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Preamble:
I began asking and answering these questions about myself and writing in
1998 and added more in the summer of 2009/10. This is the 26th
simulated interview in 14 years, 1996 to 2010. There is no attempt in this
particular series of Qs &As to be sequential, to follow themes or simulate
a normal interview. I have attempted a more logical-sequential pattern in
most other interviews. I have posted literally millions of words on the
internet and readers who come across this interview of 3500 words will
gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read at sites on this
world-wide-web, sites they can access by simply googling the words:
RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of others words like: poetry,
literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, inter alia.
1. Do you have a favourite place to visit? I’ve lived in 25 cities and
towns and in 37 houses and would enjoy visiting them again for their
mnemonic value. There are dozens of other places I’d enjoy going
circumstances permitting, circumstances like: lots of money, good health,
lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people in those places.
3. Who are your favorite artists? There are several dozen art
movements and hundreds if not thousands or artists. I will name two
famous artists whose work I like and two whom I have known personally:
Cezanne, Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates.
5. Who are your heroes? The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith,
Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in
‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Memorials of the Faithful and many more that I come
across in reading history, the social sciences and the humanities.
6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and John
Hatcher in my middle age, Jamie Bond and Douglas Martin when I was a
young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too many
to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 65.
7. If you could invite several people(a dozen) for dinner from any
period in history, who would you choose and why?
I’d chose the following people but I would not have them all come at
once. I would take them as follows:
7.1 Pericles: I’d like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age,
as he saw it.
7.2 Roger White: I’d like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observe
that real kindness which I could see in his letters.
7.4.1 Douglas and Elizabeth Martin, 7.4.2 Jameson and Gale Bond and
7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university
academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on my
developing values in the formative period of my late teens and early
twenties.
8. What are you reading? At the moment, in 1998, my last year of full-
time employment, I have fourteen books on the go: eight biographies,
four literary criticisms, one book of philosophy and one of psychology.
Now in the first year on two old age pensions a decade later, I am reading
only material on the internet and that reading list is too extensive to list
here.
10. What food could you not live without? I would miss my wife’s
cooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must
be said, though,(answering this question ten years later) now that I live in
northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and Mexican food. Now that I am
retired I hardly miss these foods.
11. What do you do when you feel a poem coming on? I get a piece of
paper and pen or go to my computer/word processor.
Woodcock went on to say in that same interview that when one acts
dramatically or precipitately—like resigning from a job or losing one’s
temper--it often has consequences that are very negative. He gave
examples from his own life and I could give examples here; I could
expand on this important theme but this is enough for now. Readers who
are keen to follow-up on this aspect of my life can read my memoirs.
I was reading about the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have
mentioned in this series of questions and answers. He said that he did not
have all that many friends who were writers. He knew their problems,
but he did not know the problems of painters. He said that he liked to
move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists and people who
could tell him something. By my mid-fifties I had had enough of people
telling me about things. If I wanted to know about stuff I could read,
watch TV, listen to the radio or google. If I wanted some social life I
could visit a small circle of people but, after an hour or so I usually had
enough of conversation. Due to my medications by the age of 65 and
perhaps due to being in my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80)
I found more than two hours with people took me to the edge of my
psychological stamina, patience, my coping capacity. It was better for me
to seek out solitude after two hours to preserve the quality of my
relationships and not to “blot-my-copybook,” as my wife often put it
when I indulged in some emotional excess, some verbal criticism of
others or gave vent to some kind of spleen.
16. How would you describe the social outreach in your poetry?
17. Some poets see their work as a form of social criticism and like
the Canadian poet Irving Layton, for example, they rage against
society and some of what they see as society’s illnesses and injustices.
Where does your poetry fit into this picture?
Many of Layton's more than forty published volumes of poetry are
prefaced by scathing attacks on those who would shackle a poet's
imagination; over the years he has used the media and the lecture hall to
passionately and publicly decry social injustice. But perhaps his loudest
and most sustained protest has been against a restrictive puritanism that
inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. My poetry is
not an expression of scathing attacks on anything; nor is it a passionate
and public poetic vis-à-vis that quixotic tournament of social issues that
are paraded in front of me day after day in the print and electronic media.
I did not travel the way Purdy did. I just kept moving to new towns, some
two dozen, and for a great many reasons until I was too tired, too old, too
worn-out, too sick, too poor----goodness---what a sad tale, eh? Now I
travel in my head and through the print and electronic media.
I don’t feel like this at all, although I can appreciate Larkin’s sentiments.
If I want some congenial poetic spirit I read his poetry or I read about him
but I have no strong desire to meet and have a chat. But I like to talk
about poetry and that is why I’ve simulated these 26 interviews.
Gary Geddes says in the same interview I quoted above that when he was
translating a book of Chinese poetry with a George Leong, George would
often bring him the most depressing melancholic poems in Chinese to
translate. Geddes would say: "George you gotta give me something else, I
can't bear all of this stuff.” I feel that same way about a lot of poetry,
indeed, most contemporary, classical and poetry from any period of
history. I just don’t connect with it. My mind and heart do not engage.
The poets I do engage with hit home quite deeply, but they are relatively
few.
A poet has many functions, but two functions of this poet that interest me,
to answer this question off the cuff so to speak, is: (a) to discover and
distil the labour and the genius of the Bahá'í experience and (b) to give
expression to the delight and the love that are at the heart of writing. The
Canadian poet A.J. M. Smith wrote this in 1954.4 Smith had a
preoccupation with death as I have, although not as intense and not in the
same way as Smith’s. Out of his preoccupation with death he made
poetry. I have made my poetry out of this and other preoccupations.5
3
Don McKay, “Local Wilderness,” editorial, The Fiddlehead, 1991,
pp.5-6.
4
A.J.M Smith, “Refining Fire: The Meaning and Use of Poetry,” On
Poetry and Poets: Selected Essays, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto,
1977, p.64.
5
Anne Compton, “Patterns for Poetry: Poetics in Seven Poems by A.J.M.
Smith,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 28, spring/summer,
1991.
From a Bahá'í perspective, of course, the arts and sciences in general, and
poetry in particular, should “result in advantage to man,” “ensure his
progress,” and “elevate his rank”6; that music is a ladder for our souls, “a
means whereby they may be lifted up into the realm on high” 7; that the art
of drama will become “a great educational power”8; that when a painter
takes up her paint brush, it is as if she were “at prayer in the Temple” 9;
that the arts fulfil “their highest purpose when showing forth the praise of
God”; and that “music, art and literature...are to represent and inspire the
noblest sentiments and highest aspirations.”10 The beloved
Guardian(Bahá'í leader from 1921-1957) saw such spiritual power in the
arts that he predicted they would eventually do much to help the Cause
spread the spirit of love and unity.
22. When you talk about art and the arts what do you mean?
When I say “art” or “the arts,” I mainly have in mind those that are
commonly referred to as “fine arts” such as poetry, painting, sculpture,
theatrical drama, film, music, dance and others. But I also have in mind
the “design arts,” such as architecture and urban design as well as the
crafts, such as pottery and rug-weaving because these arts operate on a
spiritual as well as a material plane.
I have a photo which I post at many internet sites. The caption, the
descriptive comment on this photo, reads: “This full-frontal facial view-
photo, taken in 2004 when I was 60 in Hobart Tasmania, has a light side
and a dark side. It is an appropriate photo to symbolize my lower and
higher natures. These are natures that reach for spiritual, for intellectual
and cultural attainment on the one hand and reach for and get caught-up
in/with the world of mire and clay and its shadowy and ephemeral
attachments.
Of course, when I look in the mirror there is not this clear dichotomy of
light and shadow. When I look in the mirror I see an external self, a face
6
Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 168.
7
Kitáb-i-Aqdas, paragraph 51.
8
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London, p. 93.
9
Ludwig Tuman, Mirror of the Divine: Art in the Bahá’í World
Community, p. 45
10
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Blomfield, The Chosen Highway, p. 167.
which bears a relationship with my real self, a self which is not my body.
My real self is an unknown quantity and my face really tells me very little
about this real self. And so, to answer your question, I see what nearly
everyone else sees: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, cheeks, etc.
25. Talk a little bit about the types of poetry written and read today?
The famous American essayist Joseph Epstein wrote over 20 years ago
that: “Sometimes it seems as if there isn’t a poem written in this nation
that isn’t subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation
or the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or
another.”11 Dana Gioia wrote that “the first question one poet now asks
another upon being introduced is ‘Where do you teach?’” Dana Gioia,
“Can Poetry Matter?,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1991. Gioia himself
acknowledges a heritage of a commentary of concern for the health of
poetry extending from Edmund Wilson’s “Is Verse a Dying
Technique?”(1934) through to Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry?”
(1988).
I’ll close with some words from American poet William Carlos Williams:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.13
26. Talk a little about courage, creativity, ecstasy and fantasy if you
can.
I will draw on the words of Rollo May, the man who introduced
existential psychology to the USA and whose writings influenced me
back in the 1970s. “If you do not express your own original ideas,” wrote
May, “if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed
yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make
your contribution to the whole.”
Concluding Comment: