- 25 Apr 2010 04:31
#13377768
This is the 20th interview in nine years and the first since late in 2002. This interview was stimulated by reading some interviews in the poetry magazine called Poets and Writers and it was conducted over a period of about five weeks. In the last two years I have created and developed two volumes of interviews with poets and writers. These volumes serve as my archive for interviews with poets. There are dozens, no hundreds, of interviews available on the internet and in the last two years I’ve read many of them. I’ve been reading interviews for, perhaps, forty years. But this focus on interviews with poets is, at the most, ten years in the making: 1994-2004. I think this is part of my reason for continuing this interview process.
In interviews one frequently has the opportunity to reflect on what one is writing, compare and contrast it with the thoughts of other writers and poets and get as precise a view as possible of what one is writing, how one is going about it and why. The interview, simulated or otherwise, gives me the opportunity to synthesize my ideas, deal with questions and issues I have not dealt with before quite as specifically and gain fresh perspectives on the writing process. Interviews are also useful for other writers and poets to provide insights into the creative process in personal terms. I hope some readers find these words helpful.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 18th to December 25th, 2004.
Interviewer:(I) I understand your poetry writing has fallen off somewhat in the last two years, 2003-2004. Why is that?
Price:(P) I wrote an 1000 page autobiography and spent six to eight months posting dozens and dozens of pieces of poetry and prose on internet sites. I’ve still managed to put out three booklets of poetry since the last interview in late 2002 and I’m working on a 4th with some fifty poems thusfar in this new collection, a collection which may take me over the 6000 poem mark. The work goes on.
I: Do you have a program, an outline, something you are aiming at in your poetry?
P: Yes and no. My poetry is its own program. It speaks for itself. I also try and take the hermetically sealed autobiographical poetic mode and give it a good mix and shake with the historical, the psychological, the sociological, the spiritual, so much that exists in the world of the social sciences and the humanities. That is quite a conscious part of my program, my aim, my purpose in writing. I try to make use of what is known and give a fresh take on it by means of juxtaposition, blending, contrast, comparing, mixing, et cetera, and take what is not known and give readers a sense of surprise. I create, in the process, what you might call my own personal aesthetic, my voice. I define my heritage, my historical inheritance, my life and my community. Some readers can come with me and others, inevitably, can’t relate to my voice. Such is life. Such a situation is as common as air; it’s true in poetry and in interpersonal relationships.
I: A memoir, a poem, presents an opportunity to think, to remember, to put into motion the engine of imagination—it’s revisable or at least it should be so. Is that a summary of much that you have been writing lately?
P: Yes. I could say a great deal more, but the short answer is ‘yes.’
I: The poet Richard Howard said in a recent interview that “one writes the way one has to.” He also made the point, talking about his own writing, that in recent years the manner of his prose has simplified and become a little stronger and more direct. He said he was pleased with that process, that direction to his writing. He also said that he thought his poetry was getting a little better with the years. This is Howard’s description of how his writing is coming along, how it is changing. Are these sentiments helpful to you in any way, to help you reflect on your own work over the years?
P: Well, there certainly seems some inner imperative when one writes. I’d have to agree with Howard there. I think, too, that my writing has got simpler with the years, both my poetry and prose. I find it hard to evaluate what I write. Something inner comes out, but whether it is good, bad or indifferent seems to be largely defined by the readers and there are such different views on that. In the end the term quality is a bit of an enigma. Some of the joy in what one writes lies, as W.B. Yeates put it, outside oneself and some of the joy lies within and other stuff is found in the mix between the two.
I: What constitutes a "failed" poem to you?
P: I’m not sure I could define or describe a failed poem, although I can easily say some things about poems that move me, that have special meaning and ones that don’t. There are some of my poems I particularly enjoy when I reread them and others which don’t seem to give me the sense that I am saying something interesting, unique, persuasive, provocative. I wrote one today, on this the last day of this interview. It was based on the movie The Way We Were. I even had my wife help me after the first draft. I rarely do this, but we shared a common experience and I thought she could be helpful. And she was. But the poem was still flat and ultimately not very satisfactory.
There are several internet sites at which I am asked to give an evaluation of someone else’s poetry. What gives me the sense of a fine poem that someone else wrote is when I feel the person is saying something new or any one or mix of those adjectives I referred to above. Poetry which says stuff you know only too well, poetry which is banal, trite, commonplace or, on the other hand, is so complicated you can’t understand it--that is poor poetry or failed poetry. It’s a poem that fails to attract my attention or give me pleasure.
I: Would you recommended that poets give their craft the same attention and discipline as, say, a violinist or a ballerina? What does discipline and attention in a poet look like? How do you "practice" poetry?
P: There are probably as many ways of practicing poetry as there are poets. Some poets don't think they have to take themselves as seriously as other artists do. They think that just because they feel something, they can turn that feeling into a poem. They have not got a sense of apprenticing themselves to their art. They need to be like violinists and ballerinas as well as carpenters and mechanics. Poets have to keep their tools sharp, immerse ourselves in good and great poems, good and great literature, be ready to respond to the life’s stimuli and be sensitive enough to be stimulated in the first place. The poet’s world is words, not paint and visual forms, or needle and thread or clay or cloth. One’s heart and head has got to be full or, at least it helps to have something going on in these departments.
I wrote poems from 1962 to 1992 and, looking back a dozen years later in 2004, I have a sense of those first thirty years serving me as apprentice-poet. For the sort of poetry I write I need to draw on a vast range of print: books, articles, essays, poetry, magazines; much from the electronic media: film, TV, radio, CDs, et cetera and a good deal of everyday life. I was nearly 50, the middle of middle-age, before I took my first steps as a serious poet.
I: Do you go out and look for experience to write about? You know the way some writers do: they search for the weird and the wild, the strange and the amusing so they can put the experience on paper.
P: By the time, as I say, that I began writing in any serious way, I was nearly fifty and by the time I retired from full-time employment and had the time to write in any full-time sense I was in my late fifties and I had had enough experience of the strange, the weird and the wild for a lifetime, for my lifetime. I wanted to stop having experience of that kind. I felt no need to travel, to have deep and meaningful relationships; I could get that from the print and electronic media if I wanted to see the bizarre, the eccentric, the romantic, the unusual. I was beginning to feel old. Retirement is not a word I back away from; rather, it is a word that aptly describes my current state: I have retired from so many things in life that filled my days to overflowing: teaching, meetings, endless chats/conversations, going-out, going somewhere, going here, going there, worrying about not enough sex, not enough money, not enough fun/excitement, et cetera.
I: We have discussed this question before, but how would you characterize the position of poetry in these earliest years of the new millennium?
P: I think Dana Gioia put it well in her recent essay in The Hudson Review(Spring, 2003). The average amount of time people spend with print is much less than an hour a day, with several hours devoted to the electronic media. In the last several decades there has been a shift from print to electronic media as the medium for information and entertainment--and poetry. Gioia defined the shift as ‘the end of print culture.’ I would not be as bleak. I think there is a lot of print being consumed, not much of it is poetry. Celebrities, personalities and human drama are all the rage in the media and, if poetry gets a mention at all, it is usually in the context of these rages, these themes. But, as Gioia emphasizes, the bulk of the new poetry today is not literary poetry but popular; it is oral: rap, cowboy poetry, slam poetry and the poetry of song, says Gioia; even advertising and sociology could be added as poetry, if one can believe some critics. And much of it is to be found in the oral media, the electronic media. This oral poetry is a big money spinner and is found in cafes, bars, on TV and the radio. It courts the public and the emphasis is on entertainment.
I: Where do you fit into this new mix?
P: I started writing poetry, first casually and then seriously, when this picture I have just described got going and became what it is today over the last several decades. My work, my poetry, is not part of this popular poetic culture, although I did play with this culture on its edges with several poetry readings beginning in the 1960s and 1970s continuing into the ‘90s, with playing the guitar, with sing-alongs, with listening to popular music for 40 years before writing poetry seriously. My work is predominantly written not oral. It fitted into the post-secondary and secondary educational scene where I worked for decades. Whatever reputation I have--and it is quite small--has been made in print and, for the most part, on the internet not in academia and not in the popular culture.
If I want to fit my poetry into popular culture I will have to make a move back into the oral domain or write about other topics. If I do, this will be at some time in the future in performance, oral, poetry. If I am able I may get into an audio-visual and visual poetry. How successful I will be at engaging a wider public remains to be seen. I am certainly not going after it these days.
I: The poet Anthony Hecht once said that W.H. Auden’s poetry infused the public domain with the private. Do you think this is an important part of your poetry?
P: Without a doubt. That is part of the core of what my autobiographical poetry is all about. I also infuse the contemporary with the historical, the simple and the complex. I mix the pot alot. Poetry, for me, is about words and ideas inspite of Mallarme’s view to the contrary.
I: Since you have written so much poetry--some 6000 poems in the last 25 years--several million words, how would you categorize it?
P: I’ve always liked Auden’s fourfold division which he outlined in the preface to his 1945 Collected Poetry. My division is not the same as his, but I am indebted to his idea, his concept, some of his framework. The first category is “pure rubbish” which I regret having conceived. The second is poetry containing good ideas but “never really coming to much.” The third are “satisfactory poems,” the bulk of my poetry, “but not important” in any way. The fourth category contains those poems for which I am “honestly grateful.” I could also make a twofold division of my poetry: “Baha’i themes and secular or non-Baha’i themes.” I have a “time-frame division” in which my booklets of poetry are divided into four time periods beginning in 1980 and ending in the present. One could also divide my poetry up into “historical time periods,” some involving the Baha’i Faith, some involving history’s phases.
I: Recently the New Scientist(2004) had an interview with a psychiatrist who also suffered from bi-polar disorder. Part of the interview involved an attempt to distinguish mania from exuberance.
I know you have suffered from this disorder. How would you make this distinction and how important is exuberance in writing poetry?
P: A significant percentage of people who have manic-depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament at least at the high end of their swings. But most people who are exuberant do not have manic depressive illness. So exuberance is far from a pathological state for most people who have it. It is a highly valued and integral part of who they are. And if you understand the role of exuberance in manic-depression then you do get a perspective on exuberance because extremes in behaviour will always illuminate normal behaviour. Of course, there are limits to the comparisons. Exuberance, energy, enthusiasm, intensity were critical to my success as a teacher and in other roles in life. But after 20 years of bi-polar experience(1962-1982) I came to know when the energy was pathological. After 40 years(1962-2002) of life in the bi-polar world, I preferred the energy to be expressed in solitary pursuits like writing rather than the social where they had been centered until at least my mid-fifties from, say, 15 to 55.
I: When the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges was interviewed in Montreal in 1968 he was asked by the interviewer why the knife as an object appeared so frequently in his short stories and if he was obsessed with the knife. Borges gave a fine, a logical answer. It seems to me that if you have any obsession in your poetry it is not with an object, but with a process: time. Do you agree?
P: I admit to a certain obsession which derives from a number of sources. I think I have answered this question before in previous interviews somewhere. I grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb; I was a teacher for 30 years; I’ve been a Baha’i and my adult life has been divided into plans, epochs, stages and phases, 19 day months, annual holidays, holy days, birthdays, equinoxes, solstices, seasons, sunset times, sunrise times, endless meetings, my culture worships the clock. I could go on and on. I think that’s enough.
I: You have such a range of titles: some fabulous, some downright obfuscating, some complex, some simple, some suggestive, some direct. They unfold and reverberate in the reader on so many levels at once. Sometimes the reader simply stops reading because he or she can’t connect with a particular title. I like to think of your titles as bridges or walls, bridges between your life, your society, your religion, your notions of the political, the social, the individual, or walls that can’t be jumped over without a lot of work. They seem to create a meeting place, at least for those who want to try, between all of the titles when they are put in a booklet or a book. Would you talk about what work, what job, what purpose, you intend for a title in an individual poem or between poems or even in overview for your whole epic collection of poetry: Pioneering Over Four Epochs?
P: Sure! I think this is one of the most interesting of the questions I’ve discussed in the first 20 interviews I’ve had in the last dozen years. A title involves the meaning of a thing, its happening. It occurs or predicts something that is going to occur with the language itself and with the subject matter. Finally, a title really ought to bring into balance the whole, the rest of the poem. The title is associative, as opposed to figurative. Quite literally something results from the title’s association with something else or its association with the specificity inherent in the title. Sometimes in selecting the title I am interested in raising difference and sometimes in comparing one thing to another, directly or indirectly. A title needn't be picturesque, although sometimes I aim for that quality. I also aim for what you might call an independent gesture, one that is sure, fresh, provocative, humorous. Even indifference in a title is a form of distance which I believe a poem requires occasionally in its title. This indifference, even disinterestedness, will eventually collapse, if the poem works. The title becomes a small, dignified ritual and is therefore not servile in relation to the whole poem. It is substantive, sometimes displays intention.
I want my poems to be as intimate as a couple making love at night on a beach, and I'd like the reader to roll off of them afterward, completing the triangulated relationship, to feel the sandy curve of the earth with his or her own belly. Of course, I don’t always or even often acheive this aim. I could also express my aim in more intellectual, more cognitive terms. But I want to be as brief as possible. The height of a warm summer and the cold mathematical abstraction of a winter in one of my poems are meant sometimes as a commentary on our lives and sometimes as an experience of them. The rhythm, the beat, of the poem is but another way to interpret the beating of the heart. I am trying to make, to bring, something alive, to be experienced physically, in the mind or the feelings. Roland Barthes talks about how this moment is like a child pointing to an object, but the object itself is nothing special. I like to think I am providing a moment of enlightenment about our age, our natures. Yet it's "nothing special," simply beautiful. This is the work, that is, the play, of language, the meaning of my life and, hopefully something of meaning to readers.1
I: Could you talk about the concept of identity which is important, not only in writing poetry, but also in one’s sense of self, of history, of culture, of so much of what makes us human?
P: Sure! I’ve been teaching about it, talking about it and thinking about it for decades. I’ll probably be a little complex here, but let me forge ahead anyway. I’ll try to be brief: my religious identity as a Baha’i acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of my particular subjectivity, my particular sense of who I am. I also acknowlege that all discourse, all writing, is placed, positioned and situated and all of my knowledge is contextual. I find it helpful, fertile, useful if this way of looking at my Baha’i identity is contested, subjected to a dialectic, if it arises from an assertion of a difference, a clash, of opinions. In this way my identity is based on, develops from, is clarified by a process of engaging and asserting difference rather than suppressing it. But this process of assertion requires an etiquette of expression, one that most people have yet to develop. And, of course, we don’t want to disagree on absolutely everything we say.
This identity acknowledges the reality of decentralised, diffuse but sometimes systematized knowledge; power which also has a diffuse set of sources and at the same time accepts the useful concepts of perifery and centre, margins and depths, surfaces and heights. Once we clarify the notion of identity, once it is redefined in a universal and non-derogatory way, once it engages difference without implying superiority and hierarchy, with due regard for the tenderness of language and the fragility of human personality, it is hoped that this will help the Baha’i community express its group consciousness, help it to develop in a manner which is unfettered by the accrued and often inaccurate associations of history and culture, tradition and ignorance.
I: You said that idea would be a bit complex and I can see what you mean. Anyway, thanks Ron. I look forward to continuing this discussion in the months and years ahead.
P: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.
__________________________________FOOTNOTE___________________________________________________________
1 I would like to thank Jane Miller, “An Interview with Jane Miller,” Electronic Poetry Review, 2002.
2 I would like to thank Emma Heggarty, “Native Peoples of Canada: Rewriting the Imaginary,” 14th April 2003, Internet, 2004.
Ron Price
December 25th 2004
In interviews one frequently has the opportunity to reflect on what one is writing, compare and contrast it with the thoughts of other writers and poets and get as precise a view as possible of what one is writing, how one is going about it and why. The interview, simulated or otherwise, gives me the opportunity to synthesize my ideas, deal with questions and issues I have not dealt with before quite as specifically and gain fresh perspectives on the writing process. Interviews are also useful for other writers and poets to provide insights into the creative process in personal terms. I hope some readers find these words helpful.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 18th to December 25th, 2004.
Interviewer:(I) I understand your poetry writing has fallen off somewhat in the last two years, 2003-2004. Why is that?
Price:(P) I wrote an 1000 page autobiography and spent six to eight months posting dozens and dozens of pieces of poetry and prose on internet sites. I’ve still managed to put out three booklets of poetry since the last interview in late 2002 and I’m working on a 4th with some fifty poems thusfar in this new collection, a collection which may take me over the 6000 poem mark. The work goes on.
I: Do you have a program, an outline, something you are aiming at in your poetry?
P: Yes and no. My poetry is its own program. It speaks for itself. I also try and take the hermetically sealed autobiographical poetic mode and give it a good mix and shake with the historical, the psychological, the sociological, the spiritual, so much that exists in the world of the social sciences and the humanities. That is quite a conscious part of my program, my aim, my purpose in writing. I try to make use of what is known and give a fresh take on it by means of juxtaposition, blending, contrast, comparing, mixing, et cetera, and take what is not known and give readers a sense of surprise. I create, in the process, what you might call my own personal aesthetic, my voice. I define my heritage, my historical inheritance, my life and my community. Some readers can come with me and others, inevitably, can’t relate to my voice. Such is life. Such a situation is as common as air; it’s true in poetry and in interpersonal relationships.
I: A memoir, a poem, presents an opportunity to think, to remember, to put into motion the engine of imagination—it’s revisable or at least it should be so. Is that a summary of much that you have been writing lately?
P: Yes. I could say a great deal more, but the short answer is ‘yes.’
I: The poet Richard Howard said in a recent interview that “one writes the way one has to.” He also made the point, talking about his own writing, that in recent years the manner of his prose has simplified and become a little stronger and more direct. He said he was pleased with that process, that direction to his writing. He also said that he thought his poetry was getting a little better with the years. This is Howard’s description of how his writing is coming along, how it is changing. Are these sentiments helpful to you in any way, to help you reflect on your own work over the years?
P: Well, there certainly seems some inner imperative when one writes. I’d have to agree with Howard there. I think, too, that my writing has got simpler with the years, both my poetry and prose. I find it hard to evaluate what I write. Something inner comes out, but whether it is good, bad or indifferent seems to be largely defined by the readers and there are such different views on that. In the end the term quality is a bit of an enigma. Some of the joy in what one writes lies, as W.B. Yeates put it, outside oneself and some of the joy lies within and other stuff is found in the mix between the two.
I: What constitutes a "failed" poem to you?
P: I’m not sure I could define or describe a failed poem, although I can easily say some things about poems that move me, that have special meaning and ones that don’t. There are some of my poems I particularly enjoy when I reread them and others which don’t seem to give me the sense that I am saying something interesting, unique, persuasive, provocative. I wrote one today, on this the last day of this interview. It was based on the movie The Way We Were. I even had my wife help me after the first draft. I rarely do this, but we shared a common experience and I thought she could be helpful. And she was. But the poem was still flat and ultimately not very satisfactory.
There are several internet sites at which I am asked to give an evaluation of someone else’s poetry. What gives me the sense of a fine poem that someone else wrote is when I feel the person is saying something new or any one or mix of those adjectives I referred to above. Poetry which says stuff you know only too well, poetry which is banal, trite, commonplace or, on the other hand, is so complicated you can’t understand it--that is poor poetry or failed poetry. It’s a poem that fails to attract my attention or give me pleasure.
I: Would you recommended that poets give their craft the same attention and discipline as, say, a violinist or a ballerina? What does discipline and attention in a poet look like? How do you "practice" poetry?
P: There are probably as many ways of practicing poetry as there are poets. Some poets don't think they have to take themselves as seriously as other artists do. They think that just because they feel something, they can turn that feeling into a poem. They have not got a sense of apprenticing themselves to their art. They need to be like violinists and ballerinas as well as carpenters and mechanics. Poets have to keep their tools sharp, immerse ourselves in good and great poems, good and great literature, be ready to respond to the life’s stimuli and be sensitive enough to be stimulated in the first place. The poet’s world is words, not paint and visual forms, or needle and thread or clay or cloth. One’s heart and head has got to be full or, at least it helps to have something going on in these departments.
I wrote poems from 1962 to 1992 and, looking back a dozen years later in 2004, I have a sense of those first thirty years serving me as apprentice-poet. For the sort of poetry I write I need to draw on a vast range of print: books, articles, essays, poetry, magazines; much from the electronic media: film, TV, radio, CDs, et cetera and a good deal of everyday life. I was nearly 50, the middle of middle-age, before I took my first steps as a serious poet.
I: Do you go out and look for experience to write about? You know the way some writers do: they search for the weird and the wild, the strange and the amusing so they can put the experience on paper.
P: By the time, as I say, that I began writing in any serious way, I was nearly fifty and by the time I retired from full-time employment and had the time to write in any full-time sense I was in my late fifties and I had had enough experience of the strange, the weird and the wild for a lifetime, for my lifetime. I wanted to stop having experience of that kind. I felt no need to travel, to have deep and meaningful relationships; I could get that from the print and electronic media if I wanted to see the bizarre, the eccentric, the romantic, the unusual. I was beginning to feel old. Retirement is not a word I back away from; rather, it is a word that aptly describes my current state: I have retired from so many things in life that filled my days to overflowing: teaching, meetings, endless chats/conversations, going-out, going somewhere, going here, going there, worrying about not enough sex, not enough money, not enough fun/excitement, et cetera.
I: We have discussed this question before, but how would you characterize the position of poetry in these earliest years of the new millennium?
P: I think Dana Gioia put it well in her recent essay in The Hudson Review(Spring, 2003). The average amount of time people spend with print is much less than an hour a day, with several hours devoted to the electronic media. In the last several decades there has been a shift from print to electronic media as the medium for information and entertainment--and poetry. Gioia defined the shift as ‘the end of print culture.’ I would not be as bleak. I think there is a lot of print being consumed, not much of it is poetry. Celebrities, personalities and human drama are all the rage in the media and, if poetry gets a mention at all, it is usually in the context of these rages, these themes. But, as Gioia emphasizes, the bulk of the new poetry today is not literary poetry but popular; it is oral: rap, cowboy poetry, slam poetry and the poetry of song, says Gioia; even advertising and sociology could be added as poetry, if one can believe some critics. And much of it is to be found in the oral media, the electronic media. This oral poetry is a big money spinner and is found in cafes, bars, on TV and the radio. It courts the public and the emphasis is on entertainment.
I: Where do you fit into this new mix?
P: I started writing poetry, first casually and then seriously, when this picture I have just described got going and became what it is today over the last several decades. My work, my poetry, is not part of this popular poetic culture, although I did play with this culture on its edges with several poetry readings beginning in the 1960s and 1970s continuing into the ‘90s, with playing the guitar, with sing-alongs, with listening to popular music for 40 years before writing poetry seriously. My work is predominantly written not oral. It fitted into the post-secondary and secondary educational scene where I worked for decades. Whatever reputation I have--and it is quite small--has been made in print and, for the most part, on the internet not in academia and not in the popular culture.
If I want to fit my poetry into popular culture I will have to make a move back into the oral domain or write about other topics. If I do, this will be at some time in the future in performance, oral, poetry. If I am able I may get into an audio-visual and visual poetry. How successful I will be at engaging a wider public remains to be seen. I am certainly not going after it these days.
I: The poet Anthony Hecht once said that W.H. Auden’s poetry infused the public domain with the private. Do you think this is an important part of your poetry?
P: Without a doubt. That is part of the core of what my autobiographical poetry is all about. I also infuse the contemporary with the historical, the simple and the complex. I mix the pot alot. Poetry, for me, is about words and ideas inspite of Mallarme’s view to the contrary.
I: Since you have written so much poetry--some 6000 poems in the last 25 years--several million words, how would you categorize it?
P: I’ve always liked Auden’s fourfold division which he outlined in the preface to his 1945 Collected Poetry. My division is not the same as his, but I am indebted to his idea, his concept, some of his framework. The first category is “pure rubbish” which I regret having conceived. The second is poetry containing good ideas but “never really coming to much.” The third are “satisfactory poems,” the bulk of my poetry, “but not important” in any way. The fourth category contains those poems for which I am “honestly grateful.” I could also make a twofold division of my poetry: “Baha’i themes and secular or non-Baha’i themes.” I have a “time-frame division” in which my booklets of poetry are divided into four time periods beginning in 1980 and ending in the present. One could also divide my poetry up into “historical time periods,” some involving the Baha’i Faith, some involving history’s phases.
I: Recently the New Scientist(2004) had an interview with a psychiatrist who also suffered from bi-polar disorder. Part of the interview involved an attempt to distinguish mania from exuberance.
I know you have suffered from this disorder. How would you make this distinction and how important is exuberance in writing poetry?
P: A significant percentage of people who have manic-depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament at least at the high end of their swings. But most people who are exuberant do not have manic depressive illness. So exuberance is far from a pathological state for most people who have it. It is a highly valued and integral part of who they are. And if you understand the role of exuberance in manic-depression then you do get a perspective on exuberance because extremes in behaviour will always illuminate normal behaviour. Of course, there are limits to the comparisons. Exuberance, energy, enthusiasm, intensity were critical to my success as a teacher and in other roles in life. But after 20 years of bi-polar experience(1962-1982) I came to know when the energy was pathological. After 40 years(1962-2002) of life in the bi-polar world, I preferred the energy to be expressed in solitary pursuits like writing rather than the social where they had been centered until at least my mid-fifties from, say, 15 to 55.
I: When the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges was interviewed in Montreal in 1968 he was asked by the interviewer why the knife as an object appeared so frequently in his short stories and if he was obsessed with the knife. Borges gave a fine, a logical answer. It seems to me that if you have any obsession in your poetry it is not with an object, but with a process: time. Do you agree?
P: I admit to a certain obsession which derives from a number of sources. I think I have answered this question before in previous interviews somewhere. I grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb; I was a teacher for 30 years; I’ve been a Baha’i and my adult life has been divided into plans, epochs, stages and phases, 19 day months, annual holidays, holy days, birthdays, equinoxes, solstices, seasons, sunset times, sunrise times, endless meetings, my culture worships the clock. I could go on and on. I think that’s enough.
I: You have such a range of titles: some fabulous, some downright obfuscating, some complex, some simple, some suggestive, some direct. They unfold and reverberate in the reader on so many levels at once. Sometimes the reader simply stops reading because he or she can’t connect with a particular title. I like to think of your titles as bridges or walls, bridges between your life, your society, your religion, your notions of the political, the social, the individual, or walls that can’t be jumped over without a lot of work. They seem to create a meeting place, at least for those who want to try, between all of the titles when they are put in a booklet or a book. Would you talk about what work, what job, what purpose, you intend for a title in an individual poem or between poems or even in overview for your whole epic collection of poetry: Pioneering Over Four Epochs?
P: Sure! I think this is one of the most interesting of the questions I’ve discussed in the first 20 interviews I’ve had in the last dozen years. A title involves the meaning of a thing, its happening. It occurs or predicts something that is going to occur with the language itself and with the subject matter. Finally, a title really ought to bring into balance the whole, the rest of the poem. The title is associative, as opposed to figurative. Quite literally something results from the title’s association with something else or its association with the specificity inherent in the title. Sometimes in selecting the title I am interested in raising difference and sometimes in comparing one thing to another, directly or indirectly. A title needn't be picturesque, although sometimes I aim for that quality. I also aim for what you might call an independent gesture, one that is sure, fresh, provocative, humorous. Even indifference in a title is a form of distance which I believe a poem requires occasionally in its title. This indifference, even disinterestedness, will eventually collapse, if the poem works. The title becomes a small, dignified ritual and is therefore not servile in relation to the whole poem. It is substantive, sometimes displays intention.
I want my poems to be as intimate as a couple making love at night on a beach, and I'd like the reader to roll off of them afterward, completing the triangulated relationship, to feel the sandy curve of the earth with his or her own belly. Of course, I don’t always or even often acheive this aim. I could also express my aim in more intellectual, more cognitive terms. But I want to be as brief as possible. The height of a warm summer and the cold mathematical abstraction of a winter in one of my poems are meant sometimes as a commentary on our lives and sometimes as an experience of them. The rhythm, the beat, of the poem is but another way to interpret the beating of the heart. I am trying to make, to bring, something alive, to be experienced physically, in the mind or the feelings. Roland Barthes talks about how this moment is like a child pointing to an object, but the object itself is nothing special. I like to think I am providing a moment of enlightenment about our age, our natures. Yet it's "nothing special," simply beautiful. This is the work, that is, the play, of language, the meaning of my life and, hopefully something of meaning to readers.1
I: Could you talk about the concept of identity which is important, not only in writing poetry, but also in one’s sense of self, of history, of culture, of so much of what makes us human?
P: Sure! I’ve been teaching about it, talking about it and thinking about it for decades. I’ll probably be a little complex here, but let me forge ahead anyway. I’ll try to be brief: my religious identity as a Baha’i acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of my particular subjectivity, my particular sense of who I am. I also acknowlege that all discourse, all writing, is placed, positioned and situated and all of my knowledge is contextual. I find it helpful, fertile, useful if this way of looking at my Baha’i identity is contested, subjected to a dialectic, if it arises from an assertion of a difference, a clash, of opinions. In this way my identity is based on, develops from, is clarified by a process of engaging and asserting difference rather than suppressing it. But this process of assertion requires an etiquette of expression, one that most people have yet to develop. And, of course, we don’t want to disagree on absolutely everything we say.
This identity acknowledges the reality of decentralised, diffuse but sometimes systematized knowledge; power which also has a diffuse set of sources and at the same time accepts the useful concepts of perifery and centre, margins and depths, surfaces and heights. Once we clarify the notion of identity, once it is redefined in a universal and non-derogatory way, once it engages difference without implying superiority and hierarchy, with due regard for the tenderness of language and the fragility of human personality, it is hoped that this will help the Baha’i community express its group consciousness, help it to develop in a manner which is unfettered by the accrued and often inaccurate associations of history and culture, tradition and ignorance.
I: You said that idea would be a bit complex and I can see what you mean. Anyway, thanks Ron. I look forward to continuing this discussion in the months and years ahead.
P: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.
__________________________________FOOTNOTE___________________________________________________________
1 I would like to thank Jane Miller, “An Interview with Jane Miller,” Electronic Poetry Review, 2002.
2 I would like to thank Emma Heggarty, “Native Peoples of Canada: Rewriting the Imaginary,” 14th April 2003, Internet, 2004.
Ron Price
December 25th 2004
married for 48 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 16, and a Baha'i for 56(in 2015). I have written several books and they are available on the internet.