J.H. Prynne was not a name to conjure with when I was a first-year English student at Cambridge in 1966. As far as I knew, he was just another lecturer whose lectures I didn’t go to. By 1968, though, I was more involved in poetry, writing it and planning to launch a poetry magazine with my friend and fellow poet Nick Totton. Nick had read Prynne’s recently published Kitchen Poems and was full of enthusiasm for it. When I bought my own copy and sat down to read it I was simultaneously baffled and captivated, a state of mind that has been repeated each time I’ve opened a new book by Prynne in the 58 years since.
J.H. Prynne died on Wednesday at the age of 89, after a prolific life as a teacher and essayist, a loyal friend to his students and, above all, a poet of great stature whose remains will not be transferred to Westminster Abbey. The landscape of English poetry changed after the publication of Prynne’s second book, Kitchen Poems, in 1968. His later writing found a wide, eclectic readership. There were opaque, exquisite experiments in lyric, on the one hand, and on the other, long, argumentative pieces, densely intuitive, often obscure, inviting readers to consider how the poem was supposed to address the world, if it could rise to the occasion.
The UK’s nuclear weapons capability is dependent on the US. Not only does Britain rent its Trident missiles from America, but the British-built warhead designed to be carried by those missiles, the Holbrook, is closely based on the American W76. The Los Alamos National Laboratory announced last year that a replacement for the W76 is going ahead: the W93 should be ready by 2034. There is no need for the UK to replace its warheads. A Holbrook’s maximum yield is ninety kilotons of TNT-equivalent, about six times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the US Navy wants a new warhead in the mid-2030s and the UK has to follow suit even though there are no good reasons to do so.
Kate Valk and, on screen, Spalding Gray (Spencer Ostrander)
In Nayatt School, Spalding Gray played a ‘pedantic schoolteacher’ and the psychiatrist from The Cocktail Party, using a recording of its 1949 production. ‘It was also about my mother,’ Gray wrote, ‘and the victimisation of women in male-dominated social structures. It worked on many levels for us all.’ The play has now been remounted by The Wooster Group. Nayatt School Redux, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, is on in London this week.
My father called from the market to say he needed my help. It was the end of February. Tensions between Israel and Iran were escalating and prices in Gaza were rising rapidly. I rushed to join my father. My friend Ahmad, one of our neighbours in the camp, came with me. He didn’t have any money but he’d borrowed some from a friend to buy a bag of flour. Like all of us he was afraid of what might happen if the crossings were closed. We found my father at a vegetable stall. The price of tomatoes had tripled in a day.
Heavenly on stage at TJ’s in Newport, Wales, 10 October 1994 (Rob Watkins)
The music that showed me who I wanted to be, what I wanted from life, was the music that came out on Sarah Records.
The 2300 workers at the Volkswagen factory in Osnabrück, northwest Germany, have been confronted with an unexpected plan for industrial transformation. Last month, it was reported that the car manufacturer was in talks with the Israeli state-owned arms company Rafael to make missile defence systems based on Israel’s Iron Dome. VW has never closed a factory in its home country, but in 2024 it announced that three plants, including Osnabrück, were at risk because of declining sales, high energy costs and competition from Chinese electric vehicle makers.