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RonPrice
Joined: 27 Oct 2004
Posts: 28
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
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 Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2004 10:08 pm Post subject: Vision Amidst Complexity |
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VISION AMIDST COMPLEXITY 
In the visionary poetry of the west since the early 1950s, say since 1953 when the Baha’is say the Kingdom of God on earth began, there has been a thoroughgoing rejection of contemporary society; there has been a search for a new non-culturally dominated vision with an emphasis on personal meaning. “Dreams press us on all sides” said Robert Bly, but for many of the so-called visionary poets it was not the wide socio-political world around them where the vision found its chief expression. It was with the dying self, its inner sensations and fears, with withdrawal, with private experience that their vision was incarnated. 
As the Shrine of the Bab and the Mother Temple of the West were finally completed in the early 1950s; as the Guardian continued to expatiate on his vision of both our present society and its future; and as the Baha’i community expanded significantly in those same 1950s, the vision took on greater and greater specificity. By the 1990s, after three decades of visionary exegisis by the Universal House of Justice; after a burgeoning publishing thrust that established a massive literature filled with an increasingly elaborated vision; after magnificent architectural constructions, an unfolding splendour from Mt. Carmel and the confluence of continents to the mid-most heart of the ocean; and after the continued and steady growth of the community, the vision that stood before the believers and the seekers among their contemporaries was enthralling. -Ron Price with thanks to Hyatt H. Waggoner, “ Prospects”, American Visionary Poetry, Louisiana State UP, Baton Rouge, 1982, pp. 200-207. 
Amidst a staggering complexity,
fragmentation, division, multipicity,
proliferation, interdependence,
eclecticism, globalization, sensory
explosion, knowledge bubble-baths,
strains and stresses of incredible
magnitude, post-traditional experiment,
absurdity, brain heat, white-hot, blackness,
dark heart of mysterious transitions, post-
modernism, poststructuralism, pentapolar
political orientations, impoverished psycho-
emotional mental sets in a plurality of
conceptual perspectives: phenomonology,
hermeneutics, psychanalysis and critical theory:
mutually contradictory, mutually exclusive,
complementary, independent, beyond arbitrary
mixing, varying temperaments, problems with
deep intellectual shafts that cannot be settled—
all of this lies behind and above this vision
which has been growing so unobtrusively in our
midst and now stands before us like a dream: so new,
so various, so dazzling, so alive, amidst this tumultuous
transition—going forward now as never before. 24/8/97.
_________________
Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 63. He taught for 35 years in pre-primary, primary, secondary, post-secondary and seniors schools. |
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RonPrice
Joined: 27 Oct 2004
Posts: 28
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
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| Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 6:02 am Post subject: Thanks to Donald |
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I appreciated your response to my prose-poem, Donald. Here is a link to some photos at the Baha'i World Centre, if you have not seen them before:
http://www.bahaiworldnews.org/terraces/photos.en.html
_________________
Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 63. He taught for 35 years in pre-primary, primary, secondary, post-secondary and seniors schools. |
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RonPrice
Joined: 27 Oct 2004
Posts: 28
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
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| Posted: Sat Oct 07, 2006 12:24 am Post subject: Artistic Heroes For Poets and Architects |
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MY OWN ARTISTIC HERO
I substitute a literary self for a historical self, a private self going public with few masks, groping at authenticity and declaring my autobiography in my poetry, in intense and personal experience, concerned with my deepest emotions, my self-exploration, self-definition, self-identification, self-invention, a lifetime’s work of the self, dictating the principle structure and content of the poem, revealing a self I did not know I knew, where the present moment is not everything but a rich contributor to the past and the future in poem after poem, countering not only the impersonality of my bureaucratic, technological society and the affect this impersonality has on the progressive decay, the disintegration, of the notion of the self, myself; but also the massive influx of many intense relationships that are part of my personal and professional lives. -Ron Price with thanks to Samuel Maio, Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry, Thomas Jefferson UP, Kirksville, 1995, pp. 1-22.
I am my own artistic hero, of sorts,
especially back then as I tried to change
the world1 and then as I tried to tell of
my dark side, my many sides, in a period
of poetry dominated by a concern for self,
narrating my autobiography in verse and
guaranteeing that readers would get the
real me, in many different forms, styles,
digressions, wayfaring, an observer, a
confessional element, some universal
consciousness defined, in part, by my
vision, art and bio-history, my referential
conversation, my joyful composition, my
music, my proselike lines of discovery.
Ron Price
26 May 1997
1 1962 to 1971 saw the beginning of my pioneering ventures, first on the homefront in Canada, and then overseas in Australia. That enthusiastic, energetic, centre stayed with me until it took on a quieter form in the 1990s, writing poetry.
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Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 63. He taught for 35 years in pre-primary, primary, secondary, post-secondary and seniors schools. |
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