MIND THE GAFFE / SEND THE DEPARTED OFF ON A CHARIOT OF PITHY PRAISE INSTEAD OF A USED EDSEL

“Good Lord, that obit’s a botch. Back you go—next Chiltern Railways into London. And this time, insist they mind the gaffe.”

Recently, this blog received word from a London magazine that a minor poet of the mother tongue had died (without ever being touched by a Nobel Prize--my words not his). 

 Sad enough on both counts. 

Sadder still was the send-off: a laborious obituary that read like a man trying to teach a toddler the whys and wherefores of Beowulf over lukewarm tea. 

The salutatorian, who freely admits he never met, much less spoke with J. H. Prynne [1936-2026], nonetheless pressed on, choreographing an elaborate and largely unreadable assault on literary modesty. One searches for a kinder phrase, but “pretentious babble” refuses to yield its ground. 

The trouble announced itself early. In the opening paragraph alone, he invoked Keats and Auden, then marched in, one by one, comparing our departed with every great poet ever to have drawn breath in England. I

t was less tribute than overcrowding. I had the odd sensation of staring at a 1974 Vauxhall stranded on the polished floor of a Mayfair Aston Martin showroom, its dents and faded paint suddenly reimagined as distinction simply because of its surroundings. One was meant to admire the dandelion because it happened to grow in Buckingham Palace’s garden. The poor Vauxhall achieved a kind of borrowed grandeur, though it would have been far happier on the road. 

If there is mercy in the hereafter, St. Peter might consider sending Prynne briefly back, if only to defend himself against such inflated ceremony. Reading the piece was akin to enduring the hours-long oratory that preceded Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, sound and fury that leaves one longing for the clean strike of a single ungilded sentence. 

Sage parents advise us not to speak ill of the dead. 

Fair enough. 

But for those of us still breathing, the author of dear Prynne's rambling obituary remains very much among the living, and answerable. Alas, one can only hope for better days, and better criticism, ahead. 

IN PRAISE OF A FEW J.H. PRYNNE PHRASES 

“The whole thing it is, the difficult matter.” — Kitchen Poems (1968) 

“What words say, it is the difficult matter.” — The White Stones (1969) 

“A glass of salt water is no comfort.” — The White Stones (1969) 

“We are drawn onward by what we cannot see.” — Brass (1971) 

“The mind will not become itself by force.” — Brass (1971) 

“Each thing is what it is and not another thing.” — Wound Response (1974) 

“Memory is the cause of it.” — The Oval Window (1983) 

“The air is thick with what we mean.” — Bands Around the Throat (1987) 

RETRO FILES / YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE REACH OF THE U.S. MILITARY

On May 2, 2011, the United States publicly confirmed that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a covert raid carried out by U.S. Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The announcement—delivered by Barack Obama—landed with unusual clarity. 

It was less a victory speech than a statement of reach: after a decade-long manhunt following the September 11 attacks, the United States had located and eliminated the world’s most wanted figure deep inside a sovereign nation. 

 The message, implicit but unmistakable, was that distance and concealment no longer guaranteed safety. Intelligence, persistence, and precision had closed the gap. For many observers, the moment marked not just the end of a manhunt, but a declaration about the evolving scope of modern military and intelligence operations.