The Jinling Patriots of J. H. Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats

Abstract
Scholars of J. H. Prynne have so far offered no context or clarification for the dedication for Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is (2011). The dedication reads: ‘FOR THE JINLING PATRIOTS’. 1 The rare dedicatory notes in Prynne’s formidable corpus tend to allude in the usual manner to friends and poetic influences—Charles Olson, Peter Riley, and Ed Dorn, for instance—though many of these dedications disappeared when the original chapbooks entered the larger collections (all titled Poems) that established Prynne’s reputation beyond the Cambridge poetry scene. The dedication to ‘the Jinling Patriots’ is therefore unusually obscure in its meaning and relevance. We present two distinct but related readings the dedication: the...