Beginning an analysis of J.H. Prynne’s “Not Ice Novice” (2022)

16pp. Risograph printed by Earthbound Press on acid-free paper. Forty-four rhyming quatrains. Pictorial title page. Edition of 150 copies.

Three, three, the rivals,/ Two, two, the lily-white boys,/ Clothed all in green, O/ One is one and all alone/ And evermore shall be so. — English folk song

Some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher — Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Mars ain’t the kinda place to raise your kids/ In fact it’s cold as hell — Rocket Man, Elton John and Bernie Taupin

The poem’s first verse is as follows:

Sycamore or lesson

vanes spinning to fly

new seeds at session

off out over the sky

Not for the first time in a poem by Prynne, the initial word is ‘sycamore.’ Here though it primarily refers to the astronaut wings in 18 carat gold, shaped like sycamore seeds, which were awarded to the fliers on Richard Branson’s Virgin Space Ship Unity, whose rotated twin tail booms enable its slow ‘spinning’ from a ‘session/ off out over the sky’ ‘to fly’ back through Earth’s atmosphere, a ‘lesson’ learned from nature: the sycamore’s ‘new seeds’ have ‘vanes’ which enable them to drift further from the tree. (‘Off out’ is a colloquial British English compound meaning ‘going out’ — e.g. ‘off out?’ meaning ‘are you going out?’)

Emphasising the ‘-ore’ ending of ‘sycamore,’ the poem’s second word ‘or’ introduces material riches as a related theme of the poem alongside space flight. (Later we read of ‘ore,’ ‘gold,’ ‘wealth hereby untold’). In its usage as a conjunction with the poem’s third word, ‘or’ also brings up the rivalry between some of the world’s richest men in their race into space: ‘lesson’ is an anagram of ‘S.S. [Space Ship] Elon’ so that the full opening phrase ‘Sycamore or lesson’ offers Elon Musk’s SpaceX project as alternative to Richard Branson’s sycamore-inspired venture.

Jeff Bezos is the slow and steady third rival in the race, as well as the poem, proudly owning the idea of slow and steady progress by adopting a tortoise as the mascot of his Blue Origin space venture.

This all helps us to start to understand the first verse of the poem. It also provides a good launch pad to read the remainder. With these themes in mind, we find many other words and phrases in the poem ‘clandestine[ly] imbued’ with an often unexpected primary meaning related to these rivals (selected words from the poem are marked here in bold for clarity).

• The ‘thin ice’ of the poem’s rimy surface which actually cracked first for me: the combination ‘badger grimes’ indicates Musk and Grimes, the stage name of his former partner, who first met each other on Twitter. They had a few kids together, including one through a surrogate (‘be not afraid,’ as Gabriel reassures Mary). There are many playfully poetic names here for Musk himself: musk ‘mallow’ is the flowering plant Malva Moschata; ‘spikenard’ is also known as muskroot; the diverse family of carnivorous animals known as Mustelidae (weasel) includes the ‘badger’ and ‘wolverine’ as sister subfamilies; musk ‘milfoil’ is a species of shrub; the flowering plant blue melilot ‘trefoil’ is known as musk taffle; and the ‘redstart’ is in the Muscicpidae family of birds.
• Musk promised in 2018 to eat his hat with ‘mustard’ if his rival’s rocket were to fly a national security spacecraft before 2023, and wanted an ‘oven’ on his spaceship.
• The phrase ‘chased by a feline’ might suggest Musk’s ‘copycat’ accusations towards Bezos.
• Blue things throughout suggest Bezos’ Blue Origin, as well as the colour of the sky itself: ‘brilliant deep blue,’ ‘zircon,’ ‘azurite,’ ‘yarrow’ (of which the essential oil is a rich blue due to azulene). ‘Prime’ (a synonym of which is ‘privet’) refers to Amazon’s logistics service, ‘finch’ was a name Bezos proposed for Alexa, ‘cloud’ evokes Amazon’s web services, and all link metonymically to Bezos. (‘Prime’ is also the name of a light rocket launch vehicle being developed in the UK by Orbex.) In the context of Bezos’ space programme, the word ‘corn’ can refer to the vast acreage of Corn Ranch in West Texas which is its base.
• ‘Window[s]’ could refer to the Microsoft founder Paul Allen, who had a hand in financing the development of Branson’s Virgin space craft, and ‘alphabet’ to the Google computing and network services supporting the Musk space programme and Starlink (‘over cloud-light’). Alphabet Inc. also holds an equity stake in Space X.
• It’s not simply the Norse etymology of the word ‘crake’ we should follow, to the onomatopoeic cawing of a crow which is of no relevance to our theme, but more specifically its etymology through Middle English craken, Old English cracian, Proto-West Germanic *krakōn, and Proto-Germanic *krakōną (cf. Wiktionary, 14 October 2023), to the persistently loud boastfulness which has characterised the public relationship between the rivals. Also, we shouldn’t overlook that ‘crake’ is an etymological doublet of ‘chark’ — to reduce by strong heat to charcoal — a significance which will become clear shortly.
• ‘Centipede’ polysemically refers to: the aim of crossing the Karman Line 100km above sea level (‘centi’ signifies a hundred, and ‘pede’ as a suffix denotes a perverse or ridiculous interest in something) which Branson’s venture notably fails to achieve at only 80km, still in the earth’s atmosphere, and is therefore merely a type of ‘saltation’ (being carried by a surrounding fluid and falling back) rather than true space flight by the strict definition; a common description of the appearance of Starlink satellites as a centipede of ‘onrunning’ lights across the sky; and the anecdote of Musk promising he would send Bezos a giant statue of the number 2 on Musk’s arrival first at a personal wealth of US$200 billion (where the compound is taken in the sense of having a perverse or ridiculous interest in hundreds of billions of dollars).
• In the same verse as the ‘saltation’ joke on ‘goatee’ Branson is the word ‘artichoke,’ which is actually derived from Arabic (al-kharshufa), but in its journey to us in modern English the word has historically acquired false associations with the prefix meaning high (‘arc’+) and the idea of a stump (+‘ciocco,’ a northern Italian word for stump), together implying a limited attempt at height. In its surrounding context, it suggests the other two rivals are mocking Branson for achievement of his more modest ambitions (‘saltation next obliged/ goatee soever no more/ by artichoke contrived// Mutual merrier laughter’).
• The unusual phrase ‘at tendency’ perhaps alludes to a typographical error in a letter from Ezra Pound to G. Bernard Shaw about the latter’s parsimony in failing to purchase James Joyce’s Ulysses, demonstrating ‘at (sic) tendency toward the adoration of the money fetisch.’
• Metallic ‘silver’ and ‘obsidian’ black metallic are limited edition Tesla colour options.
• Musk initiated his acquisition of ‘Twitter’ in April 2022, and while the purchase was only concluded in October of that year, at the time of writing and publishing the poem in July 2022 the die had already been cast.
• ‘Evermore’ in combination with a ‘raven’ recalls Edgar Allen Poe’s poem of lost love: is it alluding to the celebrity divorces and separations endured by Bezos, who reportedly suffered a $US50 billion settlement, and Musk, both with his first wife and (twice) with his second wife, as well as the palimony following his separation from Grimes — ‘momentous eyelashes’ indeed.
• For all three of our rivals, accusations of tax (‘taxon’) avoidance have been a minor recurrent inconvenience. Branson lives on the tax haven of Necker Island in the Caribbean. American billionaires Bezos and Musk famously, and perfectly legally apparently, pay minimal personal tax, and historically in many years have paid none.
• The phrase ‘at swells ridden’ suggests surfing, relevant in the context of Bezos and now Musk as internet moguls, and Branson being a silver surfer in the more literal sense, having set the record as the oldest man to surf the English Channel.
• Branson, Bezos and Musk have all ‘green [..] washed’ their projects in ‘offset mimicry,’ promising to invest in ecological projects to balance out the damage their space projects do to the ozone layer, burning fuels produced in energy intensive processes from ‘ethylene’ and such, thereby making the ‘sunlight burn brighter.’ Their wider activities also demonstrate a frequently pointed out inconsistency and unsustainability with respect to the environment, including Musk’s flip-flopping in his public statements on ESG, though he broke off related associations with Donald Trump (‘tangerine’) when he stepped away from the Paris Agreement. “[Earth] is the gem of the Solar System. Why would we do heavy industry here?” said Musk. Towards the end of the poem (‘epidote fuschia ballast’), there is a suggestion that ‘bleeding hearts’ (a very common name for a popular type of ‘fuschia’ and also here perhaps an ironic name for environmentalists) are a ‘ballast’ to the rivals’ pursuit of space travel. The name of the rock forming mineral ‘epidote’ is repurposed to refer to an inordinate fondness (‘dote’) of space flight (the prefix ‘epi+’ meaning ‘going above’). A ‘canter’ in this context is ‘someone who cants’ using hypocritical and sanctimonious talk.
• Branson, Bezos and Musk have all thrown the weight of their wealth into cryogenics, presumably aiming to defy the mortal span of three score years and ten famously allocated in ‘tract [psalm] ninety’ after which we ‘fly away’ (Psalm 90:10).

We’re also presented with broken and fragmented references to classical and folk sources which we can read through the same lens:

• ‘mortal shuttle [..] coil’ is a reference to Hamlet’s soliloquy, with ‘shuttle’ for ‘shuffle’ in Shakespeare (as Schopenhauer suggested it should have been, in reference to weaving), adding a fresh layer of meaning to the canonical fragment concerning the mortal dangers of space shuttle flight.
• The longer phrase ‘Ever more shall be so’ references a well-known English folk song, Green Grow the Rushes O, and by association its refrain ‘one is one and all alone,’ in this context perhaps implying either the competitiveness or solitude of the rivals. Its phrase ‘three, three, the rivals’ might be applied to Bezos, Musk and Branson in this context — but how to single two out from the three to stand as the ‘lily white boys’ of the song, since all three fit the description, and all are painstakingly ‘dressed in green’ or at least very thoroughly ‘green [..] washed’?
• The ‘Ash Grove’ is a traditional Welsh song, but I suggest that, via its direct reference to a group of ash trees, here it is intended to refer to The Ashes, the hotly contested (‘by touch ever warm’) biennial cricket test series. As well as being an example of a classic rivalry, it is particularly relevant in the context of Branson because of an embarrassing episode during the 2006–07 cricket series played between the sporting rivals England and Australia over Christmas (‘holly and ivy’ — also traditional rivals in the forest) in which Branson suggested the Ashes urn should remain in Australia (‘sharing the crown’) when Australia were about to decisively win the series, and in presenting his poorly-thought-through case he publicly fluffed its century-old history, and caused a ‘civil storm’ in the media. ‘Beside corn felt crake/ persistently at night/ locally for wide awake/ was ever their delight’ is a verse about staying up at night to watch the Ashes, being played in Australia, so always late at night in England, and enjoying the boasting of the sportsmen and commentators. The ‘corn felt’ is a bale of corn — leftover stalks, leaves, husks, and cobs ‘wrought into a compact substance by rolling and pressure without weaving’ like felt — and ‘The Ashes’ are burnt bales, using the etymological association of ‘crake’ to its doublet ‘chark’: ‘reducing to charcoal.’ Chamaescilla corymbosa, the ‘brilliant deep blue’ ‘squill’ of an earlier verse, is endemic to Southern Australia, and stands as one metonym for Australia in the retelling of the episode, as does the ‘trefoil,’ (the triple-stripe of Adidas which sponsored Australia in the series).
• The ‘sitting [..] green bottles’ evoke the traditional Ten Green Bottles song, sometimes interpreted as death picking off mortals one by one, as in Hardy’s poem The Five Students.

‘She sells her sea shells/ on shore’ is the longest and most obvious (to me) external reference in the poem, to a popular song created from a tongue twister, often (though perhaps doubtfully) taken to refer to the fossil collector Mary Anning. It also evokes the title of another 2022 poem by Prynne, Sea Shells Told. If the phrase is intended to be a reference to fossils, it could be part of a wider contrast of (especially iniquitous) mortal beings returning to ashes and ‘dust’ to be scattered in the ‘wind’ (Psalm 83:14–15), against the relative permanence of the traces of organic life left in fossil form, the ‘extra-hard’ substance of ‘tooth’ and ‘shell’ produced by soft-tissued organisms, and the heat-resilient ‘gem’ ‘zircon’ used in spacecraft (which turns to ‘blue’ zircon by application of high heat). In such a case, it could all stand as a metaphor for the process of producing poetry, which leaves its specially marked and more permanent trace of events still in flux, just as the psalms themselves have endured to record the fate of the otherwise forgotten righteous and their enemies in Old Testament times.

On the other hand, as well, the shells could be a reference to Musk’s description of Tesla as a ‘shell company’ at the time he initially got involved, or the wider ‘game of shells’ he has been accused of by some commentators, in which ‘diversionary moves’ have been used to distract investors from Tesla’s past disappointments.

So much for the possibly false positive evidence of the proposed theme in Not Ice Novice. In the spirit of research integrity I feel I must admit to some possibly false negatives where I failed to convincingly read into the poem something which we might expect to have been included, given the proposed theme:

• Other than the words ‘hoarse bit’ and ‘canter,’ the rearing horse featured on the pictorial title page, and possibly again the ‘momentous eyelashes,’ I found no convincing reference to the alleged episode of Musk lewdly exposing himself to a flight attendant and offering a horse in return for favours (a case settled out of court).
• The words ‘hollow,’ ‘lumen,’ ‘macaroni,’ as well as ‘magnet,’ ‘electrical shell spiral,’ and ‘coil,’ are insufficiently convincing evidence of a reference to Musk’s troubled vacuum-tube Hyperloop maglev transport project.
• The words ‘lemon’ and ‘bit’ do not quite support a reference to Musk’s scheme to accept payment for Tesla cars in bitcoin, but to reserve the right to refund a defective car (known as a ‘lemon’) in Tesla’s choice of cash or bitcoin, depending on which was worth the least at the time of refund.
• The word ‘taxon’ is insufficient to suppose a reference to Musk’s Neuralink project to interface technology with the brain.
• The references to ‘deep blue’ and the verse ‘Difference engine win/ the game [i.e chess, go] at minimum/ to bear now and grin’ do not strongly support an allusion to artificial intelligence, at least not specifically to OpenAI, a project to develop general artificial intelligence, which Musk was involved with for 3 years to 2018.
• ‘Camping out in winter’ cannot alone be enough to suggest Musk’s intention to terraform the cold planet of Mars.
• The words ‘salted,’ ‘oven .. roast’ do not suggest Bezos is being labelled a peanut.
• The YouTube prankster Max Fosh registered what was ostensibly a ‘macaroni’ company named Unlimited Money Limited with 10 billion shares, sold one of the shares share in the City of London for £50 to a chancer on the street with money to burn, and then had the company officially valued at £500 billion, making him richer than Elon Musk — before it was pointed out he was potentially guilty of fraud and quickly had to wind it up.

As well as an ABAB end rhyming scheme throughout, we’re also presented with ‘thought rhymes’ where similar or complementary ideas stand in close proximity to one another (‘barrier protection’; ‘early .. late’; ‘add [..] sum’; ‘tooth / indent’; ‘twitter [..]chat’; ‘prime // coil’ (via the common meaning of ‘spring’)), ‘eye rhymes’ where there is a visual similarity without necessarily a sound rhyme (‘penguin engine’; ‘rivet inert’; ‘make mine anemone’), and internal rhymes (‘leasing [..] creasing’; ‘taxon [..] waxen’; ‘cypher wafer’; ‘indent in want inclined’; ‘oven raven’; ‘most roasted’; ‘dart [..] redstart’), all of which promote a veneer of cohesion on the face of the text.

Chains of semantic associations also help to bind the whole, even while the words are often used in the poem with a facet of meaning other than their meaning within their groups’ contexts, such as:

• words evoking fire: fiery, burn, oven, roasted, incentive, burn, lumen, set alight on fire;
• words evoking wind: wind, breeze, flutter, wind, storm, gale-force, gust, anemone (etymologically from ‘anemos,’ a windflower which only opens in the wind), saltation;
• words evoking fluid: splash, liquid, swells, splashes, washed, fluent, ocean;
• geological terms: gem, zircon, ore, obsidian, jewel, alabaster, azurite, epidote;
• botanical terms: sycamore, teasels, mallow, squills, ash grove, thistledown, dill, willow, elder, milfoil, trefoil, privet, mustard, artichoke, fuschia;
• ornithological terms: bird, finch, pippet, flock, corn [..] crake, redstart, twitter, whinchat, flight, wing;
• cricket terms: slice, wicket, bat, bye, badger (an avid cricket fan), toe (the bottom of the bat), beehive (a graphic showing the spatial distribution of bowls from a bowler), boundary, charge (a batting manoeuvre), deep (an outlying region of the cricket field), flight (a specific bowling technique), mine (shouted by fieldsmen trying to catch the ball), return (the fielder returning the ball), and reverse (a bowling technique). (Note how sometimes it’s the word and not its technical cricket-specific meaning that overlaps with the space-race rivalry theme by re-interpretation (e.g. ‘flight’), and other times it’s the meaning or idea that transfers, while the use of the word itself would be uncommon in the context of our theme (e.g. ‘beehive,’ which is a particular type of graphical representation of the path of the bowled ball in cricket, resembling bees around a hive, whereas in the context of spaceflight we would normally refer to trajectories and orbits). In terms of my ‘Loom of Form and Meaning’ — see link for an example application in linguistics — these would be good examples of C1 and A3 moves, respectively.)

Bonding of the textual surface is also achieved through:

• interrupted word groups: lying .. fallow, be not .. afraid, flock .. together, bear .. and grin, sit .. tight, bear .. pith .. mortal shuttle .. coil, oven .. roasted, sitting .. green bottles, running .. berserk, silver .. old, wealth .. untold, danger .. dire, hand .. down;
• familiar phrases: in tune, the full moon, far and wide, holly and ivy, was ever their delight, difference engine, win the game, reverse charge, match point, far and wide, camping out in winter, neither be merciful, further from truth.

In many of these cases, Prynne likes using diversionary tactics, deliberately leading us to read words, compounds, and phrases with a particular local meaning which is actually not the meaning required to follow the wider narrative. Certainly, a ‘difference engine’ is an archaic word for the proto-computer, and the small semantic unit tidily binds the two words together locally. However, there is also an additional meaning which is understandable only from the wider context of the whole poem: differences between rocket engines are a key source of competitive advantage and relative expense for the rivals, the cost of which they can only grin and bear, with the very-low-fuel-temperature ‘penguin [cryogenic] engine[s],’ which ‘splinter’ from the launched rocket but remain reusable, being among the most successful (‘Difference engine win/ the game at minimum/ to bear now and grin/ add to the frosty sum’). There isn’t sufficient information in this four-line verse alone to lead to this interpretation, without having some inkling of the rocket theme of the overall poem. But isn’t it normal in many kinds of even pre-modern poetry for the local detail to take on its full significance only in the context of the wider whole: for example, we can’t appreciate the climactic significance of the metrical disruption of the ‘full-hearted’ song of Hardy’s ‘frail, gaunt’ Darkling Thrush without experiencing the otherwise hymn-like strict iambic flow of the remainder of the poem in its entirety? The difference is that a tentative initial reading of local features is quite likely to badly misfire in Prynne without an idea of the overall trajectory, and deliberately so since it was ever his delight to lead you astray with the witty surface play of words.

Another chain of associations concerns evenness: pippet, even, vapid. ‘Pippet’ is a rare word. Its single illustrative example in the Oxford English Dictionary is a quotation from Bertrand Russell on comparing the two clubs on a deuce — ‘Take again the two of clubs, and the proposition “this is similar to that” applied to the two pippets’ (Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940) — perhaps inviting us to consider how similar our rivals are to each other. And if that is the case for the rivals in life, so much more will the rivals be levelled by time and death, aligning with the theme of earth, dust and ashes to which we all return.

Prynne’s vocabulary is more diverse than many poets, including in this poem specialist terms from disciplines such as geology, botany, and rocket science, but against that background some of the same words recur noticeably in his wider oeuvre. But the discovered world view we use to decipher their use in this poem, and by extension to read a particular facet of relevant meaning into its more common words and phrases, does not usually assist in understanding their use in those other poems. The word ‘sycamore’ here has a very particular intended meaning, not shared with its equally particular uses in ‘Sea Shells Told’ or ‘Duets Infer Duty.’

Following the initial repetition of ‘Sycamore or,’ the ‘or’ sound continues to recur throughout more than seems usual, at least in certain places (e.g. hoarse, or, shore before, mortal, endure, tore, ore within two pages later in the poem), serving to further emphasise the theme of gold. One such compound, ‘ever more,’ appears not far away from a ‘raven,’ but in this context we should perhaps be more likely to interpret the raven as a traditional symbol of greed, and ‘ever more’ as an inclination to always have more and never enough, and to ‘add to the frosty sum’ of ‘wealth hereby untold,’ than as a reference to Poe’s poem of lost love and madness, though again a binding effect is achieved on the surface level of the poem along with the secondary associations.

Also concerning the ‘or’ sound, there may be a phonological pun in the combination ‘hoarse bit’ where the word ‘hoarse’ is used where we might expect ‘horse’ — in phonology, the ‘horse-hoarse merger’ is the merger of the vowels /ɔː/ and /oʊ/ before /r/, which has word pairs like horse-hoarse and or-oar sounding the same. Here, it would surely be too risky to suggest that this is a reference to Tesla electric cars replacing the petrol cars which themselves replaced horses.

While we are considering technical matters, there is one pertinent quotation I came across while researching the rare word ‘onrunning’: ‘Such effects usually startle by injecting into tranquilly onrunning lines the discordant consonant clusters of unfamiliar words. Local place names of Arabic origin may be used metonymically. One whole line (930) abruptly reads “Daravenazes, Fargues, Xaraguies.”’ (Trueblood, A.S., A reading of the Parayso of Soto de Rojas, in Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, 1996) While Prynne’s lines may not exactly be tranquilly onrunning, we do encounter the pleasingly arresting effect of tongue twisters, crunchy consonant clusters, and technical or otherwise unfamiliar vocabulary and folk names, very often used figuratively.

I find the final verse (‘Thin ice crack first/ skip or skate entire/ bye hardly worst/ set alight on fire’) open to wider interpretation than the first.

• Is Prynne offering us his advice for reading his poems, including, with his ice skating metaphor, Not Ice Novice in particular: focus on what you find most comprehensible first, after skimming or reading the whole thing even if only superficially, it’s not a bad thing to make small advances without understanding the whole, so that with some good sparks of inspiration you can melt the frosty surface of the poem and reach a more fluent reading?
• ‘Set alight on fire’ seems to refer to the Amazon Kindle device/service and the Fire tablet.
• The final two words ‘on fire’ are a fragment from Melville’s Moby Dick chapter 99, The Doubloon — along with ‘gold,’ ‘rivet,’ and ‘main-mast’ on the same page of Prynne’s poem, and perhaps ‘cypher’ earlier — and allude to the rivalry for the coveted gold token riveted to the mast of the Pequod: ‘this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it.’ As Ahab believes that the white whale Moby Dick is the embodiment of evil and that he is capable of defeating it, do the rivals believe the object of their space race will provide the answer to human salvation?

There are 3 feet of varying metre in the 4 lines of each of 4 verses on 11 pages, totalling 44 verses in all. You couldn’t really call the verses ‘blocks’ — they are too small and light, though not at all austere — and on the page the white space between the left-justified quatrains forms a Saint George’s cross of sorts, or a four-paned window looking in on the world of the poem. Each quatrain’s first word is capitalised, but there is no punctuation throughout. Lacking the markers of conventional grammar, the quatrains are not obviously onrunning, but at the same time the associative chains extending throughout, and the loose uniformity of trimeters and prosodic texture, do not give the impression that the quatrains are isolated from each other. (Pertinently, Richard Capell uses the unusual and undefined term ‘onrunning’ in his classic volume on Schubert’s Songs (1957) to describe a technique of composition likened to the operatic aria and blank verse, as opposed to folk song and stanzaic form.) But in what order should we read the verses on a page — as two rows of two, or as two columns? Does the uncertainty have a cohering effect as we experiment with different sequences?

The longest obvious unit of meaning often initially appears to be as short as individual words (e.g. ‘Habit nervous treeline’), of varying syllabic lengths. Unlike 2021’s Dune Quail Eggs, in which words have no obvious relation to their neighbours throughout, in a text like Not Ice Novice the unit of meaning sometimes (though often deceptively) extends to short contiguous or interrupted phrases. Syntactical rules may apply (rhyming, alliteration, anagrams and prosody are syntactic), but most often not the traditional rules of grammar, so the words can be legitimately parsed in many different ways. The excess of surplus meaning to be found in the relationships between these units, each in itself far from simple, is accordingly made even more complex.

Robert Kiely has written interestingly and informatively about Peter Manson’s ‘The Baffle Stage,’ another recent poem (2014) in forty-four rhyming quatrains, surely known to Prynne (Kiely, R., Null-Exit Pamphleteering, or #VALUE!, in Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2019), and has playfully explored the relationship of its rhyme to double entry book-keeping and accountancy, the financial crisis and subsequent austerity.

In this case, while Prynne’s poem may be about wealth and the obsessions of the super-rich, the tone is not negative or bitter (we might rephrase the title as ‘notice: no vice’), nor didactic or despairing. It seems drily humorous and genial, light and free, full of fascinating detail, encyclopedic references, entertaining anecdotes, kaleidoscopic rhymes of different types, many-faceted etymologies, and playful puns.

Its rhyming double entry is a thing of wonder and beauty, its production seemingly unforced but controlled, well designed and operating effectively, but in poetry as in business, much of the interesting and important information which drives real value falls beyond the boundaries of the mostly historical record of past performance captured in the rhyming double entry ledgers which match in total in the trial balance: the forward order book, the as-yet-unproved probable and possible reserves, the still-to-be realised intellectual property pipeline, the customer activity and churn rate, the environmental performance and wider impacts, the social contract with internal and external stakeholders, the transparency and equity of power structures, the quality of vision and leadership — including what has come to be known variously as the ESG agenda (dismissed by Musk, after Tesla was controversially ejected from a leading ESG index) or triple bottom line. Neither is ‘value’ itself a common measure — it is as multifarious as its various component parts. Actually, perhaps it’s better not to try to measure everything with the same single unit, whether that be historical or mark-to-market monetary value, risk adjusted returns and value at risk, or any other over-simplified single or simple set of measures. Reductive answers are often misleading. Beauty and truth are to be sought in complexity, if they are to be pursued at all, and those who would at least approach, understand and appreciate more should be ready to grapple with difficulty. But we need to believe that in confronting difficulty we will have our efforts repaid, trust that what may emerge is not merely pareidolia, and anticipate not only that the journey’s end will be worth it, but that the journey itself will be a worthwhile destination.

Why do I enjoy reading Prynne? I find his work credible. For my effort, he gives me back the world (including, but far exceeding, some references to sources, people and events, both canonic and obscure, which I enjoy exploring and might not otherwise encounter) in a form initially only dimly recognised, but then all the more appreciated for being obscured for a little while, and then seen from a different perspective with more freshness, humour and clarity.

There’s also an enduring sense of mystery before the parts I didn’t manage to understand better this time, and an ever-renewing awareness of a journey in progress, or even only just begun.