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and the storage of material goods (242). Prynne extends the sensory data into anthropomorphic fallacy, where, “pollen here is bright feeling, damp spores stamped down in the Eckman spiral of stripped earth,” and animals are imparted with the will and potentialities of humans (219). The absence of the subject, and the impaired condition of perspective is blurred as, “the white bees swarm out from the open voice gap. Such “treasure” the cells of the child run back through hope to the cause of it” (230). Prynne’s bees are indicative of a change in cognitive capacity that allow the pastoral tradition to expound upon alternate analogies, not only those of home, labour, consumption and order.18 In Wound Response Prynne implies that the demarcations between man and animals have regressed, to the point where “the bees [are] an intense provocation, metonymic selves in syllabic flow (-) towards the bright mirror” (242).19 The bright mirror, with its double connotations of the self’s desirous want in a capitalist society, combines with the bright flash of bombs exploding, and eradicating “the cells of a child,” implicating the capitalist system with the ever expanding war, and the destruction of nature in other countries (230). Even before the archaeologist-inspired translations of “The Rune Poem,” all nature has become, “the negative flower of the Cosmos, itself the recognition of polynucleotides streaming out from the epoch such as shyne in our speech like glorious stars in the Firmament” (242). The obvious satire hinges upon secular and religious concepts of life, and between natural and scientific explanations and ontologies. The line above, from “Plant Time Manifold,” concludes with a line from Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence that discusses the development of rhetoric and knowledge, as having been overrun by science, scientific data, and in this case, streaming polynucleotides (242). The conclusion of this line adds to the satirical discourse of scientists discussing the division between higher and lower forms of animal life, as well as the implication regarding repetitive instances of melanin and skin colour as differentiating and ranking races. Reeves and Kerridge, former students of Prynne, whose 18 Reeve and Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, 40. 19 This relationship parallels the primitive versus civilized comparisons implicated in the poem. In this case, the divisions have fallen back to the point where human actions can be seen as no more complex or of higher cognitive capacity than those replicated in the metonymic system, as the actions of bees.
book, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, was instrumental in articulating Prynne’s aesthetic of linking the internal and the external, describe the enjambment of ideas in Prynne’s poetry as re-identifying and reorientating the subject. They write: “The switch from discourse to discourse in Prynne’s poetry might thus be small thetic events: movements of disruption continually repositioning the reader as subject in relation to new objects.”20 The divisions render the poems as a series of connected images with a continuously moving pattern of thought which reorientates the subject towards new interpretations. Whereas, in Pound, these events would have been a series of static placements from where judgements could be made. Prynne presents the premise of Wound Response as a satirical joke, equating Pound’s “direct treatment of the thing” with Whitman’s accounts of field medicine, and the treatment of mortally wounded soldiers during the civil war.21 Whitman’s accounts generally implicate the inability of the field hospital to treat wounded soldiers. A Lacanian interpretation of trauma, fitting with Wound Response’s context of traumatic aphasia and memory reconditioning is that trauma is, “a missed encounter with the real.”22 Prynne’s continual use of pastoral tropes within the poem structures Wound Response as a pastoral deployed through the Romantics. This establishes the reading of the poem within the framework of lyricism as a modernisation of Wordsworthian modes of self-discovery. Just as the replication of the top and bottom line in “The Rune Poem” establishes a framework of definition on the poem, this device places boundaries on our interpretation of the whole.23 For the translation of these runes I have used 20 Reeve and Kerridge, Nearly Too Much : The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, 120. 21 Carpenter, A Serious Character : The Life of Ezra Pound / Humphrey Carpenter, 197. 22 Louis Armand, “Ground Zero Warholing: John Kinsella and the Art of Traumatic Realism,” Solicitations: Essays on Criticism & Culture, 2nd ed. (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2008) 405-421. In relation to Prynne and the wounded subject of the poem, this Lacanian interpretation of trauma seems all the more fitting. Armand explains Lacan’s interpretation of trauma as “a rupture and a failed rendez-vous, a recoil at the very limits of the representable, an after-effect that is unable to account for itself. We might also say that this ‘missed encounter’ describes a type of nostalgia, an insistence upon going back over past events, a fixation upon particular instances in the hopes of isolating the very thing that can never be present here: the encounter itself.” 23 J.H. Prynne, “The Rune Poem,” Poems (Bloodaxe/Fremantle Art Centre Press, 1999/2005.).