Intimate Commerce Poem by Ron Price

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.

So many years of incessant labour
and a particular kind of observation
surely will come to something-
all this poeticizing,
some peculiar affection
for those leavening forces.

So many years of incessant labour
for this international spirit
breathing forth the perfume
of His Cause so that, one day,
it will not be passed over
by the thoughtful.

So many years of incessant labour,
one of the antennae of the race,
but the bullet-headed many
do not trust this antennae
and the slough of despond
continues with troubled
forecasts of doom.

So many years of incessant labour
to create means of communication.
This is the struggle,
the struggle of great art
to describe the different,
to write of it in poetry.

Ron Price
4 October 2002