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
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