RonPrice

REALITY

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

Here was a bit of history,

came across it the other day

in a bookshop: some letters,

letters written by Van Gogh.


He was writing about his

ultimate goal and feeling

that he was on the right

track---firmly convinced

he was---so convinced

that he paid little attention

to what people said of him.

He painted what he felt

and felt what he painted.

This is my story, too, my

story of poetry....except

that......few people say

anything about my poetry

and I never know if I am

exactly on track, if I write

precisely the best, the most

apt that can be written.


But.....I fit my emotions

around my assumptions:

1.that this poetry is at the core of my life,

2.that it expresses my essential relationships

with all that I know and love--and

3. I write--this is my faith.

-Ron Price 14/3/02.
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Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

Do you write any poetry, Ron Price?

RonPrice

The prose-poetry I write tends to take the following form or style:
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IDIOSYNCRASY

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

We pay a terrible price

for our fatal flaws-----

as you put it when you

were finishing up your

great work, Manning...


The one precious gift

we need is to read

the direction of the

river of life and I have

poured much into that

reading-reading-reading.


I have poured my life

into a type of literary

'holy crusade.' It has

fortified my days, but left

me worn at the edges as

the light was finally installed

on the hill, up on the hill in

that oft' war-torn-dry-land


It wasn't, as Clark concluded,

that no one knew the direction

of the river or had anything to say.(1)

Too many people thought they knew

and even more had something to say.


If I did not have that sense of direction--

acquired early, in my teens, I would have

drowned in that blood-dimmed-noisey tide

of passionate intensity(2) and endless,

absolutely endless, endless, opinions.

(1) Clark, Vol.6, op.cit., p.500: written on or about May 13th 1987.
(2) W.B. Yeats: in his famous prophetic poem.

Ron Price
22 February 2002
Revised 27/6/07
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That's all folks!