The poetry of J.H. Prynne - an exhibition
February 2025
The poetry of J.H. Prynne - an exhibition was curated by Ian Heames (English 2005).
The exhibition, occupying 14 cases in the Caius Lower Library, offers a survey of the publications to date, principally in pamphlet form, of the poetry of J.H. Prynne.
Over 60 pamphlets and larger books are represented, and a dozen of his most recent booklets can be browsed on a table set up at the entrance of the show. There's also a rare chance to read the very early poem 'Swifts', published in an issue of the college magazine The Caian and never subsequently reprinted.
Prynne has been a Fellow of Caius since 1962, and was the College's Librarian for 37 years, between 1969 and 2006.
As Director of Studies in English, he taught generations of Caius English students, likely numbering around 400- to 500 individuals, and as University lecturer will over the years have addressed several thousand.
Beyond Cambridge, Prynne has taught and lectured at the universities of Surrey and Sussex, as well as in China, where he also holds honorary professorships. He has been published widely in translation, including into French, German, Chinese, Spanish, and Danish.
Whist precise figures would be difficult to determine, it's likely that Prynne's teaching has directly reached at least 10,000 students of English literature in Cambridge and beyond. Circulation of his books, in English and translation, may well reach into six figures (100,000 copies or more).
The booklets presented in the current exhibition collectively contain over 1,500 individual poems, and showcase much of the Library's extensive holdings of what are now in many cases extremely scarce original editions.
Prynne's publishing career has been distinctively marked by his enduring preference for entrusting his work to small independent publishers. In addition to working with a number of small presses (beginning with his student the poet Andrew Crozier's imprint Ferry Press in the early 1970s), he has also designed, typeset, and privately printed his own booklets — and this long after his status as a centrally prominent figure within certain communities of readership would have made other channels of publication and distribution easy to obtain.
Having never sought any material return for his writing, and having tended to shun other familiar means of commercial furtherance (such as giving public readings), Prynne's reputation has, of necessity, grown organically. The close attention to literary texts that characterises his teaching and his published criticism has perhaps led his readers to extend some of the same values of open-ended imaginative scrutiny to their ongoing encounters with his poetry.
The second volume of his collected Poems (2016-2024), recently out from Bloodaxe, is a larger book than the first volume, which presented work from the mid 1960s to its publication in 2015, and was itself nearly 700 pages long. This fact gives a bare indication of the marked acceleration of his output in recent years, but the range of projects encompassed is perhaps best taken in across the sweep of the exhibition as a whole, where the original pamphlets are set out individually, rather than in the heavy tomes of the two-volume collected (which the Library also naturally holds).
Prynne's collected critical writings, also in two volumes, are forthcoming from Oxford University Press (New York), and are sure to bring many new readers to this vast and singular life's work of poetry and its teaching.
In addition to the exhibition book table, where many pamphlets can be browsed at leisure, a selection of former students' remembrances of working with Prynne are also available to read. Visitors are invited to add their own contributions to this growing and multifaceted document of individual engagements, regardless of whether they previously knew the writer and his work or are coming to it for the first time.
The exhibition will run until the end of February 2025. To arrange a visit, please contact the College Librarian, Mark Statham (mark.statham@cai.cam.ac.uk). Guided tours are also available by appointment. Please contact Ian Heames (ijaheames@gmail.com).
