Luminous Realities: Exploring the Creative Process: Poetry Out Loud - Listen to This!

Luminous Realities: Exploring the Creative Process: Poetry Out Loud - Listen to This!
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SO WONDERFUL, SO DELICATE

In his autobiography art critic Kenneth Clark quotes a passage from the diary of Bernard Berenson, the famous twentieth century renaissance art critic. Berenson’s experience resonated with my own and so I have rewritten his words, retranslated his expression in terms of my own poetic adventure. There is something in the process of writing poetry that is like a pilgrimage. I travel to book after book, to experience after experience, to suck from them the juices of poetic ideas. I became filled again and again with images which I absorbed from reading and life and made them unforgettably and often forgetably, my own. I travelled through my life, anywhere and everywhere, to the remote and the easily accessible and acquired feelings so wonderful, so delicate and so subtle that I could scarcely define them to myself, though I did not cease trying. -Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait, John Murray, London, 1974, pp.135-6.

What would I find here
that I could treasure unto death?
What meaning would fall
from the pages of my days,
the sentences of my life,
the delicate and subtle breaths
that once filled my lungs
and gave to my eyes such feelings
that now seem richer, more wonderful
than ever I could have felt and which,
with memory’s warm and softening touch,
come to me like a dream, from out of mist,
out of a grey emptiness that I fill with energy,
with dynamic forces never before felt quite
like this in their unity and variegation.

Ron Price
16 September 2000

A NEW LIFE AND A NEW LARA

Ten weeks after I had come to the firmest and most realistic of decisions I had yet made regarding my future career—the decision to become a primary school teacher--the film Dr. Zhivago was released. During my pre-adult life(1963-1944), I had wanted to be a bricklayer, a fireman and a professional baseball player--in that order. My career as a primary school teacher also proved unrealistic and was short-lived, although it proved to be much more realistic than those other three alternatives mentioned above, all of which were early life enthusiasms born of childhood and adolescent play and dreams.

On 22 December 1965, the day that the film Dr. Zhivago was released, I was on my way to a Baha’i youth winter school at the University of Waterloo campus in Waterloo Ontario. The film was shot in the previous months while my father lay dying in Dundas Ontario, while my mother was finishing her working life and retiring and while I was majoring in history, philosophy and sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. In the first year(22/12/65-22/12/66) of the release of Dr. Zhivago, a film that became one of the most popular 20th century movies, I moved to Windsor to study under Dr. Jameson Bond, an anthropologist at the University of Windsor and a Baha’i who had lived in the high Arctic for a dozen years; I also began my teacher training and started a relationship with Miss Judy Gower whom I married in August 1967.

After pondering with some anxiety for eight months(12/65-8/66) the decision to teach school in the Canadian Arctic and after finishing my degree; after selling ice-cream for the Good Humour Company for three summer months and after attending a one week Baha’i youth training institute in Michigan, I left my home town, family and friends and started teaching career on Baffin Island among the Inuit. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 March 2008.

I knew nothing of Dr. Zhivago
until years later and little of the
Russian revolution or communism,
for that matter, although I had studied
Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts.1 I had discovered my
own romance not unlike Zhivago’s in
a revolution of quite another order in a
snow-bound world of quite another time.

With tragedy and a new high-seriousness
built into my daily life and with decisions
made---the enterprize all came to naught:
the north, the Arctic, the Eskimos, health,
marriage, career and, like Zhivago, I found
an inner poetic beauty, a new life and--like
Zhivago--I created one with my own Lara2
and life went on and on toward my own
mysterious end which has not yet come.

1 Written by Karl Marx in the summer of 1844.
2 While married, but separated from my first wife, I formed a relationship with a woman who became my second wife in December 1975.

Ron Price
30 March 2008

Some Personal and Background Information

1. A Poem I Wrote:

My writing is remorselessly and, I like to think, glitteringly intent on diagnosis. The glitter of invention is, for me, everywhere and it is linked with and provides a distinctive literary identity, a creative abundance. For some readers I’m sure this is the case, but not for most. For most who chance upon my writing, though, the affect on them is enervating as it is for me after a long day of writing or even periodically in the course of any single day. I like to think my literary venture is gallant and ambitious, even if it is not really successful in the marketplace. My unremitting concern for detail, for analysis and for comment is not everybody’s and my advice to many would-be readers is to take my writing in small doses.-Ron Price with thanks to Vincent Buckley, “The Novels of Patrick White,” The Literature of Australia, editor, G. Dutton, Penguin, 1972(1964).

I create a world, too, Patrick;
I want to show extraordinary
things behind the ordinary,
the mystery and the poetry,
to transcend the tensions and
explore my world by words.

No mere surface impressionism
but passages, words, vibrant with
significance growing out of profound
numbness and pervasive inarticulateness.

2. EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS HELD: 1944-2007

1999-2007-Writer/Poet: George Town Tasmania
2002-2005-Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston
1999-2004-Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc
1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies and Human Services
West Australian Department of Training
1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies and Co-ordinator of
Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland, WA.
1982-1985 -Adult Educator, Open College of Tafe, Katherine, NT
1981 -Maintenance Scheduler, Renison Bell, Zeehan, Tasmania
1980-Unemployed: Bi-Polar Disability
1979 -Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian CAE
Youth worker, Resource Centre Association, Launceston
Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Tasmanian CAE
Radio Journalist ABC, Launceston
1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities, Ballarat CAE, Ballarat
1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, Whitehorse Technical College,
Box Hill, Victoria
1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston
1972-1973 -High School Teacher, South Australian Education Department
1971 Primary School Teacher, Whyalla SA Australia
1969-1971 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County
Board of Education, Picton, Ontario, Canada
1969 Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co. Ltd. Toronto Ontario
1967-68 -Community Teacher, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern
Development, Frobisher Bay, NWT, Canada
1959-67 -Summer jobs from grade 10 to end of university
1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in
Canada: McMaster Uni:1963-1966, Windsor T’s College: 1966/7.
1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around
Hamilton Ontario.

3. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA

I have been married for 37 years. My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 60. We’ve had 3 children: ages in 2006-41, 36 and 29. I am 62, a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written 3 books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2004 and voluneeer teaching/work in 2005 after 35 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 47 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 225 lbs, eyes/hair-brown, Caucasian. See my website for more details at: http://www.users.on.net/~ronprice/ and go to any search engine and type: ‘Pioneering RonPrice’ or ‘RonPrice Poetry’ for additional writings.
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