Month: February 2023

By Stannard. You can read a much better on-line review from Loydell. I only like the first and last postcards, except for the line beginning all but the first poem “Crack of dawn swam in / ” (which is then followed by “ocean Frolicked on sand Sent postcard to Ma”), and not in the last poem. Perhaps it raises expectations too high with its simplicity, as all but the first and last poem etc. seem composed of meaninglessness. The 11 pages of poetry are then followed by 5 empty pages and a picture of someone (not Stannard!) with a walking stick.

I find it difficult to stomach in places. Postcards remind me of mail art (though Stannard seems unconcerned with the poetry underground) and conceptual art works in general. I suppose it’s post language poetry, because I think he asserts that the poems mean only their words and what they say; there’s nothing else it could be about.

I suppose I would quite like to read it as post conceptual poetry (I just mean where we are after conceptual poetry), in which case it might be an slightly incoherent allegory on his kitsch precedents and subsequents (“Arrived safely… returning home to Ma”, starts and ends the chapbook), which I find satisfying – i.e. useful to how I felt – but doesn’t help me enjoy the rest of it. I have read next to nothing about that.

Alternatively, read it to enjoy the humour / seriousness of it.

Published 1969.

As a whole, I have a sense that he, Prynne, wants to fall asleep and dream, to drift off, and see hope again, and to transform the energy of capitalist accumulation into a new community. So I have a sense of Prynne needing to return.

Via the line, his heart has gone out into the world, and he is trying to write it back in, but needs a new alternative to melopeia; the image is there, but he is dissolving it.

Instead, the poems seem most meaningfully composed of other people, especially a dichotomy of ‘loyalty’ and ‘hope’. But. while the writer is nomadic, no-one speaks (The nomad is perfect / but the pure motion which has no track is / utterly lost; even the Esquimaus look for sled / markings, though on meeting they may not speak): Prynne seems predominately to be writing about how “we / you / I” love. For me, the collection is oddly conversational (perhaps oddly, the last poem reminded me of Williams and ‘no ideas but in things’), and the line as a fragment constructs for each poem a unique chatty diction (e.g. ‘Lashed to the mast’ seems to me mock heroic). In turn, that worked out into a sense of gradually feeling closer to – but no more intimate with – someone, until this alienating dialogue meant I identified with an image. 

In that act of sympathetic identification, free of sensuality, I think there is a new sublime language (“The / mower works now, related to nothing but the hand and purpose…”) that shocks and dissolves the listener by asserting dynamic / destabalising change and reflects on the frustrated need to be at home and reconciled with nature outside human agency and domination.