The writings of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Baha, often referred to as the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and the writings of Their successors, Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice make up what I refer to as "the Baha’i writings." The Baha’i writings and now a burgeoning commentary on them provide an inspiration, a quintessential inspiration, for the poetic writing and commentary in this section of my website. The interview below places this inspirational material, this body of spiritual writing, in what I hope is a relevant context for readers. But first some poetry that places the Baha’i writings in a personal, a contemporary and, clearly, a varied perspective.

There's been a rise to greatness

in our age: a pleasure, for some,

in a cunning tenacity of mind

even while suffering from life.

Of course, it's not new,

this resilence, this animal toughness,

this persistence, this endurance

of men like Dostoevsky, of Badi,

TO MENTION ONLY TWO.

This over-flowing vitality,

this explosion and excess of health,

this intensified reality, sensibility,

temperament, faculty, capacity,

something titanic, some wholeness

of conception, this outpouring effect

is discussed and analysed....and, then,

beyond:

some power, some influence

which shatters the cup of speech,

as engineers fail to dam the sea,

creates new categories,

new faculties for the mind,

but somehow, strangely, I find

after all these years of holding

this power in my hands,

my critical faculties prevent me

from even approaching

its outpouring effect:¹

greater and beyond.

holy dust at the centre

of nine concentric circles

and a retreat of deathless splendour

where the souls of two

manifestations of God reside,

where a tranquil calm

and revivifying breath

inspire volumes with

unnumbered exhortations²

and revolutionizing principles.

 ¹ The poetic starting point for Tolstoy was "the peasant." (See Ernest J. Simmons, Introduction to Tolstoy's Writings, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968, p.7.)

This is the fifth interview in fifteen months. It was begun in 1997 and completed in 2001. Like all the interviews I have recorded, they were simulated, choreographed, produced, directed and written by this writer. This particular interview, the fifth in the series, resulted from reading a series of interviews with Edward Albee over the twenty-five year period 1961 to 1987 and published in Conversations With Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin, University of Mississippi Press, London,1988. My knowing that these were historic days, days of infinite preciousness in the brief span of time before the end of the century, days of urgent and inescapable responsibility as I strove toward my God-promised destiny in the midst of a spiritual drama,¹ provided a motivational matrix for the comments that follow. The part of the interview that took place in 2001 drew on an interview with V.S. Naipaul on "Books and Writing," ABC Radio National, 16 September 2001. ¹Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1997.

_______________________________________________

Questionner(Q):Are you conscious of influences on your poetry?

Price(P): Yes and no. My religion, my reading, ‘big’ events in my life, people(family, friends, associations) are each and all immense influences on what I write. Given the time and the inclination I’m sure I could point to literally hundreds of poems that have direct links to one of these four influences. That’s the ‘yes’ part. The ‘no’ part would go something like this: often I begin a poem and I have no idea how it will end and I have no idea just where it came from, the germ of the idea. It’s like the birth of a baby and you did not know you were even pregnant. Keats put it well in a letter he wrote in 1820 and which I often quote, or paraphrase. Once a poet gets to a certain intellectual maturity etherial finger-paintings can be engendered, voyages of conception he calls them, which arise out of the most mundane experiences.

Q: Are there any serious problems with the interview method?

P: The viewer or the reader who comes across a transcript must keep in mind that answers change. Truth is relative. Individuals change. Ways of thinking about things go through processes of complete overhauling. As Edward Albee put it in an interview in 1980 with Peter Adam, an interviewee finds as he is giving an answer, one he has given many a time, and in mid-stream he realizes he does not believe that answer any longer, or it is just not true. The interviewer also has to keep in mind that we all have many selves, many ‘positions’, we are many things to many different people. I find a position, a point of view, evolves with each poem; it’s an organic process.

Also, the concept that the spark of truth comes from the clash of differing opinions means that the interviewee often will play the devil’s advocate just to generate that truth spoken of above. A sociologist with an interaction perspective might say something like "a sense of self results from the process of interaction". Putting this a little differently, he might say the interviewer strongly influences the way the interviewee comes across. There are many things that affect an apparently neutral or objective interview. There’s a whole literature available now on the subject of interviewing. I often play the devil’s advocate game when my wife and I are in company. My wife used to find it quite annoying, but she’s used to it now. We’ve been married for 22 years now.

_________________

Q: Do you prefer the ambiguities of life or the factual in your poetry?

P: You really need both in poetry. They compliment each other over and over again. As Carl Jung says most of the really important things in life don’t admit to answers. It’s better that way, he argues, they give us something to work on right to the end of it all. They help us grow. The endless analysis of issues helps to fill life’s spaces in with challenges, enigmas, paradoxes that the mind can play with forever; for so much of the everyday is factual and beyond analysis, the routine, the sensory, better just enjoyed without too much thought.

Q: Do you take any particular "position" on any particular philosophy or troublesome social issue like starvation, asylum seekers, or the situation in Ireland?

P: Generally I have a strong disinclination to take up specific positions on a multitude of social issues. I find social issues generally are quite complex and the 'yes-no' or the 'this-or-that-side,' the quixotic tourament of emotional enthusiasms, is generally too simplistic to take a side. My poetry has a great deal to say about various philosophies and some broad social issues of gender, race and justice and I discuss them in several of these interviews. There are a multitude of questions and issues in the world, some of which my religion has quite strong or specific teachings on and, as part of my repertoire of beliefs, I support the official view held as part of my religion. But insofar as the multitude of concerns in that quixotic journament of events that come before us daily I often have not the least idea what 'the answer' is. I often have 'views' or 'thoughts' but not 'answers' like some kind of instant coffee; and my poetry does not attempt to deal with most of these 'news items' that flash before us and are gone. Poetry is a very intimate touch, a sensitive expression, of a language. It offers quite intimate keynotes and perspectives but it does not attempt to offer systematic answers to endless complex questions.

Q: The Trinidadian born writer of great success, V.S. Naipaul, once said in an interview that when he started out to write he had a blank piece of paper in front of him and a blank in his mind. He knew he wanted to write but he did not know what to write. He said writing had always been difficult for him and it was just a matter of time before he burnt out. How would you describe your experience with writing and your attitude to some of what Naipaul says here?

P: The first time I remember wanting to write something outside the necessary requirements of school, I was in my early twenties. And yes, I found it difficult. But it got easier after four years of university study and several years of teaching; the process got much easier. I always knew that I wanted to write about the Baha'i Faith. I think it took about twenty years, though, say, 1964 to 1984, before I was able to write about the Baha'i Faith, about issues in society in relation to it or, indeed, about my own experience with anything I would now describe as success.

Naipaul also defines civilization in terms of the capacity of individuals to stand outside themselves and evaluate their lives and to do this on a daily basis. By the 1990s this became the core of my poetry, this introspective quality, this examining of life. The business of burning out was something that worried Emerson. I burnt out several times before writing came to dominate my life. This was due to my bi-polar illness. I came back from the abyss each time. I tend to think the same will be true of writing. Fatigue, immense fatigue sets in when I write, just about daily, but rejuvenation occurs and I can start again. Inevitably, of course, the whole thing, the writing, will end. As the Bab says, "we go into a hole for those who speak no more."

Q: To stay with Naipaul for a moment: he says in that same interview, that writing is partly a matter of gathering the strands of life experiences, the details that form those strands, into some statement of truth. This is what it means to transform our experience, to create our world. There is nobility in this process, he says, and writing is a talent, a divine fire. What do you think of these themes, these ideas of Naipaul?

P: Naipaul puts the nature of writing very well. It dertainly is an accurate statement of what I am doing and trying to do in my efforts to write. And yes, it does transform my experience; it does create my world; it recreates my world. Everything Naipaul says here I experience in my writing and is part of my philosophy of writing. Naipaul also said he had always been gripped by what people said. It was the basis of his intimacy with people. I, too, for many years felt this 'conversational grip,' but after thirty years of a great deal of talking and listening, the grip was loosened. And now as I approach the age of sixty I'm not interested in loging forty hours a week of this interactive process, a little here and there and that's all, thank you. I have not got burnt out, just singed at the edges. Now I pour my fires in writing instead of endless chatting.

_________________________ 

Q: Some literary critics say that what characterizes American literature is a preoccupation with Americanness; whereas the preoccupation of European literature is 'man's life in society.' What do you think is the chief preoccupation of your poetry?

P: I'd say it is a combination of the above two positions, only I'd put it a little differently. I am unquestionably preoccupied with the Baha'i Faith and what it means to be a Baha'i. I am also concerned about man in society and so much of my poetry deals with content that comes from science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, religion, history, literature, the act of writing, biography, autobiography, non-partisan politics, landscape, community...goodness where do I stop?

Q: What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

P: I don’t consider writing as work. I like to read, eat, drink, sleep, walk; I actually like my job as a teacher; I enjoy relationships, some of the time; I enjoy shopping, although my wife would never believe that; I enjoy driving in air-conditioning on a hot day; I like swimming, sauna-bathing, good grief, I could go on and on. "The usual stuff," as the American playwright Edward Albee put it when he was asked the same question.

Q: Why did you stop sending your poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library?

P: After sending nearly 3000 poems in less than five years--1992-1997--I felt a little pretentious that so much of my work was being stored there and me not being either famous or rich. I felt I had expressed my enthusiasm to a sufficient degree for the marvellous developments on the Arc and it was time to leave it off, so to speak. I got the idea of sending my poetry to other places and this is what I plan to do since it is really impossible to get my poetry published at the various publishing houses around the Baha’i world. Then, I returned to sending poetry to the BWCL from 1998 to 2000 inclusive and, after sending some 5000 poems in total, I ended the process.

Q: Do you think much of your audience as you write?

P: They drift somewhere out on the perifery. Our society is largely a film and television culture with poetry just about irrelevant, ‘cauterized, coterized’. Millions write the stuff, on the net, in little magazines, probably more poetry is being written than in all history. But, like the theatre, it’s not mainstream, although when I read Pamela Brown’s description of poetry as ‘close to popular culture’, I understand what she’s driving at.¹ My concern is with the reality, the honesty, the poem I’m writing. It’s quite an introspective process. It’s not about popularity. I’m in there but the audience hardly exists, except in a posthumous sense. I like to think what I write may be valued, as W.H. Auden put it once, by some future generation. Time will tell.

_______________________ 

Q: The Polish poet Cszeslaw Milosz said that poetry should be written rarely and reluctantly under unbearable duress and only in the hope that good spirits choose us for their instruments. Your poetry would seem to testify to the opposite of this philosophy?

P: I like the last part of the idea. I like the concept of being a channel for good spirits beyond the grave, although it is always difficult to know for sure when you are serving in such a capacity. As far as the frequency of writing is concerned, I think that is quite an ideosyncratic issue. The opus of each poet is different; the published portion varies from virtually nothing to many volumes; for still others, like Emily Dickinson, it all gets published after their death. For still others it happens, like Keats, when they are young, like a flood; or like me, in middle age, another flood. In some ways I think poetry chooses you; it is not forced. I think the confluence of the death of Roger White and the anchorage I found here in Perth after years, two decades, of moving from town to town and job to job allowed my poetry to find a home in this world.

I must say, though, that Milosz has put his finger on part of the essence of poetry-the pain of life, the suffering in human existence. But this is only part of the story. There is also the public pain in this dark heart of an age of transition, as the Guardian calls our times. There is also the joy, the adventure, the knowledge and understanding and so much, much more.

Q: Do you plan any of your poetry? Do you worry about where the next one will come from?

P: Ralph Waldo Emerson used to worry about the ending of his creativity. I come across this idea from time to time in reading about other poets, not frequently, but occasionally. The only time I worried significantly about creativity was when I used in argue with myself about taking lithium which seemed to have an effect on my creative edge. That was in the 1980s, by the ‘90s I did not concern myself at all. If I lose interest in writing poetry, I will probably miss it because it has been such a source of pleasure, for at least five years now. One can’t predict this sort of thing in life any more than one can plan the next poem. Poems seem to pop out of some intuitive, cognitive-emotional zone. The only planning that takes place is while I write but, even then, the whole thing usually comes pretty fast, like the rushing current of a river. It is very cathartic.

I don’t have time to worry about the process, although occasionally I agonize over a phrase, an ending, a word. I’ve been averaging a little under two poems a day for five years. I’m awake for about 16 hours a day and two poems does not sound like much: a poem every eight hours. But given the fact that I’m a teacher, a parent, a husband and am involved in the local Baha’i community, I would not want the process to be any faster. When I retire in a few years perhaps the production rate will increase. I’m not sure who controls the assembly line. I have a central role and certainly push alot of buttons. Perhaps, if the stuff is not very good I can blame Ford!

Q: Gwen Harwood the Australian poet who died two years ago in Hobart said she did not think about her position in the literary field; she did not intellectualize about her writing. What sort of attitude do you have to your writing?

P: I don’t really have a position in the literary field, not yet anyway. I am a solitary person after I leave my various professional and public responsibilities. I am not against the idea of a public definition, fame or wealth and if it comes my way that will be fine, but I don’t seek it out. One of the reasons I have put these interviews together, though, is that I think about what I write. I seek out a sense of definition; I want to be able to put into words what I’m trying to do. It is part of being articulate, part of the autobiographical process. But it is not just an autobiographical surge of the spirit. I think my writing is partly what one analyst of narrative defined as narratives purposes: self-assertion, self-transcendence, to exercise my skills and to give meaning to the moment.

Gwen calls herself a Romantic. She said she thought it was "a nice thing to be called."² I’ve always thought of W.B. Yeats as the last of the Romantics, although certain Romantic tendencies linger: the desire to reform humanity, messianic interests. I have such interests. It would be difficult for a Baha’i not to have them. These interviews express a certain intellectualization of what I do, where I’m at. My writing is also a bi-product of tranquillity, emotions recollected in tranquillity as Wordsworth put in 200 years ago. After three decades of the hectic, the problems of maturity, marriage and career I feel a certain peace, what one poet called the golden years.

_______________________

Q: Why do you write poetry when you are obviously an effective communicator in your profession as a teacher? I would have thought you’d had enough ‘communicating’ at the end of the day.

P: Yes, for twenty years, beginning in 1973, I’ve seen myself as an effective communicator in the classroom. Student evaluations of my work also support my own view and I enjoy the teaching process immensely. But I have found communication in my two marriages has not been easy. Also the general difficulty I have had, and the rest of the Baha’i community in the West, in communicating the Baha’i teachings to the people we contact each day—and the importance given by the Baha’i community to this teaching process—creates a pressure that the Baha’i lives with year after year. I think writing poetry has partly been a response to this pressure and the tensions in my two marraiges over more than twenty-five years. I also read an average of a book a day and have for years and my mind just gets so full of stuff-in addition to the endless output of the media and what one gets from the seemingly endless conversations with people-that I need some outlet. Ideas build up, float around, scratch about. I should say something, too, about Rilke in closing because so many things he said in his ‘advice to poets’ explain the reasons I write; perhaps another time.

Q: Why the sudden outburst in poetry in your late 40s and early 50s?

P: I’d written 150,000 words of published essays in Katherine when I wrote for newspapers in the Territory. I’d written enough academic essays to sink a ship, although I still did not have a Master’s Degree. I’d tried writing sci-fi, but ran out of ideas and found it too demanding. I think I got to 40,000 words one summer holiday; I even went off my lithium in the hope that the creative edge would be sharper. But I found the exercise too onerous. A lady in California, Betty Conow, who had edited some of my essays on the request of Roger White, suggested I write poetry. I had been doing a little poetry writing, perhaps two dozen poems a year from mid-1981 to early 1992. Then the surge started. In the last four months of 1992 I wrote 75 poems; in 1993, 700 poems; in 1994, 708 poems; from 1995 to April 1997 another 1500 poems. I have tried to answer this question in other interviews in other ways. This is yet another stab at it.

Q: Would you say your poetry is strongly ‘message oriented’?

P: It’s mostly didactic, directly or indirectly. I’ve got something to say about a thousand-and-one things. There are probably several major themes which I’ve commented on before in other interviews(Volumes 17, 20, 21 and 24) I try to be humorous when it comes naturally; I try to contextualize the message in history, in my own life and ideas. But I don’t worry too much about how people are going to react. I did in the early years of my writing and I think the worry was useful because I wound up simplifying my poetry so people could understand it and, in the main, I achieved this. I’ve had several public readings of my poetry in Fremantle and I was well received. I felt like I was in a classroom. Of course, not everyone is going to understand what you write and there will often be interpretations of your words that you had no intention of putting in. But I think you have to let it go, let it travel on its own, wild and free so to speak.

___________________________ 

Q: How would you label yourself as a poet?

P: I don’t like labels. I’m a Baha’i who writes poetry, or should I say I’m trying to be a Baha’i and I try to write poetry. I find the term ‘poet’ a little pretentious. Even with the terms ‘husband’ and ‘father’ I sense a gap. They are roles you only partially fill. Being a poet is not a career position, a career move, part of a trajectory. It’s an occasional experience. It is not loaded with expectations; you don’t have to prove anything. Occasionally when I read in public I feel like a performer, an entertainer. The label ‘poet’ is not one I wear comfortably. In some ways writing is more what you hear than what you write. Labels tie things down too much; I want to savour the experience in all its complexity and expansiveness in a living world. A poem can not be summed up in a glance, any more than a painting. It needs time and patience. The more time and patience, the more labels disappear. I don’t like to see a break between the aesthetic, the poetic, the sociological, the historical, the psychological. The whole of existence is multi-dimensional, interdisciplinary, incredibly complex and utterly simple all at once. It can’t be reduced to some label, although I like Judith Rodriguez’s definition of poetry as "the habit of squeezing for the essence."³ If other people call me a poet I'm happy to accept the term.

Poetry has a long history now of movements, positions, ideas, approaches, styles. It’s like many other disciplines there is alot going on in them when you start to go below the surface, when you dig a little deeper. I’m teaching a course now in sociological theory; I used to teach philosophy. I took an eclectic apporach to these subjects and I do the same with poetry. 

Q: You have been asked many times abouth the influence of the Baha’i Faith on your poetry. Could you answer this question again?

P: Some poets are ambivalent about the influence of religion. Australian poet, Fay Zwicky, thinks of religion as one great confidence trick, for example. Other poets are clearly Christian in some way or other; sometimes the infleunce is obvious; sometimes it’s indirect. Sometimes poets talk about how Taoism or Buddhism influences their perspectives. Anyone who reads my poetry to any extent will know that the Baha’i teachings, its history, its organization, its philosophy, et cetera are manifest again and again in my poetry. In fact, I would say if you are not interested in the Baha’i Faith you would have to cut away, what, fifty to ninety per cent of my poetry? So much of what I write is inspired by, a comment on, a wrestle with, some aspect of this Cause that I have belonged to for nearly forty years.

__________________ 

Q: How do you cope with all the personalities that come into your life?

P: I try to cut off when I’m finished with the ‘duty’ side of my life. I’m a little like Keats in the sense that I absorb alot of my environment when I’m out in it. It’s like being fully turned on, ultra-receptive; things impinge, sometimes quite acutely. So I try to turn that whole world off and read and write. This way I can control the input totally. I like to think this will be a permanent diet when I retire. For now I can only get a few weeks, a few days, a few hours, of solitude. I desire invisibility for the next dip into the jungle of life and all its complexity and stimulation. When I have had humanity in and out of every corner of my being, then I seek silence, solitude. It’s then that I read about poetry, but I rarely read poetry itself. I want to listen, or perhaps find, my own voice; the voice of others gets in the road, or it’s just plain uninteresting. But some poetry you want in your head so you read and reread it: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats, Dawe, et cetera.

Q: You read your poetry at the July 1997 Conference on Global Governance in Perth; it was also read in New Zeland at a Baha'i Studies Conference in 1998 and again at the conference on Creative Inspiration in Melbourne in 1999. You have also been published in a dozen magazines. Could you say something about this public face?

P: I’ve given many Baha’is a poem or two, or more. I’ve read a poem several times at a Feast or a deepening. I’ve written many essays about poetry, especially Roger White’s. I’ve got nearly 3000 of my poems at the Baha’i World Centre Library. I’ve read publicly, as I’ve said before, at a cafe in Fremantle. After perhaps as many as five or six years of reading poetry(1994-1999), I retired to a less public profile, or should I say I read my poetry less often in public, but I still write it and I try to get it published as often as I can. I rarely read because I find it limits the text of my poetry; it feels too oriented to display, to entertainment. It must be if it will be heard and enjoyed. It limits the reader’s reaction by imposing the author’s view, although being a teacher I’m used to doing that. You have to when you’re on the stage with an audience. I’m not a performance poet, although on those occasions when I have been ‘performing’, it has been quite successful. I enjoy pleasing people but, after nearly thirty years of teaching on a thousand platforms, it does not have the turn-on it used to do. I prefer the page, the book, kept, preserved. I feel a little like the great educator Carl Rogers who said after he had taught for several years that he thought teaching got in the road of learning.

I think my general lack of interest in self-promotion, voyeurism as some call it, begins in the desire for solitude. I'm not interested in being a personality. I've done this for nearly thirty years as a teacher and lecturer. Public reading tends to put a portrait around the personality. Tagore or White would have preferred a focus on the poetry not the personality. Some publishers prefer it that way too. They don’t even put photographs in with the poetry. Maybe in the next five years of writing poetry I may find myself with a more public profile. We shall see.

_______________________ 

Q: Thank you again for your time. I wish you well in the years ahead and to many more years of writing poetry.

P: Thank you; I hope the buzz continues to enrich my middle years.

 Ron Price

September 2001

 INUNDATION

This poem exists as part of my need, the need, to assert the poetic enterprise against the cinematic one, the entire electric aesthetic of the electronic media, the entertainment industry and its staggering proportions with an attached fantasy life ranging from the sublime to the grotesque and a consumer's paradise of legitimate and forbidden pleasures. Poetry must clear the ground for its particular pleasures and not attempt to compete with the eternal beings on the screen who are like the Greek gods of old and are like us, but so much larger than life, filling in a meaning where often little exists in empty lives. Our culture is dominantly visual and the ground for poetry is, it would seem, a small patch. -Ron Price with thanks to Laurence Goldstein, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, p.173.

Film took off¹ after the Sun set

and TV² with the beginning of

our International Teaching Plan

leaving poetry with the small place

in the sun which it had long enjoyed,

a bright spot right here: like a garden

of roses, pearls in an ocean,

leaves on a tree, rays of one sun,

endless bounties of inner significance

and delicate wines of the spirit.³

In this snow-white spot

where poetry is read, in silence,

where eternity sweeps around me

like a sea lapping me with sounds,

I am left with an inundation.

It came from The Sea.