Luke Roberts

I first heard about J.H. Prynne from my friend Josh Stanley. It was spring 2007 and I had just turned twenty. Josh – the only other poet I knew – marched me to Heffers bookshop, read aloud to me from a sequence called Fire Lizard, and insisted I buy a copy of Prynne’s Poems. I was baffled, embarrassed. Cambridge was an alienating place, and I was a bad student: didn’t attend any lectures, barely went to the library. 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. 

I spent the summer of 2007 reading through Poems – all 500 pages – and trying to get to grips with it. Day Light Songs was my way in, along with Pearl That Were. The evident beauty of it, in there amongst everything else. Every time I lit a cigarette I would think: ‘Inhale      breathe deeply and / there the mountain / is’. I also had a copy of To Pollen, which I must have got direct from Barque Press, again on Josh’s instruction. I had never seen a poetry pamphlet before. It was exciting: To Pollen was happening right in front of us, part of the language and feeling I’d been looking for in the era of Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib. And it was hard not to take the final line – ‘Try doing it now.’ – as a kind of dare.

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That autumn I met him in person for the first time. He was my supervisor for the contemporary paper, four sessions one-on-one. It felt like a big deal. He’d just come back from a teaching stint in China. When I arrived at his office – he was always, always late – he gave the strong impression he hadn’t been there in months. Walked around straightening pictures with his umbrella, inspecting piles of books with apparent surprise. Very theatrical. He noticed a little trinket from his mantelpiece had fallen – a glass bottle full of 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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One time I was wearing a duffel coat and he told me a story about being on national service in Germany 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 pockets on the front, and a hood, with… bones for opening and closing. Bone-buttons.’ The lady looked at him like he was crazy, until she said: ‘Ja! Ein duffel coat!’ He really hooted with laughter. I did too. I couldn’t get enough of his anecdotes. 

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Our first supervision lasted something like three hours. We didn’t talk about the paper at all. He showed me inscribed books by Charles Olson, explained that the letter ‘O’ was very hard to typeset satisfactorily in the word ‘POEMS’, placed Hart Crane side-by-side with Coleridge. Eventually he handed me a stack of recent poetry pamphlets and told me not to eat soup anywhere near them. I left in a daze. It was always like that. 

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His stamina was extraordinary. On bonfire night he invited me over with Josh and Ian Heames, who would later publish so many of Prynne’s pamphlets. We read poems together while fireworks went off somewhere in the distance. Eventually it got to 5am and he said: ‘Well, okay guys, I have to go to the dentist in a few hours, so we better wrap things up.’ He must have been 70, 71. I had never met anyone like him. 

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A few years later, he arranged to meet a bunch of us in the days after Christmas. We showed up as usual, and he started to make a big deal when it was nearing midnight. 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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We used to bring our poems to him for inspection, printed on special paper. Josh and I had discovered these boxes of silk-woven 90gsm-whatever on sale in W.H. Smith. I guess we were announcing the seriousness of our intent. Prynne thought it was hilarious. ‘Oh, yes yes. Of course. Very expensive stuff. I see.’ He would give gnomic feedback – I remember something about the weight of a car battery in relation to a particular 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 as consciousness,’ wrote Marx in The German Ideology, ‘language is practical.’

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His office was absolutely full of papers, books, paintings. He told me once the trick was to place a page of the 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. 

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Serious talk often, 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 the passage again. 

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We were under the impression that, aside from brief naps during the daytime, Prynne didn’t really sleep at all. But he used to come to the poetry readings we organised, and would often drop off quite brazenly. 

Once, when one of the other readers couldn’t make it, Prynne stepped in and read Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire. He had a terrific lisp, and it was completely 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?’ 

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He was very tall. Maybe 6ft 5? With a huge frame. Long hair, neatly combed. He bent over a little bit, especially in conversation. He was calm, deliberate, gentle. But he could get animated and fierce, too. Sometimes he’d give you a real bear hug goodbye.

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He didn’t like having his photograph taken. Once, a visitor from the United States snapped away surreptitiously and we were all outraged on Prynne’s behalf. A kind of protective feeling. 

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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 stroopwafels, a Welsh cake. Motherly, almost. And like a magician, too.

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Once, leaving his rooms late at night, he produced a special key that let us out through a secret path into a series of gardens. It was like the passage from Proust Lydia Davis often discusses, 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 attracted misfits, difficult characters, weirdos. Sometimes everyone would come back to his rooms after a reading – maybe twenty, thirty of us. We’d have to come in through the side gate of Caius College. It had a ridiculous medieval name. The Gate of Honour?  Once I locked my bike up in the alley and it got stolen. I’d taken LSD and walked home some insane route, lay down listening to the dawn chorus by the river.

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Before his hearing started to deteriorate there was always music. Everything from Tang Dynasty string music to the Fall. He talked about going to see X-Ray Spex back in the day with John James and Wendy Mulford and being crazy for Lora Logic. He lent me recordings by Alban Berg after I’d been reading Büchner’s Woyzeck, put me on to the piano music of Christian Wolff. Once he got out a CD by the thrash metal band Anthrax, which he’d found on a stall in the market. ‘I thought it was a pretty cool name.’

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We spooked him once in Market Square, mid-morning, browsing books. A rare sighting in daylight. I was with Justin Katko, 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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If you knocked over a drink on his light beige carpet, he’d spring into action. Rub the carpet in one direction only, with the grain, and plenty of cold water. Once, at Justin’s, he was exasperated by how ineptly I was trying to light a fire and took over, blowing on the kindling. Practical knowledge. Basic skills. Like knowing the names of flowers, how things work.

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And was it really true that he’d once 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, disowned first book. He could certainly be scathing and caustic, sometimes even about himself.

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He could be old-fashioned, formal. 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 Pound: ‘Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women.’ But things are rarely as simple as that.

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Prynne’s stories about national service in Germany: driving big trucks down the highway. And once, in a prefab aluminium hut, hearing Stockhausen on the radio, how amazing that was. 

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I think I realised, early on, that to seek his approval would be a mistake. His example could only be followed so far, and you had to set your own schedule, find your own way. And I was always trying to leave Cambridge: I ran to London, to Brighton, to America, to Cumbria. It seemed necessary, somehow, to read the poems at arm’s length, but to press your forehead right against the page and see it through. This immense freeing and forbidding achievement, half open gate, half electric fence. 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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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 said he’d been in a Benjamin Britten opera for children – maybe part of the chorus? – when he was an evacuee. Am I remembering this right? Was he?

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

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He wore a red star badge under the lapel of his black corduroy jacket. One time he came back from China with a Mao badge that lit up with flashing LED lights. 

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‘You must always remember, sitting here in the warmth, that a mile outside Cambridge there are people on their hands and knees, digging in the cold soil to harvest beetroot.’

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Once when I came to see him I was surprised to find that he’d arrived early. He was sat at his desk trying to fix a flashing light-up wand his grandchild had got at the pantomime. He looked pleased, exasperated, happy to be doing this thing. 

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He took friendship seriously. I met him soon after many of his oldest friends had started dying: Edward Dorn (1999); Douglas Oliver and Barry MacSweeney (2000); Andrew Crozier (2008); R.F. Langley (2011). 

I read his letters to MacSweeney in the archive at Newcastle and they took my breath away: life-saving interventions, ferocious in their care. ‘Just a note penned in darkness to think of you in your own dark corner, soon to be flooded with the total & clear light of passion, running up to the clear peak of its own reality and truth.’ 

He had Langley’s self-portrait in the corner of the room – facing the door, like the first thing you’d see as you walked in.  

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Other things I remember on the walls: a print by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; something by Blake(The Gates of Paradise?); a big green Julia Ball; lots of Chinese calligraphy. He had a little Max Ernst print – or was it de Chirico? – which he said he’d got in Germany: the kindly dealer had given it to him for whatever he had in his wallet. 

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When Prynne came back from Thailand with the manuscript of Kazoo Dreamboats in 2011 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. His immense hospitality, generosity. Tapping the table to get a refill of green tea.

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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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Late 2011 – soon after Kazoo Dreamboats – we were driving to a party at Connie Scozzaro and Caitlin Doherty’s student house. I remember him quoting from the poem, 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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Prynne smoked enormous quantities 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. Plausible tangled wires. 

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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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The same thing applied to a line in Acrylic Tips. He was staying in a hotel in Australia, a visiting guest for some weeks at a university. He was working away on the poem but found he’d painted himself into a corner. So he decided the next line of the poem would have to come from the side of a vehicle, whatever van next drove into the carpark. ‘I waited and waited, sharpening my pencil: and it was a locksmith!’. He told this anecdote with a faint air of scandal.

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He liked to say ‘cool beans’. Sometimes, in emails, ‘Kool beanz’. Also, ‘Keep on truckin’’.

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One summer he was invited to Buckingham Palace, an event for poets, a garden party with the Queen. He carried his invitation around with him, would produce it occasionally, laugh in contempt, and then put it back in his pocket.

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Paul Celan – Prynne always spoke about him with utmost seriousness, like he was still trying to figure him out.

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He was talking, one time, 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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Once he said he’d never been on a protest or political demonstration because he was scared for his physical safety. 

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I don’t think he liked violence. He warned me, once, about another poet: told me never to let him get between me and the exit of the room. 

But he did say that the student movement, if it had really been serious, should have kneecapped the protestor who swung from the flag of the cenotaph. ‘It’s a question of discipline.’

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He met my sister at a poetry reading, and spent a minute or two looking between us, before saying: ‘Yes, I can see the resemblance.’

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Prynne would sometimes heckle poetry readings a little bit, give impromptu talks. I guess in Cambridge we all knew who he was. Later we met people 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. They did not appreciate this so much.

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I remember being rude about Philip Whalen once, after reading his journals, and Prynne said: ‘Hey, come on now.’ 

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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 for some. I said, but J, there’s no freezer at the occupation. But he just said: ‘These guys need ice-cream.’

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He read the whole of Kazoo Dreamboats at least one more time. It must have been 2016. It was happening in the same complex of buildings we’d occupied in 2011, an uncanny kind of repeat. But the microphone wasn’t switched on, so he was basically inaudible. It was like listening to someone shuffle papers for 45 minutes. I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately sabotaging it, turning it into farce. 

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 or prophet. 

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I missed a reading he gave at the Serpentine Gallery in 2017 for the Rose Wylie exhibition 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. When I arrived it was all over, but ‘Hey!’ he said, pleased to see a familiar face. ‘Well, this is pretty weird!’

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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 as I’d been on my first encounter as a twenty-year-old. It was hard to keep up. Sometimes I thought he was trying to use every single word he’d ever known, like an enormous process of saying goodbye to the language.  

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One last 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 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.