Heidegger, Prynne and 'Parataxis'

'in Cambridge, let's split'

-Iain Sinclair, Red Eye

In an attempt to get an initial grasp on the Heidegger-Prynne interface, I have reached for my little pile of back issues of the Cambridge journal Parataxis, most of which I bought from Drew Milne around 17 years ago. Edited largely by Milne, from 1991 to 2001, the content in Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing has long overpowered me with its complexity, representing as it does a benchmark for criticism of the contemporary poetries of J. H. Prynne and other representatives of what Milne, in Parataxis 3, tentatively labels ‘the Cambridge axis’. Now that, tragically, so much of this seems posthumous – Parataxis, the Cambridge axis, myself – the time is at least perhaps opportune for a less intimidated attempt on my part to understand the positions which Parataxis articulated, in particular in relation to Prynne and Heidegger. It is clear to me now, finally, after all my years of starstruck bafflement, that the Parataxis critics articulated a triad of suspicions: of a phenomenology-aligned reading of Prynne’s poetry, of aligning Prynne with Romanticist poetic tradition, and of the concern with a return to prior temporality which Prynne’s work shares with Heidegger’s. Yet Parataxis also voices Prynne’s own resistance to circularity, and it seems important that his powerful critique of totalized recursion is echoed in the pages of the journal by a particular critique (Alan Marshall’s) of Cambridge cultural Marxism’s negative dialectical approach, which usefully begins to restate the relation between Prynne’s poetry and phenomenology. You could even conjecture that Marshall's intervention in the penultimate issue of Parataxis in 1996 represented as significant a moment within the genealogy of academic Prynne reception, as the later, broader but perhaps less interesting, shift from the early-mid 1990s, cultural critique mode of Parataxis (a mode energized by the fury of 1980s anti-Thatcherism), to the depoliticized exegetical mode of Glossator 2: On the Poems of J. H. Prynne [online here] in 2010. 

Disregarding the possibility of Heideggerian Marxism, in Parataxis 9 Milne responded to Marshall’s claims on the part of phenomenology by seeking to cordon off the diverging critical approaches of Marxism and Heideggerianism still further.

‘If any attempt is made to relate what “phenomenology” might mean for poetry, the phenomenology of experience suggested by Hegel and Marx is in sharp conflict with that developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The “experience” of capitalism may be incommensurate with a phenomenological account of experience.’

In my experience, the letter from your university informing you that you have earned £4500 this year as an hourly paid lecturer, is an equally gritty and vicious phenomenon whether you view it with your Marx or your Heidegger specs on. (As is the lack of a letter when you are then sacked without warning, after having been assured repeatedly that your contract would be renewed). But in the next number of Parataxis, in his article ‘Speculative Assertions: Reading J. H. Prynne’s Poems’, Milne’s reading of the reference in Prynne’s ‘Foot and Mouth’ to the ‘Pressure Sensitive/ Tape (also known as RUBAN ADHESIF and NASTRO ADHESIVO)’, persists in separating Heideggerian from Marxist perspectives on our experience of this world. In this reference of Prynne’s to what Milne calls ‘the trans-national language inside rolls of Scotch tape’, Milne writes, ‘The world-at hand is figured not as the transcendence of tools in the revelatory unveiling of Being, but as an implicated concern for the techniques and habits which sustain this world.’ This sort of sardonic pillorying of Heideggerian terminology is particularly depressing given Milne’s inability to stand by the Marxism to which he opposes that terminology. The response to Marshall in issue 9 comments that ‘there remains the task of showing how dialectical thinking which is critical of what is usually thought of as phenomenology could be developed, or how an account of the affinities between Adorno and Prynne could be sustained’. This comment is hardly an investment of faith in original Parataxis co-editor Simon Jarvis’ landmark Adornian reading of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, which had appeared in Parataxis 1 (and which has been republished here). 

Jarvis’ article argued that Prynne’s poetic resists the presentation of phenomenological immediacy because such a presentation would be undialectical. Prynne’s poem ‘The Numbers’, Jarvis maintains, does not supply us with ‘a choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as impervious to external determination’:

‘Attempts (such as that of Michael Grant in the Dictionary of Literary Biography) to assimilate Prynne’s wish to start from individual experiences to Husserlian phenomenology write off his acknowledgement that to understand individual experience is also to go beyond it. Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediatedness.’

Before I get to Marshall’s reaction to these remarks, I want to note two further attempts, other than Marshall's, to reclaim the possibility of recognizing phenomenological immediacy in Prynne. The first relates to the particular immediacy of a certain strand of Prynne’s poetic discourse which we could call his Londoner’s language. Prynne’s origins as a Londoner are rarely attended to by critics, though there are occasional references to his registering of wartime experience in his poems. But it seems to me that in his essay for Parataxis 9, ‘Counterfactual Prynne: An Approach to Not-You’, John Wilkinson unwittingly touched on precisely the arch London quality of Prynne’s language, when he wrote of the Not-You line ‘our confidence is end-up like a roller towel’, that it is ‘a characteristically Prynnian witticism which tends to make exposition sound laboured’. Academic exposition is attracted, because ‘end-up like a roller towel’ is a hermetic, difficult phrase. Why a roller towel ? But this phrase also carries a sort of difficulty which renders exposition unnecessary: because it is as if hermeneutic mediation is resisted by precisely the incisive immediacy – the sheer phenomenological baldness – of the language’s quality of underworld hermeticism. This line of Prynne’s is a slap round the face with a rolling pin, never mind a roller towel. A new semantic content has been displaced, from elsewhere, somewhere covert, and is suddenly here. This London tenor of phrasing has maintained its speakers outside the law for centuries, and it will continue to shock academic interpreters whilst holding its secrets close. 

This first attempted reclamation of phenomenological immediacy, like the second one which I want to note now, enlists an attention to Prynne’s involvement with what we could call visionary phenomenology.

                                                                            [...] This is the place

   where, deaf to meaning, the life stands

      out in extra blue. [...] [The Oval Window ]

N. H. Reeve’s extended discussion of these lines in his ‘further note’ on The Oval Window for Parataxis 6, begins by relaying his ‘suspicions’ of their communication of visionary experience. ‘Any celebration of an enhanced, heroic moment, unashamed to assert its claim to superiority, almost automatically gives rise to suspicions as to the interests it could be serving.’ However, Reeve continues, ‘in this case […] those suspicions stay secondary’. For ‘here the momentary thrill can remind us that this cynicism reflects a loss to which we are not reconciled, that there is still the ghost of something dear to us which we expect poetry to awaken’. It is precisely the phenomenological experience of visionary shock, that is – or what Reeve goes on to term ‘an apparently immediate sensation’ – which brings us to awareness of both the desacralization and disenchantment of this life, which typically is not definite enough to be ‘the’ life, and the continuing existence (however spectral it may be) of ‘a degree of intensity and radiance unavailable to our normal categories’.      

Reeve’s reference to ‘the Romantic tradition of the privileged lyric moment’, suggests the relation of Prynne’s involvement with such visionary phenomenology to the Romanticist poetic tradition from which his poetry is distanced elsewhere in Parataxis. In his ‘Speculative Assertions’ essay of 2001, for instance, Milne maintains that ‘Foot and Mouth’ ‘could be read as a satirical revision of the conflicts of ethos and pathos enjoyed in the late romanticist and quasi-philosophical readings associated with [Harold] Bloom’s Wallace Stevens or Heidegger’s Holderlin [sic]’. (In his footnote to this Milne notes that the ethos/pathos opposition was in fact later ‘deployed by Prynne’s de Kooning/ O’Hara essay’). In a significant comment in a letter to Allen Fisher of 16 September 1993, published in Parataxis 6, Milne aligned his long-standing suspicion of the poetic lineage of ‘faded romanticism’ – a romanticism far from Prynne’s own romanticism of ‘extra blue’! – to his scruple regarding phenomenological readings. One suspects here too a suspicion of the concept of poetic tradition itself; the postmodernist suspicion that anything connected, integrated or whole is universalist, coupled with a Marxist charge that poetic linguistic beauty is that which is consumed by the bourgeoisie and produced by the naïvely artisanal (those who believe themselves to be ‘originally’ related to language).

‘In the restricted notion of poetry, a phenomenology of experience and faded romanticism gesture at the tradition of poetry while implying utopian ideas about the civic possibilities of language. What makes it restricted is the assumption of a poetic relation to language, and an overdetermined sense of what constitutes formal beauty and coherence.’   

Milne offers Fisher no explanatory background for these assertions, beyond the rather inane remark that ‘I take it that one of the faultlines in contemporary poetry and poetics is the relation between a restricted notion of “poetry” and a more dispersed sense of a poetic relation to linguistic manifolds’. However, in his important article for Parataxis 9, ‘The Two Poetries and the Concept of Risk’, Marshall usefully explained how Milne’s statements invoke ‘the idea of the two traditions of modern poetry’. In relation to this schema, Milne’s ‘restricted notion’ of poetry refers to the notions of the Stevens, or ‘symbolist’, tradition. Marshall summarizes:

‘A typical formulation of the two traditions of modern poetry thesis can be found in the criticism of Marjorie Perloff, particularly in the essay “Pound/ Stevens: whose era?’, where Perloff uses these two authors and the apparently incommensurable positions of what become in effect their respective critical camp-followers to entrench a dichotomized formalism, already known perhaps from the writings of Charles Altieri as that of the objectivist versus the symbolist, but variously referred to here as: the constructionist versus the expressionist, the encyclopaedic (or epic) versus the lyric, the fragmentary versus the meditative, and so on.’

Milne’s determined opposition to aligning Prynne’s writing with the Stevens, or symbolist/Romanticist poetic tradition is clear in ‘Speculative Assertions’, when he distances Prynne from ‘humanism’ and ‘civic personhood’. Milne acknowledges (the early) Prynne’s ‘lyric sequences’, but recasts Prynnean lyric as anti-lyric, a lyric mangled by the ‘destructions of subjectivity akin to anti-humanist phenomenology’ which drive it. Such a lyric is intrinsically only a diminished Olsonian ‘epic’ anyway. (Phenomenology is seemingly now admissible, as a prop for Milne’s anti-humanist inclination).

‘Prynne’s poems eschew the vocalizations of humanism, providing neither a congealed “voice” nor an identifiable persona or civic personhood. The bardic temptations of post-humanist epic – that poetry could include everything and  history – are brought into the briefer focus of lyric sequences. Song is acknowledged as an expressive parameter, but the agencies prompting lyricism are not those of a singer, and are more easily read as destructions of subjectivity akin to anti-humanist phenomenology.’

It is the Parataxis article on Prynne most willing to engage with Heidegger's thinking which is also most sympathetic to associating Prynne’s poetry with Romanticist poetic humanism. In their essay ‘Deaf to Meaning: On J. H. Prynne’s The Oval Window ’, which appeared in Parataxis 3 (and is republished here), N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge read the following lines from The Oval Window :

 It is not quite a cabin, but (in local speech)

                                      a shield, in the elbow of upland water,

                                      the sod roof almost gone but just under

                                      its scar a rough opening: it is, in first

                                      sight, the oval window. […]

Reeve and Kerridge argue that this description of what they call (reflecting on the picture on the volume’s cover, and anticipating Prynne’s 2008 ‘Huts’ essay) a ‘rough shepherd’s hut’, ‘seems to touch’ on ‘various Romantic traditions of negotiating a place for the self, a place of at least provisional stability, amidst the boundless organicism of the world’. Where Milne admits lyric into Prynnean poetics only if its very constitution is warped by ‘destructions of subjectivity’, Reeve and Kerridge attend to the way in which The Oval Window rearticulates the remnants of a Romantic poetic of self-stabilization. ‘The poem’s emphasis is always on the temporary, threatened, fragmentarily glimpsed moments of “staying put”, and the barely habitable condition of such buildings as would make Heideggerean “dwelling” possible.’ In this connection, Reeve and Kerridge also quote the lines referring to the arctic tern which ‘stays put wakefully, each following suit/ by check according to rote’. They comment that the tern’s condition – of ‘patience which is not passive lethargy, repose which is alert and vigilant rather than timidly self-protective’ – represents ‘something close to what Heidegger meant by “dwelling”, a kind of reverential letting-be and letting-come of the world in which man was properly rooted’.

Such references to a form of ‘dwelling’ that stabilizes the subject are echoed in D. S. Marriott’s article in Parataxis 9, ‘Contemporary British Poetry and Resistance: Reading J. H. Prynne’, which, in its discussion of the relevance of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’, relates the idea of ‘dwelling on the earth in the light of day’ to Prynne’s preoccupation with return. Marriott states that the poem ‘elliptically refers’ to Orpheus’ ‘need to return to the land of the dead to reclaim (and ultimately lose) the lost love’. Prynne’s poem’s metaphor of ‘the sun making things “worse”’, argues Marriott, ‘draws on the local-existential sense of being on earth in the Orphic myth and its explicit connection between human life and dwelling on the earth in the light of day’; the latter ‘two processes’ are ‘etymologically linked in the Latin derivation of humanus from humus’.

In his essay in the same number of Parataxis, ‘The Spirit of Poetry: Heidegger, Trakl, Derrida and Prynne’, Anthony Mellors writes of ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’ that it represents Prynne’s ‘most protracted meditation on the subject of return’.  Marriott’s article quotes the following lines:

                                   […] To our unspeakable loss; we make

sacred what we cannot see without coming

                                      back to where we were.

                                Again is the sacred

          word, the profane sequence suddenly graced, by

                                     coming back. […]

The Parataxis critics suggest two distinct ways of reading such meditations on return. Marriott’s reference to the ‘semantically incomplete and referentially opaque’ nature of Prynne’s poetry, straightforwardly explains Prynne’s own references to unspeakability and ‘what we cannot see’, as well as the uncertainty (in the second cluster of lines just quoted) as to exactly what the profane has been ‘suddenly graced’ into. Marriott, moreover, encourages us to be wary of the idea that such opaque reflections on return were formulated as a conscious critique of secular, liberal-progressivist rationality: Prynne’s poetic opacity, Marriott writes, ‘cannot be construed as an oppositional hermeticism as Mellors argues [in his PhD thesis]’. But Mellors’ charge, in the pages of Parataxis, that the idea of return in Prynne is a ‘mystical’ one, is indeed instinct with his criticism of the opacity of Prynne’s poetic language, which Mellors casts in Heideggerian terms. ‘Prynne wants to get rid of “meaning” altogether, and replace it with a formal significance, which, through the indeterminate contingencies of poetic Saying, moves beyond them to reaffirm a hidden agenda of mystical return.’

Milne had already evinced a similar dislike for the idea of ‘mystical return’ when, in a letter to Prynne of 7 March 1993, which was published in Parataxis 5, he noted his poetic ‘determination’ when writing his own Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, ‘to evade a Heideggerian fetish of the etymological and pre-Socratic grounds of language and being’. A specifically Heideggerian mysticism is clearly Milne’s particular target, since here he also writes of ‘a Benjaminian dependence on a theological mystification of history which is often my own gnostic temptation in the face of defeated reason’. So late-Benjaminian mystification of history is endorsed, whilst Heideggerian mystical restoration of origins, or what Mellors calls ‘the Heideggerean project of “destruction” that attempts to clear away metaphysical abstractions from supposedly original properties’, is impugned. Quoting from Derrida’s Of Spirit, Mellors extended to Prynne his suspicion of Heideggerian return to an ‘original temporality’:

‘Heidegger constantly invokes the spiritual (especially in the essays on Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl) and, like Prynne, claims to undercut Christian (and Platonic) appropriations of the term by returning to a prior or original temporality: “In its most proper essence, as the poet and thinker allow it to be approached, Geist is neither Christian Geistlichkeit nor Platonic-metaphysical Geistigkeit.”’

Mellors goes on to practically accuse Prynne’s poetic of the late 1960s of Aryanism when, having noted that ‘the arcane pursuit of etymological value arises as a justification for and sublimation of crude beliefs in national, racial, and sexual superiority’, he specifically compares Heidegger’s essay on Trakl to Prynne’s ‘A Pedantic Note in Two Parts’. ‘As in Prynne’s essay, we are dealing [in Heidegger’s Trakl essay] with the cultural programme of defining and returning to our “proper home” in a neat dovetailing of Indo-European linguistic origins with the philosophy and poetics of temporality.’ This sort of alignment of Prynne with Heidegger’s Nazi Aryanism strikes me as being little more than sensationalism: when Prynne observes that the runic wynn 'was the name for "bliss"; it was a proper name, reaching right across Germania and back before the division of the Indo-European peoples', he is not advocating racial exclusivity or hegemony.

It seems to me that the critique put forward in Parataxis of Prynne’s concern with return to a prior or original temporality, needs to be tempered by an awareness of the resistance to circularity which Prynne expressed elsewhere in Parataxis. I am thinking of the attack on totalized recursion made by Prynne in a letter to Milne of 21 March 1993, published in the journal’s issue 5. ‘If swinish contentment or stoic damage control are both off the map, then the work of any manifold (poetry included) must be directed so as to minimize inclusion in the main structure of unrecognized recursive loops.’ In their Parataxis article Reeve and Kerridge had already wondered, in connection with The Oval Window, about the nature of the ‘quest’ in that poem for ‘alternative responses to the world, Heideggerean or otherwise, which are not artificially stabilized by controlling circuits and mechanisms’. But such a controlling circuit – a ‘main structure of unrecognized recursive loops’ – could itself be linguistic, recalling the ‘Infantile,/ recursive pandect’ already posited by Prynne as early as the Wound Response poem ‘An Evening Walk’. The ‘main structure’ of his letter to Milne indeed seems to refer to totalized significatory or semantic circularity: later in the letter Prynne writes of ‘the cycle of pure irony’, and it is in relation to the possibility that both Milne’s and his own poetries now are trapped within and stabilized by their hyper-vigilance, that Prynne desires a poetic irony ‘directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates’:

‘Perhaps this is my own current look-out, indeed, and I reserved a bolt-hole at the outset here [in this letter] by referring to non-conductive irony, coyly leaving room for a version not armed against itself (I think that’s a recursive illusion anyway) so much as directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates.’  

Prynne’s observation of the Cambridge late modernist tendency towards hyper-vigilant poetic irony echoes Out to Lunch’s insightful witness, in his review of Wilkinson’s ‘Harmolodics’ for Parataxis 4, of the ‘frozen gaze of Parataxis [sic] scruple’. Coyly concealed behind his post-punk nom de plume, Ben Watson pointed here to the recursive circuit of total scruple which characterizes the late modernist poetics propounded within Parataxis (and which was precisely what was so intimidating to a graduate student like myself, newly arrived in Cambridge and trying to find the confidence to position myself in relation to late modernist poetries – in particular to the work of Iain Sinclair, the Olsonian element of which is a special victim of Cambridge scruple). It seems to me (now) that the Parataxis scruple is frozen by nothing other than the academic prejudice of which it ultimately consists. When Milne, writing in Parataxis 4, simply asserts that ‘Adorno’s critique of Heidgger’s [sic] poetics of Hölderlin in his essay ‘Parataxis’ (recently translated in Notes to Literature vol. 2) remains pertinent’ to Martin Harrison’s use of Heidegger, but does not explain how or why it remains pertinent, the student senses a cultural Marxism whose argumentation has become paralyzed by its own arrogance.   

Marshall’s article for Parataxis 9 offers close readings of two poets, Prynne and George Oppen, ‘who are ordinarily associated with the Objectivist tradition as defined or redefined by Olson and others’. But this positioning of these poets does not lead Marshall to cordon them off within the field of ‘open’ poetry – Marshall underlines ‘the inadequacy of the idea of the two poetries, one that is open [Pound/Olson etc.] and one that is closed [Stevens etc.]’. Therefore, and whereas Milne disdains attention to ‘phenomenology of experience’ as a feature of the ‘restricted’ (closed) poetry he critiques as a Marxist, Marshall’s approach frees the potential for a phenomenological reading of Prynne whilst showing Parataxis cultural Marxism to be paralyzed within a ‘fixed opposition’:

‘I shall argue that the kinds of risk both writers [Oppen, Prynne] take cannot be properly understood with reference simply to the fixed opposition between 1. lyric ego meditating on the phenomenology of experience and, 2. unbeautiful dance [cf. Milne’s ‘improvised dance’ in P 6, 28] over the manifolds of language. I shall argue that neither writer abandons the phenomenology of experience altogether.’

Marshall’s intervention against Parataxis cultural Marxism also locates that Marxism’s paralysis in the negative dialectical approach to Prynne advanced by Jarvis’s work on ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. In this way, Marshall echoes Prynne’s own resistance to circularity with a critique of paralytic negative dialectical criticism of Prynne, which again restores the potential for phenomenological readings of Prynne’s poetry. Marshall identifies a ‘danger for “dialectical” criticism […] in its haste to disavow phenomenology, “as a category”’, of encouraging a lack of ‘daring the “moment”’.

‘In an early essay for Parataxis, Simon Jarvis wrote: “Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediateness.” A truly dialectical criticism would have nothing to fear from “apparent immediacy”. On the contrary, the danger for “dialectical” criticism is that in its haste to disavow phenomenology, “as a category”, it will turn mediation into an empty truism, without ever daring the “moment”.’

To get frozen, recursive-dialectical reading of Prynne moving by ‘daring the “moment”’ would first involve recognizing, with Marshall, that poetry is itself a contingent process of phenomenological (visionary) definition: ‘each poem is a trial, a process, an attempt to come “face to face to a fact” (as Thoreau aptly puts it) rather than a complete facing up’. Recovery of the ‘mediated immediate’ that is the phenomenology of experience within a poem, is, Marshall argues, therefore only possible through a recovery of the ‘element of process’ – both within our practice of reading and then, when our reading is un-frozen, within the poem itself:

‘[…] any language can be regarded as reified: that is, only by recovering a moment of the process (or to put it in the statutory pigeon-Hegelian, of the mediated immediate in the instance of its mediation) can language and experience reflect upon each other (in the way that Hegel says the concept of the object reflects upon the subject): this element of process is riskily evoked in the reified analogue of the reading process itself.’

Bathos Monotone

J. H. Prynne’s poem, from his 1971 volume Brass, is titled ‘Thinking of You’, but at first sight it appears to address kitchen waste, rather than the traditional romantic object of the lyric poem. This form of bathos has its own dark comedy, a bitter comedy that is reinforced by the sheer monotone relentlessness of the repetition of the references to the 'can' or its ‘fat’ within the poem’s series of functional, prosaic statements. These functional-yet-gnomic statements are layered, or laid down, almost like a sequence of disregarding slaps. I say almost like, because in their diminished functionality the slaps are sloppy, miscast ones. In fact Prynne's use of unexpected punctuation, such as the comma inserted in line 4, can be seen to effect the breakdown of the violence of philosophical logic - that sterile argumentative fury which is so helpful for efficiently constructing a dissertation, or maintaining (and raising) one's place in the hierarchical academic 'rank' - into a species of philosophical verse which is cognition of academic violence and not its unwitting perpetuation.      

Not going forward let alone re-

turning upon itself, the old fat in the can.

The old fat rises to a reason and

seems because of its can, not going

forward but in its rank securely,

so as to be ready. Divinity rises to

no higher reason since going up alone

is returning itself to the can. You choose

if you like whether we stay in the rank

or go forward as alone we can, divinely

secured about the midriff. Older than

forward is the way we might go and

grow because we do, fat. In the can it

is the rancid power of the continuum. 

Human sublimity – such as the sublimity of romantic love, or of the visionary capacity of our imagination – is referred to here, in terms of access to the divine. Perhaps the solitary transcendental imagination – when we each, ‘alone’, are ‘divinely/ secured about the midriff’ – is privileged over sublime I-thou relations, or being as the Siamese twin of a You. But any human sublimity, solitary or otherwise, is bathetically reduced to old fat, animate spirit converted into inanimate matter. You could call this Prynne’s Marxist materialism: a critique of alienation, of the reifying commodification of the subject, which in fact holds out little hope for humanism.

But the use of the comma in the penultimate line, for example, seems to complicate this reading. ‘we do, fat.’ These words could be taken as suggesting our conversion to fat in the can, dead matter (‘we…fat’), but perhaps they simply refer to the way that, when we ‘grow’, we become fat. Hence Prynne stills holds out the possibility that, even after all the abuse under capitalism, we remain (perhaps overweight) humans with spirit. In addition, the proposal that we might ‘go forward as alone we can’ claws back the fact of human agency, our status as can-do mammals, from the very word for the inanimate lump of metal itself: ‘can’. Humans ‘can’ create works of spirit, such as this poem, and such a human cultural construction can appear unusually bloated, or ‘fat’, as a  consequence of the poet’s intention to double-space its lines (the double-spacing of ‘Thinking of You’ is unusual in Brass, though there are areas in ‘Of Sanguine Fire’ which are double-spaced too). So you could say that if ‘Thinking of You’ itself, as a poem, ‘is’ fat it is only because Prynne decided that it should be so; indeed the air between the lines which fills out the poem on the page or screen could be said to emblematize the human spirit which chose to put it there, just as Prynne chose to put spaces between the constituent words of his later title ‘Air  Gap  Song’.

But of course the poem sees us old (modern) humans, emblematized as ‘old fat’, to be in dire straits now – spirit contained within a reified can-world. ‘Not going forward let alone re-/ turning upon itself, the old fat in the can.’ As Keston Sutherland rightly suggests in his article on Brass, 'Hilarious Absolute Daybreak' (online here), the poetic performance of bathos effected in Brass entails not ‘lamentation’ of hopelessness so much as a direct statement of hopelessness. Hence the refusal of the idea of spirit’s self-critique: ‘let alone re-/ turning upon itself’. Quoting Prynne's poem ‘Crown’ from his The White Stones, Sutherland writes:

‘Brass does what The White Stones, Olson and Heidegger programmed themselves not to do: it recasts the Heimkehr of fortune as the paralytic transit from destiny to modern politics, and it does that by evacuating lamentation rather than by universalising it. Brass is the reversal of a reversal, “the question/ returned upon itself”.’

Floating contained as the fat in the can, the modern spirit of ‘Thinking of You’ reprises the ‘crust’ from the earlier Brass poem ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’: the ‘slight meniscus’ which ‘floats on the moral/ pigment of these times’. In each poem the meniscus, the spirit-level – that is, the attenuated form of our spiritual life – can be seen to be an epiphenomenon of a moralizing, mass media-entwined contemporary politics. The second stanza of ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’ begins by commenting on this particular version of an infantilizing politics of the ‘ought'.

And so we hear daily of the backward

           glance at the planet, the reaction of

                   sentiment. Exhaust washes tidal flux

        at the crust, the fierce acceleration

     of mawkish regard. To be perceived with

                         such bounty! […]

True to Sutherland's imputed explosion of 'destiny' within ‘modern politics’, this poem adds that a politics which dominates the environment whilst cosseting the population in an enforced state of eco-friendly ‘moral/ stand-by’, remains vulnerable to the inevitable, predestined revenge of nature that it is bringing upon itself:

                               […] We should

shrink from that lethal cupidity; moral

          stand-by is no substitute for 24-inch

      reinforced concrete, for the blind certain

              backlash. Yet how can we dream of

                    the hope to continue, […] 

The bad idealism represented by ‘moral/ stand-by’ has a contrary, the last lines here imply. It is just that the hopeless micro-climate of Brass stifles such a good morality at inception. ‘how can we dream of/ the hope to continue’. Likewise in ‘Thinking of You’, the old fat attains ‘a reason’ – perhaps that of Kantian moral normativism – and remains canned. Lacking the hope to continue, it is ‘not going/ forward but in its rank securely’. This is precisely ‘so as to be ready’: as if it too has been convened by the TV/Twitter news to ‘moral/ stand-by’.  

But then some lines later ‘Thinking of You’ proposes that we can still choose to ‘go forward as alone we can, divinely/ secured about the midriff’. It seems to me, however, that these lines contain a critique of reason à la moralizing progressivism: Prynne is noticing here a false, privatized progressivism, supported by religion or transcendence. Earlier in Brass, the poem ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ had already warned against the self-insulation of an over-articulate poetic avant-garde from mass society: here carnal collision was already advocated over being ‘divinely/ secured’.

                                        […] No

poetic gabble will survive which fails

        to collide head-on with the unwitty circus:

           no history running

                     with the french horn into

         the alley-way, no

         manifest emergence

           of valued instinct, no growth

                    of meaning & stated order:

Earlier lines in ‘Thinking of You’ suggest moreover that a movement of private reason – ‘going up alone’ – itself hobbles divinity’s own civilizing action:

                                                                     […] Divinity rises to

           no higher reason since going up alone 

is returning itself to the can. […]

What might it mean for transcendental potential to rise to a ‘higher reason’? And what might it mean for a collective exercise of reason to escape return to ‘the can’? With the latter concern we are returned to Prynne’s early visionary politics of socialized language, which (as I note in my book on Iain Sinclair) he propounded in an important letter to The English Intelligencer of 14 March 1968, but also, in The White Stones, in the memorable third and fourth points of the ‘up-/ shot’ concluding ‘Questions for the Time Being’:  

                                                    […] 3. What goes on in a

                   language is the corporate & prolonged action

                   of worked self-transcendence – other minor verbal

                   delays have their uses but the scheme of such

                   motives is at best ambiguous; 4. Luminous

                   take-off shows through in language forced into any

                   compact with the historic shift, but in a given con-

                   dition such as now not even elegance will come

                   of the temporary nothing in which life goes on.

By the time of Brass  the life-world has darkened from our ‘temporary nothing’ to ‘the hate system’ and ‘the entire dark dream outside’ of ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’: ‘the rancid power’ of the progressivist-capitalist ‘continuum’. True to Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment has reverted to mythic barbarism in the can-world. But still in ‘Thinking of You’, arguably, self-transcending, ‘corporate’ and ‘historic’ linguistic activity is identified by Prynne with the emergence of visionary potentials. The final lines of ‘Thinking of You’ show that such ‘Luminous/ take-off’ is never abjured as a possibility for our collective exercise of reason, even in Brass.

                                                                             […] Older than

                                            forward is the way we might go and

 grow because we do, fat. In the can it

 is the rancid power of the continuum.

This last particular 'fat', referring as it does to the traveller on a ‘way’ of collective reason which is ‘Older than/ forward’, or more mythic and irrational than progressivist enlightenment reason, yet also – precisely as such a life-force or exercise of crazy vitalism – a transcendental potential which can itself ‘grow’ and rise to a ‘higher reason’, arguably looks back specifically to the ‘fanatic resin’ mentioned in the preceding poem in Brass, ‘Es Lebe der König’.

                                                                           […] the plum exudes its

fanatic resin and is at once forced in, pressed

down and by exotic motive this means the rest,

                                    the respite, we have this long.

In both poems Prynne suggests that this is now our time of decision: in ‘Thinking of You’, ‘we might go’, and in ‘Es Lebe der König’, ‘we have this long’. Given that ‘Es Lebe der König’ is dedicated to Paul Celan and that the ‘You’ of which the succeeding poem’s title is thinking could well again be Celan, it seems that ‘the rest,/ the respite’ within which reason might decide to grow is indeed our own historical moment following the reversion of enlightenment to myth in the Holocaust. ‘Es Lebe der König’ indeed has its analogue to the bad alternative, the canning of reason with ‘the rancid power of the continuum’: the moment of restriction within instrumentality when ‘the beloved enters the small house’. ‘The house becomes technical, the pool has/ copper sides, evaporating by the grassy slopes.’ Yet the very evaporation of this version of the can hints that we still have respite within which to decide whether to let our potential path of reason atrophy into academic sophistication, and ‘re-enter the small house with/ animals too delicate and cruel’. Structured by bathos, hopelessness and the recognition of technology’s restriction of spiritual horizons, Brass can still imagine its own copper sides breaking open, growing into a wider path on ‘grassy slopes’. In ‘The Five Hindrances’, Prynne writes of the way of collective reason to which Brass thus points in terms of glowing ‘air’, spirit. ‘The future history of the/ air is glowing, with amity beyond the path itself’. The present-day time of decision, when the narrow old way might vanish for good, is also the moment of ‘manifest emergence/ of valued instinct’, of ‘growth/ of meaning & stated order’. For this contemporary moment of decision, ‘The Five Hindrances’ adds, is as dazzling and bemusing as the visionary element which it holds in fruition:

                 […] Now we come through

     the air we breathe bemused by the week: the fire

                        of heaven, gentle, very light. […]

Reading with Vision, part 4

& here is the fourth, final part of my 2007 commentary on Vernon Watkins' poetry.

A Pioneer’s Log

‘The Bloodhound’, which is probably Watkins’s major extended poetic statement on the subject of visionary hermeneutics, identifies a slow resolution of readerly understanding with a process of self-abnegatory pilgrimage – a walk of penitence. The sacred cognitive hunt is necessarily impeded:

Delay may reward me, even evasion

Bring me at last to truth, to the martyr’s posture,

By many paths to a tree transfixed by nails,

Or on to a field of remorse, to a fallen bough,

To footprints under the bridge, and a folded vesture. [391]

The interpreter’s disparate paths of faith are marked by an abdication of self-righteousness; their flighty, mad relentlessness matched by divine relief.

Unresting I follow the trail, a lugubrious attorney

To joy’s keeper, the sleepless giver of rest,

Great judge of the unforgiving. To find his word

An exuberant calm lends meaning to every journey. [392]

‘The Bloodhound’ hints that so long as a record is made, even the most indirect interpretative process can remain guided by a sort of investigative magnetism, or turn out ‘true to [divine] judgment’:

However devious the path through inconstant water,

I keep the log: my account of the trail I render,

Bringing to light what ferns or the scrub had hidden,

Had I gone the direct way. But, as filings quiver,

I turn, as needle to star, with insistent feet. [391]

Watkins’s poetic likening of visionary hermeneutics to the collation of a log-book of quivering filings – shifting sands that nonetheless are providentially ordered – is borne out by some statements of Dora Polk’s in the introduction to her Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision. Polk points out that, though published eventually in 1977, her academic study was written between 1967 and 1970, when Watkins studies was (already) no industry. This was why ‘I had to win access to Watkins’s work by the fumbling methods of the explorer who lacks maps or accounts to help him, and must rely principally on his own ingenuity and the tools he carries on his back. And, to continue the metaphor, my findings are recorded rather in the manner of a pioneer’s log – a tentative account of the personal process of discovery of Watkins’s vision’. Polk’s work on Watkins was a vocation, if one long delayed by her need to earn a living. It was a genuine personal spiritual exploration: she writes of becoming ‘the beneficiary of Watkins’s vision, which, after all, is what the study of poetry is all about’. A reader’s visionary hermeneutic is thus, Polk lets us see, part of an ongoing, developing process of spiritual re-birth; her log-book anti-method is in keeping with the shifting ‘flux of debate’ surrounding the poetry, and ‘the cumulative nature of literary criticism’. A reader’s visionary log-book also perpetuates what Norvig calls the poet’s own ‘dynamic concept of the imagination’.

Such magical transformations can emerge out of the social marginality of visionary poetry, for instance out of its resistance to the self-promotional procedures of academic career-building. Watkins studies, for instance, is no career option within today’s entirely secularized English departments. But the spiritual aptitudes, ‘the tools’, required for genuinely vocational study, can often be more fine, quiet, deep-grained and personal, than those required for developing a successful CV.

Notebook method: the method of the ‘failed’/private/underground (upper-)middle-class repressed/suppressed outsider. Benjamin (Arcades), Kierkegaard, Kafka-diaries, Weil. Compare Stephanie Strickland on the way Weil’s family constricted her - & hence the relevance of her work to the women’s, and men’s, issues of ‘hunger, violence, exclusion, betrayal of the body, inability to be heard, and self-hate’. Unpublished remains. ‘Unpublishable’: Kierkegaard, ‘backstage practice’. Exiled from life: ‘can’t find a way in’, a way of expressing one’s gifts in the real world (versus MES: working-class popstar). Cf too Newton, in Tristram Hunt’s film: research as sacred, private knowledges.

The reason why others my age aren’t wanting to write (eg diary/documentary essay form) like their adolescent literary heroes (for me, Kafka’s diaries, & D H Lawrence impulse-reproduction; for IS, massive influence of Beats on his London journalistic writing mode), is that younger literary academics simply weren’t formed by literature – they didn’t read it as teenagers (one ex-colleague only reading NME, another reading nothing even as a student). Hence why should they rebel against the subsumption of literature by (cultural theoretical) concepts? And today’s ‘novelists’/ ’poets’ never read fiction or poetry as kids either. At least I was reading DHL, Ginsberg, Blake – as well as being groomed for professional specialization in academic lit. crit. by Leavisite/ pre-Oxbridge school essay lit. crit. Never forming a personal relationship with the writing in this way – explains the widespread incomprehension of IS’s work amongst literary critics now (cf Alex M.: ‘field of contemporary literary studies has found the task of analyzing Sinclair’s writing problematic’, in City Visions). [Traherne: ‘It acts not from a centre to/ Its object as remote,/ But present is when it doth view,/ Being with the being it doth note.’] Post-Brass Prynne is popular (!), more approachable (!) and written about precisely because his sheer modernist textual games prevent attachment, there is little recognizable human presence there to feel implicated with: or the residual sense of a spectral personality behind the writing is effectively ironized out of existence by its submersion within his surrounding range of depersonalizing modernist (textual/poetic) strategies [Ian Hunt, praising JHP’s lacuna mode to Catling in Parataxis, takes this as a virtue]. This so even with the ‘uh Pandora’ comic-erotic interfusions in Triodes.

Sean Bonney on hearing of my notes on Radon Daughters: ‘You should just publish the notebook.’

My private moon voyages [Lud] into Kafka’s diaries, age c.15 – a bid for the sacred which had been pushed – by my entirely secular daily routine – into 3AM nightspace. (Alongside hearing the pirate radio broadcasts). And which then disqualified me, since exhausted, from participating effectively in the worldly educational community the next day. Alienation, and misery – estranged as John Lydon in the King’s Road [on The Filth and the Fury], provoked by the absence of a sacred element to view everyday capitalist life as just a rat-race – stumbling bleary-eyed across Blackfriars Bridge. Fighting against the commuter crowd, like Karen Armstrong c.17 on ‘release’ from her convent, & like me still (yesterday at Moorgate station). Urban Panic Attack. And, from then on in, study as a refuge from the secular world. Immersion. Which, of course, the university didn’t actually turn out to be. [Bond, Workshy journal]            

Insofar as the anti-methodical processes of visionary hermeneutics generate the form of a pioneer’s log-book, which records the pilgrim-path of insight as it passes through shifting cognitive sands – ‘and then it is footpad, footpad, nose to the ground,/ Ear and eye to the trail’ – they also recall the essay form as described (and promoted) by Theodor Adorno. Both types of writing rely on self-abdication and faith: Watkins’s log-keeping bloodhound is ‘trusting the scent to discover my destination’ [391], whilst for Adorno ‘the word Versuch, attempt or essay’ recalls ‘an intention groping its way’. But a loss of self-righteousness and subsumptive processing does not rule out intelligence or self-consciousness: ‘the slight elasticity of the essayist’s train of thought forces him to greater intensity than discursive thought, because the essay does not proceed blindly and automatically, as the latter does, but must reflect on itself at every moment.’

The trail’s elasticity is only ‘slight’, because of the unresolved tension between stasis and dynamism – for example, between fixed and unfixed cognition, or between a neat commensurability of concepts to the object and the lack of such – which characterizes the essay form. Adorno wrote of the essay’s privileging of the incommensurate, of how it is ‘concerned with what is blind in its objects. It wants to use concepts to pry open the aspect of its objects that cannot be accommodated by concepts, the aspect that reveals, through the contradictions in which concepts become entangled, that the net of their objectivity is a merely subjective arrangement. It wants to polarize the opaque element and release the latent forces in it.’ Sinclair’s ‘Before I Left the Rue Grimoire’ ironically comments on our fear of this ambition.

light darts from out there not so very far

strikes the inner sea we hope

precise equivalent soundless & scaled down

This sort of reception of light – of truth, of the meaning of an object – represents the contrary of how a visionary hermeneutic aims to receive light. In a way, visionary hermeneutics hopes to read an illuminated poem imprecisely, so as to liberate its incommensurability – its miraculous, formless and transforming, shifty aspects – and release, not some ‘soundless & scaled down’ echo, but one (to return to ‘Beckton Alp’) ‘raw and absolute and unappeased’.

Sinclair’s thinking about pedagogy, and about visionary experience – when that thinking is filtered through the diary form of his 1971 book The Kodak Mantra Diaries – again suggests an emphasis on the release of incommensurability. These diaries relay a dialogue between Paul Goodman and Sinclair in which Goodman accuses Ginsberg, his poetry, of a lack of ‘religious depth’:

He has no theological feeling at all. He doesn’t know what real faith is. He understands on the other hand that religion is the crucial thing. He knows this in some deep way and so he picks up some eclectic eastern stuff which he understands in an external pedantic way – but with no feeling of faith, miracle, communion, sacrament, all the things which make for religious life in a way that I would conceive it. He cops-out into notions of union, ecstasy etc etc – which are all sentiments. They’re very nice sentiments but they are merely aesthetic and have nothing to do with the springs, in terms of which heaven and hell are determined, or in terms of which the Messiah will come.

Goodman’s view of Christianity, vaunting ‘the springs’ – deep structures, whether practical (such as Communion), or conceptual (such as the terms in terms of which heaven and hell are determined) – over mystical emotional effects, recalls Watkins’s poetics: much of Watkins’s poetry is reducing itself to a thematic demonstration of Christian conceptual structures, for instance, such as the generation of resurrection from suffering or a pain/life dialectic. Sinclair, however, responds to the accusation of a lack of formal Christian ‘religious depth’ with the question: ‘Is that a bad thing?’. Sinclair seems to be hinting here at an interest in how miracle or sacrament can be an incommensurable, everyday, more superficial phenomenon, one not reliant on being determined by deep structures – whether practical structures of organized religion such as the liturgy, or pre-set, rigid conceptual structures. In ‘The Return of Spring’ Watkins wrote of how ‘what first I feared as a rite I love as a sacrament.’ [117] Rather as Adorno saw the essay seeking to release ‘what is blind’ in its material, in The Kodak Mantra Diaries we can see Sinclair seeking out the opaque element in our religious experience, and in pedagogy:

Can’t you throw out the old pupil / teacher relationship anyway, and approach any subject mutually, both looking for insights, get rid of the formal structure?

We could think towards a religious-exploratory experience which is more free-form – one which is fluid, provisional, shifting, as if transformed by kick-starts of cognitive shocks. Moments of incommensurability, crystallized by visionary perception, re-organize the trail itself, as we pass through them.

                   

Arrested Glory

In this wild eve’s thunder-rain, at the batement of it, the night-shades now much more come on: when’s the cool, even, after-light. [David Jones]

Perhaps writing itself is not only kick-started by perception, but is also enabled precisely by its collapse, when it is going too fast: when a translation has occurred. In ‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’, Watkins identified the intensity of Hölderlin’s poetry to be grounded in the extreme reciprocity between his visionary perception and the natural vision herself: when the poet has become her medium.

[…] The courses of rivers

Remained a compelling mystery; yet when he wrote

Of these, he no longer watched, he became the river.

So swift his thought, so close to the life he saw,

He knew the rose as the rose is known to herself,

Fell with the cataract’s fall, or became that eagle

Of piercing sight, or learnt the time of the fig-tree,

Not by time, but by breast-feather and leaf. [309]

‘The Cave-Drawing’ reveals Watkins’s view that the artist’s visionary understanding, learning, hermeneutic can be not only as speedy as its object, but also as fugitive and fortuitous. A ‘luck’ enables a singing of the light; so that precisely an arrested ‘mine/ Of mineral wonder’, a frozen crystallization, re-energizes art.

For us he made light sing in the dark of his line,

Arrested motion, all animals pierced and crystalline:

He, he alone had found it, his look trained down

By luck their lightning emergence. This was his mine

Of mineral wonder, making the skilled hand run,

A hunter, spearlike, outspeeding all ages begun,

At which we marvel. [149]

The arrest or training-down performed by visionary hermeneutics involves an act of celebration and compression, which is also an act of eternalization, as the resulting obscure crystal is rescued from time. In ‘Taliesin in Gower’:

Rhinoceros, bear and reindeer haunt the crawling glaciers of age

Beheld in the eye of the rock, where a javelin’d arm held stiff,

Withdrawn from the vision of flying colours, reveals, like script on a page,

The unpassing moment’s arrested glory, a life locked fast in the cliff. [185]

‘A life locked fast’: there is the emphasis on the crystallization of an organic unity, as in Jerusalem when Blake remarks that ‘he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole/ Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized’. Sinclair has spoken of the ‘brief glyph-notes’ from which the prose sections of his Lud Heat evolved; to Acker he commented: ‘for a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something.’ The goal of crystallizing definition is really simplicity: ‘none so intellectual/ As the simplest truth of all.’ [401] Smith told Middles: ‘My problem’s knowing when to shut up on a song. I can’t put that bleeding pen down, so I hone it, try to get it as simple as possible. That is something I have learned over the years. I know how to edit.’ Academic practice – the administrative-bureaucratic method of cognition – can instead necessitate purposeless complexification, in line with a melancholy Puritan work ethic. Jerusalem foretold the reign of false activity:

And in their stead. intricate wheels invented. wheel without wheel:

To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion

Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind

And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task!

Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom

In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread:

In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All,

And call it Demonstration: blind to all the simple rules of life.

‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’ proposes, ‘What might the gift not bring to their holy light/ Who ask love only?’ [309]. Similarly, Kierkegaard’s distrust of his day’s professional and quasi-professional hermeneutics – ‘Christendom has got itself stuck in cleverness’ – made him see how ‘someone more than its match in cleverness’ could continue to work for wisdom: with an aim to ‘restore simplicity’. ‘The world has become just far too clever. The person who is to work effectively for the religious must get behind them – else he won’t be of much use.’

Nine years before, in 1839, Kierkegaard’s notes had drawn attention to the celebratory, even redemptive function of a backstage practice of crystallizing simplification. ‘All poetry is life’s glorification [Forklarelse] (i.e. transfiguration) through its clarification [Forklarelse] (through being clarified, illuminated, “unfolded”, etc.). It is really remarkable that language has this ambiguity.’ The perception held by Kierkegaard’s ‘poetry’ aims at the visionary register of Watkins’s ‘arrested glory’, or the radically strange, post-real ‘transfiguring after-clarity’ of The Anathemata, when life ‘looms up curiously exact and clear, more real by half than in the busy light as noses everywhere at stare-faced noon – more real…but more of Faëry by a long chalk’. This moonlit visionary perception or hermeneutic recalls the radically passive, detached attention proposed and practiced by Weil, which Finch likened to ‘”description”’, ‘when this word has lost all of its overtones of complete logical mapping. We are looking not for exactness but for description so detached, so penetrating, so obvious that it has the character of revelation.’ This ‘kind of seeing in which the ordinary becomes translucent’, is suggestive of the revelatory ‘holy light’ of ‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’.

What might the gift not bring to their holy light

Who ask love only? Sacrifice willed by the heavenly ones

Raises our god-pierced eyes. Our selves are nothing;

That which we seek is all. [309]

The lights over the ‘world-flats’ hover uncertainly, by fits & starts, ‘Wills-of-wisp’ so to say, anyway, thats the idea, - uncertainly & only now and again. Is that O.K.? [Jones to Watkins, 26 June 1960]   

Seeing

Parenthetical numbering in this exposé relates to The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000). Other, source, texts:

Acker, Kathy, ‘Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer’ (1997)

Adams, Sam and Gwilym Rees Hughes, eds, Triskel Two: Essays on Welsh and Anglo-Welsh Literature (Llandybie: Davies, 1973)

Adorno, Theodor W., Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)

Allen, Diogenes, Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006)

Blake, William, Complete Writings, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: OUP, 1972)

______.Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. by Morton D. Paley (London: Tate Gallery, 1998)

Bond, Robert, ‘More than Museums: No Traveller Returns, by Vahni Capildeo’, Jacket, 26 (October 2004), here

______. Iain Sinclair (Cambridge: Salt, 2005)

Boulton, James T., ed., The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: CUP, 1997)

Buber, Martin, Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985)

Finch, Henry Leroy, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, ed. by Martin Andic (New York: Continuum, 1999)

Ford, Simon, Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and The Fall (London: Quartet, 2003)

Jones, David, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1952)

______. Letters to Vernon Watkins, ed. by Ruth Pryor (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976)

Kierkegaard, Søren, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1996)

McLellan, David, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)

Middles, Mick & Mark E. Smith, The Fall (London: Omnibus, 2003)

Norris, Leslie, ed., Vernon Watkins: 1906-1967 (London: Faber and Faber, 1970)

Norvig, Gerda S., Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake’s Illustrations to The Pilgrim’s Progress (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993)

Polk, Dora, Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision (Swansea: Davies, 1977)

Scholem, Gershom, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003)

Sinclair, Iain, Lud Heat/ Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995)

______. Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997)

______. Landor’s Tower: or The Imaginary Conversations (London: Granta Books, 2001)

______. and Emma Matthews, White Goods (Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002)

______. The Firewall: Selected Poems 1979-2006 (Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 2006)

______. The Kodak Mantra Diaries: October 1966 to June 1971, Beat Scene special issue, December 2006 [orig. publ. London: Albion Village Press, 1971]

Thomas, Dylan, Collected Poems: 1934-1953, ed. by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: Phoenix, 2000)

Traherne, Thomas, Selected Writings, ed. by Dick Davis (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988)

Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge, 1997)

Williams, Rowan, ‘Swansea’s Other Poet: Vernon Watkins and the Threshold between Worlds’, Welsh Writing in English, 8 (2003), 107-20

Hearing

The Fall, Psykick Dance Hall (Eagle Records, 2000)

______. The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004 (Sanctuary Records, 2005) 

______. Reformation Post TLC (Slogan Records, 2007)

Next post: Karl Jaspers