I need to say, firstly, that Private Eye is passed on to me by a mate, that I'd not spend my own money on it, but, secondly, that once in a while it gets it right.
This is a tremendous effort at pastiching Prynne, the very forefront and paragon of subverting what we were led to believe was poetry. Some of us might have got beyond that already by not accepting such things as that poetry must be made of rhythm and/or rhyme.
Regular, or longstanding, readers here will know that 'all you've got to be is any good'.
Prynne and his like had a point but possibly suffered from labouring the one point they had at the expense of all others. It is potentially brilliant, definitely hilarious, but ultimately only of interest to its adherents if it refuses to come back to Planet Meaning.
Private Eye's uncredited pasticheur risks enchroaching on the brink of meaning in line 6, where Bowie is brought to mind, and the last three words that suggest Dover Beach. That might not be entirely their fault even if an editor in a position to do as much could have pointed out that they were at risk of meaning something not entirely untangential.
It's great how, trying to write about such writing, one is led into the same dead ends as theirs does. In a way, I'd so like to be convinced that theirs was an ever expanding universe of potential but I'm not. I think it's a party game and no more than that. I'm thrilled by the twice-washed tablecloth.
Is it old and thus a bad thing that it's only been washed twice or was it only bought last week and has been washed twice already. We are not to know and it is in such wondering that 'poetry' can sometimes be found. Elusive, 'thought-provoking', generative, lush.
The satirist, in one phrase, did for me more than my brief looks at real Prynne ever did. So, maybe I could go back to real Prynne, informed by that, and enjoy his poems more. And that's what I'd call 'irony'.
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