on a train back from London late at night, and suddenly Prynne laid out a little spread: some stroopwaffels, a Welsh cake. Motherly, almost. And like a magician, too. 

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Prynne didn’t really talk about his own poems. Or only coyly. But sometimes legend would slip out. We used to bring him bags of mini cheddars, because he’d mentioned them in a line from For the Monogram: ‘Roll over to / the cheat show of mirror facings, costed mini cheddar / countenance alert’. The story goes he’d been stuck with the sequence until one day he was walking home and there was a huge pile of them on the pavement. Like W.H. Auden said: ‘The glory of poetry is that the lack of a single word can ruin everything’. Mini cheddars!

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When the students occupied Lady Mitchell Hall in 2011 – where Prynne gave a reading from Kazoo Dreamboats with Selma James – we drove to the Co-Op to get supplies. Prynne was totally impractical, insisted on buying half-a-dozen tubs of ice-cream, walked round the shop looking for raspberry ripple and chocolate sauce, sent people running into the storeroom to search it out. I said, but J, there’s no freezer at the occupation. He just said: ‘These guys need ice-cream.’

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Prynne smoked a lot of weed: bomber joints. I always found being stoned kind of boring – I was, as they say, a drunk – but sometimes the conversation would tip over into something so absurd it made a new kind of sense. Once I was sure he’d claimed to have come up with the double-helix structure of DNA. Sometimes it was like that, and you’d leave thinking, well, that’s crazy, Prynne thinks he discovered DNA? OK, maybe this is something I have to look into. 

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Prynne recommended reading Edward Upward’s The Spiral Ascent, a trilogy of novels about a poet who joins the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s. He said with great emphasis that serious political commitment involves real drudgery – knocking on doors and licking postage stamps – and isn’t really heroic at all. This tends to be a problem, for poets. 

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Dialectics. Some conversation I can’t remember in detail, but he said, OK: you are a historical materialist, you move like this – straight line – but dialectical materialism means we move like this – a zigzag.

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Before his hearing started to deteriorate, there was always music. He used to talk about going to see X-Ray Spex back in the day with John James and Wendy Mulford and being crazy for Lora Logic. Once, he got out a CD by the thrash metal band Anthrax which he’d found on a stall in the market: ‘I thought the name was pretty cool.’ I can’t remember now if we listened to it or not. Another time he was talking about Barbara Guest, how funny she was, how much he liked her, and he tried to find a reel-to-reel tape of her reading. Much ceremony and kerfuffle. But when he pressed play what came out was Michael McClure, talking about millions of jellyfish.

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We spooked him once on Market Square, mid-morning, browsing books. A rare sighting in daylight. I was with Justin, and we sort of crept up on him. He was annoyed with us for taking him by surprise, one of the only times I remember his humour really failing him. But he explained he’d been working all night on his commentary on George Herbert – he’d just that minute finished it, and he was still coming down. 

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The Night Vigil of Shen Zhou: ‘My nature is such as to enjoy sitting in the night. So I often spread a book under the lamp going back and forth over it, usually stopping at the second watch. Man’s clamor is not at rest, and yet the mind is bent on learning. Seldom does he find the outside calm and the inner world at peace.’

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When Prynne came back from Thailand with the manuscript of Kazoo Dreamboats we could hardly believe it. It was ridiculous, amazing, his gift to the student movement. I stayed up all night reading it and it made perfect sense: ‘princes of gorgeous folly stand all around, with their inhalers.’ It was dedicated to the Jinling Patriots – the Jinling was a Chinese restaurant we used to go to all the time. He would tap the table gently to signal for the tea, never let anyone pay. His immense hospitality, generosity, patience. Even when I poke around, my feelings about him aren’t so complicated: simple gratitude. 

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In the same period, I remember driving with him to a party at Caitlin Doherty and Connie Scozzaro’s house. He quoted from Kazoo Dreamboats, yelling ‘Bomb the airport burn off the ocean terminal rip out those waves, baby it’s time!’ while driving round a roundabout. When we got there and he was parking he reversed hard into another car. I pointed this out, but he just said: ‘Bumpers, Luke! They’re called bumpers! It’s what they’re for!’, laughing like a maniac. 

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I think I realised, early on, that to seek his approval would be a mistake. His example couldn’t really be followed, or could only be followed so far. Being a poet was something you had to figure out for yourself, and on your own terms. And really I was always trying to leave Cambridge: I ran to London, to Brighton, to America, to Cumbria. It seemed necessary, somehow, to keep Prynne’s poems at arm’s length, but at the same time to press your forehead right against the page and see it through. This immense and forbidding achievement. Some nimble contortion was obviously required. But of course I was in awe of him, loved being in his orbit, at the tail-end of his comet. 

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Leaving his rooms once, late at night, he produced a special key that let us out through a secret path into a series of gardens. Even as I type this out I start to doubt the memory: it shimmers with silver detail too much at the edges. It was like the passage from Proust Lydia Davis often returns to, where – just as they thought they were lost – the narrator’s father guides them home: ‘as if he had taken it out of his jacket pocket along with his key, he would show us the little back gate of our own garden.’ But with Prynne it was like he was introducing you to the surface of the moon.

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He read the whole of Kazoo Dreamboats at least one more time. It must have been 2016. It took place in the same complex of buildings we’d occupied in 2011, an uncanny kind of repeat. The microphone wasn’t switched on, so he was basically inaudible. It was like listening to someone shuffle papers for 45 minutes. But Peter Gizzi was visiting, and afterwards I drove north with him to the Lake District. On the way we listened to a recording of Prynne reading ‘Tintern Abbey’, windows rolled down, loud, like it was the voice of some sort of time-traveller, prophet, the weirdest ice-cream van you can imagine. 

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I missed a reading he gave at the Serpentine Gallery in 2017 for the Rose Wylie opening. They’d grown up on the same street or something like that, and he was going to read early work, from The White Stones. I went to the wrong corner of Regent’s Park and had to scale the fence and jump down, running past duck ponds in the dusk. By the time I arrived it was all over, but ‘Hey!’ he said, pleased to see a familiar face. ‘Well, this is pretty weird!’. Yes, yes. 

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I didn’t see Prynne again after 2019. The pandemic changed everything, repositioned us all. But I read everything he published, just as amazed and baffled by it is as I’d been on my first encounter as a twenty-year-old. It was hard to keep up, a kind of terminal writing, to see it through to the end. Sometimes I thought he was trying to use every single word he’d ever known, one last time, like an enormous process of saying goodbye to the language. 

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One more memory: I was walking somewhere, maybe back from the library, and I bumped into Justin. He pulled out his phone and played me a voicemail from Prynne: no talking, just an eerie whistle and hum. A few weeks earlier Prynne had acquired an aeolian harp, and struggled to get it to sound. But now here it was, and we listened to it on the streetcorner, laughing, totally moved and convinced. The first aeolian harp voicemail in history? I think so.

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From the last email he sent to me, in 2023: ‘Lovely to get this message and to hear the echoes of your thoughts. It’s true that these have been bad times recently and I keep going because poetry is the truth of life and it is a duty for us to keep the window open.’

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When I heard the news of his death I dropped what I was doing and found myself walking to William Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields. A tube strike, so the City Road was thick with traffic. A sunny day, and lunchtime, so everyone was sitting out. Texaco at 160.9, the US-Iran talks stalled, Israeli troops still in southern Lebanon. One of the true greats gone. I laid some tulips on Blake’s grave and read The Oval Window.