previously:

Small Works - Pam Rehm [Flood editions; 'an ever more spare clarity .. sustenance from the natural world, children's games, and familiar valedictions: "The world of consequence be with you - always." 'There is neither an I nor a Thou within range, but both of these seem to be balancing Rehm's thoughts from end to end.' -Fanny Howe hmm? no I or thou in range. but thoughts balanced by I here, thou there. ?

Catch Light - Sarah O'Brien [National Poetry Series 2009; Coffee House Press. “The whole - world is synonyms”.. a debut collection that contemplates the art of photography and the many essences of light.

The Journey - H.G.Adler

Collections of Nothing - William Davies King



recently:

Animals in Film - Jonathan Burt [little green reaction bks (uk) monograph

Black Sun - Kristeva

Goest - Cole Swensen ['Goest, sonorous with a hovering “ghost” mm which shimmers at the root of all things, is a meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the “whites” of painting. .. “intellectus”—light of the mind..' ' ..light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury..' ~put near Catch Light

Body - Jenny Boully [had so'd yrs ago after shipping one; pos; now in new edtn. footnotes to unseen text = blank pages above the notes

Coll Stories of Lydia Davis [fsg hardcover



& km:

Middle Room - Jennifer Moxley
['A love song to friendship, the Middle Room is a valuable and delicious literary history of recent community formations on the west coast.' ~I am wary of community formations on the west coast -'what happens when you find the avant-garde of your dreams in San Diego, California' -'this true-life sex and love and car-culture confession .. the cars are open-top, the poets seethe, love and undermine each other..'
y pretty sure J Moxley is who justin talked about: assoc w the Baffler in Chgo, is at Univ of Maine now Jennifer Moxley. Associate Professor of English. 5752 Neville Hall Room 213. Orono, ME 04469. EMAIL: jennifer.moxley@umit.maine.edu ...
www.umaine.edu/english/faculty/jennifer-moxley


Poems - J.H.Prynne
[wkp: Jeremy Halvard Prynne (born 1936 ) is a British poet.
Prynne's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His firt book was published in 1962; Prynne has excluded it from his canon. His Poems (1982) collected all the work he wanted to keep in print. An expanded and updated version appeared in 1999, with another, further updated, published in 2005. but did semcoop just get it (for first time?) fr uk?

pw: Many readers of so-called innovative or experimental verse regard Prynne as Britain's most important living poet. Until now, most of his work has been available only in small editions and chapbooks. Prynne, who teaches at Cambridge University, is the center of a group known as the Cambridge poets. His peculiarly local influence is no accident, since he has stayed away from large-scale publishing; he made this decision partly to honor the poems' quiet, hermetic quality, and partly as a response to the absorption of experimental poetics into academic parlance-a parallel, for Prynne, to capitalism's absorption of opposition. Prynne's difficulties demand, and reward, close attention. His early work shows what he learned from Charles Olson, switching from personal to political to geological frames of reference in a single phrase. Enjoyable for their complex logic and concealed wit, these early poems often alternate incompatible metres, creating a distinctive discursive cascade. Next to these recalcitrant works Prynne has placed sequences like "Day Light Songs," more lyrical, less dense and equally accomplished. .. While never a rabble-rousing avant-gardist, Prynne continues to make startling discoveries. Not-You (1993) introduces staggered lines that fall together like tone clusters.. ~innovator in the way of gerard manley hopkins sprung rhythm? (di piero: succession of poets from Thms Hardy. but Hopkins no successors. ~too ~idiosyncr) no I suppose v different ~

kirkus: ..an omnibus gathering from one of Great Britains most highly acclaimed contemporary poets. Still largely unfamiliar to American readers, Prynne has authored more than 20 volumes in England over the past 30 years. A stylist in the high modernist tradition, Prynnes lapidary phraseology and interior rhetoric..
..his voice is strong enough to carry into laterand, one hopes, healthierages to find the audience he deserves. laterand mm. (later and, one hopes, healthier ages.) carried healthierages into laterand. laterand laterland.

-Prynne has been for several decades now the most important "unknown" poet in the English language, his work earning a reputation for its sybilline authority & beauty. A nutshell description would be: imagine a collision between Charles Olson, William Wordsworth & Paul Celan--& if you don't have quite Prynne's work, you'd have a rough idea of its excitement & its extraordinary summing-up of an entire poetic tradition. which tradition? lyric?

-Prynne is the most illustrious of a fairly small number of English-language poets (others include Barry MacSweeney and Iain Sinclair) who still cleave to a sort-of modernist idea that poems ought not to say things that can be said any other way, but instead are verbal artifacts unto themselves. His early work is in a shabby, low-rent Four-Quartetsy sort of mode, but during the late Seventies he really hit his stride. His best works are glossy, sexy, sardonic, thoroughly worked-over verbal machines that do what few other poets have dared to do since the death of Pound. Prynne is not _primarily_ interested in communicating some amazingly primal or psycho-sexual-cultural-political-transcendental experience, he's interested in the glint and spark of words put together in a certain way is that enough? ~ it is if sth happens 'is going on' in the poem: mind's mountains cliffs of fall, and this saves him from being either kitschy (as the worst work of Ted Hughes can be) or trivial (as, well, pretty much most poets usually are.) This is definitely a desert island book, if only for the sheer amount of allusion and density Prynne is able to pack into a short poem - even at his most recondite, he's pushing you towards the world you've vainly tried to leave behind.

- Britain's leading late Modernist poet J.H. Prynne..


'An introduction to the poetry of J.H.Prynne', by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Jacket # 7, April 1999) by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella.
This piece first appeared in the Bloodaxe Books [ www.bloodaxebooks.demon.co.uk ] catalogue advertising the Collected Poems of J.H.Prynne (1999).
J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century.
He is a lyrical experimentalist..
Rightly particular about the presentation of poetry --the integrity of text, the frame and field of the page, the context in which presentation and consequently reception take place-- Prynne has been patient in collating another "collected" volume. This collection of poems (the Collected Poems)has been a long time in coming. At its core is the Poems volume published in 1982 by Agneau 2, long since out of print. But there have been over half-a-dozen other works since then published by small presses in small print runs.
..The ghettoizing of Prynne's reputation has resulted from his decision to publish only with small presses and to engage in public debate almost entirely through the pages of little magazines. huh.
As Prynne has avoided mainstream publishing it has been assumed that he rejects the 'general' readership, that his is a language of an informed & 'alternative' clique. But it is the indifference of the mainstream publisher to "the work" itself how is this indifference manifested by the mainstr publisher? that has been a problem for Prynne, and not the idea of availability. The affordable volume that can be read by anyone with an interest in what is going on in the poem would appeal to Prynne.
..the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts.. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes.
..thresholds are located around the body, at the various points of entry and exit where the processes of absorbing information from the world or of sending it out into the world, must start and finish. The crucial question, of where & when personal agency can truly be said to come to life, is posed most revealingly in situations where the body is in trouble, in circumstances of estrangement or pain, and consequently much of the research encoded in the poems focuses on the extremities of what one text refers to as 'wound response'. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The making & unmaking of the world.
N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, in their lively study of the poetry of J.H. Prynne, Nearly Too Much nice title well bcs for me so m is nearly too m; what is to Prynne, according to Reeve & Kerridge? (Liverpool University Press, 1995), write of the 'indeterminacy' and the 'avoidance of totality and closure.'
..some of Prynne's most signif affiliations are w American and continental writers and thinkers; Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Martin Heidegger, Paul Celan make their presence felt at different stages of his work.