I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon acquired their initial conceptualization for what became their life’s magnum opus: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon.  More than a dozen years ago in 1997 I began to think of writing my own epic poem and fashioned some ten pages as a beginning.  The poetic work of my own life, my epic, I have now begun to see in terms of the poetry I have sent to the Baha’i World Centre Library and what I have entitled Pioneering Over Three Epochs.  I have begun to see all of this poetry somewhat like Pound’s Cantos which draws on a massive body of print or Analects, a word which means literary gleanings. The Cantos, the longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and, in the now published form, written from 1922 to 1962,  is a great mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of my poetry. The conceptualization of my poetry as epic came long after its beginnings as far back as 1980 or possibly 1962 at the very start of my pioneering life.  The view, the concept of my work as epic began as a partly retrospective exercise and partly a prospective one.  

Unlike Pound’s Cantos which had its embryo as early as 1904 and did not find any concrete and  published form until 1917, my poetry defined itself as epic in retrospect as I gradually came to see my individual poetic pieces as part of one immense epic opus; and in prospect by the inclusion as the years went by of all future prose-poetic efforts.  Such was the way I came to see my epic opus insensibly and sensibly, by increasing, sometimes in subtle and sometimes in quite specific degrees of understanding and clarity from 1997 to 2000. This concept of my work as epic began, then, in 1997, after seventeen years(1980-1997) of writing and recording my poetic output and five years(1992-1997) of an intense poetic production.  At that point, in 1997, this epic covered a pioneering life of 35 years, a Baha’i life of 38 years and an additional 5 years when my association with the Baha’i Faith began while it was seen more as a Movement in the public eye than a world religion.  In December 1999 I forwarded my 38th booklet of poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library: one for each year of my pioneering venture, 1962-1999.  I entitled that booklet Epic.  The epic journey that was and is at the base of my poetic opus is not only a personal now of forty-eight years, it is also the journey of this new System, the World Order of Baha’u’llah which had its origins as far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of modern history find their origin: the American and French revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the revolution in the arts and sciences.

Generally, the goal or aim of this work and the way my narrative imagination is engaged in this epic is to attempt to connect this long and complex history to my own life and the lives of my contemporaries, as far as possible. I have sought and found a narrative voice that contains uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of reference mixed with certainties of heart and spirit.  Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its centre Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities, the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our story. I have called this poetic work an epic because it deals with events, as all epics do, that are or will be significant to the entire society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief that what I am doing is important, probably unique, to the history and development of this System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism and deeds in battle of contemporary and historical significance and manifestation.   My work and my life, the belief System I have been associated with for over half a century, involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents, but that of this Cause as it has expanded across the planet.

The epic convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a verse that is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story, is found here. I think there is an amplitude in this poetry that simple information lacks; there is also an engine of action that is found in the inner life more than in the external story. In some ways, this is the most significant aspect of my work, at least from my point of view. Indeed, if I am to make my mark at this crucial point of history, it will be largely in the form of this epic poem which tells of thirty-five years of pioneering:1962-1997. But more importantly, the part I play, the mark I leave, is as an individual thread in the warp and weft that is the fabric and texture of the Baha’i community in its role as a society-building power. Indeed, the World Order lying enshrined in the teachings of Baha’u’llah that is “slowly and imperceptibly rising amid the welter and chaos of present-day civilization,”  is becoming an increasingly familiar participant in the life of society and this epic is but one of the multitude of manifestations of that participation.  My own life, my own epic, within this larger Baha’i epic, had its embryonic phase in the first stage of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan, 1937-1944,  the first of three phases leading to the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963 as the last year of my teen age life was about to begin and as, most importantly, the fulfilment of the prophecy of Daniel regarding “that blissful consummation” when “the Divine Light shall flood the world from the East to the West.”  

In the Greek tradition the Goddess of Epic Poetry was Calliope, one of the nine sisters of the Muses. Calliope and her sister Muses, not a part of popular culture and slipping into some degree of obscurity among many of the multitude of cultural elites in our global world, were seen traditionally, at least in the west and among its cultural literati, as a source of artistic and creative inspiration.  Calliope was the mother of Orpheus who was known to have a keen understanding of both music and poetry. We know little about Calliope, as we know little about the inspiration of the Muses, at least in the Greek tradition.  In the young and developing artistic tradition and its many sources of creative expression among adherents of the Baha’i Faith, on the other hand, although gods and goddesses play no role, holy souls “who have remained faithful unto the covenant of God” can be a leaven that leavens “the world of being” and furnishes “the power through which the arts and wonders of the world are made manifest.”   In addition, among a host of other inspirational sources, the simple expression ‘Ya’Baha’ul’Abha’ brings “the Supreme Concourse to the door of life” and “opens the heavens of mysteries, colours and riddles of life.”  Much more could be said about inspiration from a Baha’i perspective, but this is sufficient for now in this brief description of the origins and purpose of this my poetic oeuvre.

Mary Gibson emphasizes in her study of Ezra Pound’s epic entitled Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians  that one question was at the centre of The Cantos. It was the "question of how beauty and power, passion and order can cohere."  This question was one of many that concerned Pound in the same years that Baha'i Administration, the precursor of a future World Order, was coming to assume its earliest form in the last years of the second decade of this century and the early years of the third, a form that was slowly coming to manifest those qualities Pound strove in vain to find in a modern politico-philosophy.  In the wider world these qualities were yet to manifest themselves, but in my mind and heart, and certainly in my poetry, these qualities found some expression.

At the heart, the centre, of my own epic, then, is a sense of visionary certitude, derived from my belief in this embryonic World Order of Baha’u’llah,  that a cultural and political coherence will increase in the coming decades and centuries around the sinews of this efflorescing Order.  The poet Wallace Stevens’ expressed his sense of  the epic “as a poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice. ”   What Stevens says here certainly gives expression to what is involved in this process for me.  I am involved in the act of creating a poem of the mind and trying to find out as I go along “what will suffice” to express what is in my mind and my heart, what are part and parcel of my beliefs and what occupies the knowledge base of the Baha’i Faith.  This process is, without doubt, at the centre of this conceptual, this epistemological, this ontological, experiment of mine.  This epic is an experimental vehicle containing open-ended autobiographical sequences.  It is a didactic intellectual exploration with lines developing with apparent spontaneity and going in many directions.  The overall shape of this work is in no way predetermined.  In many respects, both my long poem and the thousands of shorter poems is purely speculative philosophy, literary playfulness and autobiographical description that all try, each in their own ways, to integrate Baha’i history and secular history.  I attempt as I go along to affirm a wholeness within what I refer to as “a noetic integrator”  a concept I utilize in this long fragmented world in which I have lived my life and where a tempest seems to have been blowing across my society and my world for decades, for over a century.

Pound was intent on developing an “ideal polity of the mind”.   This polity flooded his consciousness and suggested a menacing fluidity, an indiscriminate massiveness of the crowd.  The polity that is imbeded in my own epic does not suggest the crowd, probably because the polity I have been working with over my lifetime has been one that has grown so slowly; the groups I have worked in and with have been small.  My style, my poetic design, though, is like Pound’s insofar as I use juxtaposition as a way to locate and enhance meanings.  Like Pound, I stress continuity in history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic poetry for Pound was “the historical.” It was part of the reclaiming job that Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain ground from the novelists.  But unlike Pound I see new and revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own world and in the future.
                            
Those who are quite familiar with the poem Leaves of Grass may recall that Walt Whitman often merges both himself and his poetry with the reader.   His poem expresses his theory of democracy. His poem is the embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can represent a whole epoch.  This protagonist can be looked at in two ways.  There is his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While I feel it would be presumptuous of me to claim, or even attempt, to represent an entire epoch or age, this concept of a private/public dichotomy is a useful one, a handy  underlying feature or idea at the base of this epic poem.   I also like to think that, as I have indicated above, this experience, this poetry, this epic work, is part and parcel of the experience of many of my coreligionists around the world even though my work has an obvious focus on my own experience. My poem The Heart of History in an Age of Extremes, written on 9 December 1999 is one good example of this crucial perspective on my experience, my poetry and the Baha’i community within whose matrix this all takes place.

In my poetic opus, my epic, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, I like to think, that with Whitman, the reader can sense a merging of reader and writer, a political philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history’s experience, at least as far back as the 1840s, if not the days of Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in those halcyon, if bloody, years of the French Revolution.  But there is much more than verse-making here.  I have no hesitation in making what Donald Kuspit calls “identitarian claims”  for my poetry.  My writing, my poetry, contains within in, page after page, an expression of what has been and is the ruling passion of my life: the Baha’i Faith, its history and teachings. They seemed to have wrapped and filled my being over my pioneering life over these last 45 years.  Indeed, I have seen myself, with an increasing consciousness, as part of what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called a “heavenly illumination” which would flow to all the peoples of the world from the North American Baha’i community and which would, as Shoghi Effendi expressed it “adorn the pages of history.”   My story is part of that larger story, the first stirrings of a spiritual revolution, which at the local level has often, has usually, indeed, just about always, seemed unobtrusive and uneventful, at least where I have lived and pioneered.

It is a narrative imagination, too, that is at the base of this epic poetry. As far as possible I have tried to make the narrative honest, true, accurate, realistic, informed, intelligible, knowledgeable, part of a new collective story, a new shared reality, part of the axis of the oneness of humanity that is part of the central ethos of the Baha’i community.   As I develop my story through the grid of narrative,  I tell my story the way I see it, through my own eyes and my own knowledge, as Baha’u’llah exhorted me in Hidden Words, but with the help of many others. I leave behind me traces, things in your present, dear reader, which stand for absent things, things from the past, from a turning point in history.  The phenomenon of the trace is clearly akin to the inscription of lived time, my time and that of my generation, upon astronomical time from which calendar time comes.  History is “knowledge by traces”, as F. Simiand puts it.   And so, I bequeath traces: mine, those of many others I have known, those of a particular time in history.

In the years since this epic was first formulated, that is since the year 2000, I have been working on my prose narrative Pioneering Over Four Epochs. In the last ten years, September 2000 to September 2010, this narrative has come to assume its own epic proportions. It is now 2600 pages in length and occupies five volumes.  It is an extension of that epic that had its first form from September 1997 to September 2000. After more than a dozen years, then, from 1997 to 2010, my epic has extended into the world of prose memoir, of narrative autobiography.  I also completed a 300 study of the poetry of Roger White which was placed on the Juxta Publications website in October 2003.  It was entitled: The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White.  My website, also entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs, has gone through two further editions in this time after its initiation as a first edition in 1997.  This website now contains some 3000 pages and 450,000 words.

There are so many passions, thoughts, indeed so much of one’s inner life that cannot find expression in normal everyday existence.  Much of my poetry and prose, perhaps my entire epic-opus is a result of this reality, a search for words to describe the experience of our age, my age.  This is part of what might be called the psycho-biological basis of my work.  My poetry and prose allows me to release surplus, excess, energy and an abundance of thought and desire which I am unable to assimilate and give expression to in my everydayness and its quotidian features.  This entire work is an expression of  thoughts, desires, passions, beliefs and attitudes which I am unable to find a place for amidst the ordinary. It adorns the ordinary; it enriches my everyday experience, as if from a distance.   I have come to see and feel my literary output as if it were a breeze en passant over my multifaceted religious faith, over my daily life.  I do not write to convince or proselytise, but as a form of affirmation of all that has meaning and significance in life.  I write of that foul rag and bone shop, as the poet Yeats called the heart, and of that golden seam of joy in life, of frailty and strength, the abyss of mental anguish and a heart exulting unaggrieved. It is all part of that trace.

An additional part of this epic is an epistolary narrative written over more than fifty years, 1959 to 2010,  and driven by this same belief system acquired over a lifetime, a belief system which finds a core of facticity and a periphery of interpretation, imagination, intuition, sensory activity and an everyday analysis of its history and teachings in the context of these letters. This collection of letters and its many sub-categories is part of my effort to compensate for the tendency of my fellow Baha’is throughout the history of their Faith not to leave an account of their lives, their times, their experiences, as Moojan Momen has made so clear in his History of the Babi-Baha’i Religions: 1844-1944, although I did not start out with this motivation, nor did I think of my epistolary work as compensation as I went along. This view I have to see in a retrospective sense.  This epistolary narrative is yet one more attempt, along with the other several genres by this writer, to provide a prose-poetry mix of sensory and intellectual impressions to try to capture the texture of a life, however ineffably rich and temporarily fleeting, in one massive opus, one epic form, with branches leading down such prolix avenues that its total form is most probably only of use as an archive and not as something to be read by this generation.

At the present time there are some 50 volumes of letters, emails and internet posts under ten major Sections delineated by roman numerals. Section III contains my contacts with sites on the internet and there are some 25 volumes of site contacts at: site homepages, forums, discussion boards, postings, replies, inter alia. The headings, the categories, of the letters, the emails and all these posts on the internet,  posts largely made since 2001 and the official opening of the Arc Project in May 2001, are also a part of this massive, this burgeoning epic. The other genres of my writing within this epic framework I leave for now.  After a decade since the initial concept of this epic was first initiated and describing, I feel I have made a start to what may become a very long story as my life heads into late adulthood and old age and the Faith I am part of heads into the second century of its Formative Age.

One of the major functions of my writing is to order the chaotic tumble of events.  It can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it becomes as I write become.  The art that is my writing can order the chaotic tumble of events that I imagine into a new history of both my own life and my times in Canada, in Australia and on the rest of the planet.  The American idea of the individual's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is countered by the Canadian goal of "peace, order, and good government."  In my writing "peace, order, and good government" is not so much threatened by the abuse of power by the ruling class and by historic events but by a spiritual revolution that is universal and out of men’s control..

Ron Price
First Draft: 9/12/99
Updated   : 9/9/'10

I find this to be an interesting article somewhat - though "prose" it is not - I could be wrong about that, I'll have to take another look - but here is my opinion- the wade of this is rather lengthy and clinical to me and no offense is intended, perhaps I'm just not educated is all

A belated thanks, Nora D. Yes, you are right: lengthy and clinical it is. It is outside the convention of short posts and a light style. I'm sure for many it is heavy going. Much of the writing in the print media is heavy-going, and much of it is light-going. To each their own, I suppose one could say.-Thanks again for your honest reaction, Nora D.-Ron in Tasmania