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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 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?
I: Tell us something about your voice as a poet, about its beginnings and
development.
I: Many writers talk about being connected to the landscape. What role
does place have in your poetry?
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
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: 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.
Ron Price
11 July 2009