‘An Object with No Predecessors’? A Computational Reading of J. H. Prynne’s For the Monogram

J. H. Prynne’s 1997 book For the Monogram arguably marks the beginning of what has been termed his ‘late style’: a period of avant-garde poetic output characterised by a shift towards monolithic blocks of text featuring highly disrupted syntax and a vocabulary drawn from a range of increasingly technical and specialist fields. This paper considers whether such ‘high-tech’ writing requires a similarly high-tech approach to reading, describing efforts to interpret the poem using a custom-built computer program linked to the Google Books database. In particular, it examines the theoretical implications of such rudimentary machine reading in light of existing interpretations of the poem by Simon Jarvis and Peter Middleton, focusing on the peculiar aesthetic implications of exponential technological development and arguing that For the Monogram is a text which anticipates and even acts out its own mechanized dissection. Through a complex incorporation of sources ranging from Mother Shipton to computer programming manuals, Prynne anticipates and disrupts any attempt at computational processing, leaving a text which is paradoxically both immune to and deformed by technological progress.