Issue 32: Adam Piette

 J.H. Prynne, Poems 2016-2024 (Hexham: Bloodaxe, 2024)

John Wieners, Pente, a book of woe (St Leonards-on-sea, Artery Editions, 2023)

Alan Halsey, The Last Unravellings of the Logoclast (Boise, ID: Free Poetry, 2024)

It's nothing new to wonder where poems come from, and not even very modernist to assume they come from the sea of language as nonhuman source. The 'deified Seed of Jove' is the teller of the tale of Odysseus, (possibly Calliope), and it is she who is also asked to resound 'Achilles' baneful wraths' in the Iliad (Chapman's translations). A holy light is the source of Milton's epic, a 'certain Slant of light' conjures the 'air' for Emily Dickinson. The muse in all cases sounds like deified langue and parole, remorselessly nonhuman, forcing upon the channelling poet-subject 'internal difference': 'When it comes, the Landscape listens – / Shadows – hold their breath –'. Ovid, in Metamorphoses 5, tells of the power of Calliope's song that turned rival singers into magpies, as Dante recalls at the opening of Purgatorio: 'that sound, / Of which the miserable magpies felt /The blow so great, that they despaired of pardon' (Longfellow translation). Without the nonhuman power of language deified, poetry is reduced to the empty chattering of poetaster imitation. Calliope is mother of Orpheus and helped the Muses bury his disjecta membra at Leibethra. The inventor of lyric had been torn apart by Apollo's Bacchantes for some transgression: the fragments of his body have the liveliness of word as natura naturans, and have something of the virtue to inspire that Calliope has. Orpheus's head, some believed, ended up at Lesbos, mythological source for the quality of poetry pouring from the island. The Orpheus story speaks to the dangers of internalisation of nonhuman language forces, as well as staging an ideal incarnate poetics, the poem as embodiment of language-as-goddess, its endgame a mess of fragments with uncanny energies, a feast of body-parts that sing abstracted songs from language's textual collective and chorale.

J.H. Prynne's latest blockbuster of a book from Bloodaxe collects the poems, pamphlets and sequences written between 2016 and 2024, writing that attends very obliquely to the insane politics of the time, to the pressing quandary of a public poetics capable of denunciation as well as of sustaining advocacies, and performing an experimental and forbidding dissection of the ethical and critical-theoretical perils of aesthetics and lyric utterance. The late Prynne styles are baffling at first readings because of their eschewal of pronoun and subjectivity, their acid defences against communicableness and lyric satisfactions, their seemingly ultra-cerebral surfaces and textures, denying readers the pleasures of ordinary syntax and meaning-making (that is, if such readers such as I can be bothered to have any demands at all beyond immediate consumption). The huge 700 page volume of eight years' work defies reviews like this one too: everything in the textual objects bristles at the very idea of approach by feelers from New Critical, bourgeois, pedantic and greedy lapdog critics. I shift therefore from review mode and its lazy performance of taste, middle-man fake bonhomie and high-minded judgingness, over to looser essay mode, perched in rather rickety fashion on an even looser reader response foundation (yes consumer commodification by another route, it must be said). I'll be looking at two sequences, Of the Abyss (2017) and the 2019 Of Better Scrap, partly to confess the impossibility of reviewing the whole book, but also to explore their variously Orphic manners. Of Better Scrap has as one of its four epigraphs these lines from the 1598 Loves Labour Lost:

They haue been at a great feast

of Language, and stoln the scraps

            (Act 5, scene 1, ll. 38-9, qu. p. 67)

The lines are whispered by the schoolboy in an aside to Costard, satirising Nathaniel the curate, Armado the braggart and the pedant Holofornes for their laboured verbosity, racked orthography and Latinate pedantry. Prynne sets the lines above the entrance to his scrapyard, as if to warn the reader of the scrambled and random assortment of phrase and text ahead, and to have us understand that the process has satire of contemporary pedantry and bloated language-use as its target. We should expect disjecta membra, parole scraps stolen from the feast of language that is langue, inscribed in a text that is aware of how language is consumed, invites consumption, even of Orphic flesh. Costard replies to the boy that he is surprised he's survived (as the one being schooled) the language parasites' modish hunger for carnal word: 'O, they have lived long on the almsbasket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus. Thou art easier swallowed than a flapdragon' (5.1.40-44). The sequence has 67 poems of various shapes and sizes, but most in page blocks of 20-25 lines that play with pentametre, hexametre, octametre rhythms very offhandedly, with something of the arbitrariness of syllabics. The lines read as processual insofar as they strike as language scraps beachcombed from texts without provenance. Yet the point of them is not an exercise de style that trumpets the process exactly. One of the poems 'Top Silver Deliver' opens:

Eximious talent infringe the bill, tap-tap mend

or modify bred canteloupe nightly bird on brede

gullet orient sprinkle and dropping, on purpose

top silver deliver pannier floated.  (82)

Holofornes is targeted with 'eximious', a word Stephen Fry might use with a smug smile. The first line invites us into an entertainment of sorts, and the show on the bill is a language game as consumption of word orts: the talent on the bill of the show turn into birds through the shift from tap dancing to the tapping of the bird-bill. Language might be being allowed to breed and feed on its own arbitrariness, 'bred' becomes 'bird' becomes 'brede', associative fodder from the pun on bill and the first phoneme of the word. The mending or modifying of phonemes is akin to genetic manipulation of fruit or bird, which might infringe the bill of animal rights or laws constraining GM foods. But it is related too to our own readerly eating of animals and peoples and things for a word, the gullet that orientalises what it consumes, paying top dollar for objects delivered in panniers, floating onto our top tables with their silver service every night. O let us sprinkle salt upon the flesh of the words the gullet takes on down, shopping till we drop, blood dropping (or should that be dripping) from the fleshy scraps at the feast of our purposes. Sore thumb, though, in this feast of body-parts: the word 'canteloupe', misspelt fruit, generating query: is this Finnegans Wake we are eating at, portmanteau of antelope and cantaloupe on our plates? The OED cites 'canteloupe' as a variant spelling, and one of the quotations speaks of its vinous taste (1739 'The Cantaleupt [sic] Melon: ... the Flesh ... is of a rich vinous Flavour' [Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary]). The word pops up later in the poem, where a marble instep, 'clip surmising domain' and 'mental proficient / action' are said to 'suppress what for, veinous implicated over / counterpart'. Something here is imagining statues, country houses and films made about country houses, and the mental habits of such places and stating that these are what are really suppressing the information a reader might need to work out what all this is for. The rich vinous flavour of the cantaloupe or canteloupe or cantaleupt is a hunger for riches and it is this commodity-hunger which erases the use value. One of the entries for 'veinous' in the OED (1878 translation of Gegenbaur's Elements of Comparative Anatomy) runs 'We find representatives of this in the parasitic Dicyemidæ, which live in the so-called veinous appendages of the Cephalopoda.' One might venture to put beside this quotation another from Philo Blinn's essay 'Breeding Cantaloupes' in the Journal of Heredity of 1908 which ends: 'Other variations of traits and qualities, such as flavor, color, and texture of flesh found in the different varieties, are additional hints as to the possibilities that are within the grasp of the future cantaloupe breeder' (4.1, January 1908, pp. 165–180). What Prynne's poem is doing is placing as counterparts the heredity breeding protocols of the 2oth century with their grievous associations of 'surmising domain' as racist judgments in the human sphere and the comparable protocols governing taste and texture of poetry within the top silver apparatuses of late capital. The critic and the poet who hunger for veinous words, the lords of language and the breeders of lyric, are future cantaloupe breeders, veinous parasitic appendages of the suppressive regimes of the pleasure industries. The poem ends with uplift, like a Larkin poem taking off into the aether:

                    Full agreement incident, name

alternate marking more hope mere tremor affine

grasp future shadow on the road, now openly

The consensus protocols that govern the controlled event of the poem on the page as it is consumed mark out any otherness as fodder for this uplift: 'incident' might be another name for poem, and its cold form of happening offers the judicious consumer 'more hope' and the pleasure of very small-scale feelings that affine one, as if one were the sugar from that plantation. The poem as just such a small pleasure for our gullet offers hope of more, so we can grasp future pleasures just so and no more: the words figure forth shadows on the road on our domain, now openly ours, opening so pleasurably onto the space of our dramatic feelings for alternate marking and the uplifting satisfaction of our full agreement with our own sweet selves.

         Everything on the page, however, is also challenging the close reading protocols I have just indulged: for they exhibit the crossword puzzling pseudo-politics of the critic who is the Holofernes-target in the first place. Close reading posits its mental proficiency and taste just so, and the close reader is enthusiastically subject to the poem's raillery as 'epicure nasal' always on the prowl, 'never enough throughout'. Mea culpa, I just can't help it: it is startling to be in such sights as satirical object, and to get some measure of the taste wars which manufacture uplift for poetry as one of the machines of the entertainment industries.

         If Prynne's satire is Swiftian and light-fingered in Of Better Scrap, it takes on darker forms in the astonishing Of the Abyss, a sequence of ten poems that seem to be in the same register as the later sequence, fragmentary, pronoun-free, randomly constructed, difficult with its gappy syntax and chainlink effects, its heady abstraction. Yet the focus is sharper on a source for its language – not openly aimed at the general target of aesthetisized capital and consumer drives so much as at a very specific evil in the world. The individual poems resist consumption, are hard to parse, seem armoured against the greedy reader eye. The compositional logic conjures up a very calculating and ordering intelligence as a form of narratorial language-force that breaks down any clarity about the specific evil. 'Abyss: 1' opens with 'Lead-glance ranking, plank splintered in turn / alone to want living forward, across desert'. The subject that is wanting to live forward, have any future at all as living being, is made solitary, the planks that might lead to that future splintered, by the same lead-glance, both a heavy gaze upon being, and related to money (Lead Glance is Galena, lead sulphide which is a source of silver). The planks across the desert might be the planks victims are forced to walk on the desert of the seas, and the rest of the sentence supports this: it mentions a 'possible fleet' and 'vessel', and the briefest glimpse of a 'child penchant' before the language becomes obfuscatory, persecutory:

many after all displayed fluke after, in the roof

cling disbar galena by instance, it must be

flood even so trimmed up as all the rest, flow

all at last better, to crown for sure, for shore

traffic now alight go in open find.

The child penchant leans over the boat, but is also subject to the lead-glance with its penchant for children trimmed up as part of a trading initiative, for Galena, or people as commodities. The boat they sail on is designed to flood, the child designed to cling, the flow of this language keyed in to the flood of drowning waters, crowning moment, human trafficking played out as a language game ('for sure, for shore'), as an open hunger for victim flesh on display, recalling whale hunting (those beautiful flukes) of past brutal days. Poem after poem explore the abyss of the procedural, prurient, parasitic gaze upon the drowning bodies of the refugees on the Mediterranean. Published first in 2017, the poems track the horror of the boats and the death of children after the drowning of 2-year-old Alan Kurdi in 2015: 8,500 people lost in the Med since the Syrian boy died, the Guardian wrote in 2017. The poems focus their gaze on those child victims, with a motif cluster that strikes home ('all child eyes' [Abyss: 1], 'hold the child / out first' [Abyss: 2], 'child care' [Abyss: 3], 'too young / many are held over' [Abyss: 4], 'Afford the child each over lost over late' [Abyss: 5], 'childish first near finish' [Abyss: 7], 'not hidden a child' [Abyss: 8], 'small eyes peering' [Abyss: 9], 'little shoes' [Abyss: 10]). The plangency of this beats as heart within the same discourse-field of the cold narratorial lead-glance in ways that sit in judgment on the language-machine of the systems of border control and trafficking. Under judgement too is the ways we consume the poem:

                                Hold all our own

breath on this behalf, of constant more

for less. Frame close to break-point don't

reach for be still and know in fault yours

and mine, small eyes peering, what else.

Don't imagine what's next up, link entire

voyage tremble for front view, look there.

Shade small eyes at the blows replaced, at

face value, how it looks is all there what

is known unsure, too clear shall be so, fre-

quent day after day on clear notice say

breathing hard, soundless for evermore.

                                    ['Abyss: 9', p. 33]

The being in charge of the seeing directs the scene of the boat and its children for suspense's sake, to generate held breath in the viewer in ghastly relation to the breaths being held by the drowning. The appropriation of the suffering is also there, the migrants held as 'our own', for sensational emotion's sake, always hunting for more. That addiction is caught in the framing of the camera eye of journalist and reader, close to the suffering to capture the moment of breaking, in anticipation of the stilling of the subject-under-inspection. The gaze is accompanied by moralizing qualms that are themselves luxuriated in, the 'fault yours / and mine': both confessing what is so wrong in the vulturine attention and adding that squirm to the mix of media-affect. The peering of the 'small eyes' of the children on the boats is adopted as though it could stand in for the guilty gaze that feeds on them, before being quickly erased by technical ennui ('what else'). The dos and don'ts of this technician and director imply they don't want to film the actual deaths, leaving that to the imagination as trembly anticipative climax withheld. The 'front view', as in front page photo as well as what is centrally framed, is a controlling of look, focussing with liberal heartfulness on the small eyes of the children for sensation's sake: how the light and shade brings out their features; hints at violence replaced by the front-page snapshot. The journalist seeks their faces for their value as sensation-objects, and what is all-important is 'how it looks' which is 'all there', as in absolutely key as message, but also 'all there [is]': something of Beckett's exploration of combined cruelty and pseudo-dramatics in How It Is lie behind the tonalities of this dissection of 'how it looks'. What is known by the media is left deliberately thin in terms of actual political knowledge; it would be a mistake, the journalist-eye is saying, to make things too clear. What the media chooses to present as unclear and hazy 'shall be so' by fascist diktat according to the conventions of the daily news cycle and the 'clear notice' (as in stripped-bare message-making) of the story. What is being generated is not a story about the migrants and their peril, but a focus on readership/viewership and their bated breath, all for the silent monumental everlastingness of the mute death-object, synecdoche for all those thousands now soundless in the abyss.

           Prynne's satirical writing has heft and boldness with a dive into the creepy discursive liquidity of speech and value of language in the public sphere, and a verve to the regulated hatred of the representations hyper-aware of its own investments in lyric uplift and its temptations. The savage indignation of the writing is Swiftian too in the depth-charge of its outrage: Of the Abyss is the 'Modest Proposal' of our time, intricately tracking the unholy mix of sensationalist, word-carnal, cold-hearted gluttony of the gaze upon the suffering of those we choose not to understand in our shows of lukewarm compassion. The fractured surfaces of the text, its difficulty, these are being generated by the broken politics of our time, its lacunae, its nasty and unctuous sanctimoniousness, the viciousness of its control systems and communication technologies, the greedy consumerist drives of its cultural apparatuses. None shall scape whipping in these severe satirical texts, not least the lyricist and critics and poetasters that choose to serve, not least poetry itself. Prynne's answer to the question where poetry comes from: it comes from culture as a congeries of forces, drives and dispositions, inescapably public, unavoidably saturated in fake feeling and fabricated points of view.

         In a subtle 2020 review of five of Prynne's collections, including Of the Abyss  and Of Better Scrap, Luke Roberts reflected on the contradictory doubleness of the writing, centripetal and centrifugal: 'the language that I can make refer to the migrant crisis points me out into the world, but the non-semantic or not yet semantic elements – syntax, the sound, the patterning of vowels and consonants, the falling of stress at the line break, the way the words are joined – push back to the composition'.[1] The rival reference, to world and composition, have as their intermediary not the poet as biological and historical subject but a persona proxy. Roberts quotes from a Prynne 2013 lecture on poetics where he argues that poems are not written by poets but by 'a more or less distinct and separate poet-self', the poet’s 'imaginary'.[2] Roberts further adduces a 1968 letter to Ray Crump that had appeared in the English Intelligencer, where Prynne reflects on the public and political nature of poetry, whatever its set of styles or technical graces:

Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe.[3]

It is hard to hold these credences in mind when reading, so powerful are the conventions of illusory selving generated by the autobiographical affordances of lyric. What Prynne's writing demands and its contradictions and obliquities suggest is a necessary and satirical performance of lyric as a public truth of language mediated by a poet-self that is being sponsored by the political world. The poem is coming out of the air of language, subject to the freaks and twists of weather as cultural and historical shifts and zones. The persona that mediates these performances is less a modernist dramatic monologist than a aesthetic weather gauge and weathercock, a satirical role played to the hilt by the compositional intelligencer as machinic symptom of lyric's entanglements.

Prynne's abyss and scrapyard are versions of the language environment governing the graces of lyric in ways that key his work into the political critical-theoretical counter-subjectivity of OIsonian and LANGUAGE poetics. It is all the more remarkable then that Olson championed and defended the work of John Wieners, whose writing is so from his own heart, so openly lyrical, so rooted in his own day and lifeline. Patricia Hope Scanlan at Artery has brought out an edition of Pente, a book of woe that is a valuable addition to the selections of Wieners’ work that have been bringing him out of the shades of oblivion, the 1998 Black Sparrow Selected, edited by Raymond Foye (building on the Selected Poems Wieners himself saw through to press, with Jonathan Cape in 1972); the 2015 Wave Books selected, Supplication; Scanlan's 2011 edition of unpublished work with Artery, Strictly Illegal, edited by her with poems selected and introduced by Jeremy Reed ; the Olson-Wieners correspondence 'the sea under the house' in 2 vols, ed.  Michael Seth Stewart (Lost and Found, 2012); the selections from the journals, Stars Seen in Person, ed. Michael Seth Stewart (City Light Books, 2015); the selected letters, Yours Presently edited by Michael Seth Stewart (University of Mexico Press, 2020); the selection of poems, journals, ephemera edited by Richard Porter, Solitary Pleasure (Pilot Press, 2023). We are still waiting for a publisher to take on Robert Dewhurst's meticulous edition of the collected poems: until then, we have the collections and selections. PENTE publishes an important manuscript revision of Wieners’ 1965 Ace of Pentacles that had been given to Panna Grady in 1966 and intended as a second edition. She sent it to Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum Press, and there it languished, partly due to the chaotic breakdown of relations to publishers in 1966 with the dispute between Fulcrum and Jonathan Cape (Wieners had sent them both his work); until now where through the advocacy of Patricia Hope Scanlan the edition has now seen the light of day. Wieners had wanted a new title because it had been revealed to him in a vision, as he explained at a reading in Montreal in 1966:

Ace of Pentacles is a card in the Tarot deck, but the book should be called PENTE which are the words that appeared in a hypnagogic vision. Hypnagogic is the state between waking and sleep. It's what Jung practiced ... the letters 'PENTE' appeared in that state and I didn't know what they meant, so I kept hunting around and I made the word 'pentacles' out of it, and somebody said, why don't you call it 'Ace of Pentacles'? And we made a whole thing about the Tarot deck, but that's not the title of the book. It should be 'PENTE' and that's from the Greek, which is 'woe'. (qu. Michael Seth Stuart in his introduction, xxxv)

There's an error here: 'pente' means 'five' in Greek; the word meaning 'woe' is 'penthos'; 'pentheo', to mourn, lament. But Wieners makes the Greek word 'five' mean 'woe' with the Blakean subtitle 'a book of woe', and the 'five' is there in the sustained play with five-beat verse in the collection. The Blake connection is cemented by Wieners’ decision to feature as frontispiece image a plate of Blake's 'The Chimney Sweeper', where Blake connects his own poetry to the street voices and 'notes of woe' of the working-class under the cosh of the public truths of capital: 'They clothed me in the clothes of death, / And taught me to sing the notes of woe.' The image also makes clear Wieners’ post-Romantic attachment to lyric as political, spiritual and sexual truth-telling from a subject-position that is no performance and has no persona: it is not Prynne's imaginary, but a Blakean poet-self that is surrendered to lyric making without sacrifice of connection to the experiencing being in lifetime. The difficulty of reception of text felt by Prynne's reader-under-judgement does not go away with Wieners’ work, however. The poems battle with their own forms of communication, with the intrusion of phantom personae as fabling pseudo-selves, with the language as shifting, treacherous weather-medium, and have distantly comparable ambiguities and breaks in meaning. I'll zoom in on one fine poem, 'Procrastination', and detail the changes to the versions that Wieners published in his lifetime, to give some sense of the importance of PENTE as a second edition.

         With many thanks to Michael Kindellan for the copies of the three versions of 'Procrastination' in the public domain – Michael and Alex Rose Cocker are editing a volume of essays on Wieners, Utter Vulnerability, and provide one of the useful bibliographies that accompany PENTE in this volume. As Robert Dewhurst states in his introduction to the hopefully forthcoming Collected, the first of the versions of the poem to appear was in the first number of Bret Rohmer and Diane di Prima's Signal magazine in 1963. The second was in the 1964 Ace of Pentacles, and the third in the Alan Marlowe and di Prima-edited The Floating Bear newsletter in 1965, along with the two previous versions. The PENTE version, then, gives us a fourth version, or perhaps more accurately a version that accompanies the Floating Bear version (which has an extra stanza). 'Procrastination' might be being played out in the dithering of the various versions, given the theme, which is the waiting for the coming of the poem from the aether, air, weather. 'I feel tomorrow it may be', the poem opens: rather than putting a task off till tomorrow, the ordinary meaning of 'procrastination', there is a hope that tomorrow will bring the poem, a leaning towards the morrow. Note the unabashed I-voice and the grounding in feeling, neo-Romantic note of woe; feeling stricken by uncertainty. The inspiration will come 'Later / ah when the world is ripe', as hypnagogic vision: 'then will descend / o letters of fire' which will fall on the poet's head. The time-paradox is being played out, or rather the doubt as to whether the lines we are reading are those letters of fire, or whether this is a poem that procrastinates, a filler-poem by the merely biographical poet vainly waiting for the imaginary (as language-poet) to take over with a real poem. Is the chain of words of this first stanza a message from the hand of another, written on the wall of the text by fire, or is it the improvised scrawl of the troubled self? The call for poetry is the poetry, an entanglement of still selving poet-self and imaginary – this reads like a play with the muse of fire, the burning bush, the Pentecostal tongue, but is unafraid of a more bathetic take, an awkward writer's block-inflected musing. The comedy is openly there on the surface of the stanza, the 'ah' and 'o' hiccups at line-beginnings, the pratfall of flaming letters that might 'fall on my head'. Belshazzar, desperate for interpretations of the vision of letters that will  'dissolve doubts' about 'hard sentences', was rebuked by Daniel for his grotesque partying with holy goblets from the temple with his concubines: the writing on the wall spelt out 'your days are numbered | your days are numbered | you're weighed in the balance & found wanting | you'll lose everything to your enemies'. Wieners writes a poem that is written in letters of dissolving doubt, in lines that party with the idea of the godhead beyond. All three published versions have a last line to this stanza which runs straight: 'o letters of fire fall on my head'. PENTE is the only version that bears a comma: 'o letters of fire, fall on my head'. The tiny break makes clearer the ambiguity created by the enjambment: 'then will descend / o letters of fire, fall on my head' swivels between a certainty about the fire descending tomorrow, and invocation to the letters, generating doubt. What falls on his head is less clearly the fiery letters: the comma divides the line and dissolves it in doubt, making it a hard sentence to read, as though something were missing both if the enjambment is performed (as in 'then will descend / o letters of fire [which will then] fall on my head') and if the last line is read as invocation: 'o letters of fire [please or please don't] fall on my head'. Wieners’ proxy poet-self fears his own poetry: if it comes from elsewhere it might speak with the tongues of the accusers, his days are numbered, he'll be found wanting, his enemies will prevail.

         David Grundy in a forthcoming essay in Kindellan and Cocker's collection, writes about Wieners’ strategies of revision as always about 'hidden reference, naming and not naming' 'which are about disavowing the pain of a specific loss' (16). Grundy suggests the loss of Wieners’ lover Dana, the fireman companion whose departure triggered the Hotel Wentley poems, may be haunting many of the later poems too. The 'letters of fire' read as in potential relation to the lost fireman of other days.[4] Grundy also explores invocations in Wieners’ poems, and surmises rather wonderfully that:

an erotic plea [...] is also a plea for and an assertion of a queer community. To treat it at a distance is to perform an objectifying violence on it. In protesting absence, the poet refuses distance from the reader, implicated into the position of addressee, even as Wieners’ tense- and tone-shifting use of the first-person explodes beyond the bounded, singular subject.[5]

'Procrastination' begins with a first-person subject and his feeling, but any certainty about the subject and what the subject might be feeling is riven by dissolving doubt: 'it may be [that] I feel tomorrow', or maybe tonight, or later perhaps; with the letters of fire – maybe the ahs of the 'a's, or the ohs of the 'o's – signifying feeling when they fall on the page tomorrow; or maybe they will just burn as four of the letters in 'procrastination', interiority reduced to arbitrary print signifiers. What comes through is the difficulty of engagement with any other presence, the doubt ('it may be') dependent on an unreadable potentially hostile ripening world, necessary in some difficult way as trigger for the Pentecostal event. The syntax suggests this, broken as it is, and so does the pacing of the sound in the shared space of the lines – the letters of 'fire' burn in 'ripe' and 'fall'. The dissolving doubt in the lines is aporetic leaving it up to readers to juggle dubious variants & judgements: we're too close and fusional and entangled in the form, as the poem's shift from I to you in the next stanza suggests. If PENTE points to a Pentecostal model of writing with all of its costs, the wonder is who is god of this textual world, poet-self, world, language, reader, or spirit beyond?

         The second stanza takes us into the actual Pentecostal moment, despite the writer's resistance: the arm is 'against the hard brown desk' as the mind says 'Not now', a comic version of St. Augustine's 'Lord make me pure but not yet'. The letters of fire fall anyway ('it has begun'). Comedy rules the first lines written under the influence:

                        The old heat is in the heart.

This is the new start you long awaited.

The clunkiness of those rhymes, heat-heart-start-await, are compulsive, and the sense contradictory – the old heat signals a new start; how can the heat be old if it's been so long awaited? The letters of 'heat' are in 'heart', but hardly in a fiery way: they seem to issue from the graphemes of the resistance to Pentecost: 'against the hard'. The ohs and ahs are scattered along the lines: 'Not now'-'Go on'; arm-hard – and again threaten to reduce the old heat in the heart to sound- and letter-repetition. The poem hopes that these networks of sounds and signs signal feeling – the next line, isolated on the page, runs: 'The traceries of feeling inter-lock the chest.' Those traceries may be traces but they are ones sponsored by the chances of language and the chimes of phonemes tolling arbitrariness. The poetry causes physical symptoms, like love on Lesbos, the fluttering heart and flame streaming beneath the skin of Sappho's fragment 31 reprised in the interlocked traceries: again suggesting the yearning for poem is also a yearning for a loved other. Wieners is aware, and this is what is generating the dubiety, that loving yearning feeling might not be communicated to reader in the words as they fall upon the page. Feeling might dissolve away in the passage to heartless cold script. This is why 'traceries' is precise, as it has traces within its form: the emotions leave traces like snail-tracks, no living creature there. The first versions of the poem has 'patterns', not 'traceries': the shift takes place first in Ace of Pentacles; the PENTE volume adds the hyphen to 'interlock', the tiny emendation pointing forward to the em-dash added to later lines: 'Leaves break from the branches –, / /  their whistle in your ears' ('their' referring back to 'traceries'). Signal version had 'Too soon the leaves break from the branches. / /  And whistle in the air of your ears'; Ace ran 'Too soon leaves break from their branches. / / They whistle in your ears'; and Floating Bear 'Too soon the leaves break from the branches./ And whistle in the air of your ears.' PENTE's em-dash picks up on the hyphen in 'inter-lock' and suggests the breaking of the leaves that whistles in your ears is an energy concealed as potential within the traces of the marks on the page, and the pacing and spacing of the line-breaks .

         PENTE's 'Procrastination' has another wonderful strangeness up its sleeve. The Signal version had 'The eyes become bright and hard as diamonds', and whose eyes is moot. Ace changed this to 'The eyes become onyx and pearl', Bear returning to Signal's take with 'Eyes become bright, and wet at their edges.' PENTE is loyal to Ace: 'Their eyes become onyx and pearl'. This is subtle and strange: the eyes becoming pearl summons The Tempest and the drowning of Alonso lyingly sung by Ariel (and reprised by Eliot, of course). Their becoming onyx may allude to Yeats's 'The Mountain Tomb' where the Father in his tomb has 'All wisdom shut into his onyx eyes'. Onyx is black with bands of white, point to the blacks and whites of ink and page. 'Their eyes' not only refers back to 'traceries of feeling' but rearranges the sounds and some of the letters, while furthermore sustaining a trace-line of inter-locked repetitions connecting 'their traceries-pearl-Leaves break-their branches-ears', a more sensuous version of the heat-heart-start cluster. What the eyes read and the ears hear in the poem are traceries of feeling become spirit, the phonemes and graphemes become letters of fire once the poem catches. 'The spirit is near, and the mind / grasps upward to the full sun', the PENTE version runs. The spirit may be Dana's ghost; it may be the inspiration needed to make a poem work, through all the phases of composition and revision; it may be the generous spirit with which a reader is invited to read, again with feeling; it may be the spirit of the language as langue/parole; it may be the spirit of Wieners himself, feeling and scripting beyond the grave. But the poem gives it a specific name: the traceries of feeling that whistle in your ears if you read the poem near. The 'ear'-rhyming of the cluster defines the traceries as letters of fire, the graphemes and phonemes of the words on the page come alive in syntax and reader-breath, generating motions of the mind. The poem ends sentimentally imagining the mind of the poem rising toward the sun wheeling in the heavens, and conjuring the poem itself as a kind of sun: 'you are  a star / in the blue of the day-time sky-light'. This ending had been achieved with Ace, though with the choice not to capitalise 'in'.  Those quite heart-breakingly beautiful compounds make more sense, though, in PENTE as the hyphens have a textual history with 'inter-lock' and 'branches –'. The traceries of feeling as print-marks become material spirit with the sun-image. The sun-as-star takes us back to the 'ah' of the first stanza, and it burns with letters of fire as a sky-light. The poet-self has discovered the godhead in sun-worship, and the poem, set in an ambiguous time when 'night falls at noon', creates a resurrection-plotline from the fall to this upward movement of mind into the full day-time of a poem's temporality. The tomorrow has arrived with this day-time, like a noonday sun seen through the sky-light above the desk. The lover whose loss was endured and whose return was so long awaited, returns as  a source of sentimentality 'à l'état pur', shining as letters breathed into life (the 'eyes' become 'i's and repeated diphthongs in 'time-sky-light').

         The PENTE manuscript comes into its own as a second edition of Ace of Pentacles at such close proximities of engagement. The spirit is near if and only if the spirit is willing to listen and play. This is a very real joy to have, the edition bringing John Wieners to life again not only through the wishes of his late revisions, but also through the care and love shown by the editors, for which so many thanks.

If Prynne has a Swiftian exploration of the sources of lyric, and Weiners a more Blakean understanding of the language-as-other, then Alan Halsey could be said to combine both Swift and Blake with his superb set of satirical voices and sourcings. As he struggled with the protean monster cancer in his last months before his death in October 2022, he turned to the essentials of poetry and his own poet-self in miniatures of text and image that have Blake's deftness of visual and lyric invention, Swift's comedy and brio, and also nod towards Edward Lear's combination of sketch and limerick in the loving tussle with language and harsh circumstance that the nonsense mode allows. These little poem-objects remained unpublished and potentially lost on his hard drive in the posthumous days, until two extraordinary occurences. As his wife Geraldine Monk tells the story in the preface to her edition of them, The Last Unravellings of the Logoclast, Alan's friend Martin Corless-Smith had a dream where Alan showed him a new manuscript 'with arcane drawings', and Geraldine herself was told by a medium, Jane Pond, that Alan appeared to her 'writing/making figures'. The two supernatural prompts led Geraldine to root about on Alan's computer where she discovered the late poems, in a file one section of which had a mock-up entitled Self-Portraits Removed from an Exhibition. Unravellings and logoclast are Alan's own terms for the process of writing and the poet-self: the subject unravels in the (de)composition of the poems and artworks; the satirical force of the work combines iconoclast and logoclast energies. The poems and drawings of these unravellings have a common shape: a drawing, sketchy, cartoony, modernist-childlike, free-flowing, witty; and below a four-line poem. It is a shape Alan had developed in his collaboration with Kelvin Corcoran for the Shearsman chapbook, Into the Interior.  The first of the Into the Interior section looks like this: