Chicago Review

On Halloween 2003, William Fuller delivered a lecture at the University of Chicago on the Levellers and the poetry of J.H. Prynne; the night before he had read his poetry for us as well. Both events have been archived here.

CR has published several of Fuller's poems since the mid 1990s, and he was kind enough to allow us to print the lecture as an essay, replete with illustrations, in our Spring 2005 issue (which included a section on Louis Zukofsky).

Prynne is often alleged to be illegible. English critics like Dame Edna Longley are especially eloquent on this charge. At a lecture at Cambridge University this February, she averred that Prynne’s pamphlet Red D Gypsum permits “no retrieval of coherence at a higher interpretive level.” As it happens, Red D Gypsum is the very text Fuller works with in “Restatement of Trysts,” although he comes to an altogether different conclusion:

As defiantly autonomous as the text appears, as one works through the histories collapsed within individual words, the paratactic unspoolings of the syntax, the strange subterranean connections back and forth across the pages, from phrase to phrase, word to word, syllable to syllable, one comes to divine a principle of growth "demerged" in the world. "Demerged," an old word meaning "immersed," would on its face appear to denote separation: Prynne's characteristically fluid use of it, within the floating shadows of contexts past and present, leaves the issue undecided, neither one nor the other but both. We are immersed and separated.

Red D Gypsum has become a thing of the world to unfold with and of the world and within and of itself: the poem connects as it breaches, contracts as it proliferates.

Fuller has lived in Chicago for the last twenty years. He received a PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 1983, and is now Chief Fiduciary Officer at The Northern Trust Company. In the late 1980s with Paul Hoover he organized the reading series "New Writing/Lower Links" at Club Lower Links in Chicago. His most recent books are Sadly (Flood, 2003) and Watchword (Flood, 2006), as well as a handful of pamphlets from Equipage, Rubba Ducky, and Barque.