I have been away from Canada for thirty-six years. I have been precipitated into homesickness many times. Images of northness, seasonality, spaciousness, magnificence, extravagant teeming abundance, still support my reality in the relentless Australian sun with its unalleviated glare. But I do not feel that sense, so common in twentieth century poets, especially those who left their homeland, of myself as an outsider.
I became accepted, not only by the Baha’i community in Australia, but by a community of Australians that I belonged to and academics that I had some association with. If leaving Canada was a sacrifice, and there is no strong evidence that it was, the experience, it would appear, nourished rather than inhibited my creativity. I gained a great deal, so much that I could not have found in Canada had I stayed there. The politics here is much the same as the Canadian: partisan stuff night after night on the TV and in the newspapers, stuff I had become alienated from as early as the late 1950s.
Combining history and biography, much of my poetry is a type of sociological imagination as C.Wright Mills described it back in 1959. This imagination escapes the merely personal by surrenduring to the features of life's bigger picture; it escapes personality because the poet is only a medium, a vehicle, a vessel, a catalyst in the process of creation. Mills said as early as 1961 that both liberalism and socialism had exhausted themselves. At the time I was playing baseball and had a big interest in girls. But 40 years later I realized that Mills was right and that my interest in a new politics associated as it was with the Baha'i Faith had a relevance far beyond my imagination in 1959.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
Linear Mode
