Ron Price

Speak to me of freedom
Midst liberty confounded
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You made it big, Jack,
in the last half century
as I went from my teens
to two old-age pensions.
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JOHN KEATS

Coming in at last from the Periphery
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JOHN ASHBERY

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INTIMATE COMMERCE

Every poet follows his own genius, his own poetic inclination and every poem dictates its own laws. For this reason poetry is, for me, an experiment. I exult in the freedom of the poet and in the independent, elastic and prodigious literary form that is the poem. I do not use the word 'prodigious' loosely. For I have now written some six thousand poems and two million words. I find this result, this productivity, 'marvellous' and 'enormous, ' two of the meanings of 'prodigious.' I employ whatever terms and ideas are available to suit my needs and match the performance that evolves during the poetic exercise I am engaged in. The 'form' of each poem is its shape, a shape that results from the unfailing cohesion of all the ingredients in the poem and from the germinating idea or ideas at the centre of the poem. The success of each poem results from its intensity, its coherence and its completeness. During the writing of each poem my motive provides an intimate commerce, an avenue, a vehicle, for the flow of ideas, for the growth of taste and the active sense of life that each poem engenders. -Ron Price with thanks to J.A. Ward, The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,1967, pp.4-9.
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So much lies ahead, after
I am gone, long after I am
gone…for my epigone1 to
whom I direct the required
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The poem below is by William Wordsworth. It is entitled 'A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags.' I tried to place his poem in italics and the verses of my poem alternating with his, but was unable to do this with the fonts available at this site. I have taken Wordsworth’s poem and directed its content toward my own life.

I remember my mother reading Wordsworth in the 1950s, but I did not read him seriously until the early 1990s when I was nearly fifty. The events in my poem took place, but in quite a different way than I have conveyed them here. I have taken some poetic license in writing what follows; or you might say this poem is semi-autobiographical. I write this prose-poem on the eve of another school year in the northern hemisphere as primary and high school students go back to school tomorrow. Down here in Tasmania where I now live I do not think about teaching any more since I am retired.–Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, September 4th,2005.
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Today in New England a celebration is taking place to pay tribute to one of the most astute poets of that region: Hayden Carruth.1 Until two days ago I had not even heard of this poet but, while waiting in the Launceston Tasmania library at mid-day(21/11/’08) before going for an ultra-sound at a local hospital, I picked up somewhat at random volume 84 of Contemporary Literary Criticism, a useful encyclopedia of analysis and commentary of the works of writers and poets, biographers and autobiographers as well as novelists and journalists. I had been dipping into this encyclopedia in the last fifteen years(circa 1993-2008) , beginning in the last several years of my employment as a full-time teacher in Western Australia.

In the same spirit of randomness and, perhaps, serendipity, as someone might browse through a magazine while waiting in a doctor’s reception area, my eyes casually fell on the pages devoted to Hayden Carruth. I found out very quickly many things about his life, about his poetry and his general writings. When I got home I looked him up on the internet. I found out he had just died and that this celebration I mention here was taking place today. I write this prose-poem to contribute my part to a celebration of someone I hardly know but with whom, in only the last two days, I have developed a sense of a spiritual, an intellectual, kinship. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Times Argus Online,15 November 2008.
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GEORGE WOODCOCK

Editor, poet, critic, travel writer, historian, philosopher, essayist, biographer, autobiographer, political activist, university lecturer, librettist, humanitarian, gardener-George Woodcock(1912-1995) seems entitled to wear almost as many hats as there are works to his credit-which stand at somewhere between 120 and 150, not including his radio and TV plays, documentaries and speeches. He no longer wears any hats, though, having gone some fifteen years ago to that mysterious and undiscovered country, that hole where we all go and speak and write, eat and drink, no more.
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CONSUMPTION

Consumption is a significant part of the circulation of shared and unshared, harmonious and conflicting, significant and insignificant meanings. Meanings in their various shades and intensities are at the core of what we call culture. We communicate through what we consume and we consume, in one way or another, an immense variety of material products. Consumption is perhaps the most visible way in which we stage and perform the drama of self-formation. In this sense, then, consumption is also a form of production, the production of self,1 so argues John Storey, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. As a writer and editor, as a scholar and poet, I consume and produce ideas on a daily basis.
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POETRY AND SCIENCE

The language of both science and poetry is a language under stress. Words are being made by their respective authors to describe things that often seem indescribable in words: equations, chemical and physical structures in the case of science, and an inner life of thoughts and emotions, among other things in the case of poetry. Words don’t and cannot mean all that they stand for. Yet words are arguably the best means people have to describe experience. By being a natural language under tension, the language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions emerge shaped as states of matter and, more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in the soul. This is why one can say that science is poetic. One thing is certainly not true: that scientists have some greater insight into the workings of nature than poets, or vice versa. Some people feel that, deep down, scientists have some inner knowledge that is barred to others. The expertise of a scientist is an expertise acquired by learning and, unless others acquire the required learning, that particular piece of the universe of knowledge is, indeed, barred to those others. Poetry soars in the world of science.1 It soars all around the tangible, in deep dark, through a world the scientist reveals and makes his own. Poetry in the hands of a lover of life and words, a person with great knowledge and wisdom, can soar in the worlds of intellect and understanding the two most luminous lights in the world of creation.2 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Roald Hoffman, “Science, Language and Poetry, ” The Pantaneto Forum, Issue 6, April 2002; and 2Abdul-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette,1970, p.1.
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It was a wet and cold Sunday afternoon as Tasmania and Australia moved closer this weekend to the winter solstice just two days away. My wife usually watches Aussie rules and I write in my study. I often go downstairs to make a cup-of-coffee, have a snack, see how she is doing, wash a few dishes and have a break from my writing and reading. As I walked across the lounge-room I chanced upon the ABC1’s half hour program entitled: The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries.1 I did not get to see all of it, but my whistle was whetted and the result is this prose-poem.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) ABC1,4: 30 to 5: 00 p.m.19 June 2011.

The name John Ruskin caught my ear
as this focus on the individual artist
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BRABHAM

Part 1:
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