Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio SoHereWeAre In February 2004, Randall Stevenson writing in The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12 1960-2000: The Last of England? (OUP 2004) inadvertently sparked a media controversy by suggesting that the achievements of experimental poets, such as J.H. Prynne, would be of more lasting significance than that of the Movement poets. The value of J.H. Prynne’s poetry was debated in newspapers and on the radio but not seriously engaged with. As I regularly get asked about the value of Prynne’s poetry, I thought that I might offer some contextualising notes as a preliminary to reading his Poems (Bloodaxe 2005). The arc of Prynne’s poetry over the past forty years may be said to have broadly moved from a metaphorically based open field lyricism towards a metonymic and etymological challenge to the reader. It is, above all, concerned with encouraging the reader on a journey, involving a reading process that avoids closure. It is about the journey, that is a continual process, towards meaning and comprehension rather than finding answers. It places utterance within the political and socio-economic predicament of the individual in relation to its historical and geographical landscape. One might say that it is one journey of utterance that acknowledges the boundaries and thresholds of the individual, through and across the nuances and shifts of language and historical time. It draws upon specific discourses and their appeal to knowledge, both provisional and substantive, within the languages of criticism and human sciences and beyond. It is a poetic utterance that looks back to the earliest epic and founding literature and forward beyond any postmodernist position. It has enlarged the focus of the poet beyond the reference frames registered by Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. It appeals to a community of speakers, readers and writers, cognizant of the fact that all are in a series of markets and hierarchies of language and discourse outlays, without privilege. This work is substantially supported by critical essays, such as ‘Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words’ (The William Matthews Lectures 1992 Birkbeck 1993), where Prynne reassessed the arbitrariness that Ferdinand de Saussure famously attributed to the signifier and signified and emphasized a set of secondary relations through which meaning developed such as historical contexts and usages, accumulated layers and aspects of association, social function and usage codes, and practical criticism, such as They That Haue Powre To Hurt: A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (Cambridge 2001) and Field Notes: The Solitary Reaper And Others (Cambridge 2007 distributed by Barque Press) that shows an exceptional regard to determining the fullest context and meaning of a poem. Each word and phrase in a poem has a philological and etymological base that returns the reader to things and the world of which they are a part. The words used enact and sustain the relations and forces between language and the world. Two words invariably used to describe the initial experience of reading the Poems are ‘arid’ and ‘difficult’. ‘Arid’, as if it were written in a desert. That is to say that it is often missing the props of mainstream metaphorical poetry that enables a quick grasp of meaning, intention and the scope of the poem under review. It is what is called ‘difficult’ poetry. It is, as it were, poetry of the desert. I shall now pursue these two notions as a way of locating the literary context to the Poems. Poetry written from the desert, of whatever order, may be seen as poetry of exile. One thinks of Ovid, Paul and Jane Bowles, and the post-holocaust poetry of Edmund Jabés and Paul Celan. The critic. T.W. Adorno wrote that ‘after Auschwitz, we can no longer write poetry’. It was Jabés who wrote that after Auschwitz, we must write poetry, but with wounded words’ and in conversation with Mark C Tay