Many of my poems are written about some immediate situation, event or personal activity. Some of these 'immediate events' are placed in a context of history and society. Some are ongoing events, like the writing of poetry itself. Readers will find here some poetry and an interview. This poetry, for the most part, gives an accent to my immediate experience. Indeed, over a million words are now devoted to this prose-poetry as I call it. There are now, too, some 30,000-40,000 words available in the form of interviews: one of these interviews, simulated interviews I should add, is found below--after several poems.....

Twice in the last four months I have heard the poet-novelist Michael Ondaatje interviewed on the radio. What he had to say about writing his novels was descriptive of why and how I go about writing poems. Writing, said this Canadian/SriLankian writer, is an exit from the things in life you can't do or understand or don't want to do or understand. One can do and understand only a small portion of life's activity and conundrum. Writing is one of the great escapes in life and one of the forms of intense engagement all at once. Ondaatje did not say all of this. I've just expanded on a basic point he made. He said he does not plan what he writes; the writing, characters and plot, evolves out of the language and its focus and it is hard work. The plot is not there until he finishes his book. This also true of the process of my writing poetry. Voice, Ondaatje went on, comes along in the process; it is difficult to know just where it comes from. -Ron Price with thanks to "Michael Ondaatje," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 5 March 2002.

Yes, Michael, voice came along

insensibly in that first decade,¹

mysteriously welled-up, grew,

found its place as the black marks

appeared line after line on the pages.

The poem comes along insensibly, too,

the same way, mysteriously, wells-up,

grows, finds its place on the page,

life making its mark, telling its tale,

bring the inner and outer into one form.

And so I renew my life, life, express

what you might call a certain, distinctive

planetary sensibility, a spiritual-moral vision,

a maker-agent of a new culture and the oneness

of humankind, of all reality and my experience.²

1 1992-2002: perhaps it evolved in the years 1962-1992 or 1944-1994 or........in ways I can neither understand nor describe.

The darkest, most frightening

time in history, stimulating,

transforming this scattered

collection of people

into a global, unified

and harmonious civilization.

The man could not look out of a window without seeing something that had never been there before.-J.M. Barrie on Thomas Hardy in The World of Poetry: Poets and Critics on the Art and Function of Poetry, Selected by Clive Sansom, Phoenix House, London, 1959, p.86.

A poem gives the world back to the maker of the poem, in all its original strangeness, the shock of its first surprise. It is capable of doing the same for the rest of us. -John Hall Wheelock, Poets of Today, 1954 in ibid., p.86.

Even the sun and the moon are novel curiosities;

who wants to get used to stars?

When you come away from death’s grasp

and darkness’s engulfing night an unfathomable

beauty and mystery hits your eye.

When you die everyday from some mortal wound,

some day-star of divine mystery is rekindled

in your breast, a radiant dawn breaks and

you are reborn, but then you die again

in the whispering embrace of Satin.

Simplicity and freshness, unsubdued by habit,

unshackled by custom, join to wonder and

the poet explores his own amazement

at what he sees, as if for the first time,

in the forest of time on the crumbling bark,

wet leaves and under the glistening sun.

Can he convey this pristine beauty

which overwhelms his senses and fills

them to overflowing with their compelling

sweetness and a vision he can scarecly express?

Ron Price

18 September 1995

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PIPELINES AND QUIBBLES

All that one relinquishes of the past is not so consciously shed as the events of imperious yesterday which cut through our enjoyment of the present and which we simply call ‘forgetting.’ -With thanks for an idea to Roger White, Notes Postmarked the Mountain of God, 1992, p.7.

If I didn’t think our mistakes were

the source of our best learning

I’d be irredeemably saddened

by some of my bitterest lessons:

like the woman I once loved whom

I drove away with my intense vision

which I wanted her to wear and by

an anger which seemed to grow

like some weed in my garden shutting

out the glow in her golden hair.

like the woman I once knew

called my mother whom I sacrificed

on the anvil of my own petard

and whose loneliness I did not see,

so blind was I to her very need;

I did not hear her cry, so caught up

was I in my own brave and lonely deed.

only because it is my life! Rumi

once said. But so, too, is it sweet:

the cup of pure and limpid water*

this is the final honey of life,

a certain indifference: for one brings

one’s past into the present and finds

providence revealed in calamity,

even the one in today’s pipeline,

for there’s always a new pipeline.

And then there is the inevitable quibble,

some inner dissenting voice for one knows that

God’s will has not entirely appropriated his.

With quiet elation he turns to his book,

his garden view and his silence. The fan

blows a breeze relentlessly, effortlessly,

like the past which is never relinguished,

consciously shed, as easily as this wind

which blows in his face, or those branches

in the garden which give all their beauty

and form to nature’s zephyrs, forever.

Ron Price

28 December 1995

* ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, p.239.

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I was impressed recently by the art work of Richard Long. I saw a demonstration of his stone work on television several years ago and last week I borrowed his book Walking in Circles from one of Tasmania’s best, most extensive libraries. The following interview which I have ‘choreographed’ is a result of reading about his philosophy, reading an interview with him and looking at his wonderful work in stone, wood and his own ‘choreography’ of art. This interview was also influenced by the words of Robert Creeley about poetry in The American Poetry Review(Sept/Oct, 1999, pp.17-18) -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.

 Interviewer(I): Do you think that artists are difficult to get to know, that they are virtually invisible.

Price(P): Yes, most artists are virtually invisible; very few make it into the media, into the world of fame and publicity. Many artists would like their work to be known, but they would prefer to remain in the background. That is understandable. As far as those who do get to be known by the masses it is largely a superficial knowing. Occasionally, a biography is written about someone’s life, then some depth is possibly revealed. The biography industry has unearthed increasing numbers of good quality work, though often the artist is dead by then. The biography section of a good library has become massive.

I think people generally, though, are difficult to get to know to any depth. That is why I have pursued autobiography as I have. "Know thyself" has quite specific and profound meanings to me in this entire work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. After living in so many places and ‘knowing’ so many people over more than 40 years in my 'journey', I can think of many people whose biography I would enjoy writing. For some time I was interested in the life of Roger White. But he argued over and over that his life was not worth writing about. Actually I did write a brief biography of Roger, several pages. I sent it to him; he made a number of corrections and returned it to me making it clear that he could see little value in me or anyone else writing a detailed biography of his life.

I should add that after writing brief biogrpahical statements of some two dozen Baha'is back in the 1980s in the Northern Territory, I concluded that there was a general disinterest in the subject. After attempting to continue the process when I lived in Perth in the 1990s I realized it was an uphill battle and I gradually lost enthusiasm for this literary exercise. Looking back over these years, I could argue that my interest in writing autobiography partly arose out of the difficulties I had in writing biography. But to write a significant and useful biography, like the one recently published on the Canadian Baha'i Angus Cowan, requires a passion, an enthusiasm and a direction that perhaps my peripatetic existence has militated against. And so I lead the way in Baha'i literature toward an autobiographical thrust.

Henry James and Anthony Trollope became disenchanted with the biographies they were working on. The fields of both biography and autobiography are littered with manuscripts which are incomplete. I have come to settle for pleasant conversation when human interaction is unavoidable, but I make no attempt to write the stories of others as I did for perhaps a dozen years. To a large extent now, I keep human conversation to a minimum, having had enough for a lifetime. Each artist’s invisibility has different roots. The energy I used to pour into talking and listening for most of the first forty years of this pioneering experience, 1962-2002, I now pour into writing and reading.

I know I'm wandering a bit, but to conclude....

The main poetic company I had in the first dozen years of writing poetry, my formative years, was Roger White. It was ‘a company defined by letters,’ as Robert Creeley might have called it.(The American Poetry Review, Sept/Oct, 1999, p.18) He was there at the start from 1980 to 1992. In the years 1993 to 1999 the company I had was, for the most part, books: ‘a company defined by books,’ dozens and dozens of them. I found email, public reading in cafes, etc., publishing, unrewarding and, in the case of publishing, virtually impossible. Even though I was a successful entertainer in public and had been for years as a teacher, I found it increasingly a source of fatigue, a medium I had overworked, was overworked. After thirty years of having a listening audience as a teacher I had come to derive little enthusiasm from a form of interaction that resembled the role of a teacher. Even feedback from individuals, ranging as it did from glowing praise to outright indifference and disinterest, was generally not useful. My wife’s feedback I found most helpful. She was critical: ‘a company defined by affinity’.

More recently, I have found my first meaningful email relationship. It may lead to the eventual publication of my first chapbook as it has already to an enriching dialogue. I suppose this is essentially ‘company by email.’ Occasionally someone comes into my email horizon and a series of emails results that is quite satisfying. Email has its dangers, though; one must be sensitive to its use or one can be dumped with piles of garbage one doesn’t want to read. But as a medium it lends itself to the simple transmission of poetry.

 I: Richard Long says that artists are map-makers of human consciousness and of the spiritual world as well as measurers and describers of the natural world. Do you agree?

P: Everyone’s life is a map and everyone makes maps. When I was in my teens I bought a religio-philosophical map that has guided my journey for over forty years now. I make my own map from this master-map. This map is used as the basis for my exploration. My poetry reveals just how I use this map.

I: How are your ideas born, where does the energy come from and how do they develop into poems? Do you know what you’re doing? Are you perfectly secure in your writing?

P: Ideas for poetry are born of intuition, there’s a lightness right at the start, a quickness, a feeling of "connection, of yes, of aha, there’s something here, this is good, I like this." The poem is an effort at taking these feelings, this brightness and giving it form, development, substance, more than the airy-nothing, the vagueness, the potentiality which it is at that starting point and which it will be, if I don’t work on it and give it shape.

The energy comes from books, from experiences, from being in a room alone and being with others in social situations. I also liike to think it comes from "souls who have gone on." I have been praying for their assistance for several decades now. Baha'u'llah tells me they can help me. I believe Him. But I can not 'prove' they are helping me. I don't have any extrasensory impressions. Ideas come in a myriad of ways. The poem becomes a stopping point in my journey, a brief visible moment, a resting place in that same journey, a sustained note, a punctuation mark, a point I can look back on later in life in quite a different way than the normal memory trip. The whole exercise of writing the poem is usually quite spontaneous, quite fast, although on occasion the poem takes two or three hours to take form.

I feel a strong sense that I know what I am doing. I also have an equally strong sense of security, but not all the time. I have my vulnerabilities, my losses, my incapacities. They are legion. With each poem, or group of poems, I define the process more sharply, more definitively, more comprehensively. In writing poems I pay a lot of attention to what I am doing, to giving the process a description. I would say, looking back over what must be at least two million words now, that there is an ongoing poetic analysis of process, of content, of relationships between what I am doing, my writing, and myself, my Faith and my society which are the three corners of the geometric triangle that is my poetry.

The sense of security I feel is not arrogance, superiority, or self-righteousness. It is a composite feeling that is firstly inspired by my religious commitment, the faith that is built on this commitment, something that is reflected in all the appropriate protocols of piety I know as a faithful petitioner and practitioner. It is also a feeling that takes me out to sea, with my spirit wrung, with remorse on my wings, with an open wet world beyond which I do not always approach with courage and which I sometimes apporach with sadness. I am aware of my cowardice, for I am human.

I: Would you go so far as to see your own life as your poetry?

P: Yes, I often feel I am the path which is outlined in my poetry. It is a line of movement between the many places I have travelled, the many experiences I have had. It is a path, a line, conditioned by my thoughts, feelings, indeed everything that has happened to me. Not all of it is down on paper, of course. What is not there will disappear into oblivion and be no more, eventually, except perhaps traces in the lives of others I have known, traces that are for the most part not observable. What is there is my line; I walk my line. We all walk our own line; it is the easiest thing a human being can do to put our mark on a place—and the hardest! My words have a substantive actuality about them for my poems are autobiographical and I bring my society and my Faith into relation with my self. I don’t do this in all my poems but in many of them I do.

Every work of art, every poem, has its own mysterious sense of purpose about it, except for the works of those, I suppose, who see their work as devoid of purpose. This purpose comes partly from the traces of energy used in the making of the work, or perhaps this purpose uses these traces of energy. There is an energy connected with the spiritual path as defined in the Baha’i teachings. There is an energy in aloneness and its simplicity. Purpose is also connected with a withdrawal of energy and its defining, delimiting, function. Purpose also comes from the viewer’s own inner journey in relation to mine, to me, the provider of the poetry.

I try to keep all channels of sensitivity open, to experience things as keenly and immediately as possible and to explore as deeply into reality as I can. My poetry, in the end, should be a conveyor of this feeling ; for, as Pound once said, only emotion endures.

I: Tell us a little about some of your thoughts on poetry.

P: Writing poetry is like finding your place in a room, in a group, on a street, in a town, in a state, in a country, in the world. Finding your place, bringing the physical things around you into the right, the most suitable, relationship. The process is dynamic; so is the process of writing poetry. You have to find the right set of words and when you find it, you move on to another poem, to another part of life. It’s like making everything your friend, making it familiar, even when you’ve never seen it before. You do the same with people, so you are comfortable wherever you go in the world, as long as you’re not freezing or roasting. The process of writing poetry is a poeticizing of your world, of a translation of the familiarization and the estrangement, yes, estrangement, because you can’t win it all. You are going to hurt, be hurt, feel alone, afraid, joyful, worn out, utterly fed-up with existence, et cetera.

I: Do you always feel happy when writing poetry?

P: Most of the time it is an exercise in concentrated pleasure. Effort, my life, my world, come together in a pleasing mix. This is what keeps me at it day after day, year after year, ten years of quite concentrated work, after a dozen years of more casual encounters. Also, by the time I had started writing poetry seriously, I was tired of a lot of things in life. Poetry was clearly a new lease on life. I’m happy and relaxed when I write; occasionally, when something has got under my skin and I’m feeling sad, despondent, unhappy, or whatever, writing poetry is like a conduit for this negativity. I usually work it out, like someone else might do in a physical workout. I do it also because it has deep meaning to me; the most profound, sublime feelings come to me when I work in the privacy of my chamber. I hope this sublimity comes through to the reader. If it does that is a bonus; thusfar I have not heard about it happening in others who read my poetry

Ron Price

8 December 1999

 _____________________________________

 A MANIFESTATION OF BARBARISM?

In December 1989 The Simpsons aired for the first time on television. In the last 12 years, 1989 to 2001, this program and its characters have become an institution, a mass phenomenon. I was first introduced to the program by a class of 18 year old boys in a Tafe College in Perth about 1990. In the dozen years since its inception, I have met people who love The Simpsons and people who hate it, appauled they are by what they see as its low moral tone. It was with interest that I came across an article yesterday "Simpsons at the Gates: Intimations of the Coming Barbarism" located at The Simpsons Website. The author, Keith Gessen, makes many points about The Simpsons in his article. He talks about stories we tell in order to live. We order, he says, the anarchy of our experience into useful narratives.

Glessen refers to Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind and Bloom's concern at the collapse, the irrelevance, of the referenceable reality of the classical canon of western literature, the once critical provider of our stories. Glessen sees The Simpsons, among a host of other programs, as part of a great devouring of the tradition of western culture by means of idiocy and videocy or, as Gore Vidal puts it, having laughing gas pumped into lounge-rooms every night to the humour and delight of millions and billions. A plethora of cultural material has entered society since the beginning of 'the Kingdom of God on Earth' in 1953 when TV was beginning its conquering road; and since the unveiling of the Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1919 when radio was about to spread its sounds to every corner of th eplanet.

One thread among the trillions of threads of the billions of garments in the current cultural provided by these electronic media and their melange is the Baha'i Faith and its story. -Ron Price with thanks to Keith Glessen,"Simpsons at the Gates: Intimations of the Coming Barbarism," Internet, 13 October 2001.

We were just experiencing some of

that longed for entry-by-troops, signs

of an acceleration yet to come....when

We were just experiencing our first

heightened expectations from the

architectural design just adopted

for the Terraces and the realization

of the Guardian's vision along the

path of the kings.....when.........

We were just experiencing those

changes in attitude in the early stages

of the fourth epoch and thought to

ourselves: perhaps, peace was breaking

out.....at last........when.............

We were also experiencing the verve, the vision

and versatility of the International Teaching Centre

with warm admiration......when.............

As we entered the second half of the then

Six Year Plan,¹ what some thought to be a

manifestation of barbarism entered our culture.

It insinuated itself into the hearts of millions

with a laugh and a chuckle, very clever....perhaps

the barbarians had finally arrived.

Were their names The Simpsons?

 Surely not? Surely......when??

Unlike the vast majority of my poems which are written with a light heart and with the serious but pleasureable pace of life within me, this poem is written with a heavy feeling as if one of life’s arrows had pierced the normal shield that protects me from various aspects of life’s travail. And so I put up my especial shield of poetry which satisfies the craving of my mind to react adequately to life.-Ron Price with thanks to J.C. Powys, In Spite Of: A Philosophy for Everyman, Village Press 1974(1953), p.289.

I’ve cried:

far more than ever.

I’ve prayed:

more than in months.

I’ve walked

and thought.

I’ve talked

and done everything

in my repertoire

and this poem

is my last defence

against innermost turmoil,

dark melanchology

and deep brooding misery.

It’s just a more extreme form

of the soar-plunge,

the bi-polar tendency,

which is part of my life

right to the central core

and poetry will always be flawed,

because flesh is flawed

and we know that:

Of course, you will never be lost to me,

my dearest man.

I struggle here in this poem to ease the pain,

the perplexity and the complexity of it all.

If I could just have more of that self-forgetfulness

it would all be gone and time would perform

its great healing walk.

 ¹ Shakespeare, Sonnet 64.

Ron Price

21 June 1999

______________________

This poem was written while sitting in a parking lot behind the Park Heights apartments on Subiaco Road, opposite Kitchener Park, while the football fans streamed out of an afternoon footy game at the Subiaco Oval. I was resting in the middle of moving my son and my step-daughter into their new flat in Cottesloe, on the eve of the winter solstice. My wife and I had gone out to buy some hot food to help keep us going on one of those all-day jobs.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 3:30 pm, 20 June 1999.

The birds still sing,

white clouds float by

in a sea of clear blue,

the Sunday arvo footy¹game

still packs-em-in by the thousands,

although there aren’t many places

to buy a pie at 3:30 in the afternoon.

A normal winter freshness is in the air

and the sun, intense and warm,

sets the world aglow.

You’d never know it was the

darkest hour before the dawn

in this age of transition, perhaps

the darkest hour in the history

of humankind’s several civilizations.

 Ron Price

20 June 1999

 ¹ arvo is an Australian expression for ‘afternoon’; footy is a vernacular expression for ‘Australian football.’

_____________________________

Jack Lemon died today. He was a famous actor of the twentieth century. He was born in 1925. The year I pioneered in 1962 he played in Days of Wine and Roses. He came into prominence during the Ten Year Crusade and was active in the film industry for over half a century in more than one film per year. The persona he developed was of a humorous character usually with some weakness or fault. Like so many of the actors and actresses in the first eighty years of the Formative Age, Jack Lemon served as part of the backdrop, for Baha'is who liked watching films, of the texture of the Formative Age.

Lemon was part of a system that projected a world, through thematic and social conventions, values and institutions, that seemed natural and self-evident. That world habituted its audiences to accept the basic premises of the social order and its ideology. But, beginning in the 1950s/1960s, the social consensus both in society and in film began to 'come apart.' Jack Lemon and his films were part of this questioning of society's dominant myths and values.¹ -Ron Price with thanks to "The Jim Leher Hour," SBS TV, 5-6 pm, 29 June 2001; and ¹ M. Ryan and D. Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1990, p.3.

People began to question,

if they had not already,

the dominant ways of doing things

during those Ten Year Crusade years.

That most wonderful

which appeared in the world,

that inception of the Kingdom

of God on earth¹

was blowing onto cinema screens

and transforming our world,

little did we know.

Your work, Jack, back then,

back when I had just taken-off

into my pioneering world,

your Days of Wine and Roses,²

was more than part of some

creeping leftism.³

It was part of a permeation

of light to the entire planet.¹

1 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p.351.

Ron Price

12 October 1996