INTERVIEW 19

The interview below is intended to provide some helpful perspectives in relation to my poetry, poetry found at literally hundreds of sites in cyberspace.  Anyone interested in following-up on this interview, in obtaining more details on my approach to poetry, can read a number of the other 18 interviews, book reviews, history, poetry, etc. available on the Internet at my website: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ This is the 4th edtion of my website, a site which has been on the world-wide-web since 1997.

Note: All 'interviews' are simulations and this one was prepared as part of a package inclusion in a booklet called Twenty Years On for the Baha'i Council of the Northern Territory late in 2002.

Interviewer: (I) Would you say your poetry has evolved, especially in the last twenty years, to serve specialized uses that cannot be served by other means?

Price: (P) Poetry, for me, serves many uses: some academic, some exegetical, interpretive, imaginative, some narrative, some active, some polemical, some autobiographical, some creative, some communal-community oriented, some confessional, some conversational, some identity defining: my identity, my society, my religion, my ideas.  I think I can achieve these ends, serve these uses or purposes in other forms of writing but not as efficiently, as conveniently, as succinctly, as through poetry.

I've tried novels, some dozen efforts in the last twenty years but the furthest I've got is about 30,000 words, perhaps twice; I've tried autobiographical narrative twice: 30,000 and then 60,000 words in a second edition. Maybe someone will publish it long after I've gone. I've kept a journal, a diary, off-and-on, even retrospectively, becoming a narrative in the century 1944 going back to 1844. This loose, drifting material of life, as Virginia Woolf calls it, this place where one flings a mass of odds and ends, I only turn to occasionally, perhaps half a dozen times a year these days. Maybe I'll utilize this genre in my later adulthood. I've never counted the words but it occupies four volumes here in my study.

Essays give my poetry the only real competition it needs to concern itself with.  I must have 150 essays unpublished and another 150 published. I tend to turn to the essay for some extended piece of thinking and writing. It is about as extended as I want to be, say, two or three thousand words. This amounts to two to three hundred thousand words.   I write short, two to three hundred word, items for magazines and letters to family and friends, publishers and magazines.  Finally, I keep notes on a myriad subjects  in over one hundred binders in my study. But, without question, poetry is king for me and has been for ten years: 1992 to 2002.

I: Could you comment on the notion of form in your poetry?

P: Over these ten years a poem has become for me, firstly, a combination of prose and poetry. I usually introduce a poem with a prose epilogue, often quite a long epilogue, one of fifty to a hundred words and sometimes two hundred or more words.  I think my poetry has as its first major feature this prose-poetry form. Perhaps the word category is better than form; it is certainly another word I'd use to provide some typology, some organizational model for what I call poetry.  My poems are conversational, autobiographical.  They are my way of telling the story, a story, my story, or, as Robert Pinsky calls it, they are each a thing in itself, not a member of some category. Each poem is an organic crystallization of experience and thought.  It involves the play, the interplay, of imagination and thought.  The result is the experience of the power to discover form.    For me, though, a poem's content is largely, though not entirely, independent of its form.  I agree with poetry critic Jonathan Holden who says that the main anxiety of modern or postmodern poetry is "anxiety with respect to poetic convention."   What is the most suitable form for my verse, for what I want to write?  Since there is no sure sense of what poetic form should be, what are the most favourable conditions for my poetry?  In the last ten years I found a form, a style, that was suited for where I was at in my life--a man in his fifties on the edge of retirement from his profession-- and where society was at, if I can be so presumptuous to define such a complex thing.

I: Since so much of your poetry could be labelled conversational poetry, could you tell us a little about how you see it in overview?

P: In conversational poetry the poet or the speaker in the poem is not famous or well known. They are ordinary men and women, unless the persona they create for a particular poem is famous in some way.  In my case the ordinary person is myself sharing the same quotidian life as my readers.  If I am to get the attention of the reader I must establish some element of extraordinariness in my poem, in my conversation. Unless it is at least equal in value in some way to the best or the most useful conversation the poem has no raison d'etre. I'm sure that is the main reason why most of what I write, what most poets write, fails to attract a readership.  People find other art forms, other activities including conversation, quite simply more attractive, more engaging.  For the most part, there is little I can do about that.  Wordsworth and many since him in the last two centuries wrote conversational poetry, but their language is now seen as hackneyed and obsolete, at least for most readers.  Wordsworth's vision was lofty but it does not capture the modern imagination.

I certainly have vision in my poetry but getting the attention of readers is no simple art today. My free-verse, narrative, conversation poem or voice, what you could also call 'prose lyric,' establishes its authority, its arousal of interest, by means of some narrative, some ethical, tone inherent in the voice and sensibility of the poem. It's very informality and familiarity is its strength.  Another type of conversational poem is the rhetorical, with its heightened and dignified language.  It is digressive, abstract, meditative, speculative, philosophical in type.  It establishes itself through an aesthetic, intellectual voice.  

I colour my conversation like some stained-glass window which colours the daylight and, whereas conversation is generally lost to history, I see my poetry as more enduring since my intentions are to a large extent communal.  My work is part of a texture of community, in this case the Baha'i community, with its pretensions, aspirations, to a long range future and role to play in the history of global civilization.

I: The poet Robert Hillyer  sees poetry as a more natural form of expression than prose.  Poets often turn to what you might call non-literary analogues such as conversation, confession and dream to recover some of the favourable conditions for poetry. Do you agree with Hillyer?

P: He certainly tells it as I experience it. Of course, not everyone sees it the same way. But there is certainly a naturalness to poetry for me, unquestionably. But there is a naturalness for me in writing letters and essays too, but little naturalness in writing novels and diaries.  Poems furnish a subtler vocabulary than other forms of writing for my experience, for how I want to write about my life, any life, any thing.  My poetry is not narrowly self-involved, although some critics may find it so. It is not self-pitying and whiningly confessional, although occasionally it may slip into that niche. There is playfulness here and a facing of life's issues squarely, at least sometimes, like everyone else. I have been hurt, cowed and intimidated along with the rest of my fellow man by various situations in life and this rich, but not so happy experience, is reflected in my poetry.  Yes, to answer your question, I think my poetry has that naturalness.

I: Do you think interviews like this help others to get into your poetry more easily?

P: I'm sure some will find interviews like this invaluable. They help provide a critical context and introduce readers to poems that might have eluded their notice. Here is someone explaining a context for my poetry and giving readers a certain illumination often before they have even seen the poetry. The aim is to enlarge the vision, the appreciation, of the reader.  It is all part of trying to win over the reader.  He or she has a lot of people playing for their attention. I know I have to work at it and, even if I work hard and do my darndest, the great bulk of the reading public in these early years of the twenty-first century is going to pass me by.

It's a ticklish business trying to describe poetry, trying to find the right words. The effect on a reader of a fully achieved poem can be no more rationally explained or methodized than a composer can explain a haunting melodic line, although one can try--and many do--I among them.  I sometimes think I have analysed my poetry too much, that I have not learned to shut up.

I’ve always liked what the Italian film director, Federico Fellini said about interviews: “An interview is a halfway point between a psychoanalytical sitting and a competitive examination.”   Fellini said that he experienced a slight uneasiness about all the interviews he’s given. He says he tries to rethink himself in each interview so as not to repeat himself. He also pointed out that he experiences embarrassing limits due to his not having answers sometimes.  One day I may say similar things, but in these simulated exercises, I have none of these problems.


I: Thanks again, Ron, for your time. I'm sure we will pick up some of these threads again at a future interview. Happy writing!

My most recent prose-poem: today(25/1/'10):
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END OF AN ERA
And a New Era

This afternoon, after finishing a late lunch, my routine laundry and dishes, essential parts of my domestic portfolio in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as I head for old age(80++), if I last that long, I bathed my feet in a solution of vinegar and water for ten minutes.  Such an exercise, I was told by my wife and as I confirmed on the googling-internet, is supposed to help remove the fungus on my toes that has gathered there in the ten years since I retired from full-time employment or, perhaps, in just the five year since I gave up part-time and volunteer work.   I turned on the TV to help pass the time while I sat in a comfortable lounge-room chair soaking my feet with my remote button poised for action.

I chanced upon the following program: “The Thirties in Colour: The End of An Era,” on SBS TV.  It was being screened from 2:35 to 3:30 p.m. this day, 25 January 2010, the eve of Australia Day Downunder.   As I watched the program’s film footage, taken by several American amateur photographers in the summer of 1937 in Europe two years before the outbreak of WW2, I thought of the first months of the Bahá'í Seven Year Plan(1937-1944) which took place in that same summer of 1937.  It was the beginning of a Plan I have now been associated with, in one way or another, for nearly sixty years.  I felt moved, as a result of this coincidental association, this synchronicity, to write this prose-poem. -Ron Price, 25 January 2010.

They had embarked upon an historic mission
that spring and summer of 1937 having heard
Freddie Shopflocher read his message on the
way to the end of the first century of this new
Era.   Little did they know of those sacrifices
which would be poured out on that sublime
mission releasing potentialities generously &
mysteriously endowed by Him Who was the
Author of that Plan lending it brilliant lustre
like that possessed by those immortal deeds
which had signalised the heroic age both for
this Cause and in that new American Republic
in previous decades perhaps as far back as the
lives of John Adams and Shaykh Ahmad in the
late 18th and early 19th century in this new era.(1)

(1) John Adams was the second President of the United States (1797–1801) and the first Vice-President (1789–1797).  Shaykh Ahmad was the founder of what became the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shi’ah Islam.  Babism was a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of that school in the 1840s in Iran.   Both John Adams and Shaykh Ahmad died in 1826, the year the first photograph was taken.  Both men laid foundations for intellectual, moral and spiritual edifices which have yet to be fully understood or appreciated by their spiritual descendants, descendants in an American democracy and in an embryonic democratic theocracy.


Ron Price 
25 January 2010

 

Prose-poem written on the eve of the summer solstice in Tasmania is found below.-Ron
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ELIOT, AUDEN, GOD AND ME

The famous poet T.S. Eliot(1888-1965) 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. From my perspective Eliot’s view of religion was its essential mystical quality, dealing as it does with the Unknown Reality which the wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned will never comprehend.  Such a view is at the centre of my belief system as a Baha’i.

The poet W.H. Auden(1907-1973) 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 in spite of his own. It was an obligation that takes place in the inescapable reality of this world, not in a visionary, an inaccessible world that might or might not exist somewhere else. Auden’s view also reflects my Baha’i ethical and moral beliefs at the core of the Abrahamic religions.

The religious and philosophical views of poets inevitably shape their poetry. 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.  This is, without question, true of the shaping of my poetry by the Baha’i Faith.  This aspect of Auden’s life and work seems to have been the least understood by his readers and friends, partly because he sometimes talked about it in suspiciously frivolous terms, and partly because he used Christian vocabulary in ways that, a few centuries earlier, might have attracted the Inquisitor’s attention---according to Edward Mendelson,1 a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. I hope that readers do not have trouble understanding my Baha’i beliefs as expressed in my poetry. I try to go out of my way to be clear and overt, explicit and serious.

Auden’s version of Christianity was more or less incomprehensible to anyone who thought religion was about formal institutions, supernatural beliefs, ancestral identities, moral prohibitions, doctrinal orthodoxies, sectarian arguments, religious emotions, spiritual aspirations, scriptural authority, or any other conventional aspect of personal or organized religion. 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. To the extent that they became ends in themselves, or made it easier for a believer to isolate or elevate himself, they became—in the word Auden used about most aspects of Christendom—unchristian. Church doctrines, like all human creations, were subject to judgment.

He made it clear that he understood perfectly well that any belief he might have in the personal God of the monotheist religions was a product of the anthropomorphic language in which human beings think. –Ron Price with thanks to 1Edward Mendelson, “Auden and God,” a review of Arthur Kirsch’s Auden and Christianity in The New York Review of Books, 6/12/’07.

We come close, here, W.H.,
you and I, but in this era of 
1000 Christianities and the
troublesome historicity that
makes belief in Abrahamic
religions and all those smelly
little orthodoxies difficult, &
as George Orwell said were
contending for our souls,1….

I must side with Henry Miller,2
and his company of romantics
with their vitalistic & visionary
intensities seeing as they did
through their own eyes & not
through the eyes of others and
portraying our culture, and its
consumerist quagmire with its
soporific effect on men’s souls.3

1 George Orwell in The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, 1984, p.40.
2 American novelist and painter Henry Miller(1891-1980) held the view that the Baha’i Faith would “outlast all the other religious organizations in North America,” op. cit., p.56.
3  ibid.,p.55.

Ron Price
21/12/’11