INTERVIEW NUMBER ELEVEN

In the ongoing exercise of defining what I am doing and of finding and

developing my poetic, my literary, voice; of describing the ‘thou’ of my
poetry so that it can reach the ears of others and of locating my work in
the midst of flux and fixity; of outlining my themes with a combination of
obsession and detachment and of dealing with a biography which is my
autobiography; of translating an activity that is both amusement and
frivolity as well as seriousness and occupation, this interview continues
the process: (i) of cognition and of describing poetry’s process and (ii) of
working out poetry’s raison d’etre in my life and this poet's quest for self-
redefinition in today's world. The impetus of inspired creativity
ineluctably takes over and shapes me as individual and as artist. The
immense force of creativity projects the indivisibility of my poetic story,
my life-story and the story of my religion and society. -Ron Price with
apprecation to several authors who have tried to describe poetry’s purpose
and on which I draw in this simulated interview.

Interviewer: (I)

Tim Winton, a popular Australian writer, says that our society tends to
arm us against the transcendent by developing in its citizenry a rationalist
view of life, of reality. Do you agree?

Price: (P)

I personally see the rationalist-transcendentalist dichotomy as false. The

greatest gift of God to man is his mind. Intellect and wisdom are the two
most luminous lights in the world of existence. To approach the
transcendent without the rational is to miss the whole reality. As I have
said on previous occasions the entire nature of physical reality, indeed all
the atoms of existence, are here for our training. Existence is a school for
our soul. We learn about the transendent rhough the physical. The
relationship is metaphorical. We learn about the abstract through the
concrete. The process also involves pain, discomfort. The mind must be
brought into play. It is not about magic, miracle and mystery, except in
the most awesome sense of wonder. The role of the prophetic figure, the
Manifestation as Baha’is call Him, is to provide a metaphorical vehicle, a
tool to understand the world of the transcendent.

I think the point Tim is getting at is that reason has kept people from
religion. I think it has kept people from believing in a type of religion that
has no place in society any more among educated people. If you have to
give up your reason to accept religion it is better to give up religion. The
two must be made compatible in today’s world, perennial truths but not
archaic ones.

I: You mentioned in a recent poem that in the winter of 1992 you wrote
thirty-five poems and that this was the precursor to the great flowering of
your poetry, some 6500 in the last 17 years.

P: Yes, I’m not sure why the flowering came when it did; I think I have
discussed this question in previous interviews at least to some extent, an
extent that can always be elaborated upon in a multifactored hypothesis
and analysis. Like the last great symbolist poet, Paul Valery(1871-1945),
who filled his notebooks with observations on the creative process, I
could expatiate on the ways and means of my methods of inquiry. There
has certainly been a massive flow of material, somewhere between three
and five million words as a guesstimation: an artistic birthing of life-
experience as one poet called the process. But, to quote Valery, it would
be a mistake, folly, to see this vorrent of verbiage as a spring of truth or
myself as some oracle.1

"Poetry,” Valery wrote, “is simply literature reduced to the essence of its
active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions,
of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the
language of "creation."2 A poem is never finish, Valery emphasized, only
abandoned. While my poetry, any one of my poems, is never finished
inspite of appearances and or my claims on occasion to the contrary, I’m
sure my work is neither purged of idols, illusions or equivocations.

I: People write best about what they know best, don’t you think? What do
you think you know best? What are your core themes in your poetry?

P: I have often said my poetry is autobiographical, so I am writing about

myself. I am writing about my experience, my experience with: my
religion, my family, my world as a teacher, the places I’ve lived, my
thoughts which I live with day after day all my life and especially since
about 1962 when I started reading a great deal and pioneering from place
to place. That will do as a summary of what has become a great mass of
poetry which is difficult to summarize.

I would like to say something about my Baha’i experience. It is now

approaching sixty years since my mother first contacted the local Baha’i
community in Burlington Ontario. I was nine years old then. It is
impossible to summarize in a few pithy sentences these six decades of
1
Paul Valery, Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, 1895.
2
Paul Valery, Littérature, 1930 .
activity and thought. But I try in my poetry to tell the story of this
experience. I try to be real, to use everyday language, to be true to life,
authentic, to run the gamut between the luminous ideals and vision and
the often tragic and melancholy day-to-day stuff which would test the
patience of a saint and the wisdom of Solomon as I often say. There is a
story in my poetry that I don’t think is often, if ever, told. I want it to be
accessible, readable, enjoyable, entertaining, thought provoking,
stimulating. I trust one day it will. I live in hope.

I: Tell us something about your voice as a poet, about its beginnings and
development.

P: I see myself, as I’ve said before, writing in the tradition begun by

Roger White. But alot of his poetry is not accessible to ‘average readers’.
I’ve met many who can’t read him. They just don’t understand what he is
saying. I don’t have a problem myself with White in this way. He started
me on my poetic road. But by the spring of 1992 I was beginning to find
my literary voice or should I say my poetic voice. I had published some
150 essays in the 1980s and, in the 1970s, I had begun to have some
success, some confidence in my writing and in my academic career, a
career with a strong literary component.

My voice became by the mid-1990s much more the voice of everyman, of

simplicity, of the vernacular, the authentic down to earth telling it like it
is, like it was and like it might be. This voice was spiced with some heavy
intellectual baggage for the heavy-weights who might one day read my
poetry. But the heavy stuff was spice around a core of quite simple
verbiage that the average fellow could understand if he was at least
interested in reading and interested in the subject matter of my prose and
poetry.

I: Many writers talk about being connected to the landscape. What role
does place have in your poetry?

P: I am not conscious of the importance of landscape in my poetry, but I

am conscious of the importance of place, of location, of home and hearth.
I think I have a rich interplay between place and ideas in my poetry.
Experience takes place inside, in an inner world for which place and
ideas, people and things are like a mise en scene. The landscape that is
real, rich, all important to me is an inner one. That’s a quick, off the cuff,
response.

I: Tell us a little more about how you see the process of writing poetry
and your relationship with readers.
P: As a poet I transpose observation into language through a heightened
awareness that challenges the reader also to observe. The poet cannot
exist isolated from the experience of the reader. Experience, meaning,
the form of the poem itself and the reader are never separated from the
poet; the poet depends on each of these components of movement. The
author lays claim to a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, only some of them original, blend and dash. There exists in my
words a tissue of ideas drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.3

There is what might be called a poetic objective which is the liberation of

the mind and the spirit from the prison of life. It is a prison which bars
aperson from accessing his or her source of inspiration. The poet’s
imagination must be broadened by an ability to dream while the
conscious mind remains open for the heart to follow suit. When the
world of imagination, inspired by visionary observation, begins to seep
into the writer, he/she must watch, wait, and listen for the cue: the poet

wears extra eyes around his neck,

his mind pokes out his ears the way an Irish Setter's nose
pokes out a station-wagon window.4

I can’t help but feel the concerns and sentiments of the Canadian poet,
journalist, novelist, short story writer and lawyer, A.M. Klein(1909-
1972). Klein saw himself—and poets in general--as throwback, relict and
freak who have been cheated by modernity out of their historic role and
position as poets. Klein saw the position and deposition of the poet as
one of self-fragmentation. Other social figures, he argued, had replaced
the poet as guides and teachers of people in the many human
communities: the successful businessman, the celebrity, the politician, the
rich popular artist and the scientist with his inventions ans well as his
deadly inventions. The world continued to both inspire and preoccupy
Klein. The purpose of the poet’s interest has been transformed. Now the
poet explores a world, as Klein sees it, which has banished poetry.5

3
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Literature of the Modern
World, editor, Dennis Walder, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1990, p. 231.
4
Alanna F. Bondar, “DESIRE: THE METAPOETICS OF DON
MCKAY'S BIRDING, or desire,” in Studies in Canadian Literature,
Volume 19, No. 2, 1994.
5
Rachel Feldhay Brenner, “A.M. KLEIN'S THE ROCKING CHAIR:
TOWARD THE REDEFINITION OF THE POET'S FUNCTION,” in
Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 15, No. 1, 1990.
Although I understand Klein’s concerns, expressed in the wake of the
great depression and the holocaust, from the 1930s to the 1950s, I don’t
share his deep pessimism. The role and function, indeed, the very nature
and forms of expression of poetry have been transformed in my lifetime.
There are more poetry writing and reading poetry now than ever before in
history. While I can’t help but agreeing with much that Klein writes
about the poet, my views are more nuanced and more complex. I
approach the questions and issues Klein dealt with vis-à-vis the poet in a
very different way to him. But I mention him here because he is a useful
reference point and his sensibility is a strongly contrasting one to my
own.

I: Sir Laurens van der Post, the modern mystic and philosopher, said we
need to seek an inner voice. is this another way of defining what you are
trying to do?

P: Unquestionably! One of the reasons I write is that sometimes I find the

voice, spot on. It is exhilarating. It’s like connecting with your soul.
Much of it is connected, I like to think, with a rich vein of Baha’i
experience which other Baha’is can tap into and experience that sense of
delight, surprise, pleasure, the ‘aha experience’, that feeling of ‘this
fellow has said it the way I felt it.’ The last several decades have not been
easy ones building the Baha’i Order, its administrative system around the
planet. A lot of people got worn out, exhausted, in a battle which in some
ways is uniquely Baha’i experience. I have tried to tell this story as best I
can. It’s my story but it belongs to everyone who has worked in and for
this World Order of Baha’u’llah.

I: Writers of fiction it is said are myth makers. Historians construct

history; while writers of poetry, says Aristotle, are more philosophical
and studiously serious than historians because they deal with the
universal. Do you think there is any thruth in this general view?

P: I’m not so sure about these distinctions. I think one can make many
refined definitions of genre which can be useful. I think the central
question is “what is the writer trying to do?” Wilde, Joyce and Shaw were
trying, among other things, to define what it meant to be Irish at the turn
of the century; Twain wrote about what it was like to live on the
Mississippi River in the American south at a certain time in the
nineteenth century. I write about what it was like to be a Baha’i in the last
half of the twentieth century in Canada and Australia and, more
especially, an international pioneer.
I think the poet Jimmy Santiago Baco defines a certain central honesty
that I like to think is at the heart of my own poetry. He says he follows
what his poem is describing, what it is doing at the moment of its setting.
He follows it, as he puts it, ‘in his blood.’ His poetry, he says, lives not
only on the page but, when he reads it, he becomes the poem as it makes
and remakes his body and soul. I like this perspective, for it is mine, too.

I: Tell us something about what you do and how much writing occupies
your life.

P: I'm driven and have been for years, although my medications soften the
edges of this drive, this activity, this focus on writing. I don't do much
else these days and haven’t since I retired from FT, PT and casual work in
the years 1999 to 2005. I don't have much of a social life and don’t want
one. I've been very circumscribed by other circumstances in my life
which keep me writing. I am a naturally social person but after half a
century(1949-1999) of a social focus, I wanted a more solitary style of
life in which I could give myself to writing, to reading, to independent
scholarship. I think I would have continued my life of endless social
pursuits if I had not tired of it by the late 1990s.

I: We’ll let you get back to it then, Ron.

P: thanks very much.

Ron Price
11 July 2009