[RonPrice]

This is the 20th interview in nine years and the first since late in 2002. This interview was stimulated by reading some interviews in the poetry magazine called Poets and Writers and it was conducted over a period of about five weeks. In the last two years I have created and developed two volumes of interviews with poets and writers. These volumes serve as my archive for interviews with poets. There are dozens, no hundreds, of interviews available on the internet and in the last two years I’ve read many of them. I’ve been reading interviews for, perhaps, forty years. But this focus on interviews with poets is, at the most, ten years in the making: 1994-2004. I think this is part of my reason for continuing this interview process.

In interviews one frequently has the opportunity to reflect on what one is writing, compare and contrast it with the thoughts of other writers and poets and get as precise a view as possible of what one is writing, how one is going about it and why. The interview, simulated or otherwise, gives me the opportunity to synthesize my ideas, deal with questions and issues I have not dealt with before quite as specifically and gain fresh perspectives on the writing process. Interviews are also useful for other writers and poets to provide insights into the creative process in personal terms. I hope some readers find these words helpful.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 18th to December 25th, 2004.

Interviewer:(I) I understand your poetry writing has fallen off somewhat in the last two years, 2003-2004. Why is that?

Price:(P) I wrote an 1000 page autobiography and spent six to eight months posting dozens and dozens of pieces of poetry and prose on internet sites. I’ve still managed to put out three booklets of poetry since the last interview in late 2002 and I’m working on a 4th with some fifty poems thusfar in this new collection, a collection which may take me over the 6000 poem mark. The work goes on.

I: Do you have a program, an outline, something you are aiming at in your poetry?

P: Yes and no. My poetry is its own program. It speaks for itself. I also try and take the hermetically sealed autobiographical poetic mode and give it a good mix and shake with the historical, the psychological, the sociological, the spiritual, so much that exists in the world of the social sciences and the humanities. That is quite a conscious part of my program, my aim, my purpose in writing. I try to make use of what is known and give a fresh take on it by means of juxtaposition, blending, contrast, comparing, mixing, et cetera, and take what is not known and give readers a sense of surprise. I create, in the process, what you might call my own personal aesthetic, my voice. I define my heritage, my historical inheritance, my life and my community. Some readers can come with me and others, inevitably, can’t relate to my voice. Such is life. Such a situation is as common as air; it’s true in poetry and in interpersonal relationships.

I: A memoir, a poem, presents an opportunity to think, to remember, to put into motion the engine of imagination—it’s revisable or at least it should be so. Is that a summary of much that you have been writing lately?

P: Yes. I could say a great deal more, but the short answer is ‘yes.’

I: The poet Richard Howard said in a recent interview that “one writes the way one has to.” He also made the point, talking about his own writing, that in recent years the manner of his prose has simplified and become a little stronger and more direct. He said he was pleased with that process, that direction to his writing. He also said that he thought his poetry was getting a little better with the years. This is Howard’s description of how his writing is coming along, how it is changing. Are these sentiments helpful to you in any way, to help you reflect on your own work over the years?

P: Well, there certainly seems some inner imperative when one writes. I’d have to agree with Howard there. I think, too, that my writing has got simpler with the years, both my poetry and prose. I find it hard to evaluate what I write. Something inner comes out, but whether it is good, bad or indifferent seems to be largely defined by the readers and there are such different views on that. In the end the term quality is a bit of an enigma. Some of the joy in what one writes lies, as W.B. Yeates put it, outside oneself and some of the joy lies within and other stuff is found in the mix between the two.

I: What constitutes a "failed" poem to you?

P: I’m not sure I could define or describe a failed poem, although I can easily say some things about poems that move me, that have special meaning and ones that don’t. There are some of my poems I particularly enjoy when I reread them and others which don’t seem to give me the sense that I am saying something interesting, unique, persuasive, provocative. I wrote one today, on this the last day of this interview. It was based on the movie The Way We Were. I even had my wife help me after the first draft. I rarely do this, but we shared a common experience and I thought she could be helpful. And she was. But the poem was still flat and ultimately not very satisfactory.

There are several internet sites at which I am asked to give an evaluation of someone else’s poetry. What gives me the sense of a fine poem that someone else wrote is when I feel the person is saying something new or any one or mix of those adjectives I referred to above. Poetry which says stuff you know only too well, poetry which is banal, trite, commonplace or, on the other hand, is so complicated you can’t understand it--that is poor poetry or failed poetry. It’s a poem that fails to attract my attention or give me pleasure.

I: Would you recommended that poets give their craft the same attention and discipline as, say, a violinist or a ballerina? What does discipline and attention in a poet look like? How do you "practice" poetry?

P: There are probably as many ways of practicing poetry as there are poets. Some poets don't think they have to take themselves as seriously as other artists do. They think that just because they feel something, they can turn that feeling into a poem. They have not got a sense of apprenticing themselves to their art. They need to be like violinists and ballerinas as well as carpenters and mechanics. Poets have to keep their tools sharp, immerse ourselves in good and great poems, good and great literature, be ready to respond to the life’s stimuli and be sensitive enough to be stimulated in the first place. The poet’s world is words, not paint and visual forms, or needle and thread or clay or cloth. One’s heart and head has got to be full or, at least it helps to have something going on in these departments.

I wrote poems from 1962 to 1992 and, looking back a dozen years later in 2004, I have a sense of those first thirty years serving me as apprentice-poet. For the sort of poetry I write I need to draw on a vast range of print: books, articles, essays, poetry, magazines; much from the electronic media: film, TV, radio, CDs, et cetera and a good deal of everyday life. I was nearly 50, the middle of middle-age, before I took my first steps as a serious poet.

I: Do you go out and look for experience to write about? You know the way some writers do: they search for the weird and the wild, the strange and the amusing so they can put the experience on paper.

P: By the time, as I say, that I began writing in any serious way, I was nearly fifty and by the time I retired from full-time employment and had the time to write in any full-time sense I was in my late fifties and I had had enough experience of the strange, the weird and the wild for a lifetime, for my lifetime. I wanted to stop having experience of that kind. I felt no need to travel, to have deep and meaningful relationships; I could get that from the print and electronic media if I wanted to see the bizarre, the eccentric, the romantic, the unusual. I was beginning to feel old. Retirement is not a word I back away from; rather, it is a word that aptly describes my current state: I have retired from so many things in life that filled my days to overflowing: teaching, meetings, endless chats/conversations, going-out, going somewhere, going here, going there, worrying about not enough sex, not enough money, not enough fun/excitement, et cetera.

I: We have discussed this question before, but how would you characterize the position of poetry in these earliest years of the new millennium?

P: I think Dana Gioia put it well in her recent essay in The Hudson Review(Spring, 2003). The average amount of time people spend with print is much less than an hour a day, with several hours devoted to the electronic media. In the last several decades there has been a shift from print to electronic media as the medium for information and entertainment--and poetry. Gioia defined the shift as ‘the end of print culture.’ I would not be as bleak. I think there is a lot of print being consumed, not much of it is poetry. Celebrities, personalities and human drama are all the rage in the media and, if poetry gets a mention at all, it is usually in the context of these rages, these themes. But, as Gioia emphasizes, the bulk of the new poetry today is not literary poetry but popular; it is oral: rap, cowboy poetry, slam poetry and the poetry of song, says Gioia; even advertising and sociology could be added as poetry, if one can believe some critics. And much of it is to be found in the oral media, the electronic media. This oral poetry is a big money spinner and is found in cafes, bars, on TV and the radio. It courts the public and the emphasis is on entertainment.

I: Where do you fit into this new mix?

P: I started writing poetry, first casually and then seriously, when this picture I have just described got going and became what it is today over the last several decades. My work, my poetry, is not part of this popular poetic culture, although I did play with this culture on its edges with several poetry readings beginning in the 1960s and 1970s continuing into the ‘90s, with playing the guitar, with sing-alongs, with listening to popular music for 40 years before writing poetry seriously. My work is predominantly written not oral. It fitted into the post-secondary and secondary educational scene where I worked for decades. Whatever reputation I have--and it is quite small--has been made in print and, for the most part, on the internet not in academia and not in the popular culture.

If I want to fit my poetry into popular culture I will have to make a move back into the oral domain or write about other topics. If I do, this will be at some time in the future in performance, oral, poetry. If I am able I may get into an audio-visual and visual poetry. How successful I will be at engaging a wider public remains to be seen. I am certainly not going after it these days.

I: The poet Anthony Hecht once said that W.H. Auden’s poetry infused the public domain with the private. Do you think this is an important part of your poetry?

P: Without a doubt. That is part of the core of what my autobiographical poetry is all about. I also infuse the contemporary with the historical, the simple and the complex. I mix the pot alot. Poetry, for me, is about words and ideas inspite of Mallarme’s view to the contrary.

I: Since you have written so much poetry--some 6000 poems in the last 25 years--several million words, how would you categorize it?

P: I’ve always liked Auden’s fourfold division which he outlined in the preface to his 1945 Collected Poetry. My division is not the same as his, but I am indebted to his idea, his concept, some of his framework. The first category is “pure rubbish” which I regret having conceived. The second is poetry containing good ideas but “never really coming to much.” The third are “satisfactory poems,” the bulk of my poetry, “but not important” in any way. The fourth category contains those poems for which I am “honestly grateful.” I could also make a twofold division of my poetry: “Baha’i themes and secular or non-Baha’i themes.” I have a “time-frame division” in which my booklets of poetry are divided into four time periods beginning in 1980 and ending in the present. One could also divide my poetry up into “historical time periods,” some involving the Baha’i Faith, some involving history’s phases.

I: Recently the New Scientist(2004) had an interview with a psychiatrist who also suffered from bi-polar disorder. Part of the interview involved an attempt to distinguish mania from exuberance.
I know you have suffered from this disorder. How would you make this distinction and how important is exuberance in writing poetry?

P: A significant percentage of people who have manic-depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament at least at the high end of their swings. But most people who are exuberant do not have manic depressive illness. So exuberance is far from a pathological state for most people who have it. It is a highly valued and integral part of who they are. And if you understand the role of exuberance in manic-depression then you do get a perspective on exuberance because extremes in behaviour will always illuminate normal behaviour. Of course, there are limits to the comparisons. Exuberance, energy, enthusiasm, intensity were critical to my success as a teacher and in other roles in life. But after 20 years of bi-polar experience(1962-1982) I came to know when the energy was pathological. After 40 years(1962-2002) of life in the bi-polar world, I preferred the energy to be expressed in solitary pursuits like writing rather than the social where they had been centered until at least my mid-fifties from, say, 15 to 55.

I: When the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges was interviewed in Montreal in 1968 he was asked by the interviewer why the knife as an object appeared so frequently in his short stories and if he was obsessed with the knife. Borges gave a fine, a logical answer. It seems to me that if you have any obsession in your poetry it is not with an object, but with a process: time. Do you agree?

P: I admit to a certain obsession which derives from a number of sources. I think I have answered this question before in previous interviews somewhere. I grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb; I was a teacher for 30 years; I’ve been a Baha’i and my adult life has been divided into plans, epochs, stages and phases, 19 day months, annual holidays, holy days, birthdays, equinoxes, solstices, seasons, sunset times, sunrise times, endless meetings, my culture worships the clock. I could go on and on. I think that’s enough.

I: You have such a range of titles: some fabulous, some downright obfuscating, some complex, some simple, some suggestive, some direct. They unfold and reverberate in the reader on so many levels at once. Sometimes the reader simply stops reading because he or she can’t connect with a particular title. I like to think of your titles as bridges or walls, bridges between your life, your society, your religion, your notions of the political, the social, the individual, or walls that can’t be jumped over without a lot of work. They seem to create a meeting place, at least for those who want to try, between all of the titles when they are put in a booklet or a book. Would you talk about what work, what job, what purpose, you intend for a title in an individual poem or between poems or even in overview for your whole epic collection of poetry: Pioneering Over Four Epochs?

P: Sure! I think this is one of the most interesting of the questions I’ve discussed in the first 20 interviews I’ve had in the last dozen years. A title involves the meaning of a thing, its happening. It occurs or predicts something that is going to occur with the language itself and with the subject matter. Finally, a title really ought to bring into balance the whole, the rest of the poem. The title is associative, as opposed to figurative. Quite literally something results from the title’s association with something else or its association with the specificity inherent in the title. Sometimes in selecting the title I am interested in raising difference and sometimes in comparing one thing to another, directly or indirectly. A title needn't be picturesque, although sometimes I aim for that quality. I also aim for what you might call an independent gesture, one that is sure, fresh, provocative, humorous. Even indifference in a title is a form of distance which I believe a poem requires occasionally in its title. This indifference, even disinterestedness, will eventually collapse, if the poem works. The title becomes a small, dignified ritual and is therefore not servile in relation to the whole poem. It is substantive, sometimes displays intention.

I want my poems to be as intimate as a couple making love at night on a beach, and I'd like the reader to roll off of them afterward, completing the triangulated relationship, to feel the sandy curve of the earth with his or her own belly. Of course, I don’t always or even often acheive this aim. I could also express my aim in more intellectual, more cognitive terms. But I want to be as brief as possible. The height of a warm summer and the cold mathematical abstraction of a winter in one of my poems are meant sometimes as a commentary on our lives and sometimes as an experience of them. The rhythm, the beat, of the poem is but another way to interpret the beating of the heart. I am trying to make, to bring, something alive, to be experienced physically, in the mind or the feelings. Roland Barthes talks about how this moment is like a child pointing to an object, but the object itself is nothing special. I like to think I am providing a moment of enlightenment about our age, our natures. Yet it's "nothing special," simply beautiful. This is the work, that is, the play, of language, the meaning of my life and, hopefully something of meaning to readers.1

I: Could you talk about the concept of identity which is important, not only in writing poetry, but also in one’s sense of self, of history, of culture, of so much of what makes us human?

P: Sure! I’ve been teaching about it, talking about it and thinking about it for decades. I’ll probably be a little complex here, but let me forge ahead anyway. I’ll try to be brief: my religious identity as a Baha’i acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of my particular subjectivity, my particular sense of who I am. I also acknowlege that all discourse, all writing, is placed, positioned and situated and all of my knowledge is contextual. I find it helpful, fertile, useful if this way of looking at my Baha’i identity is contested, subjected to a dialectic, if it arises from an assertion of a difference, a clash, of opinions. In this way my identity is based on, develops from, is clarified by a process of engaging and asserting difference rather than suppressing it. But this process of assertion requires an etiquette of expression, one that most people have yet to develop. And, of course, we don’t want to disagree on absolutely everything we say.

This identity acknowledges the reality of decentralised, diffuse but sometimes systematized knowledge; power which also has a diffuse set of sources and at the same time accepts the useful concepts of perifery and centre, margins and depths, surfaces and heights. Once we clarify the notion of identity, once it is redefined in a universal and non-derogatory way, once it engages difference without implying superiority and hierarchy, with due regard for the tenderness of language and the fragility of human personality, it is hoped that this will help the Baha’i community express its group consciousness, help it to develop in a manner which is unfettered by the accrued and often inaccurate associations of history and culture, tradition and ignorance.

I: You said that idea would be a bit complex and I can see what you mean. Anyway, thanks Ron. I look forward to continuing this discussion in the months and years ahead.

P: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.
__________________________________FOOTNOTE___________________________________________________________
1 I would like to thank Jane Miller, “An Interview with Jane Miller,” Electronic Poetry Review, 2002.
2 I would like to thank Emma Heggarty, “Native Peoples of Canada: Rewriting the Imaginary,” 14th April 2003, Internet, 2004.

Ron Price
December 25th 2004

[RonPrice]

As a follow-up to the above interview, I'd now like to post this prose-poem about a writer who has come into my life after my retirement from FT work in 1999. He was one of the most "political" writers in his 40 years of teaching at Columbia University as a Professor of English and comparative Literature. Although I don't agree with many of his views, I have come to appreciate many of the thrusts of his writing and I post the following item here at this Political Forum because of my appreciation for his mind and his writing.-Ron
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ESSAYS and THOUGHTS
DURING MY TEACHING CAREER

Part 1:

For forty years Edward Said (1935-2003) taught at Columbia University where he was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Said was principally responsible for the emergence of postcolonial studies as a dominant form of literary and cultural criticism. I only came across post-colonial studies after I retired from FT employment in 1999. Said started teaching at Columbia the year I started university in the lunch-pail city of Hamilton Ontario—lunch-pail because Hamilton was a working man’s city.

I did not start reading Said’s writings or, indeed, reading about Edward Said until, as I say, I had retired from my own 40 year working life: 1959-1999. While I was teaching Inuit and Aborigines at different ends of the earth, as well as primary school in Canada and then secondary and post-secondary students in Australia from 1967 to 1999, among a number of other jobs, Edward Said was writing the essays that are reviewed here.1

Part 2:

Except for the contextual "Introduction: Criticism and Exile", and the essay about Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations in which Said blames Huntington for propagating a mentality of "Us Against Them", the chronologically organized essays in Reflections on Exile2 were written between 1967 and 1998. Throughout this bulky collection there are topics which include: Ernest Hemingway on bullfighting, Tarzan, the Egyptian belly-dancer Tahia Carioca, Moby-Dick, the "shamelessly pro-colonial renegade" V.S. Naipaul, and Said’s own autobiographical memoirs. There are numerous, sometimes repetitive, references to thinkers that were critical to the development of his thought. They include: Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Georg Lukács, Friedrich Nietzsche, Giambattista Vico and, perhaps most importantly, Joseph Conrad. What remains striking is the agreement and growth of Said's standpoint over the years.

Said explains that, in relation to what probably remains the first history of the "other," his most famous Orientalism (1978), he never believed in an Archimedean point that existed outside the contexts he was describing. Nor did he believe in the possibility of devising and deploying “an inclusive interpretive methodology that could hang free of the precisely concrete historical circumstances out of which Orientalism derived, and from which it drew sustenance" (p. 300). Said was inspired by the eighteenth century Italian humanist, political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist Vico(1668-1744). Due to this intellectual influence, Said viewed concrete historical circumstances, especially those of dislocation and exile, migration and empire, as critical to any understanding of the past and present. As a result, he was disappointed with post-modern theory because it "reduced and in many instances eliminated the messier precincts of "life" and historical experience" (p. xviii).

The fact that historians like Mackenzie(1995) and Washbrook(1999) have rightly criticized Said's historical method does not make his work any the less significant. Said was one of the first to stir-up debate in the ever-growing and important field of study: the relationship between West and non-West, especially Islam.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Bob van der Linden, “A Critical Humanist among the Professional Experts, in Other Voices, Vol. 3.1, 2007. This is a review of Edward W. Said, 2Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 2002, and Edward Said: The Last Interview, a documentary by Mike Dibb, Interviewer Charles Glass, DVD extended version, 208 minutes (Estate of Edward Said, 2004).

You spoke about your leukaemia,
& the physical repulsion you had
against giving up, like your father.

You were a compulsive worker
who just kept going and did not
look backwards, seldom relaxed,
or rested----always believing that
with determination, will power, &
even with anger---things could be
done.1 He to whom every soil is as
his native one is already strong, you
said; the perfect man sees the entire
world is as a foreign land. A strong
man has extended his love to all places,
and the perfect man has extinguished
his love of all places in a detachment.2

1 See Other Voices cited above.
2 idem

Ron Price
26 November 2012

[RonPrice]

I would now like to add an introductory statement on politics for this Politics Forum.org
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As a student in primary and secondary school in Ontario Canada from the 1940s to the 1960s---political studies occupied a very small part of the total curriculum. In grade ten, in 1959/60, I remember taking an introductory Canadian politics or civics course as it was called then. History, of course, contained its share of political issues and history was a subject I took every year that I was a student as far back as at least grade four or five in 1953 to 1955.

In the autumn of 1964 I began my first and only course in politics at McMaster University. I was then a second year student majoring in history and philosophy. It was the last course I took in politics in my tertiary studies, although politics came into many of the studies I did from 1974 to 1988 in my external or distant learning programs in Australia.

The first practical contact I had with politics was during a period of time in the 1950s when my parents were involved with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a small left wing party in Ontario, Canada. In 1961, the CCF disbanded and was replaced by the New Democratic Party, the NDP as it was then called. The Ontario CCF party was formed in 1932 with the support of a number of Independent Labour Party clubs. Its roots were in the Hamilton area where I was born in 1944 and where my parents lived from the 1930s and, in the case of my mother, as far back as 1904.

The CCF elected its first MLA in the 1934 provincial election in Hamilton East. We had meetings in our home for, perhaps, a year or so in the early to mid-1950s. This was before or even during the involvements of my parents in the Baha’i Faith. My memory of this period is somewhat vague.

I did teach politics on many occasions from the 1970s to the 1990s. At the Ballarat CAE politics was part of an introductory social science course which I taught for three years to several groups of students. I also taught politics from 1989 to 1995 at the Thornlie College of Tafe in a course entitled 'Australian Government and Legal Systems,' AGLS as it was called. AGLS was largely a course to help Australians understand their political system. During that time I amassed two large files of notes which, on retirement in 1999, I threw away. I tired of teaching this program. But I did not tire of the issues raised in political theory; like sociological theory I found this field intellectually stimulating.

In the next four years, 1999 to 2003, it became increasingly important to open a file on political theory. In the first week of September 2003 I opened two files of recently photocopied articles on political theory. By the time I retired I took little interest in partisan politics and the kinds of issues generated in that AGLS course and indeed most modern 'civics' courses. But political theory interested me and that is what is found here. Inevitably politics as a discipline of study has a sociological, a psychological, an historical and a religious component.

The social sciences have become so very interdisciplinary. These two files contain the more purely political aspect of the social sciences, but it is an aspect of politics that has, as I say above, virtually nothing to do with partisan politics and the range of issues that tend to occupy the media such as: the republic, senate powers, parties, minority groups, pressure groups, foreign and domestic policy, voting and the electoral process, the legal system, parliamentary processes, inter alia.

These politics files are more concerned with the very general, the abstract, aspects of politics, basic ideas and conceptions behind the philosophies, ideologies and systems. This is a more intellectual, a more philosophical, a more theoretical, approach to politics and its problems. The line, though, between theory and practice is not always clear-cut. These two files have now been in existence for over seven years. Thusfar, I find I do not draw on them very much in my writing. When I do write about politics it is generally about some TV program which does not require a theoretical base. Time will tell how these two files evolve in the years ahead.

Ron Price
19 December 2010 to 28/11/'12

[RonPrice]

As a final, and perhaps far-too-long interview on this thread, I will add the following. The political content of this thread is only partial, but what there is--is relevant to this Politics Forum. If this post is too long for the site conventions, just let me know and I'm happy to make some adjustment to its length.Ron Price, Australia
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An Interview with Ron Price

Preamble Part 1:

I think the interview is the new art form. I think the self-interview is the essence of creativity.-Jim Morrison, “Prologue: Self-Interview,” Wilderness: Volume I - The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison(1)

(1) James Douglas "Jim" Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was the lead singer and lyricist of rock band The Doors, as well as a poet. Following The Doors' explosive rise to fame in 1967-8 when I was teaching among the Inuit on Baffin Island and pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community, Morrison developed a severe alcohol and drug dependency which culminated in his untimely death in Paris in 1971 at age 27 due to a suspected heroin overdose. I was just about to begin my international pioneering life in Australia when he was buried. The events surrounding his death continue to be the subject of controversy, as no autopsy was performed on the body after his death, and the exact cause of his death is disputed by many to this day.
-----------------------------------------
Preamble Part 2:

Ron Price was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1944. He received his primary and secondary education in Burlington Ontario, went to McMaster and Windsor Universities where he got a BA and a B Ed in 1966 and 1967, respectively. In July 1971, at the age of 26, he pioneered-travelled to Australia for the Canadian Baha'i community. He came to Australia with his first wife after teaching primary school in Canada for three years, one year of which was on Baffin Island among the Inuit.

Ron continued his education in Australia in several post-graduate studies programs. He also continued teaching: first at primary, then at secondary, and then at many post-secondary educational institutions. At the age of forty, while living in Australia’s Northern Territory and working in technical and further education in a position entitled, adult educator, he started to write for people who were not his students, his employers or his Baha’i community, the religion he had been associated with by then for 30 years. By the time he was fifty in 1994, he had begun to write poetry extensively, although not exclusively. By the 1990s he was living in Perth, Western Australia. In 1999 he retired from FT employment; in 2003 from PT work and in 2005 from most casual and volunteer work.

He became by degrees, a FT writer and author, poet and publisher, researcher and editor, scholar and online journalist and blogger, as well as his own office-assistant with the help of his wife. This reinvention of himself took place around his work in cyberspace where, by 2012, he had millions of readers spread across several 1000s sites.

His second wife, Christine, is a Tasmanian and, as of 2012, they have been married for 37 years. They have raised three children whose ages in 2012 were: 46, 42 and 35. Ron became a member of the Baha’i Faith in 1959. He gave the following interview, the first in a series of 26, in Perth Western Australia after he had been writing poetry seriously for four years(1992-1995). When this interview was recorded he had just finished his twenty-fifth year working as a teacher and/or lecturer, among other jobs in his working life, 1959-1999.

At the time of the interview he was enjoying a summer holiday at his home in the suburb of Belmont in Perth. This interview and the 25 others now total some 100,000 words. Some of these interviews are on the internet. Ron revised this initial interview several times from its inception in 1995 over the next 17 years: 1995 to 2012. Ron would have been happy to have the interview taped even if, as he put it, “the moment I know the interview is being taped, my attitude changes to being somewhat defensive and or histrionic, that is deliberately affected or self-consciously emotional, or overly dramatic in behavior or speech.”

Preamble Part 3:

It was Ron's view that because interviews contain within their method and style a demand for rapid, improvised, on the spot responses, the interview makes it difficult to say anything particularly complex or sophisticated. His sense of ambivalence also has something to do with the way in which, adopting a role as one does in an interview, seems in some ways a somewhat dishonest way to act.

One good way to do an interview, someone once suggested, is to have a long conversation without the interviewer taking notes. Then the interviewer can, if he or she so desires, reminisce about the conversation and write down his or her impression of what he or she felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. But Ron did not go for this method during these 26 interviews.

What ticked-Ron-off about the tape recording process, he said, was that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed because “it records and remembers what in retrospect one may feel are quite inaccurate or inappropriate remarks.” “That’s why, when there is a tape recorder,” he said, “I am conscious that I’m being interviewed; when there isn’t a tape recorder, I can talk in an unconscious and completely natural way. This simulated interview approach was the closest Ron could get, he said, to a much more natural approach: reflective, honest, sincere and useful to future readers.(2)

In September 2003 Edward Said(1935-2003), Professor of English and comparative Literature at Columbia for 40 years, gave an interview. For more than three days he spoke about his life and work. This interview, entitled The Last Interview, begins with a quotation from Roland Barthes(1915-1980), a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician: "The only sort of interview that one could, if forced to, defend would be one where the author is asked to articulate what he cannot write."(3)
-------------------------------------FOOTNOTES-----------------------------------------------
(2) See Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69 and his interview with Peter H. Stone in The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005 for some of Marquez’s remarks on which Ron has drawn. Marquez(1927- ) is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. See also the opening quotation above from Jim Morrison of the band The Doors; and (3) Bob van der Linden, “A Critical Humanist among the Professional Experts”, in Other Voices, Vol. 3.1, 2007.
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Questioner(Q): Why did you put this booklet of poetry together for the Collis Featherstone Teaching Project in Perth this year?

Price: I have been writing poetry extensively for about four years now. In the summer months, beginning toward the end of November, I have time off from my job as a lecturer in a Technical and Further Education(Tafe) College. I can write more frequently than normal. I send copies of the poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library. The Collis Featherstone Teaching Project(CFTP) started on 24 November so I thought I’d put together all the poetry I wrote from that date until a point near the end of phase one of that Project’s total time. The poetry is not about the CFTP. Many of the themes relate to the work of the Project. Much of the poetry is autobiographical. I have sent it along to the LSA of South Perth under whose auspices the Project is taking place. It is sent in appreciation for all the work done by the Project organizers and participants.

Q: What do you think of the CFTP?

Price: The degree of organization, viewed from a distance, is impressive. I have not been that involved myself. I gave blood, one of the Project’s many service activities and my wife helped in another activity, a letterbox drop. Most of the Baha’i friends in Belmont where we live helped out in one way or another in some aspect of the program. This was the impression I got, anyway, as the secretary of the Belmont Spiritual Assembly. The Project certainly provided an opportunity for Baha’is to participate in a locally organized program. While all this was going on, of course, most Baha’is carried on with their own teaching work, making the overall campaign of teaching in the summer of 1995/6 the most impressive thusfar in the history of the Cause in Western Australia.

In addressing one of the conferences that launched the CFTP, Padma Wong referred to ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s words when He laid the foundation stone for the Mother Temple of the West: the temple is already built. Entry by troops is a reality not yet experienced in the world of the senses in most places in the world. ‘Abdu’l-Baha always found all the barriers removed even if we don’t. He found this in 1912 in Montreal. The hearts were “in the utmost state of receptivity.” I’m sure He would find the same today, even if we do not.

(Q) Could you tell us a little about your writing? Do you consider yourself part of any literary group or tradition? What would you regard as the major literary influences on what you write?

Price: Off the cuff that is a difficult question to answer. It is difficult because the answer is complex. I can’t simply say that my poetry, for that is mostly what I write, is of this or that school, this or that tradition. I came to poetry quite late. I don’t think I even started to think of myself as a poet until I was nearly fifty. My background was the social sciences. I graduated in sociology; all my post-graduate work was in some one or other of the social sciences. From 1974 to 1994 I read mostly social sciences, say five to ten books a week on average. About 1990, in my mid-forties I began to read about poetry. My poetic sensibilities had been awakened by Roger White, a Canadian poet, whom I started reading in 1980. Between 1992 and 1995 I wrote nearly twenty-five hundred poems. Frankly, I don’t think of my poetry in terms of an association with any particular genre of poetry. The influences on my poetry are significantly the books I am reading at any one time. Since, say, 1990 I have been scanning and occasionally reading between fifteen and twenty books a week: books about writing, about poetry, writers, literature, reading, interdisciplinary studies in literature and the arts, a veritable cornucopia of material. All my poems have short introductions and these introductions are indicative of some of the influences, poetic and otherwise, that are operating at the time a particular poem is written.

Q: What about the human influences, the effect of people, on what you write? Is it as great as books which obviously have quite a significant impact from what you say?

Price: Many of my poems are the result of experiences I have with my colleagues and students at work. I lecture in the social sciences and humanities at the West Australian Department of Training. I am also very committed to the Baha’i Faith and this commitment brings me into contact with many different kinds of people and situations. These generate another group of poems, as does my family and friends. My poetry is very autobiographical and I often will write a poem about someone whom I knew many years ago, my mother or father, say. And then, this may sound strange to you, but I like to think of, and I certainly believe in, the influences on my poetry from those who have gone on to another world. This is a much more subtle, more intangible, process; but it is certainly a human influence I cannot discard because I am often conscious of it. Just exactly how this influence takes place I do not know or understand.

There are many precursors to my poetry. Although some stand out like Roger White, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, indeed, the very poetic nature of the Baha’i writings, there are dozens of influences that I would not want to veil or conceal from myself or from others. Of course, one cannot like all the poets and writers to the same degree. One develops favorites and these favorites take on greater influence. But the subject is simply too vast to put into a paragraph.

One writer who has influenced me since I retired from FT, PT and all the volunteer work that I don't want to involve myself in any more, was Tony Judt. I'll post a piece below in appreciation to Judt. Tony Robert Judt(1948-2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
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THANKING TONY JUDT

Part 1:

I was raised on words among other things. They tumbled off the kitchen table onto the floor where I sat. They bounced off the walls and ceilings in what was a very small house. My mother’s family: her father and brother, her sister and their children as well as a host of visitors were all into words in very different ways.

These people in my home, my family and the visitors, came, first from the world of churches and party politics in my childhood and then, in my teens, from the heterogeneous mix of Baha’is. They filled our little lounge-room to overflowing from time to time. My consanguineal family had its roots in England, in Wales and, going back three generations, in France. Some of them, especially my grandfather on my mother’s side, were especially enmeshed in words. My grandfather was far from famous, but he lived in books, was an autodidact, books were part of his psyche’s salvation.

The partisan politics folks who came into our home in the 1950s had a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation; the Baha’is were more meditative and prayer-oriented. The Baha’is also ate better during and after all the serious stuff. My father and mother, whom I scarcely appreciated---especially my father---were congenial hosts. It was not until they were long gone that I really began to understand their contribution to this social aspect of the life in my home, and how the extent I was a people-person was socialized into me in ways I will never know.

I did not spend long and happy hours listening to all this talk. It was like background music which I took as just part of the woodwork, part of the ambience of my childhood and adolescent life at home. Talking, it seemed to me then, as it does now, to be a central point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense. In my turn—and to find my place—I too talked. But it took me several years to find my own way, my own way with words.

Part 2:

I think it was due to the rigors of, firstly, bipolar disorder and, then, having a class of kids to deal with that brought articulacy, the need to be articulate, to the fore, but this is only a theory. The 1950s—when I attended elementary school—were a rule-bound age in the teaching and use of the English language. We were instructed in the unacceptability of even the most minor syntactical transgressions. “Good” English was at its peak and it stayed there while I studied English at high school: 1958 to 1963. CBC Radio One was the English language news and information radio network of the publicly-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Thanks also to BBC Radio and cinema newsreels in both countries, Canada and England, there were nationally accepted norms for proper speech; the authority of class and region determined not just how one said things, but the kind of things it was appropriate to say. This was true in the UK but not so much in Canada. “Accents” abounded, again in the UK, but not in Canada.

I was never really seduced by the sheen of English prose at this evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay The Uses of Literacy (1957). A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. In the UK Lucky Jim through Look Back in Anger, and on to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the end of the decade, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and “proper” speech were under attack.

In Canada I’m not sure what the sources of this attack on respectability were, nor do I think the class-bound frontiers in that English-speaking country as solid and clear-cut. The greater worry, in some ways, was the US dominated television programming and American influence in general. This influence was also seductive.

Part 3:

By the time the barbarians began arriving in Canada in the 1970s with their assaults on the heritage of English and its standards, their carelessness about form, their slow sliding into the use of invective, I was on my way to Australia. By the time I reached university, or college as some call tertiary education, in 1963, words were my “thing.” I was no silver-tongued orator but, rather, a quiet graduate from sandlot baseball who had done well at high school due to my good memory and a desire to excel, motivated as I was to avoid the mind-numbing jobs I had each summer. University tutorials rewarded the verbally felicitous student, but I was far from verbally confident or felicitous.

The neo-Socratic style (“why did you write this?” “what did you mean by it?”) invited the solitary recipient to explain himself at length. I was that shy and reflective undergraduate who would prefer to retreat to the back of a seminar and this implicitly disadvantaged me in the first two years of my university life. By my 3rd and 4th years, 1965-1967, I had developed a self-serving faith in articulacy and it was reinforced by the feedback I received. This was not merely evidence of intelligence but intelligence itself or so I imagined back then.

Silence was something at which I had been adept as a student from 1949 to my second year of university, 1964/5. By 1966, though, in the final months of my pass degree in sociology some inner force had come to the surface and words began to abound. I have often thought this was due to the high, the euphoric, the hypomanic phase of my bipolar disorder that I experienced back then, but I don’t really know. Talking came into my life like Niagara Falls and it has been there ever since although, now as I head for 70, I prefer silence and I prefer to leave the world of idle talk.

Part 4:

Some of those whom I have known over the years have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy in conversation, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I sometimes have envied their self-restraint. Teaching, first in primary schools, then in secondary and then in post-secondary educational institutions, eliminated most of whatever self-restraint had characterized my life as a student from 1949 to 1966. If I had been at all restrained as a teacher, I would have got mowed-down by the verbal traffic in those classrooms. Talking was one of my key survival packages and, by the late 1970s, humour was added to my survival recipe.

Articulacy is typically, often, regarded as an aggressive talent. But for me its functions were substantively both defensive and offensive. Rhetorical flexibility allows for a certain feigned closeness—conveying proximity while maintaining distance. That is what actors do—but the world is not really a stage and there is something artificial in the exercise. I have marshalled language to both create intimacy and cut it off.

In matters of language, of course, people are frequently deceived. I have had many a student who could talk the back side off a barn door, to speak colloquially. But these same students were unable to write an essay worth much at all. In recruitment exercises in which I was engaged I found it nearly impossible to choose young associates—many seemed so articulate, the analyses tripping off their mouths. How could you tell who was smart and intelligent, and who was merely polished and could put on a good show?

Words may deceive—mischievous and untrustworthy. I have often been spellbound by the verbal artistry of people. Whatever its appeal, it need not denote originality and depth of content. All the same, inarticulacy surely suggested a shortcoming of thought, or so I thought in my late teens and twenties. As I head for 70, I have become more impressed with the quiet person who thinks and takes his time before he engages his vocal chords.

Part 5:

This idea will sound odd to the present generation praised for their verbal competency. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion for me, by the 1970s, although this was not altogether true for me as I got older. I did not become more suspicious of the folks who sounded clever. I still enjoyed their cleverness.

The retreat from “form”, though, favoured uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,” above all in the classroom. But it is one thing to encourage students to express their opinions freely and to take care not to crush them under the weight of prematurely imposed authority. It is quite another for teachers to retreat from formal criticism in the hope that the freedom thereby accorded will favour independent thought: “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.”

Forty years on from the 1960s, there are not many instructors left with the self-confidence, or the training, to pounce on infelicitous expression and explain clearly just why it inhibits intelligent reflection. The revolution of my generation and the many shifts in culture and society, indeed a behavioural revolution, have played important roles in this unravelling of standards. The priority accorded the autonomous individual in every sphere of life should not be underestimated. ”Doing your own thing” has taken protean forms: some good and some not so good.

Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope(1688-1744), the famous English poet, knew better.1 For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the Spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst. All of this has not gone down the gurgler as I witness many a television debate and listen to many a radio interview half a century after I entered the 1960s. Still, one must be cautious.

Part 6:

The “professionalization” of academic writing—and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of “theory” and “methodology”—favours obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib “popular” articulacy. In the disciplines of the social sciences, the arts and the sciences this is exemplified by the ascent of the “television don,” whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when scholars have lost interest in communication to a mass. Their writing is always for a coterie—and that’s who they write for.

There have been many a generation of popular scholarship which have distilled authorial authority into plain text, plain speaking. Today’s “accessible” writers protrude, uncomfortably I find, into the audience’s consciousness, well, at least into mine. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience’s attention is drawn. If you can get a laugh what does it matter if it’s true goes some of the psychological litany.

Cultural insecurity begets its linguistic doppelgänger, its ghostly verbal double. The same is true of technical advance. In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, not to mention texting and much of internet posting, pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Although the Internet is still an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias and peoples’ preference for short grabs of words on the medium brings an impoverishment of thought, and seductively so.

I watch both my children and my children’s children observe the communicative shorthand of their hardware. It has begun to seep into communication itself: people talk like texts and lengthy and complex discussions are difficult for people to enter into. This is not always the case. There is probably more analysis in the media of what is going on than ever before. The scene is not simple.

Part 7:

Some of the above is a worry and some a source of optimism. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and we are reluctant to assert it unambiguously. And so they say: “It’s only my opinion.” Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever. I can convey them with ease on the internet to a coterie, but for much of my audience, my potential readership, I provide too many words. Our world of print and image glut keeps many far away from what I write. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my strongest assets, but I have competition from a myriad sources.

Part 8:

Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication is not beyond me but I must accept that most of the people in cyberspace and in real space will never come across what I write and, if they do, they will not stay to read much. I shall be confined in many ways to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections. At the same time, I do have my coterie and in a space of 2 billion users, I get my slice of the cake so to speak---perhaps several million readers!

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the world: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are many and varied today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute?(2) They are all we have.

Ron Price with thanks to (1) Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711) True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest.....and (2) Tony Judt, “Words,” New York Review of Books, 15 July 2010.
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Q: Have you tried to publish your work? Does this interest you much at this early stage of your writing?

Price: I have now been writing seriously for about a dozen years and poetry for four or five. I have had a few of my poems published in half a dozen magazines and newspapers. The Baha’i publishing houses I have sent my work to have indicated to me the difficulty of moving poetry in the Baha’i bookshops. Since my poetry is very strongly autobiographical and influenced by my religious proclivities I cannot seriously consider the vast range of non-Baha’i publishers. It is not that I am not interested in publishing; it is rather that the outlets for my type of writing are very limited. As an alternative I: often give copies of poems to friends, send one-offs to magazines and send a single copy of virtually every poem I write to the Baha’i World Centre Library.

Q: Do you read your poetry often?

Price: Occasionally I give it a try at school but I am not impressed with the process. Students don’t know what to say after they hear a poem, or group of poems. Rather than being a unifying force it seems estranging in an inexplicable sort of way. I tend to think that what I write is meant to be savored in a one-to-one reading situation; it is not part of some group experience. When I do try to go public, I feel like a performer and I choose poems which have a bigger impact, some comic or emotional response.

I’ve been listening to the Baha’i writings, the most beautiful poetry I know, being mangled by people who are essentially non-readers, or non-English speaking readers, for over thirty years. I would not want my own work to be read and mangled as well, by others. On those rare occasions when I read my own work I have to practice to get it right. Reading well is an art. It’s a little like doing vaudeville or being a poet in residence. I don’t think I’m a good enough entertainer. I’m getting better at it with the years, but I may never make it as ‘the entertainer’. I heard Roger White give a reading once to an audience of three hundred. He was very funny. I don’t think I’d want to do it if I could not keep the troops laughing, slipping the serious stuff in on the side. Perhaps I’ll feel more positively about the process in the future, when and if I become successful at the entertainer role.

Q: Since this is a politics site could you tell us a little about your politics?

Price: I'll include a prose-poem here that I wrote thanks to another poet Adrienne Rich and one of her books "What I Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics". (WW Norton and Co, NY, 1993, p.53). The title of the poem is:

CRYSTALLIZATION AND THE OCTOPUS

The octopus is the most ambidextrous creature alive. Man, in his ability to live and work within a multitude of polarities, has the most flexible mind of all living creatures. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Incredible Sickers”, 6:00 pm, Sunday, 25 August 1996.

I feel no division between art and action, no social fragmentation of poetry from life, no ivory tower, no barricades. I work in solitude surrounded by community, many communities, in dialogue and silence, alternating between myself and some collectivity. This poetry and this action moves through my solitude and its membrances. I experience the pull of the inner and the outer, voices often wrenching me between poles, between the dichotomy of active and contemplative. This dichotomy, part of the very mystery of polarity, is at the heart of oneness. The experience of oneness is the experiencing of an alternation between the active and the contemplative, an alternation as necessary as day following night. For this is oneness.-Ron Price, thanks to Adrienne Rich, What I Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, WW Norton and Co, NY, 1993, p.53.

If you want an experience of an alien life form,
you could just dive into the sea in the right
places and meet the Houdini of the ocean deeps.

This hunter and gatherer of the last frontier on
earth-the great abyss-this cephalopod, the octopus,
a skeemy predator, swimming and foraging as he
has for one hundred and fifty million years. He was
a professional long before homo sapiens sapiens
emerged looking like the mammals of yesteryear.

He is still a professional, as we learn to map his
life in this most recent epoch of the Formative Age
when knowledge continues its explosive journey from
these abyssal depths to the edges of the universe,
pioneering processes crystallized by other pioneers.(1)

26 August 1996

PS. I often wonder what the relationship is between the extension of the Baha’i Faith, an extension based on The Tablets of the Divine Plan and promulgated since 1919, and the extension of knowledge on this earth. I like to think that the Baha’i pioneer has been a critical variable in this complex equation. Pioneers have been so critical to the extension of the new light that their true value is largely unappreciated, even by themselves.
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Q: Do you talk much about your work?

Price: I do an incredible amount of talking since I am a teacher and have twenty-five hours of class contact, another ten hours roaming about talking to colleagues and students outside class and, say another ten hours a week in various types of Baha’i community activity. After forty-five hours of talking and listening I have little interest in doing any more in a one week slot. Teaching provides all the outlet I need to talk about writing in general and poetry in particular. Occasionally I find myself out in the wide-wide world, away from work, family and the Baha’i community, talking about writing, but it is a rare occasion and then only very briefly. That is probably why I agreed to this interview. I don’t talk about writing poetry for an extended period of time to anyone, ever. I’m not sure I would even want to, given my recent experience with such dialogue. Structured interviews with people who take a serious interest in poetry, that’s different.

I’ve known writers all my life. My mother and grandfather were writers. Doug Martin and Jameson Bond, two men who have made significant contributions to the Baha’i Faith had seminal influences on me as a young adult. They were both writers. Working as I have in post-secondary educational institutions I have known several writers. I find I often have little in common with writers. There is a lady I occasionally talk to at the moment, Fran Vidente. She’s just finished writing her first book and she is quite excited about it. We are as different as chalk and cheese: philosophically, religiously, in just about every way. But we understand each other. I warm to her when she comes in the room. We both shrug off the differences or ignore them. There’s some kind of inner sensitivity which understands even if it does not like the other.

My wife has read more of my poetry than anyone. She likes what I write generally. She has also admitted to a certain jealousy insofar as my poetry is concerned. She is a very honest woman; she has a tough edge, but gentle. She lays you low but kindly. Her encouragement has meant alot to me. So much of what I have written since 1982 she has not liked. So when she says she likes my poetry her words have special meaning, a certain impact. Occasionally someone will make a comment about a poem they have read. This is also encouraging. But the kind of discussion I got when I used to teach English Literature is virtually non-existent now, outside the occasional chats with my wife which seem to range corrections of my spelling and grammar to genuinely fertile dialogue.

Q: Could you talk a little more about the influence of Roger White on your writing, your poetry?

Price: I first opened a book of his poems in late 1979 in Tasmania. I think I was visiting in the home of a jazz ballet instructor in Devonport. I remember the detail because his poetry spoke to me so vividly that I was excited for the first time in my life about poetry. Roger always said that I was better at prose and essays than poetry. Well, much of my poetry is as much prose as poetry, so in a way he was right. Roger died in 1993 and I wrote a collection of essays about his poetry. He read all the essays before he died and gave his seal of good housekeeping. I tried to publish them but Kalimat Press and George Ronald were not interested so I sent them all to the BWCL. I’ve had an incredible outpouring of poetry since he got sick and on death’s door and especially after he passed away. I like to think his influence is immeasurable. I believe it is, but it is not the kind of thing I can prove.

Q: Tell us more about the autobiographical aspects of your poetry. I understand Roger White used to say, quoting Tagore, “the poem not the poet.” What philosophy, what approach do you subscribe to insofar as writing about yourself is concerned?

Price: I think everything you write about is, in one way or another, about yourself. Even Roger’s work. In fact, I think the reason he said to read his poetry, if you wanted to know about him, was because his poetry was about himself but not in a narratively structured, time sequenced sort of way. I have written a great deal, several thousand words anyway, about my poetry and how and why I go about putting it together. Roger has written briefly about his poetry but, at least in his published works, what he says in prose form is pithy, humorous and very succinct. My poetry is blatantly autobiographical. In fact I’ve organized all the poetry I have written as Section VII of Pioneering Over Three Epochs, entirely an autobiographical exercise.

Finally, let me make one more comment here, for fear of allowing everyone to think I am an ego-cent red, narcissistic writer with an entirely self-oriented perspective. I have developed over the years, especially since about 1984 when I was forty, a sense of myself as a pioneer. My identity is strongly related to this role that I have had in the Baha’i community since 1962. This poetry, this autobiography, is all part of this expression, this definition of self, this personal view of who I am in terms of my international pioneer role since 1971 and before that a homefront pioneer beginning in 1962. It is a role that will have some importance for generations to come, indeed I see myself as one of the foundation generations of decades if not centuries to come. It is my hope to provide some concrete, specific, identity-orienting material for future generations. And so I write.

Q: Could you talk briefly about becoming known, popular, read by many others? I have already asked you about publishing, but I’d like you to talk in the wider sense about the whole issue of popularity, fame and acknowledgment of your work.

Price: Everyone who writes likes to be read; it’s a little like talking; we like to be listened to when we talk. It’s natural, even necessary. I’ve got nothing against fame or wealth. But now in the late twentieth century there are thousands of poets and millions of people who write the stuff. To get through to become someone whom others read, what we could call a minor poet, like Roger White, is no mean achievement. I may make it; I may not.. Maybe with Internet and modems it might get easier. But not for me. My market is essentially those who have joined the emerging world religion known as the Baha’i Faith or others who are at least interested in it. I am a Baha’i poet. It is that explicit. Of my 2500 poems, maybe a few have a clear secular dress, but not many. My poetry speaks to, and of, the Baha’i experience, all one hundred and fifty odd years of it now. It speaks to a Baha’i view of history, to an emerging Baha’i consciousness in world literature and the arts.

If my poetry becomes popular it will be because the Baha’i Faith has become popular, at least more so than it is at present. My potential readership at the moment is so small that the question of popularity is not a relevant issue. I would go so far as to say I am not even interested in fame or popularity except insofar as it is connected with the popularity of my religion. I tend to think that in the end, while I am alive, my poetry will be for a coterie, for a coterie of a coterie. The mass media, print and electronic, are so very powerful. Poetry has always been for a coterie; that coterie is getting numerically larger and larger. But it is still a coterie. Millions, most people I’ve ever known, have little to no interest in poetry, except in some kind of distant sense, like my interest in gardening, or cooking. I do a little dabbling here and there out of necessity. But few approach poetry out of necessity, unless they are in school. To such people, the great mass of those whom I will ever know personally, or even know about, poetry is irrelevant to their lives. If my popularity or fame were to rest on their response to what I write, I would be doomed. I don’t write for money or fame, except in the sense referred to above. I write because it gives me pleasure. It is a skill which in the exercise thereof I am happier.

Q: You have mentioned the Baha’i Faith many times in this interview. Obviously it has a profound influence on what you write. For fear of turning this interview into an extended commentary on the Baha’i Faith, could you tell me simply why you are a Baha’i and what role you think it is playing and will play in the future of this planet?

Price: I think there are a multitude of interrelated reasons why I am a Baha’i, One important reason-and very natural-is that I have been associated with this Faith now for forty years. It’s an old friend. I went to my first fireside in 1955 or 1956. It is one of the few continuities in my life, in a century of vast change. A second reason is I believe it to be true. It has been immensely useful to me in my life as well, especially in the areas with people skills and providing me with a world view, with meaning. As far as the role of the Baha’i Faith: in the short term it is going to play a crucial role in facilitating dialogue between various religious groups as well as the multitude of other groups in our multicultural society. In the long term the vision at the heart of the Baha’i Faith is simply enthralling, energizing and empowering. That visions excites me, motivates me and one day it will be the center of a world civilization.

Q: Have your years at university helped or hindered your development as a writer, poet? Does an academic background facilitate creativity? What have been the mainsprings of your own creative output?

Price: As far as university and academic study is concerned, I don’t think I got a genuine intellectual experience until I got out of university and started teaching at a Teacher’s College(now a university) in Tasmania in 1974 at the age of 29. I suffering from a bi-polar tendency at university, indeed until 1980. My emotional life was in a tailspin from 1963-1967 and university life was depressing and confused at worst and hypomanic and manic at best. I could never get into academic study in a sane and organized way until I started teaching others. The last twenty-two years, 1974-1996, have seen an enormous consumption of academic books needed as part of my role as a teacher/lecturer/adult educator or simply out of interest. This great mass of books, I would think an average of from eight to a dozen every week for twenty-two years, has contributed to what John Keats once referred to as a ‘certain ripeness in intellect.’ Keats in a letter to a friend in 1818 went on to say that once this ripeness of intellect is attained the poet can get turned on to a whole world of poetry, what he called the ‘two-and-thirty Pallaces’. Books, then, academic books, certain specific academic books, are immensely stimulating and a source of creative achievement.

But there are many others which would lead to prolixity should I comment on them even briefly, so I shall simply list them: a wide and broad experience in many places, doing many different jobs, meeting and teaching thousands of students of all ages across two continents; parental and childhood influences: my other and grandfather were writers and my father had an enormous energy; suffering, especially manic-depressive illness, a broken marriage, many years of having a sick wife in my second marriage and the creative effects of my Baha’i philosophy and the value of the activities to which it has led cannot be overstated.

Q: Could you tell us a little about what else you write beside poetry?

Price: Yes, I’ve written some two hundred essays, one hundred and fifty of which have been published in newspapers. The newspapers were all in Katherine in the Northern Territory from 1983 to 1986 and the essays were all about 800 words each. The other fifty have been about my Baha’i experience in one way or another and none of them have been published. I also keep a journal or diary and have for a dozen years; I have written a story of my life some thirty or forty thousand words and the diary is also retrospective going back to my earliest memories in 1947. The diary probably has 50,000 words by now. I’ve also kept a collection of letters going back to 1967. I have no idea how many thousands of words would be in this body of print. In a quarter century of teaching you collect probably millions of words. I have some of them dotting the landscape of my study and again, the number of words is something I would not want to even try to count.

Q: Could you tell me how you go about writing a poem? Where do you get your ideas, your motivation, your patterns, your meanings?

Price: I remember Roger White saying that the origins of a poem were like the poor connections you often get on a telephone line. For me it is a little like that. It begins in a feeling or a thought or both. The thought will often be in a book, but often a quotation from the thousands I have collected in the last thirty years will be enough to move me. I need to feel moved, provoked, stirred and then it is usually a simple flowing or ideas, experiences. Sometimes it takes a little longer, say, two or three hours before the poem is completed. But usually the poem is finished in an hour or less, or a little more. I’m not sure why I write. Perhaps it is that I don’t like doing things like: gardening, household tasks, domestic duties, shopping, going out socially, watching TV, playing sport. We all have to fill in our time somehow. This is the one that gives me the most pleasure and meaning. Two to four hours in the morning, two or three in the afternoon and two or three more in the evening: six to ten hours in total on days when I don’t have to go to work or attend to any of the responsibilities that make up my life as a father, husband, teacher, secretary of an LSA, man, human being in the late twentieth century.

Q: So you think basically a writer is made rather than born, probably a loner more than some gregarious socialite? What is it that makes a writer, draws him out from the enormous diversity of human types and roles on the Earth?

Price: Without doubt, a writer is made, even if he or she comes from a long line of writers. Some, like myself have preferences for their own company; but others are as gregarious as the best of them. There are many types in my experience. I prefer my own company as a reaction to twenty-five years of teaching and literally thousands of meetings both on the job and off, in twenty-two towns, thirty-seven houses and five mental hospitals. At the age of 51 I feel peopled-out and when the normal channels of 45 to fifty hours a week of people are finished I simply have no desire to introduce another blast of verbal gush. Maybe my listening capacities have reached their limit. I don’t know, but that is the way it is.

Writers, if they are any good, usually take their work quite seriously and in Australia with a rich vein of humor. This is a marvelous counterforce to the seriousness. If there is anything I’ve learned in Australia that I have come to appreciate more than anything else it is this sense of humor. Good writers also tend to think they have something to say. Reading helps some writers. It helps me. I read so much my brain gets stuffed with ideas and information, so stuffed that I must have an outlet. Talking is not enough. Everyday experience, suffering and the simple passage of time ripens the intellect, fuels the engine. Perhaps it’s simply that life is full of repetition even a certain boredom that one must deal with. There is a vanity, an emptiness in the human situation. There is also, at the other end of the spectrum, a fascinating richness to virtually every atom of existence if you only look at it a certain way. In the end I don’t know why I write, why anyone writes. I get pleasure from the process and, as Oscar Wilde says somewhere, one settles for pleasure over ecstasy and joy when they come in very limited quantities. I rarely get higher than I do when I write or when some sensation stimulates me to write.

Q: Where do you plan to go from here? Do you sense any specific directions to your writing?

Price: For the moment I am going to continue writing poetry. It still feels like a new thing, five years, after a slow build-up of ten. I have tried one piece of science-fiction, some 30,000 words, but it does not attract me. Occasionally I write an essay but not for publication. Who buys essays anyhow? The complexities of getting essays published don’t attract me in the slightest. I write the occasional letter, but most people can’t keep a correspondence up and the few that can I tire of anyhow so the occasional letter is quite enough. The whole question of direction is going to depend on the big socio-historical process, the short-term future of the Baha’i Faith and factors I can only dimly perceive.

Writing poetry is exhausting physically and emotionally when you spend at least four hours writing and another four reading every day, when duty is not calling you somewhere else. It can also be quite energizing, stimulating, and more often is than is not. It depends on how your day goes. I’m still pretty zonked-out by midnight no matter what I do. Just how long I will stay as fertile as I have been in the last four or five years is anyone’s guess.

I’m on my way to an early retirement at age 55 and, as I’ve mentioned above, I’ve become tired of relationships and talking. In some ways this is not so bad because, in the end, one is alone in life. We are all of us alone even if we are strongly involved in society or, as a Baha’i, playing a part in the construction of a new society. But in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude. That we all live at the heart of a solitude. And we all have the consciousness of mortality. Perhaps a writer, a poet, is more conscious of this, I’m not sure. This is where I plan to go from here, to a much deeper inner life in the years, the decades, ahead.

Q: You have lived in many towns from end-to-end of two countries. Do you think of yourself as a Canadian, Australian, world citizen, what?

Price: After I had been in Australia for eight years, by which time I was thirty-five, I began to define myself as a Canadian pioneer. I had been a pioneer by that time, 1979, for seventeen years, but it took some time for the label to stick, for my identity to be tied up with this international pioneer role. My homefront pioneer role, except for a short time in the Canadian Arctic, was never a clearly defined and identifiable part of my self-image. As far as those other labels are concerned they get interchanged depending on the milieu I am in at the moment. I play with them in dialogue, as sources of humor and they make up my identity in mixed proportions, perhaps: 33%, 33% and 34%. World citizen is getting more useful as a label.

Q: Do you think of yourself less as a Canadian now that you have been in Australia for twenty-five years?

Price: Nearly half my life now has been in Australia. I almost never get homesick in any serious sense. But the snow, the cold winter days, the autumnal beauty, that Canadian personality that is both energetic and steady, the people I used to know, my family: they all come back to me in reminiscences from time to time, in small hits of nostalgia. This Canadianness, these memories, come into my poetry occasionally but, I would not think that often, except perhaps in the case of my mother and father. When I first arrived in Australia I felt as if I had come to the moon. This was particularly the case living as I did in that first year in Whyalla, semi-desert country, on the edge of that black stump. Perth is not like the moon. I’ve been here for eight years. It must be one of the most beautiful, comfortable, easy places to live in the world. My accent hangs in there and this seems to define my Canadian image for others.

Q: Many poets in the late twentieth century draw on the movies, film, TV, video, for much of their material. Does contemporary film, theatre, music, the arts in general, come into your poetry?

Price: I rarely read newspapers anymore; TV is very much a peripheral experience for me although, since I want to sit with my wife and son, I do watch the news and an odd assortment of stuff. I’d watch perhaps one video every two months; I listen to a lot of ABC radio and read a great many books. My wife and I, and sometimes our son, would go to the movies perhaps once every two months. Some radio items get into my poetry; occasionally an item from TV or the press becomes the basis for a poem, but mostly books and experience past and present.

Q: Do you ever get bored, or really anxious, or depressed, or joyful? Tell us a little about your emotional life.

Price: By 1980 I was stabilized on lithium carbonate. I was 36 years old. That was fifteen years ago now. Since that time, except on two or three occasions when I went off my lithium in order to write or in order to prove I didn’t need the lithium, my emotional life has been steadier than it has ever been. I get exhausted and depressed if I stay up after midnight, if I’ve just had a sixteen hour day ten of which involved reading and writing. It also takes me a half an hour to an hour to get going in the morning. I often have signs and signals of depression, unrealistic fears and anxieties when I first wake up, but once I’ve had my shower and a cup of tea, the joys of life beckon on a much steadier track than they did from my twenties to my forties. My spirits are just about always good until late at night. It seems to me as if the sharp edges of my manic-depression have been taken away and I’ve been left with quite a useful emotional package.

As far as boredom is concerned I don’t think I’ve been troubled with this since my teens. Since I began to be seriously interested in writing in the early 1980s, I have been particularly self-directed and engaged in meaningful and pleasurable activity. Without the emotional swings the world seems so much steadier and the writing rooted in solid ground.

Q: You did not mention music as having any influence. Could you comment on your musical experience and how it relates to your poetry?

Price: From the age of about 18 to my early thirties I used to buy LPs and the first thing I’d put into a house if I was moving around was a hi-fi. Music was an important part of my life in my teens and twenties, my years as a youth. By the mid ‘70s the music scene got to be very complicated with dozens and dozens of groups. You just could not keep up with them all. Buying records, cassette tapes and discs became too expensive. By the mid-to-late ‘70s, too, I had three children to raise and I could not afford to buy music any more. So I listened to the radio instead. Recently my family and I bought a computer with a disc player in it and I bought my first disc with a coupon given to us by the family across the road for watering their garden. It looks like my musical life is extending itself at last, after a hiatus of twenty years. I am not conscious, though, how any of this experience has affected my poetry, except in the occasional poem about playing the guitar which I have done now for nearly thirty years and which I now tire of very easily, probably from too many years of overuse and no particular talent.

Q: What are some of the topics, themes, subjects, content areas of your poems?

Price: Anyone who actually reads my poetry will see that question answered in exquisite and not-so-exquisite-detail, as the case may be. Many of my poems deal with the process of writing poetry; all the poems are introduced with quotations from various sources which relate in different ways to the content of the poetry. Off the top of my head I’d say the following were common topics in my poetry: love, religion, Mt Carmel, my family, the Baha’i Faith, poetry, writing, people, the erotic, nature, history, etcetera. I think the list, even a list of categories, is virtually endless.

Q: How do you determine the length of a poem, its shape; how do you decide when it is over, its style?

Price: The length is determined largely by the content, the topic and by what I have to say. There is no specific pattern here, as far as I can see. There tend to be certain patterns: sonnet length, one-to-two page poems on rare occasions; very few poems are less than ten lines; even fewer would go for more than three pages. A statistical analysis might reveal some concentrations which I am not aware of here. Sometimes a poem is light and humorous; at other times it is very serious, maybe even a little depressing for some people, although I am conscious of people’s disinclination to dwell on the heavy side of life at least here in Australia. Most of the time the poem is easy to end because I get a clear feeling I have said what I want to say. Perhaps once every ten or twenty poems I get into a bind and I cannot find the words I want; it is an anxious and discomfiting process when this happens and if all my writing was like this I’d give up writing poetry. Thankfully, writing poetry is a fairly flowing experience with a great deal of pleasure associated with an ease of expression. Indeed, much of the writing of poetry I would even describe as a blissful process, sheer delight. When I reread it seems as if it was not written by me at all. I find this phenomenon quite strange, exciting in a way, but it makes me feel cautious as if I was dealing with a gift, a gift that has come to me in my middle years and one I treasure as if from the Source of awe and power.

Q: Do you think you can teach people how to write poetry? Do you think people like having a poet around?

Price: If someone has something to say and they find it difficult to say as a playwright, an essayist, a novelist, a writer of short-stories, poetry may be for them. I found writing novels too difficult. I never tried writing plays or short-stories in any serious way. Essays are only written for teachers and academic journals and are very difficult to put into a more generalized public place.
--HAD TO CUT THIS INTERVIEW SHORT SINCE THIS SPACE ALLOWS NO MORE WORDS------
Q: Thanks for your time Mr. Price; I look forward to a second interview at some future time when we can continue exploring the poetic dimension and some of your own thoughts and experiences in that dimension.

Ron Price
24 January 1996 and
Finally Updated on: 2 March 2012

[RonPrice]

AUDEN AND ME

Section 1:

W.H. Auden(1907–1973) was an English poet, playwright, and essayist who lived and worked in the United States for much of the second half of his life. His work represents one of the major achievements of twentieth-century literature. “Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”1

T.S. Eliot thought of religion as “the still point in the turning world,” “the heart of light,” “the crowned knot of fire,” “the door we never opened”—something that remained inaccessible, perfect, and eternal, whether or not he or anyone else cared about it, something absolutely unlike the sordid transience of human life.

Section 2:

W.H. Auden thought of religion as derived from the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”—an obligation to other human beings despite all their imperfections and his own, and an obligation to the inescapable reality of this world, not a visionary, inaccessible world that might or might not exist somewhere else.

Auden’s Christianity shaped the tone and content of his poems and was for most of his life the central focus of his art and thought. It was also the aspect of his life and work that seems to have been the least understood by his readers and friends, partly because he sometimes talked about it in suspiciously frivolous terms, partly because he used Christian vocabulary in ways that, a few centuries earlier, might have attracted the Inquisitor’s attention.1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Edward Mendelson, “Auden and God,” 6/12/’07, a review of Auden and Christianity by Arthur Kirsch in The New York Review of Books, 21/3/’13.

Section 3:

In October 1967 just as I was
settling into my second month
teaching grade 3 Inuit kids on
Baffin Island….W. H. Auden
gave the T. S. Eliot Lectures at
University of Kent in the UK.

Auden took-up some of Eliot’s
themes, martyrdom, & relations
between poetry, belief, words, &
the Word:

Any heaven we think it decent to enter
Must be Ptolomaic with ourselves at the centre.1

Auden sought what he eventually
found: single style that was more
than capable of answering literary
need, and I did, too… as the years
passed into this new 21st century!!2

1 Auden quoted by Denis Donoghue in “Worldling”, The New York Review of Books. 19/6/’69.
2 Auden found a religious base to his poetic, as did I. I, too, was an Anglican, but only in the late 1950s, before I joined the Baha’i Faith from which I derived many of my moral and aesthetic ideas within Baha’i doctrines developed over two centuries.

[RonPrice]

HEADY DAYS
All my sins remembered

Part 1:

When one writes about politics one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other. I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement. I am now 69. My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those embryonic years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. It was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes.

But such experience in my adolescent years did not prevent me from being interested in the political world. I just finished watching a two-part doco on Whitlam,1 Australia’s Prime Minister just after I arrived in Australia from Canada when I was in my late 20s.

Gough Whitlam (1916- ) is now 97. He didn’t rise to the top to become Prime Minister; he had to fight to get there.1 He did that fighting all the way back to the same year my mother joined the Baha’i Faith: 1953. I was only 9, then, and living in Ontario Canada. Whitlam’s only free ride into the political arena came on the winds of social change that woke up conservative Australia and helped deliver the Australia Labor Party (ALP) victory in 1972. By then I was 28, living in the dog-biscuit dry land of northern South Australia, and teaching high school.

Part 2:

Tough Irish Catholic working class stock dominated Labor in the 1950s and 1960s; these were Whitlam’s opponents as he tried to rise in the ALP. Whitlam’s opponents included the conservatives, the Liberal Party members. Whitlam was different; he had a Protestant background; in the ‘50s and ‘60s he was young and fresh. He was also educated, witty, intellectual, brimming with ideas and committed to serving all Australians. Because of all this, he was resented and distrusted by his own party, the ALP.

Whitlam entered Parliament in 1953, and joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1959. I joined the Baha’i Faith that year, a non-partisan religion; I knew nothing of Whitlam. He became Labor Leader in 1967 after a catastrophic ALP defeat. I was teaching Inuit at the time in the Canadian Arctic. He didn’t win his first election as Leader in 1969 but he came close.

By 1972, his persona and policies were hitting a chord with rebellious baby-boomers who were railing against sexism and racism, and demanding peace not war, especially in Vietnam. Women and migrants also liked their suburban neighbours Gough and Margaret. At the campaign launch, TV stars, rock singers and comedians pushed the “It’s Time” jingle into every Australian lounge room and Whitlam gave Labor its first Prime Minister in 23 years. By then I was on my way to Gawler in the Barossa Valley to teach in a high school outside Adelaide in South Australia, much less that dry-biscuit, and popular as a vine-growing region.

Whitlam exercised his power at breakneck speed in 1973, appointing his own government advisor on women’s affairs, a world first; introducing a Racial Discrimination Act and investing in motorways, childcare centres, housing for low-income families and other infrastructure. Whitlam was all the rage while I got ready to move to Tasmania to teach in what is now the University of Tasmania.

Whitlam spoke of breaking the reliance on Britain and America, and of Australia becoming more independent. He bought Jackson Pollock’s $1.348 million Blue Poles for the new National Gallery of Australia and loved the ensuing controversy. The ALP was in the news a lot of the time. I was far too busy with my 60-hour a week job, with the last and rocky-year of my marriage, and with my responsibilities in the local Baha’i community where I served as the secretary. My emotions and my mental-set were full to overflowing. The partisan-political world was like a parallel universe which existed far-out on the periphery of my new Australian life.

Part 3:

In one year, the last half of 1973 and the first half of 1974, as I left South Australia and arrived in Tasmania, and after an initial rise in ALP popularity, cracks appeared in the ALP world and its media coverage. The actions of an Arab coalition started a worldwide economic meltdown. Whitlam had assumed Australia’s economy was bulletproof, but inflation and unemployment rose steeply. Ignoring advice, he pushed through one of his most prominent, and very expensive, reforms: free university education for all. The state of the economy deteriorated further.

The conservatives controlled the Senate and tried to block government legislation, but Whitlam called their bluff by calling an election. The ALP, on 11 April 1974, won with a similar majority to its win in 1972. He enacted a free healthcare service, the forerunner of Medicare, and I settled-in to what became the beginnings of my second marriage, and another 60 hour a week job teaching a new list of subjects to students preparing to teach in primary and high schools.

Part 4:

Whitlam’s renewed optimism didn’t last. The party axed his trusted deputy Lance Barnard and a scandal erupted around the relationship between his replacement, Jim Cairns, and Cairns’ exotic chief of staff Junee Morose. The decision to sign up the offshore loan shark Troth Hemline to help buy back Australia’s mineral wealth was like signing a death warrant for Whitlam’s administration. In 1975 the Opposition voted in a strong leader in Malcolm Fraser. Blocking supply this time sparked dramatic events unprecedented in Australian history: the Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked Whitlam and appointed Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister. It was game over.

Polls from the first week of campaigning showed a nine-point swing against Labor. Whitlam's campaign team disbelieved the results at first, but additional polling returns were clear: the electorate had turned against the ALP. The Coalition attacked Labor for economic conditions, and released television commercials including "The Three Dark Years" showing images from Whitlam government scandals.

Part 5:

The ALP campaign of October to December 1974, which had concentrated on the issue of Whitlam's dismissal, did not address the economy until its final days. By that time Fraser, confident of victory, was content to sit back, avoid specifics and make no mistakes. On election night, 13 December, the Coalition enjoyed the largest victory in Australian history, winning 91 seats to the ALP's 36, and taking a 37–25 majority in the Senate in a 6.5 per cent swing against Labor.

The day before the election I left Tasmania, my several responsibilities, and my job as a senior tutor in human relations and education studies at the then Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. I moved to Elwood Victoria and then Kew, and yet another job in Box Hill with its 60 hours a week. I had yet another set of responsibilities in the Baha’i community. My first marriage ended, and my second began. That election in December 1974, the comings-and-goings of the ALP and the Liberal Party in 1975 as well as all that partisan-political-media-world remained where it had always been, far-far out on the periphery of what I thought about and felt from day-to-day.

Part 6:

Wallace Brown described Whitlam in his book about his experiences covering Australian prime ministers as a journalist:
“Whitlam was the most paradoxical of all prime ministers in the last half of the 20th century. A man of superb intellect, knowledge, and literacy, he yet had little ability when it came to economics. Whitlam rivalled Menzies in his passion for the House of Representatives and ability to use it as his stage, and yet his parliamentary skills were rhetorical and not tactical.”2

“He could devise a strategy and then often botch the tactics in trying to implement that strategy. Above all he was a man of grand vision with serious blind spots.”2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Whitlam: The Power And The Passion, on 26/5/’13 and 2/6/’13, on ABC1 TV, 7:30-8:30 p.m.; and 2 Wallace Brown was one of the longest serving and most respected members of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery(1961-1995). He was noted for his even-handed reporting of political affairs and his encouragement of young journalists.

History is mnemonic, and
especially recent history in
which the events of the day
act as a background music,
often distant like a piece of
classical music which one
has heard many times but
is unknown: its name, its
composer or any of their
inner workings. And, so,
one quickly passes-on to
a real life far away from
the stage on which all that
sound & fury plays itself
out in one of our life’s great
dramaturgies as Goffman
calls so much of our life.1

Of course, it all signified a
great deal as so much of a
life signifies a great deal,
but: the enterprises of great
pitch and moment..…..their
currents turn-away and lose
the name of action..…while
all my sins are remembered.2

1 Erving Goffman(1922-982) was and is now considered, by many, to be the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century.
2Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, lines 85 to 89.

Ron Price
5 June 2013

[RonPrice]

It has been over a year since I posted on this thread but, since I have just written a piece that is strongly indebted to a fellow Canadian, I'll post it here.-Ron Price, Tasmania
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GEORGE WHALLEY
...a search for the durable and the concrete

Part 1:

George Whalley(1915-1983) was a scholar, poet, naval officer and secret intelligence agent during World War II. He was also a CBC broadcaster, musician, biographer, and translator. He taught English at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (1950–80), and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1959.

The TV series, The Twilight Zone, was released in October 1959, and I joined the Baha'i Faith that same year; I was 15, in grade 10, in love with a girl around the corner from where I lived, and was also a baseball player of local fame. Whalley married Elizabeth Watts on July 25, 1944 the same week that I was born. Until today I had never even heard of George Whalley. In my study of Shakespeare, a study that began in 1959/60 and a study that has continued periodically until now, over 50 years, I came across an essay by George Whalley. This prose-poem is a result of the interest I have taken in the first 24 hours of coming to know of his existence.

Part 1.1:

Whalley's writing has a blend of seriousness and humor; nostalgia is minimal in his literary work, and there is little or no sentimentality. His literary characteristics show an alertness, observation skills, perceptiveness and a careful craftsmanship. Whalley’s best writing always contains these qualities. Due to his wide range of interests and talents some called him a “Renaissance man” and a polymath.

Over the several decades of his writing, Whalley aims at achieving a sense of unity in multiplicity and an understanding of the poetic process. It has become increasingly clear, especially since his death in 1983, that, like George Grant, Whalley was an outstanding Canadian, one of the great minds that Canada has produced. I had the privilege of being one of Grant's students in my first year at university, 1963-4. In my years as a student in Canada and Australia, from 1950 to 1980, Whalley taught English literature at Queens University in Kingston Ontario but, as I say above, I knew nothing about him until today.

Part 2:

"Canadians are stubbornly Canadian," wrote Whalley, "we may prove in our secret way to be as unassimilable as the Jews and as inedible as the Laurentian Shield, though given to much worry about what it is to be Canadian. Canadians are often mistaken for Englishmen in Canada and for Irishmen in England; this continuously look for something of their own that is distinctive and perhaps symbolic of their Canadianness. I find certain durable things in my childhood and recall them as things concrete with no nostalgic intent.1--Ron Price with thanks to 1Michael Moore, editor, Whalley: Remembrances. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1989, p.16, quoted in "Life Of George Whalley", John Ferns, Professor Emeritus, McMaster University.

The tradition of literary criticism
I am told has two poles: Aristotle
and Coleridge, & the imagination
performs a realizing function, has
a dynamic state of wholeness that
is accessible to all men, overflows
into prose and poetry giving them
a life of their own. This gives my
way of thinking an extraordinary
promise, an intimacy of initiative
as I come to study others' words1
in a spirit that combines suffering
and unity of action & a testimony2
to life's vitality and pain's conflict.3

You are right, George, about that
stubbornness & that inedibleness,
that unassimilableness that is part
of my search for things distinctive
and symbolic of my Canadianness
as I examine ny childhood and my
adolescence for what is durable &
concrete, a home for my nostalgia.

1 John Baxter, "George Whalley and a Way of thinking About Shakespeare" in Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities, Volume 15, 2011.
2&3 This was a focus for Aristotle in his Poetics see Baxter above, pp.9-12.

Ron Price
15/7/'14.

[RonPrice]

RIMBAUD

Part 1:

One hundred years after the death of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud(1854-1891), a French poet, I was just beginning to find my way in the world of poetry. Rimbaud influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his late teens. His "genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes."1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Cecil Hackett, Rimbaud: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, (1981).

In 1991, on the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death, I was teaching English Literature at a polytechnic in Western Australia and had begun to turn to studying and writing poetry. Unlike Rimbaud I did not really find my home in poetry until well into my middle age, and after I had turned away from novel-writing. I also turned toward poetry as several fires were also beginning to go out in my career-life, my sex-life and my emotional life. By 1991 I was fully compliant on my medications for bipolar disorder. In these last two decades my emotional life has gone through a series of smoothing-out of the edges due to changes in my medications. There were some difficult transitions but, as I write these words, my intellectual-emotional-sensory world has become more balanced than in all the previous stages and phases of my life-narrative.

Part 2:

I gradually came to know more about this French poet in the last two decades as I studied more and more of the western intellectual-poetic tradition. But Rimbaud's work is far too eccentric, wild, and lacking in common sense for my liking. The French poet Paul Valery made this same point in Graham Robb's book, Rimbaud, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

I find that making comparisons and contrasts between myself and other poets provides insights and understandings into my own life and my own poetic work. It is this desire that has led to this particular prose-poem and many others of a similar nature.

Rimbaud, like me, was a restless soul who travelled on three continents. I, too, had a restless quality especially in my young adulthood. I travelled extensively on two continents from my 20s to my 50s; in later life, after taking an early retirement at the age of 55, I travelled briefly in Europe and the Middle East.
I had bohemian and libertine tendencies in my late teens and early 20s, but they were nothing like those of this French poet whose tendencies continued to a wide range of excesses; he died before he was 40. My tendencies to excess were largely curtailed, muted, conventionalised, by my two marriages, my career in the teaching profession, medications for my mental health problems, and my religious proclivities by sensible and insensible degrees over several decades.

Rimbaud's mother was authoritarian and controlling. He ran away from her as soon as he could. My mother, on the other hand, was kind and understanding; indeed, she was a liberating and encouraging force in my life. Still, as I look back to my early 20s, it seemed that I had to break the umbilical cord, and it was not easy. My publishing life was just beginning in my late 30s as Rimbaud was heading into a hole for those who speak no more, as that prolific Iranian figure, the Bab, put it so succinctly.

Part 3:

Rimbaud's poetic philosophy had several facets quite unlike my approach to poetry. "The idea," he stated, "is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses." Any derangement of my senses, which was the result of my bipolar disorder, was not something I wanted to replicate and encourage and, by the age of 24, I began a lifetime of medications that kept my sensory experience in the bounds of normality.
"Being a real poet involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet," so wrote Rimbaud. "I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer," he continued; "the poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. To be a seer he also must experience every form of love, of suffering, and of madness. The poet must search himself, consume all the poisons in him, and keep only their quintessence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, and the great learned one, among men."

Part 3.1:

"Only then will be he arrive at the unknown because he has cultivated his own soul, which was rich to begin with, more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed."2-Ron Price with thanks to 2Wikipedia, 21/12/'14.

Part 4:

I can go with you, Arthur,
on some of your ideas, but
my approach to unknowns
in life has taken a different
course with senses firmly in
tact, and not at all deranged.
I, too, will die charging into
and through my visions and
all those named & unnamed
things.....And, yes, Arthur...
there is a madness in it all,
but the world knows much
more about madness now.

I have had to deal with the
poisons you mention, but
now I only keep a little of
their quintessence as I go
into the evening of my life.

Ron Price
21/12/'14.

[RonPrice]

I feel I should offer a belated apology to those who prefer Facebook-and-Twitter style messaging. I always recommend to readers that they stop reading when they lose interest or their eyes start to glaze-over. Skim or scan the document; try to find something of value. I send you my greetings from Downunder.-Ron Price, Tasmania