Peter Manson’s translations from “Birch, Birch, Birch.”24 The opening and closing of the poem read: BIRCH BIRCH BIRCH : ale : BIRCH BIRCH BIRCH : distress of spirit : BIRCH BIRCH BIRCH : ale : BIRCH BIRCH BIRCH
Within this framework “The Rune Poem” expresses a ceremonious representation of the joy of life-giving, bees, intoxication, and the botanical cycles of life. However, within the opening and closing lines, Prynne establishes that the effusive forest of trees and flowers is creating both sustenance and a nectar (ale), which demand the continual attention and labour of bees, and only then can it produce an intoxicating effect. Prynne has linked labour for sustenance with the labour for intoxication, both rendering the bee a slave to his source. The fundamental result of this commodification of the forest and establishment of its products as natural, human intoxicants is the “distress of the spirit,” and the expression of human greed. This represents a typical Prynnian trope: establishing relations around the human, monetary and material value of objects. The continual reliance on the bees, reflects back to “Plant Time Manifold,” where, “The bees were an intense provocation metonymic selves in the syllabic flow (-) towards the bright mirror” (242).25 The bees are metonymic humans mimicking the intoxicating effects of consumption and acquisition and trying to look into a brighter mirror for an improved sense of self. The mirror reflects only the intoxicating effects of purchase, an ambiguity which gives way to the distress of the spirit and the perceived necessity of further consumption fundamental to the capitalist model.26 24 Peter Manson, “Birch Birch Birch: A Short Commentary on J.H. Prynne’s “Rune Poem” (Poems, P 244.),” Quid 17 : For J.H. Prynne : In Celebration : 24th June 2006, ed. Keston Sutherland and Andrea Bradey (Falmer :: Barque, 2006). Manson is also responsible for the initial publication of numerous insights into ‘The Rune Poem’ which informed this analysis. 25 Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics : From Pound to Prynne, 38. 26 Louis Armand, “Avant-Garde Machines, Experimental Systems,” Avant-Post, ed. Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006) 197. The culmination of overlaying referential elements at this point in the poem forms a fundamental automatonic relationship to describe the capitalist system. Merging the ideas of the ‘brighter mirror’ and the ‘trauma’ of the self (wounded, psychologically, by the constant bombardment of capitalist advertising) creates a reflected image in the mirror which represents a personal ambiguity. Armand writes that, «This ambiguity is firstly experienced as a disjointedness in the time of production as a figuring of the present as anachrony: the constant deferral of the to-come which mirrors the deferral of gratification and the alienation-effect of commodificationm as de-
The brighter mirror and the bee-bread originate in the second line of “The Rune Poem,” specifically referenced when the bees come upon the cherry tree. The cyclic consumption of nectar (for energy, honey, and beebread) stems from the allusion to female menstrual cycles, provided by the image of the cherry tree. The pollen of flowers is then mixed with honey to provide “bee-bread” to the larvae. Thus all labour gives way to the birth and rearing of young. The abundance of the birch trees and the singular cherry tree may also account for the singular reward, both in relation to physical labour and the possibilities of finding human love and producing offspring. “The Rune Poem” by design is resistant to a residual reading, but leaves the reader implicated in an historical and archaeological evidentiary-based search, attempting to ascertain the situation which existed and allowed the creation of these objects. The modern reader faces an unreadable series of ideograms, or Druid symbols, implying that a detailed, structured analysis is necessary to the reading of all Prynne’s poems. In Angel Exhaust, the critic Andrew Duncan writes: These [the Runes] were surely meant to operate like a surrealist script, rather than gnomic utterance requiring the Cambridge University Guide to Druid Symbology. Conscientious lyric has, in Prynne, reached a point of occlusion: code to which we have lost the key. When writing refuses to give off meaning it is like a commodity without exchange value; we become archaeologists sifting the royal midden.27
3. A Nest of Cathodes: The Subject of Trauma in Zulu-Time The male subject at the centre of Wound Response, who has suffered injury in conflict and is being medically examined, slowly wavers between life and death. This is indicated as the poem moves between diagnostics, as the subject experiences, “a decrease in alpha-wave activity, an increase in beta-waves, [heightening] the appearance of paroxysmal potentials,” and remembrance, scribed by Marx [ in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’] . Moreover, this movement of deferral is perpetuated as a condition, not as a departure from the norm or as a perversion of a teleological (ends-means) system of production-consumption.» 27 Andrew Duncan, “Out to Lunch: Getting the Session into Sfx with CandyStriped Techno Grunge: Not-You, by J.H. Prynne.” Angel Exhaust.13 (1993).
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