A CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION
Some writers are admired for their range, the great quantity of what they write. Joyce Carol Oates in contemporary American novels; Isaac Asimov in science fiction; Arnold Toynbee in world history; Freud in classical psychology; John Maynard Keynes in economics; Max Weber in sociology, the list goes on. I have an immense range of topics in my poetry, but I see my poetry more in terms of depth in several themes. Of course six thousand prose-poems and two million words puts me in some poetic-literary league: double-A? My take on the Baha'i experience, on my society and culture and my own life I like to think as perceptive, probing, thought-provoking and providing a multitude of perspectives. It certainly covers a great deal of territory. Time will tell if a popular audience or even a coterie will ever be found that enjoys my poetic landscape, its architecture and its inhabitants. In the meantime, like those mentioned above, I write and write with "the drive of the truly obsessed."1 -Ron Price with thanks to Murray Waldren, "A Life of Loving Subjects: A Review of Joyce Carol Oates' Middle Age: A Romance, in The West Australian Review, November 17-18, 2001.
She continually writes
and is in love with it.
Me, too, putting down
those shared values
that Ernst Gombrich
talked about as servant
of culture1....for I, too,
have the shared values
of this new community.
And really you can't write
what you think, not quite,
because perception, thought,
is a creative construction
of an inner reality.
The visible world is chimerical,
a vapour in the desert, illusion
and, so, all is interpretation,
all is a weaving and changing
of one immense story,
a celebration of one great chain
that goes back to a beginning
that is as mysterious as God.
1 E. H. Gombrich, who died two weeks ago, was one of the world's great authorities on the classical tradition of western art.
Ron Price
20 November 2001
Some writers are admired for their range, the great quantity of what they write. Joyce Carol Oates in contemporary American novels; Isaac Asimov in science fiction; Arnold Toynbee in world history; Freud in classical psychology; John Maynard Keynes in economics; Max Weber in sociology, the list goes on. I have an immense range of topics in my poetry, but I see my poetry more in terms of depth in several themes. Of course six thousand prose-poems and two million words puts me in some poetic-literary league: double-A? My take on the Baha'i experience, on my society and culture and my own life I like to think as perceptive, probing, thought-provoking and providing a multitude of perspectives. It certainly covers a great deal of territory. Time will tell if a popular audience or even a coterie will ever be found that enjoys my poetic landscape, its architecture and its inhabitants. In the meantime, like those mentioned above, I write and write with "the drive of the truly obsessed."1 -Ron Price with thanks to Murray Waldren, "A Life of Loving Subjects: A Review of Joyce Carol Oates' Middle Age: A Romance, in The West Australian Review, November 17-18, 2001.
She continually writes
and is in love with it.
Me, too, putting down
those shared values
that Ernst Gombrich
talked about as servant
of culture1....for I, too,
have the shared values
of this new community.
And really you can't write
what you think, not quite,
because perception, thought,
is a creative construction
of an inner reality.
The visible world is chimerical,
a vapour in the desert, illusion
and, so, all is interpretation,
all is a weaving and changing
of one immense story,
a celebration of one great chain
that goes back to a beginning
that is as mysterious as God.
1 E. H. Gombrich, who died two weeks ago, was one of the world's great authorities on the classical tradition of western art.
Ron Price
20 November 2001