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RonPrice
Joined: 27 Oct 2004
Posts: 28
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
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 Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 5:44 am Post subject: THIS NEW GREEN SHOOT |
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Art discovers and creates a new immediacy. It is an immediacy that is attained in the process of recollection. Images, concepts, ideas, long since known, find in the work of art, their sensuous representation. And so it is in the poetry that I write, the form of art assembles, determines and bestows order on matter so as to give it an end, definition, meaning. It is meaning, order in the service of sensibility and joy. This is achieved partly by bringing all of life, joy and sorrow, to a standstill; partly by giving the fleeting moment an enduring value; partly by transforming pain and anxiety into present pleasure and even entertainment. I see my poetry, too, as part of a reconstruction of the polis, not part of a partisan political poetry, but poetry in a wider political sense; as part of the total architecture of a new society where my poetry has a home, a place of significance, somewhere in the central square; part of the construction of a qualitatively new environment, by an essentially new type of human being, a human being I am striving myself to be; part of a new language, an artistic language as revolution, as separate from the Establishment, the traditional forces of the left and right. This seems to me absolutely necessary if the age of advanced barbarism and brutality, which has characterized our society in this century, is not to continue indefinitely. -Ron Price with appreciation to Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society”, Radical Perspectives in Art, editor Lee Baxandall, Penguin, Baltimore, 1972, pp.53067.
Yes, Jean, the world is illusion1
just a semblance of reality
from which we must construct
the real reality,
the spiritual world
which is reflected in our midst.
This world is our means:
concrete, material, sensate,
of gaining access to that other world,
often subtle and always pervasive.
It is our school,
the schoolhouse of oneness,2
given us by that Master of Love.
Yes, Jean, there is
a staggering passivity,3
a preference for sport,
in the human drama,
in a hyperreality
where the system no longer
has control over the mass:
cynical, silent, defiant,
apathetic, it waits
for western civilization
to continue its long, long,
bottoming-out,
its rootless circulation,
as new roots spread
their tendrils, spread
their tendrils. For the
old tree has died, smooth,
bare wood everywhere,
like a ghost on the horizon
and this new Green Shoot
and just stuck its head
above the ground:
some see it as an
unfolding magnificence.4
Ron Price
18 November 1999
to December 28th 2005
1 Jean Baudrillard represents post-modernism in the social sciences better than anyone, some argue. His works remind us more of poetry. In a recent article on the Internet he referred to our immediate experience of the senses as “illusion”.
2 Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952(1945), p.28.
3 Jean Baudrillard often alludes to the staggering passivity of the mass and the meaninglessness of the political process to that mass.
3 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, BE 156, reference to the nineteen terraces on Mt. Carmel.
_________________
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: Tue Sep 19, 2006 6:58 am Post subject: Mysterious Sources of Creativity |
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MY CHILD CLOAKED IN MYSTERY
I now look on the period since the age of 48 as the greatest period of creativity in my life. Perhaps its source was in the many jig-saw puzzles I made in my middle to late childhood, or the tulips I drew by the hundreds when I was four or five. I had enjoyed those activites, but for some reason stopped doing them. I think it was their repetitiveness; I got bored with them. That was true of all sports, eventually: baseball, hockey, golf, football, cricket, inter alia. This recent creativity after age 48 may be a simple desire to move beyond those simple, mechanical tasks.
I'm not sure whether the explanation of the source of this new creativity is to be found in old memories, in trusting hunches and intuitions about my childhood and adolescence. Creativity and activity has moved inward. -Ron Price with thanks to John Bradshaw, Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, Judy Piatkus,, London, 1990, p.280.
There are probably many things
in those early years
that could explain the sources
of this poetic burgeoning:
two generations of writing,
books and more books,
my mother reading poetry
in the garden; I can see her now
with Edna St.Vincent Milay
under the tree by the clothes-line;
my grandfather's poem 'Seagull',
a restless energy that got tired
of sport and eventually career,
needed some place to go,
or perhaps it was not so much
these things, but:
a great weariness of life,
an emptiness that I fill
with this sweetness of words,
this airy substance,
this vibration of utterance
in which I create a spiritual world,
some result whatever the thought,
some of my child cloaked in mystery,
a dance of aloneness, a sacred silence
where my mother is gold,
my father silver-haired
and we hold each other close,
absorbed, encircled, included
in all the colours of life
back in those first years
which dance and play
and jump into my memory,
unannounced, unbeknownst.
Ron Price
1 November 1997
to April 3rd 2006
_________________
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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