There are now over twenty interviews that provide an analytical perspective on this poetry. Most of them are not yet on the Web. Here is one interview that makes some reference to 'history' and 'society' and so I have included it as part of the introduction to this section. But first some poems that have a historical theme, that draw on a compelling vision and a dogma of such magnitude and emotional potency that the multitudinous movements of history are reduced to a single, divinely inspired current, a current that is set in a context of infinite complexity, wonder and mystery. There is an attempt at meticulous plotting and an evocative use of words, like a huge theological poem, but a strong sense of my limitations as both a person and as a poet convinces me that only a degree of the meticulous, only a degree of the evocative and only some aspects of the theological will ever be explored by me in either my poetry or my life. The field is too vast, the subject matter too profound to ever plumb the depths of the realities of existence. But one can play on the edges.

REALITY

History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions like the potter's clay and has a genuine significance for our lives when its facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.¹ It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.

Here was a bit of history,

came across it the other day

in a bookshop: some letters,

letters written by Van Gogh.

He was writing about his

ultimate goal and feeling

that he was on the right track---

firmly convinced he was---

so convinced that he paid

little attention to what people

said of him. He painted what

he felt and felt what he painted.

This is my story, too, of poetry....

except that......few people say

anything about my poetry and I

never know if I am exactly on track,

if I write precisely the best,

the most apt that can be written.

But.....

I fit my emotions around my assumptions:

that this poetry is at the core of my life,

that it expresses my essential relationships

with all that I know and love--and I write—

this is my faith; this is my faith.

-Ron Price 14/3/02.

Perhaps I will get around to reading Manning Clark's History of Australia: Volumes 1-6 in the latter years of my latter years. It is still too much for me, too detailed an account for someone like me who likes a general picture and has so much that he wants to read from an immensely burgeoning world of print. But I have found some of the things Clark says provide useful ways of putting my task as a poet in perspective. I try to say, in my poetry, 'what the heart doth say' about one of the great passions of my life--the complex interrelationships between my society, my religion and my own experience. My poetry attempts to describe the experience of one man pioneering a new Faith across two continents over four epochs of the first century of the Formative Age. Here, in what has become a massive poetic opus, is a putting into words of what one man saw when he opened a window on his experience, richly coloured as it was by his religion and the story of his society. I have, like Clark and Thomas Hardy before me, watched "that pattern among general things" which my idiosyncrasy moves me to observe.-Ron Price with thanks to Manning Clark, A History of Australia: Vol. 3 and 6, Preface, 1973 and 1987.

We pay a terrible price for our fatal flaws---

as you put it when you were finishing up

your great work. The one precious gift

we need is to read the direction of the river

of life and I have poured much into that river .

I have poured my life into this 'holy crusade.'

It has fortified my days, but left me worn

at the edges as the light was finally installed

on the hill in the Vineyard of the Lord.

It wasn't, as Clark concluded, that no one

knew the direction of the river or had anything

to say.¹ Too many people thought that they

knew and even more had something to say.

If I did not have the aid of those Men of Baha,

I would long ago have drowned in that blood-

dimmed tide of passionate intensity² and endless,

absolutely endless, opinions.

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How can these non-events, this nothing

happening, this no-interest here for many

a long year, constitute anything one could

call history? But then, if history is a method

of analysis and interpretation; if the storage

and transmission of cultural memory is partly

linked to the poetic writing of an insignificant

prime mover of this story, this creator of the

story, then we could have some very useful

writing here in this massive opus-epic.

If this poetry, like history, is about high

seriousness; if human personality is the

subject of history; if concentrated expression

is the vehicle for my story; then this poetic,

this fin de siecle creation which began after

the two holy years¹ and crossed the bridge

into this new millennium, may be judged

useful by those who want to know the truth.'²

1 1952-53 and 1992-93.

Carlyle, the British historian, says that no great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. What are your views on this concept?

PRICE(P): 

One can not ignore the role of great men and great women but, if anything, this poetry is a testimony to the contribution of the not-so-great. One of the poems(see below) in this collection, a collection I have entitled Cascading Down after "15 small pools of water in the centre of the two sets of stairs leading from the Entrance Plaza to Terrace one."(Baha'i Canada, Baha, BE 156, p.5), answers this question in part. I refer you to that poem: "At Speed and in the Darkness Before the Dawn" in which I have drawn heavily on J. Harrison's book The Common People. Obviously, Baha'i history has great souls. Our history is a documentary to them; but it is also a history of the ordinarily ordinary and a greatness that comes from the humble and the unrecognised. This poetry is as much a tribute to this latter category, as the former. I see myself, in some ways, as a symbol of the ordinary.

I: Is there much in your poetry about your family history and its relationship with the Cause?

P: The first two poems in the collection of poetry I sent to the World Centre were written in the first week of September 1992. They were addressed to my mother who passed away in 1978. She started investigating the Baha'i Faith in 1953. One of the poems in this collection was inspired by my grandfather's autobiography, A.J. Cornfield's Story, about his early life from 1872 to 1901. I refer you to this poem: "1953: A Turning Point in History" (see below)to partly answer this question. There are, of course, many other poems that involve my family history. It is impossible to separate family history from one's autobiography, whether that autobiography is poetic narrative or simple narrative prose. I know nothing at all of my family history before 1872 and have not, as yet, written any poetry about these earliest years of my family during the same years as those of the Heroic Age of the Baha'i Faith. Something may come up that is based on history in Wales, England and France. Time will tell. We could hold a separate interview on the influences of family; I have referred to some of them in the first eleven interviews. But I think this is enough for now. 

I: Have you written many poems about specific contemporary events in the political, social, economic and historical worlds? 

P: Only very occasionally. I think there are a number of complex interacting factors that, for various reasons, make writing poetry about "the news" difficult. There is something about "the news" that has an air of fantasy, of make-believe, of manufacturing, of simple transience on the one hand and an air of quite pervasive complexity on the other. There is also the problem of making sense of the recent past. Kosovo or East Timor are good examples, to chose two from a potential multitude. There is also the problem of current affairs being a mix of the tragic, the trivial, the serious and the funny all rolled into one ball. You really have to give the issue a great deal of time to unravel the complexity. There is just so much going on that the mind is on overload most of the time but not in a conscious sense, a sense that recognizes the weight and complexity of it all. Getting a precise knowledge seems just about impossible except for the specialist.

There is, in addition, no cultural and classical consensus any more and there hasn't been, perhaps since the beginning of the Formative Age in 1921, perhaps since the 1950's and the onset of postmodernism; so what the individual gets is an enormous plethora of opinions, a pastiche, incoherence, with little sense of overview. As the French sociologist/philosopher Jean Baudrillard puts it: it has became very difficult to plot reality, or even get a sense of who you are. Any poems I do write in this area of social analysis tend to be 'big picture', 'whole culture', 'wide angle' stuff.

I: Do you think the fact that your poetry deals with the big picture and not with specific social problems is partly a reflection of the nature of your religion? 

P: Unquestionably! So many of the problems in the world possess an immense complexity, as I have just pointed out. The Baha'i Faith offers helpful perspectives on many of the problems; indeed I would go so far as to say it has "the answers." But neither I nor the Baha'is are pretentious enough, or naive enough, to think we can sort out all the problems humanity faces like some sort of magician with 'the answer' to all the world's problems. Any Baha'i who makes such a claim really sees the issues far too simplistically and is just not aware of the tremendous complexity of things, or brings to the issues a mind-set that has grown up on what Bahiyyih Nakjavani calls 'Baha'i Fundamentalism.'

Such people have no idea of "what a massive dose of truth", as 'Abdu'l-Baha puts it, which "must be administered to heal this chronic old disease"(Secret of Divine Civilization, p.43) at the heart of civilization. There are no simple answers to the problems we face. The Baha'i Faith has the key to the puzzle, the riddle, of history and society. It is a genuine resolution to the thorny problems we face, but humanity it would appear must come to it slowly, little by little, in a similar way that Roman/European civilization gradually came to Christinaity.

My poetry approaches the world and its problems obliquely, sensitively, with some understanding, I hope, of this complexity, but also, I like to think, with a degree of humility in the face of it. But I certainly don't think either I or my religion have the answer, presto, to all the thorny and difficult problems bedevilling the world.

I: I understand you have just retired from teaching. What is the experience like thusfar, in the first two-and-a-half years of your retirement?

P: Yes it will soon be three years since I left the classroom. I'm in what you might call the honeymoon period of retirement. The first thing I notice is that I've slowed down. I wrote a poem this morning about the hibiscus. The poem would not have been written under normal circumstances because I needed to be in low gear, enough to stop and have a good look, especially standing out in the rain trying to write the poem. I get a good forty minutes of brisk walking in every day. I've never been able to do that before. I'm also getting to know my wife again after years of running past her on my way to work, meetings, or something that I had to do. We have also moved to Tasmania and into a small Baha'i commujity and so there are not the demands made on my time for various social and community responsibilities in the larger Baha'i community where we used to live. I'm still writing about two poems a day, though. That has not changed.

I: Spike Milligan says his father said that he would rather tell him stories about himself that were exciting but a lie, than tell him stories that were boring but true. For some of us the incurable romantic never dies. Is there any of this romanticism in your poetry? 

P: My mother used to say to me, I remember, back in the early 1960s before I went pioneering, that the Baha'i Faith was a good religion for me because of the strong element of the theatre in its framework of activities. The social dimension of life inevitably involves a certain theatricality. As I said, too, in my introduction to Roger White's Occasions of Grace there is in the Baha'i ethos, at least there is for me, a stong element of the cry of all Romantic artists since the industrial revolution: I don't want comfort; I want God; I want poetry; I want real danger; I want freedom; I want goodness; I want sin. Well, I'm not so sure about the real danger any more; enough sin seems to come my way as a result of deeds of omission or commission; and I do like my bourgeois comforts. So I suppose I'm just a part Romantic keeping these things in mind.

I would like to say something about that boredom issue, though. I think much of my poetry and prose will simply not be of much interest to many a person who comes across it. It will, to put it simply, bore them. For these people I think it is best to leave my poetry, my writing, out of their experience. In all likelihood such people will gain nothing from my work. They are better advised to seek stimulation and meaning elsewhere. I say this as a result of my experience as a teacher for three decades and meeting thousands of people outside the classroom since my working life began over forty years ago. My writing is not on their radar and will never be on it.

I: The Australian historian Manning Clark says that history is a comforter, along with the arts like poetry, the humanities and social sciences in general. They make both living and dieing more bearable. Where does your poetry fit into this perspective of Manning Clark?

P: I'd like to think that through both the autobiographical and analytical nature of my poetry, my prose-poems, people will find some intellectual stimulation. I have been seeking such a stimulation for myself all my life, at least since my late teens. I use a lot of material in my poetry that comes from history. The comfort of my poetry is in the stimulation, the meaning. This increase in meaning, this stimulation, when it is found, makes both living and dieing more bearable, to use Clark's term. Obviously everything you write does not achieve this lofty goal. You win some and lose some. A chap I met today when I was out for my walk will not be helped by my poetry for he will never read it.

Ron Price

31 August 2001

__________________________ 

I was just finishing up at the Firestone Tire

and Rubber Company that September,

had no idea about epochs and ages

and Birmingham was a long way away

from my world in the autumn days of ’63.

Those vast spiritual powers helped me

survive that year and get me through

the start of that traumatic university

depression-bi-polar disorder with my life

and grades intact—or so I hypothesize.

Those vast spiritual powers released that year—

perhaps--led to a fresh impulse, an unfoldment

of civil rights and engendered that calamity

in Birmingham in September.

For a process had been set in motion

some hundred years before that would

result in the liberal effusion of celestial grace

and a march of compelling, universal victories.¹

1 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, Wilmette, 1957, p. xiii.

Ron Price

30 January 2002

______________________

YET AGAIN

Political stability and the survival of civilization depended on an effective autocracy. This truth was not accepted by the senatorial class until the reign of Trajan in the late first century AD. -Ronald Martin, Tacitus, Bristol Classical Press, 1994, London, p.242.

And as we head through the centre of

this great maelstrom of history

a Voice speaks to help us survive

by the skin of our teeth¹.

It spoke, then, at the beginning of Empire² ,

as It speaks now at the start of global Order,

in the midst of tempest,

in our darkest incoherence this ocean speaks,

winning its way into the hearts of people

who go about, quietly and obscurely,

to bring about a new Kingdom everywhere

as governments collapse, anarchy increases,

complexity bites into the acid tendrils

of the mind and individuals are easily overwhelmed

by incomprehensible mysteries and boredom.

Our days have long been troublesome,

as they were then in those early days of Empire

when He spoke; our great body has been invaded

by open violence and slow decay

while a pure and humble religion, yet again,

insinuates itself into the minds of men,

lowly erects a place of honour

on a mountain square, its handiwork

and wisdom to adore.

Ron Price

17 November 1996

AT SPEED AND IN THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN

This poetry is by one of those who, were it not for his writing, would probably be left out of history, one of the seventy to ninety percent of the population(if not higher) who are neither rich, nor influential, not one of the major players on the stage, not famous as a writer or artist, just one of the many threads in the warp and weft that make up the Baha’i community, who strove within the limits of his incapacity while he was alive to spread the Baha’i teachings among his contemporaries and to be an example of its teachings.

This document, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, in its many genres, may be useful in describing and reconstructing on the literary stage of my time the lives of the people who were my contemporaries in the last three quarters of the first century of the Formative Age. There has been, throughout history, a literary inarticulateness on the part of the many that usually results in a shortage of community records. It results, too, from an inability to write, a lack of interest in leaving any record, a view that history is made by people in or with power, a perception that one’s life is unimportant, insignificant. In addition, people’s lives, at least in these epochs in which I have lived and had my being became occupied with so many things. My time is an antediluvian one, that is an age before the flood. It has also become, as I see it anyway, perhaps since the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and that "blissful consummation" announced by the prophet Daniel, the age of the flood.

This lack of of a written account by ordinary individuals about their lives and times and the record of the rise of a new religion in our midst is being remedied, clearly remedied in our ‘paper age’, this ‘age of analysis’ with seemingly endless correspondence, computers, cassette and video tape. But the task of recreating our present age and how it felt to live in these times to those living in them may not be as easy to achieve as one might think. Individual statements, autobiographies, especially from the ordinary believer who lacks fame, rank, status or wealth are not among the sort of books that publishers seriously entertain for their markets. So, there is little payoff, so to speak, in putting your story down on paper, if you are one of the ordinary ‘blokes.’ Whatever is written of this nature seems to achieve its usefulness decades, if not centuries, later, when the history of the period in question is written.

Future historians must construct the pattern of our time through selection, suggestion and implication. Often the further historians get away from the period about which they are writing, the better they will be able to write about it. I trust what historians and sociologists find here will be of some use. Such, indeed, is one of my many motivations for wanting to put words on paper. -Ron Price with thanks to J.F.C. Harrison, The Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the Present, Flamingo Paperbacks, London, 1984, Introduction.

Seeing how long it has taken

for the writings, diaries, letters,

poetry and historical records

of our first century to get published,

I bequeath this my magnum opus

to posterity, testifying as I do

to the complexity of the task

for an ordinary believer,

an international and homefront pioneer

in the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th epochs,

to recount in some meaningful way

the endless flux of events

that make up his Baha’i experience

and that of his fellows

over four decades or more in this century.

It seems, as I look back over all these years

in the field, like I have spun a thin tissue,

a web, across two continents, from pole to pole,

in this darkness before the dawn,

by some instinctual force, some feeling,

with the mind on all-ahead-full, always running,

a new rung every second,

making one of a thousand designs:

the funnel, orb, dome, bowl, tub or purse.¹

Using the same principles and materials,

forms that will evolve over generations

perhaps millennia or more. And here I am,

right at the start, in the first quarter-century

in nearly all the communities I have lived.²

Ron Price

10 May 1999

1953: A TURNING POINT IN HISTORY

The closing chapters of Thomas Hardy’s autobiography The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published in 1930, were left to Hardy’s second wife, Florence, to write. She did some editing of the early chapters. She deleted Hardy’s frequent vicious attacks on the reviewers who had been vicious in their attacks on him. She also cut out some descriptions of society-people Hardy had met in London. She also used her red pencil in some of Hardy’s references to Emma, his first wife. Jealousy seems to have played a part here. We now have, though, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate who makes a convincing attempt to restore Hardy’s original text. (James Gibson, Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life, MacMillan Press, London, 1996, p. 176)

As Harold H. Cornfield, my uncle, explains in his Foreward to my grandfather’s account, A.J. Cornfield’s Story, written about 1921-3, the content of the existing typed copy "is correct." ¹ The kind of problem referred to above in relation to Hardy’s autobiography is not present in the only completed autobiography(my grandfather’s: 1872-1901) in my family.

This autobiography of my grandfather

goes back a long way,

sort of fleshes things out in our family

back to, what, 1872, or thereabouts?

This kind man’s work,

at the outset of the Formative Age,

with his seal of good-housekeeping

in a Foreward in 1953,

the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth,

serves as a foundation for my

Pioneering Over Three Epochs

which starts in 1953

when a new Age began for my family

at what was a turning point

in American Baha’i history.²

I was, then, nine.

There can be nobody so petty or so apathetic in his outlook that he has no desire to discover by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in....bringing under their rule the whole of the inhabited world. -Polybius, Histories, 1.1.5.

Between 220 BC and 168 BC the whole world fell under the undisputed ascendancy of Rome....It was a phenomena unprecedented in the annals of the European theatre of civilization. -Polybius in Study of History: Vol.3, Arnold Toynbee, Oxford UP, 1954, p.313.

Roman history is still too much like a great endless jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

-Keith Richardson, Daggars in the Forum: The Revolutionary Lives and Violent Times of the Gracchi Brothers, Cassell, London, 1976, p.xi.

___________________________________________________________ 

The world empire of Rome was a negative phenomenon: the result....of an absense of resistance....It would be quite untrue to say that the Romans conquered the world. They merely took possession of something that was lying about for anyone to pick up.-Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol.1, 1920, p.51.

___________________________________________________________ 

The Baha'i World Order also grew like a great endless jigsaw puzzle. Although most of the pieces were still missing after the passing of a little more than a century and a half, the grand architectural shape was there. The pieces of the immense labyrinth would come together over time. Its undisputed sovereignity would be established, an unprecedented phenomena in the history of civilization on the planet, in the coming centuries. The process would be, for the most part, a positive one. There would be an immense resistance, in some places cruel and insidious, from foes now impossible to predict. But the unity, built up over several centuries, would be impossible to resist. The divisions of the 'tribes of the defeated'¹ would lead, in the end, only to confusion. -Ron Price with thanks to ¹Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, 1974(1938), p.17.

Well, you could say the pieces

were, for the most part, all there.

It only required the masses to enter.

The Arc had been built and now

the animals had to come in: by ones,

by twos, by threes, by more and more.

Unity was in fact,

the major accomplishment

of the first century-and-a-half.

The most perfect Being

ever to walk on the earth

had come and gone

and His charismatic Force

had been fully institutionalized.

The vineyard of the Lord was ready

and they waited all around the planet

for people to come in to the garden.

They waited to take possession

of something that had been lying

in wait, to be picked up, for decades;

for civilization had long lost its soul

and this small, peripheral fluctuation

would soon be amplified in this global,

complex, dynamic and unstable system,

loading the dice of change toward an

undisputed and planetary sovereignity.

Ron Price

15 October 2001

_______________________ 

AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT

About eleven weeks after the Opening of the Terraces on Mt. Carmel, in early August 2001, astrophysicists discovered when the first light occurred in the universe. It was about 900 million years after the Big Bang and the discovery came about by examining a quasar. For those first 900 million years after the Big Bang all was darkness. Can we conclude that it takes time for the light to come out of the darkness?-Ron Price with thanks to "Catalyst," ABC TV, 16 August 2001, 8:30-9:00 pm.

And the light shineth in darkness;

and the darkness comprehendeth it not.¹

-at least not yet during this modern tempest.

One day the world will see this light

shining through our universe, our earth,

and we will comprehend it sufficiently

to bring us a new tranquillity, peace

and unity, a power we have never known,

a power where community feeling will

triumph over all opposition, imbued

with a new vision, a new ideology,

a new morality, a unified Weltanschauung,

a strong consensus omnium to overcome

antisocial dispositions preponderant in

this world and its endless multipicity

of non-obligatory opinions.²

1John 1:5

Ron Price

25 May 1999

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