Ron Price Poems

Speak to me of freedom
Midst liberty confounded
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You made it big, Jack,
in the last half century
as I went from my teens
to two old-age pensions.
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JOHN KEATS

Coming in at last from the Periphery
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JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:
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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.
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So much lies ahead, after
I am gone, long after I am
gone…for my epigone1 to
whom I direct the required
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The poem below is by William Wordsworth. It is entitled 'A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags.' I tried to place his poem in italics and the verses of my poem alternating with his, but was unable to do this with the fonts available at this site. I have taken Wordsworth’s poem and directed its content toward my own life.

I remember my mother reading Wordsworth in the 1950s, but I did not read him seriously until the early 1990s when I was nearly fifty. The events in my poem took place, but in quite a different way than I have conveyed them here. I have taken some poetic license in writing what follows; or you might say this poem is semi-autobiographical. I write this prose-poem on the eve of another school year in the northern hemisphere as primary and high school students go back to school tomorrow. Down here in Tasmania where I now live I do not think about teaching any more since I am retired.–Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, September 4th,2005.
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Today in New England a celebration is taking place to pay tribute to one of the most astute poets of that region: Hayden Carruth.1 Until two days ago I had not even heard of this poet but, while waiting in the Launceston Tasmania library at mid-day(21/11/’08) before going for an ultra-sound at a local hospital, I picked up somewhat at random volume 84 of Contemporary Literary Criticism, a useful encyclopedia of analysis and commentary of the works of writers and poets, biographers and autobiographers as well as novelists and journalists. I had been dipping into this encyclopedia in the last fifteen years(circa 1993-2008) , beginning in the last several years of my employment as a full-time teacher in Western Australia.

In the same spirit of randomness and, perhaps, serendipity, as someone might browse through a magazine while waiting in a doctor’s reception area, my eyes casually fell on the pages devoted to Hayden Carruth. I found out very quickly many things about his life, about his poetry and his general writings. When I got home I looked him up on the internet. I found out he had just died and that this celebration I mention here was taking place today. I write this prose-poem to contribute my part to a celebration of someone I hardly know but with whom, in only the last two days, I have developed a sense of a spiritual, an intellectual, kinship. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Times Argus Online,15 November 2008.
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GEORGE WOODCOCK

Editor, poet, critic, travel writer, historian, philosopher, essayist, biographer, autobiographer, political activist, university lecturer, librettist, humanitarian, gardener-George Woodcock(1912-1995) seems entitled to wear almost as many hats as there are works to his credit-which stand at somewhere between 120 and 150, not including his radio and TV plays, documentaries and speeches. He no longer wears any hats, though, having gone some fifteen years ago to that mysterious and undiscovered country, that hole where we all go and speak and write, eat and drink, no more.
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CONSUMPTION

Consumption is a significant part of the circulation of shared and unshared, harmonious and conflicting, significant and insignificant meanings. Meanings in their various shades and intensities are at the core of what we call culture. We communicate through what we consume and we consume, in one way or another, an immense variety of material products. Consumption is perhaps the most visible way in which we stage and perform the drama of self-formation. In this sense, then, consumption is also a form of production, the production of self,1 so argues John Storey, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. As a writer and editor, as a scholar and poet, I consume and produce ideas on a daily basis.
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