Interview With Ron Price: The Poet and His Poetry

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Preamble-Part 1:
I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together as
I was about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher after some 30
years in the profession, 1967 to 1999. In the first dozen years of the
reinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, a poet
and publisher, an online journalist and blogger, an independent scholar and
reader, the years from 1999 to 2012, I added more material to what you
could call this simulated interview. This is the 26th simulated interview in
17 years, 1996 to 2013. There is no attempt in this particular series of Qs
& As to be sequential, to follow themes or simulate a normal interview.
I have attempted a more logical-sequential pattern in my other 25
interviews over those 16 years. I have posted literally millions of words
on the internet at 100s, indeed 1000s now, of sites. Readers who come
across this particular interview of about 9000 words and 22 A-4 font-14
pages will gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read at
these sites on the world-wide-web. Readers wanting access to these sites
and my work, my posts at these sites, need to simply google my name
RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of others words like: forums,
poetry, literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, inter alia.
There are more than 4000 other Ron Prices in cyberspace. Readers must
ensure they are accessing my posts and my writing and not those of some
other chap with the same name as mine. I have posted this interview for
the interest of what has become an extensive readership, my constituency
of readers, and others who come across my work for the first time, or for
whatever number of times for whatever particular person.
Preamble-Part 2:
2.1 The questionnaire concept which I utilize below was originated, so I
am informed, by French television personality Bernard Pivot after what
was called the Proust Questionnaire. The Proust Questionnaire is about
one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is
owed to the responses given by Marcel Proust(1871-1922), the French
novelist, critic, and essayist. At the end of the nineteenth century, when
Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an Englishlanguage confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of
future French President Félix Faure. The album was entitled "An Album to
Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc." At that time, it was popular among
English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes
and aspirations of the talker.

2.2 James Lipton (b.1926) an American writer, poet, composer, actor and
dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in
New York City utilized this questionnaire in his series of interviews
entitled Inside the Actors Studio. The series premiered in 1994 and has
been broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89,000,000
homes.
2.2.1 Lipton asked the following ten questions:
1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on?
4. What turns you off?
5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you
arrive at the Pearly Gates?
2.2.2 My answers are:
1. God
2. Fuck
3. My instinctual and human needs for: food and drink, silence and
sounds, sensory and especially sexual stimulation, oxygen and
physical comfort, shelter and work, love and kindness, as well as
the pleasures that come from the satisfaction of these instinctual and
human needs.
4. Noise, loud and aggressive people, conversation after one to two
hours; most of the TV currently available to me, a great deal of
printed matter. When the needs referred to in #3 above are not
satisfied.
5. Some classical, jazz and popular music, some human voices and
silence.
6. Any loud sounds, some human voices.
7. Fuck
8. I was a student and scholar, teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult
educator from 1949 to 1999. Now I am enjoying new roles: poet

and publisher, writer and author, editor and research, online
journalist and blogger.
9. Law and medicine, work in the biological and physical sciences as
well as the trades.
10. Well done and now tell me about your troubles in life while trying
to serve Me.
Preamble-Part 3:
Below readers will find my own 33 questions, questions I began to ask
and answer back in 1998 or 1999, as I was about to retire from FT
teaching, and a teaching-student life going back to 1949, half a
century. These questions were last updated on 26 August 2013.
___________________________________________________________
1.Do you have a favourite place to visit? I’ve lived in 25 cities and
towns and visited over 100. I have lived in 37 houses and would enjoy
visiting both the houses and the towns again for their memory, their
nostalgia, their mnemonic, value. When writing about these places as I do
from time to time, I would benefit from such visits, but it is not likely that I
will visit any of them now in the evening of my life for many reasons not
the least of which is my lack of funds and my disinclination to travel any
more.
There are dozens of other places I’d enjoy going as a tourist or travelteacher, circumstances permitting, circumstances like: plenty of money,
good health, lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people in
those places. My health, my new medications for bipolar disorder,
medications I’ve now had for over five years, prevents me from travelling.
1.1 Tell us a little more about your health both before your writing
began in earnest in the 1990s and before. Rather than go into detail
here I will simply refer you to my 90,000 word and 200 page(font-14)
account of my experience of bipolar 1 disorder as well as the section
of my website on the same subject. You can google “Ron Price BPD”.
2. Who are your favourite writers? The historians Edward Gibbon and
Arnold Toynbee, Manning Clark and Peter Gay, among a long list of
historians I keep in my notebooks; the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and
Nietzsche, Buber and Spinoza, among another long list I keep in my
notebooks; the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their successors
Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice; the poets Rainer Maria
Rilke and Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and Roger White; the
psychologists Rollo May and Alfred Adler, and a host of others notes
about whom I keep in my notebooks, as well as writers from many other
disciplines.

3. Who are your favorite artists? There are several dozen art
movements and hundreds if not thousands or artists that can be accessed in
both libraries and now, with a click or two, on the internet. I will name
two famous artists whose work I like and two whom I have known
personally: Cezanne and Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates. I find it
just about impossible to answer a question like this given my eclectic
tastes. I have tried in question #2, but found there were too many names
and so I do not intend to make such a long list here. As my years of
retirement from the world of jobs, community work, and nose to the
grindstone stuff, so to speak, lengthen as they have since 1999, I find
there are more and more artists in the history of art whose work I am just
finding out about and learning to appreciate.
4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists and
singer/songwriters? How can one choose from the thousands in these
categories? It is the same problem as in the previous two questions.
Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden come to mind
as composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to list. I placed a
list of my favourites at several sites in cyberspace. The list had more than
100 people and 100s of their works. Over the years, I’ve had at least a
dozen different favorite composers including: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvorak and
Rachmaninoff. My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musical
world I’ve been immersed in most deeply at any given time.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of translating melancholy and nostalgia
into a musical language. He was cured of a profound writer’s block
through hypnosis, and he dedicated his beloved Second Piano Concerto to
his psychiatrist, Dr Nikolai Dahl. I dedicate my love for music to my
mother and father both of whom played the piano in our home as I was
growing-up.
5. Who are your heroes? The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith,
Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in ‘Abdu’lBaha’s Memorials of the Faithful(1970, 1927) and many more that I
come across in reading history and other social sciences, the humanities as
well as the physical and biological sciences. Again, the list is too long and
its getting longer with the years as I head with what seems the speed of
light to the age of 70 in 2014.
6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and John
Hatcher in my middle age, Jameson Bond and Douglas Martin when I was
a young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too

many to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 70. Now in my late
adulthood, the years after 60 in the lifespan according to some human
development psychologists some new inspirations include: the essayist
Joseph Epstein, the writers Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Udo Schaefer, a
number of poets and writers whose works I had never had time to read or
did not know even existed---again the list is getting longer since reading
and research, writing and editing have become much more central to my
life, to my daily activities than during my years of employment: 1961 to
2001.
7. If you could invite several people for dinner from any period in
history, who would you choose and why? I would not invite anyone
because I don’t like to talk while I’m eating. After dinner these days I like
to watch TV for a few minutes and then go to bed. I’d chose the following
people to have a chat with at some other time during the day, but I would
not have them all come at once. I would take them as follows:
7.1 Pericles: I’d like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age,
as he saw it. I’ve come to know a great deal about Athens in the 5 th
century BC since I taught ancient history and I have many questions
which, of course, I could answer by reading. But there are so many views
of the man and the times.
7.2 Roger White: I’d like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observe
that real kindness which I could see in his letters and in his rare interviews.
7.3 My mother and father and my maternal grandparents: The pleasure of
seeing them again(except for my grandmother whom I never saw since she
died five years before I was born) after all these years would, I think, be
just overwhelming.
7.4.1 Douglas and Elizabeth Martin, 7.4.2 Jameson and Gale Bond and
7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university
academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on my
developing values in the formative period of my late teens and early
twenties.
7.5 There are many others in another list too long to include here.
8. What are you reading? In 1998, my last year of full-time employment,
when I began to list these questions and provide the answers, I had
fourteen books on the go: eight biographies, four literary criticisms, one
book of philosophy and one of psychology. Now in these early years on
two old age pensions, 2009 to 2012, I am reading mostly material on the

internet and that reading list is too extensive to list here. I never go to
libraries any more and, due to a lack of money, I never buy any books,
although my wife does occasionally and I browse through what she buys.
The internet is overflowing with enough print to keep me happily occupied
until I die. My son bought me David Womersley’s 3-volume edition(1994)
of Gibbon’s famous work in 2010 and after 3 years I’m up to page 140
underlining as I go the passages that I may use one day in my own writing.
9. What do you enjoy listening to in the world of music? I listened
mainly to classical music on the classical FM station while living in Perth
in the last dozen years of my FT employment(1988-1999) as well as some
from the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George Town
northern Tasmania in these years of the early evening of my life(1999 to
2012) this is also true only hardly any pop, rock and folk and much more
jazz and classical. I have written about my tastes and interests in music
since my adolescence in other places and I refer readers here to the section
of my website on music for the kind of detail that would lead to prolixity if
I included it here.
10. What food could you not live without? I would miss my wife’s
cooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must
be said, though,(answering this question 14 years after beginning to
answer it) now that I live in northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and
Mexican food. Now that I am retired I hardly miss these foods. I enjoy
the food I get, that my wife and I prepare and only eat a Persian meal or a
Mexican meal perhaps once a year now. Do I miss it? Yes and no. I enjoy
eating when I am hungry; hunger is the driving force and I enjoy many,
many foods when I am hungry. If I could not have some of these foods I’d
be happy with many others.
11. What do you do when you feel a poem coming on? I get a piece of
paper and pen or go to my computer/word processor and start writing.
Most of my poems take less than half an hour. My latest booklet of poetry
comes from my poetry factory, as I have occasionally come to call this
location for my production of poetry in George Town Tasmania, Australia
where I write these pieces. I have also calculated the number of poems I
have written per day over the last 32 years after a hiatus of 18 years(19621980) in my pioneering life in which no record was kept even though I was
writing poetry very occasionally, very rarely, at the time.
In the first years of my life, 1943 to 1962, the influences on my writing of
poetry included: my mother and grandfather, the primary and secondary
school system in Ontario and the university I attended. The Baha’i Faith
after 1953 was also a poetic force. All these poetic influences were

completely unrecognized as poetic influences at the time since my interests
were mainly sport, getting high marks at school, having fun, and dealing
with life’s quotidian and sometimes anxious events.
A. From 1 August 1980 to 22 September 2012 there have been 11,734
days(circa).
B. The number of poems written per day is calculated using the
following data: 7075(circa) poems in 11,734 (circa) days to 22
September 2012. That works out to: 1 poem in 1.65 days or 4.3
poems/week.
C. The maths: 11,734(days) divided by 7075(poems)
11.How important is life-style and freedom from the demands of
employment and other people to your creative life? These things
became absolutely crucial by my mid fifties. The Canadian poet,
anarchist, literary critic and historian George Woodcock (19121995), once said in an interview that it was very important for his
literary work that he could live as he wished to live. If a job was
oppressing him, he said, he had to leave it. Both Woodcock and I
have done this on several occasions, but I did not leave the jobs I
did in order to write—except for the last job in 1999 when I was 55.
Woodcock broke with a university and I broke with three Tafe
colleges. It's a derogatory thing to say it's a form of evasion, of
avoidance or cowardice, said Woodcock, but you have to evade
those situations in life in which you become insubordinate to others
or situations in which others offend your dignity.
Woodcock went on to say in that same interview that when one acts
dramatically or precipitately—like resigning from a job or losing one’s
temper--it often has consequences that are very negative. He gave
examples from his own life and I could give examples here; I could expand
on this important theme but this is enough for now. Readers who are keen
to follow-up on this aspect of my life can read my memoirs. Everything in
my memoirs is true, but it has been "filtered and worked on". Readers
tend to think a memoir is a chronicle or record of a life but, as the
memoirist Kate Holden says, “it's a much more subtle form. You're
compressing, eliding, using your craft.” She uses her craft to present a
good story and I use it to present what I hope is a good analysis, some
accurate and honest, useful and helpful reflections on life to those who
read them.
12.Were you popular at school, in your primary, secondary and
university days? I certainly was in primary and secondary school,

but not at matriculation or university. I did not have the experience
many writers and intellectuals have who received early wounds
from the English school system among other influences in life. It
wasn't merely the discipline at these schools; it was the ways in
which boys got what was called the school spirit. In most English
schools it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates against
the intellectual who is looked on as a weakling. I was popular at
school because I was good at sport and I got on with everyone.
I certainly was not seen as, and I was not, an intellectual. I was good at
memorizing and that is why I did so well, but at university I could not
simply memorize; I had to think and write my own thoughts and my grades
went from ‘A’s’ to ‘C’s. This was also due to the beginnings of episodes
of bipolar I disorder which has afflicted me off and on all my life.
14. You did not flower early as a writer. Tell us something about the
origins of your prose and poetic writing. Many writers flower early.
Many of them become largely forgotten whereas I have a different type of
creativity which seems to be growing in meaning and personal
significance, in power and vitality, literally decade by decade, again, like
the Canadian George Woodcock. This kind of creativity over the lifespan
is actually quite abnormal, atypical. I seem to have been the tortoise or the
bull if you're going to use the Taurean symbol. I have been marching
forward slowly. I think what I am writing now is better than anything I’ve
ever written in my life. Who knows what lies ahead.
Some years ago a reporter from Musician magazine asked jazz pianist
Abdullah Ibrahim a question about when his interest in music began.
Ibrahim said he understood the logic of the question but that he couldn't
answer it because music had always been part of his day to day living. I
feel in a similar way about my relationship to writing. I can't remember a
time when I didn't have a deep investment in writing. From 1949 to 1967,
the age of 5 to 23, writing was the very source of my success and survival
in school. If I had not developed the capacity to write well I would never
have got good grades and gone up the academic ladder—but I had to work
at the process back then. Any significant literary success, any published
work, did not come, really, until I was nearly forty.
15. What sort of relationships do you have these days? I was reading
about the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have already
mentioned in this series of questions and answers. He said that he did not
have all that many friends who were writers. He knew their problems, but
he did not know the problems of painters. He said that he liked to move
among painters, mathematicians, psychologists and people who could tell

him something. By my mid-fifties I had had enough of people telling me
about things, any things. I had been both a listening post, a reader, and a
talker for so many years I was a bit of a burnt-out case and wanted to shut
my ears to the endless chatter of life by the age of 55 in 1999.
If I wanted to know about stuff, about any particular person, I could read,
watch TV, listen to the radio or google. If I wanted some social life I
could visit a small circle of people in the little town I live in, that I took a
sea-change to near the mouth of a river by the sea. After an hour or so of
conversation and various forms of social interaction I usually had enough
and looked forward to my return to solitude.
Due to my medications by the age of 65 and perhaps due to being in my
middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) I found more than two hours
with people in any form took me to the edge of my psychological stamina,
patience, my coping capacity. It was better for me to seek out solitude
after two hours to preserve the quality of my relationships and not to “blotmy-copybook,” as my wife often put it when I indulged in some emotional
excess, some verbal criticism of others or gave vent to some kind of spleen
which often resulted after that two hours---due to my mental illness, my
bipolar disorder. In the 13 years since I retired I have been on a series of
medication shifts which have altered my psycho-emotional life. Now I
spend 12 hours a day in bed for an 8 to 9 hour sleep and work at literary
activity for 6 to 8 hours a day.
16. How would you describe the social outreach in your poetry? I
rarely point a finger directly at some guilty party, organization, person or
movement; sometimes there is a subtle psychological base to a poem that
hints at or implies some evil in someone’s court. My poetry is quite
explicitly non-partisan. I have dealt with this issue several times in my
series of 26 interviews. It is an important question because the wider world
often judges a person by the extent to which they engage with, or in, the
quixotic tournament of social and political issues in our global community.
I don’t shout at any multinational or rave for some environmental group.
When I do shout and rave it is about other things and there's nothing subtle
about my shouting and raving and, in the process, probably little depth in
those prose-poems of mine either. With millions of readers now in
cyberspace I’d say I now have a social outreach wider, more extensive,
than any I’ve had in my life.
17. Some poets see their work as a form of social criticism and, like
the Canadian poet Irving Layton, for example, they rage against

society and some of what they see as society’s illnesses and injustices.
Where does your poetry fit into this picture?
Many of Layton's more than forty published volumes of poetry are
prefaced by scathing attacks on those who would shackle a poet's
imagination; over the years he has used the media and the lecture hall to
passionately and publicly decry social injustice. But perhaps his loudest
and most sustained protest has been against a restrictive puritanism that
inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. My poetry is
not an expression of scathing attacks on anything; nor is it a passionate
and public poetic vis-à-vis that quixotic tournament of social issues that
are paraded in front of me day after day in the print and electronic media.
I see my poetry as an extension of the whole Bahá'í approach to social
issues and individual engagement with these issues. There are several
Bahá'í books which explore this quite complex subject. One of the best
was published 25 years ago. It is entitled Circle of Unity: Bahá'í
Approaches to Current Social Issues.1 I encourage readers to have a
look at it if they would like a more complete answer to this question, a
question that I cannot answer in a small paragraph.
As far as the imagination is concerned it is not, in my view, the opposite of
facts or the enemy of facts. The imagination depends upon facts; it feeds
on them in order to produce beauty or invention, or discovery. The true
enemy of the imagination is laziness and habit, as well as an ineffective
use of leisure-time. The enemy of imagination is the idleness that provides
fancy.2 I am not concerned, as Layton was, with a restrictive puritanism
that inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. I have
many concerns in the process of writing poetry and journals, essays and
narrative autobiography. I would like to emphasize here that authentic
historical documents, mine and those of others, are products of the human
mind and language; this is reality itself. Reality could be seen as a white
light which each person sees on a spectrum of colour. Insofar as reality is
thought, I deal in human reality all the time when I am writing and reading.
17. Do you think travelling has been crucial to your writing?

Circle of Unity: Bahá'í Approaches to Current Social Issues, editor,
Anthony Lee, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1984.
2
W. Kaye Lamb, "Vancouver, George," Dictionary of Canadian
Biography, Volume IV; B. Anderson, The Life and Voyage of Captain
George Vancouver, Surveyor of the Sea (U of Toronto Press, Toronto,
1966, p. 155.
1

The Canadian poet Al Purdy(1918-2000) admitted quite clearly that if he
hadn't travelled he wouldn't have written very much. He felt that he had to
go further out in the world and experience place in order to write. He was
one of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century.
Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works include
over thirty books of poetry, a novel, two volumes of memoirs and four
books of correspondence. He has been called Canada’s "unofficial poet
laureate" and, "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in
the life of a culture."
I did not travel the way Purdy did. I just kept moving to new towns, some
two dozen. For a great many reasons largely associated with my bipolar
disorder as well as some inexplicable fatigue with talking and listening, I
became too tired, perhaps too old, too worn-out, too sick, too poor---goodness---what a sad tale, eh? Now I travel in my head and through the
print and electronic media. And yes, travel in both these forms has been
absolutely crucial to my productivity, but it ways that are difficult to
explain since they span several decades.
18. Do you like talking about poetry?
Gary Geddes tells(In It’s Still Winter: A WEB JOURNAL OF
CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN POETRY AND POETICS, Vol.
2 No. 1 Fall 1997) a great story of Douglas Dunn who was writer in
residence at Hull. Dunn wanted to meet the famous British poet Larkin.
But Larkin was a curmudgeon. He hated poets! Douglas Dunn was told by
friends who knew Larkin that, if he wanted to meet Larkin then he had to
make sure he didn't ever talk about poetry. He could talk about jazz and
anything else, but not poetry. So these friends arranged this meeting and
left the two of them in the pub. Finally, after a few beers, Larkin leaned
across the table and said, "there are too many poets in this university. Your
job as writer in residence is to get rid of them."
I don’t feel like this at all, although I can appreciate Larkin’s sentiments. If
I want some congenial poetic spirits I read their poetry or I read about
them, but I have no strong desire to meet and have a chat. But I like to
write about poetry and that is why I’ve simulated these 26 interviews. I am
fascinated by the development of poetry in my life and seek to understand
how and why both my interest and my writing have arisen.
19. Do you like reading poetry?
Gary Geddes says in the same interview I quoted above that when he was
translating a book of Chinese poetry with a George Leong, George would

often bring him the most depressing and melancholic poems in Chinese to
translate. Geddes would say: "George you gotta give me something else, I
can't bear all of this stuff.” I feel that same way about a lot of poetry,
indeed, most contemporary, classical and poetry from any period of
history. I just don’t connect with it. My mind and heart do not engage in its
content or style, or both. Often I just don’t understand what the poets are
saying. The poets I do engage with hit home quite deeply, but they are
relatively few. They are also people I am only now discovering since my
retirement, since I have the time to read and not engage in a 60 to 80 hour
a week filled with people and responsibilities.
20. Do you use metaphor in your poetry to any extent?
Not anywhere near as much as I’d like, as much as exists in its poetic
potential. Aristotle once wrote that the ability to see relationships between
things is the mark of poetic genius. I would not want to make the claim to
be a poetic genius; how could one ever make such a presumptuous,
preposterous, claim. But I see relationships between things all over the
place. It’s one of the great motivators in why I write. I want to develop my
use of metaphor in my poetry. I don’t think I’ve really taken off yet in my
effective use of metaphor.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur(1913-2005) sees mood and metaphor as the
basis of the unity of a poem, of poetry itself. Writing poetry is certainly a
mood thing for me and I’d like to make it much more of a metaphor thing
as well. When emotion and intellect converge in imaginative writing,
writing for example that draws on metaphor, readers can be transported to
another life-world, a type of Gestalt, a Lebenswelt, to use the philosopher
Edmund Husserl’s(1859-1938) term. Any transcendence that results for
me and the reader of my work is not due to being taken to another realm at
least not consciously.
Any sense of transcendence that does take place is due to seeing meaning,
hidden meaning, meaning that did not exist before, in my or my reader’s
experience, in the things and thoughts themselves. One goes beyond the
familiar and finds fleeting moments rich in imaginative detail. There is a
world outside language as the Canadian poet Don McKay(1942- ) asserts.
It is very difficult to translate that world but some poetry can do this, can
make this translation, with conviction and delight.3 I’d like to come back
to this question several years from now when I’m in my 70s or even 80s.
21. What do you see as the function of a poet?
Don McKay, “Local Wilderness,” editorial, The Fiddlehead, 1991,
pp.5-6.
3

A poet has many functions, but two functions of this poet that interest me,
to answer this question off the cuff so to speak, is: (a) to discover and
distil the labour and the genius of the Bahá'í experience and (b) to give
expression to the delight and the love that are at the heart of writing. The
Canadian poet A.J. M. Smith wrote this in 1954. 4 Smith had a
preoccupation with death as I have, although not as intense and not in the
same way as Smith’s. Out of his preoccupation with death he made
poetry. I have made my poetry out of this and other preoccupations.5 The
medications I’ve taken in the last decade or so have softened my interest in
the subject of death.
From a Bahá'í perspective, of course, the arts and sciences in general, and
poetry in particular, should “result in advantage to man,” “ensure his
progress,” and “elevate his rank”6; that music is a ladder for our souls, “a
means whereby they may be lifted up into the realm on high”7; that the art
of drama will become “a great educational power”8; that when a painter
takes up her paint brush, it is as if she were “at prayer in the Temple” 9;
that the arts fulfil “their highest purpose when showing forth the praise of
God”; and that “music, art and literature...are to represent and inspire the
noblest sentiments and highest aspirations.”10 The leader of the Baha’i
cause from 1921-1957 saw such spiritual power in the arts that he
predicted they would eventually do much to help it spread the spirit of love
and unity. The poet, as I say, has those two functions and many others
that I write about in the millions of words readers will find if they get into
my oeuvre.
22. When you talk about art and the arts what do you mean?
When I say “art” or “the arts,” I mainly have in mind those that are
A.J.M Smith, “Refining Fire: The Meaning and Use of Poetry,” On
Poetry and Poets: Selected Essays, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto,
1977, p.64.
5
Anne Compton, “Patterns for Poetry: Poetics in Seven Poems by A.J.M.
Smith,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 28, spring/summer,
1991.
6
Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 168.
7
Kitáb-i-Aqdas, paragraph 51.
8
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London, p. 93.
4

Ludwig Tuman, Mirror of the Divine: Art in the Bahá’í World
Community, p. 45
9

10

‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Blomfield, The Chosen Highway, p. 167.

commonly referred to as “fine arts” such as poetry, painting, sculpture,
theatrical drama, film, music, dance and others. But I also have in mind
the “design arts,” such as architecture and urban design as well as the
crafts, such as pottery and rug-weaving because these arts operate on a
spiritual as well as a material plane. Readers can now google the subject
at locations in cyberspace like Wikipedia for answers to factual questions
like this one.
23. What do you see when you look in the mirror?
I have a photo which I post at many internet sites. The caption, the
descriptive comment on this photo, reads: “This full-frontal facial viewphoto, taken in 2004 when I was 60 in Hobart Tasmania, has a light side
and a dark side. It is an appropriate photo to symbolize my lower and
higher natures. These are natures that reach for spiritual, for intellectual
and cultural attainment on the one hand and reach for and get caught-up
in/with the world of mire and clay and its shadowy and ephemeral
attachments.
Of course, when I look in the mirror there is not this clear dichotomy of
light and shadow. When I look in the mirror I see an external self, a face
which bears a relationship with my real self, a self which is not my body.
My real self is an unknown quantity and my face really tells me very little
about this real self. And so, to answer your question, I see what nearly
everyone else sees: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, cheeks, etc. I also see that: I
need a shave; I need to put some ointment on my skin; I need to comb my
hair or cut my moustache.
24. What would you bring to this interview to ‘show-and-tell’ if you
could bring only one item? And what would you say about that item.
My mother-in-law, who is now 93(i.e. 2012) and lives in a little town
called Beauty Point in northern Tasmania across the Tamar River from
where I live, has a little figure in her lounge-room. It is a small figure of
three monkeys. It has a label on it: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no
evil. It always reminds me of a quotation from Bahá'u'lláh’s book Hidden
Words. The quotation goers like this and it is this of which I wish to tell:
“O COMPANION OF MY THRONE! Hear no evil, and see no evil, abase
not thyself, neither sigh and weep. Speak no evil, that thou mayest not
hear it spoken unto thee, and magnify not the faults of others that thine
own faults may not appear great; and wish not the abasement of anyone,
that thine own abasement be not exposed. Live then the days of thy life,
that are less than a fleeting moment, with thy mind stainless, thy heart

unsullied, thy thoughts pure, and thy nature sanctified, so that, free and
content, thou mayest put away this mortal frame, and repair unto the
mystic paradise and abide in the eternal kingdom for evermore.”
-Bahá'u'lláh, Persian Hidden Words, p. 44.
25.1 Talk a little bit about the types of poetry written and read today?
25.2Do you do any performance poetry?
25.1 Part 1:
The famous American essayist Joseph Epstein wrote over 20 years ago
that: “Sometimes it seems as if there isn’t a poem written in this nation
that isn’t subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation or
the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or
another.”11 Dana Gioia wrote that “the first question one poet now asks
another upon being introduced is ‘Where do you teach?’” Dana Gioia,
“Can Poetry Matter?,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1991.
Gioia himself acknowledges a heritage of a commentary of concern for the
health of poetry extending from Edmund Wilson’s “Is Verse a Dying
Technique?”(1934) through to Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry?”
(1988). But performance poetry is alive and well and, in contrast, is based
in speech. Walter J. Ong so eloquently demonstrated that this poetry is
fundamentally other than writing. Sound, he writes, “is not simply
perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.”12
These are performances of poetry, some now call mic-poetry, that practice
a poetics of openness and engagement, and in doing so inherently refuse
official, institutional surveillance. This mic-poetry and its venues utilize
space not constructed for cultural displays, spaces such as bars and
coffeehouses.
I will draw on the words of Rollo May, the man who introduced existential
psychology to the USA and whose writings influenced me back in the
1970s and still do. “If you do not express your own original ideas,” wrote
May, “if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed
yourself. Also you will have betrayed your community in failing to make
your contribution to the whole.”
Part 2:
Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?,” Commentary, Volume 86, No.
2, 1988, p.15.
12
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word, Routledge, NY, 1982, p.32.
11

“A chief characteristic of this courage,” he went on to say, “is that it
requires a centeredness within one’s own being. This is why we must
always base our commitment in the centre of our own being, or else no
commitment will be ultimately authentic.” Unconscious insights or
answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss. They
may indeed occur at times of relaxation or in fantasy, or at other times
when we alternate play with work. But what is entirely clear to me is that
they pertain to those areas in which a person consciously has worked
laboriously and with dedication.
The Dionysian principle of ecstasy is often the result: a magnificent
summit of creativity which achieves a union of form and passion with
order and vitality. I encourage readers to read May’s books. They were
and are an intellectual and spiritual delight for me and they answer much
more fully these topics for which you wanted a comment.
Count Basie's great drummer Jo Jones once said his job was not so much
to play the drums as it was to get himself into the kind of condition where
he could play the things he could imagine. I think that's my job too, but
imagination is only part of the story and perspiration, effort and work, is
the other 99 per cent.
25.2 I did some performance poetry back in the 1990s both in my
classroom as a teacher and in 1 or 2 places around Perth. In reading poetry
one is into the world of entertainment. After more than 30 years in a
classroom as a teacher, a place where I was an entertainer among other
roles, I tired of the process. When I retired I had no desire to read my
poetry.
Public readings by Russian writers including Voznesensky and
Yevtushenko grew to the point that huge stadiums could hardly contain the
audiences clamouring to hear the new poetry. When Voznesensky reads
his voice is equal to every music his language offers, and he whips his
poems toward the audience with a right arm like a tweed cobra; he delivers
his lines with a passionate, almost frightening intensity.
During performances, crowds have been known to rush the podium to
touch the cuffs of his trousers; after them, poetry groupies seek the kind of
backstage benediction the Irish poet Dylan Thomas used to like to give.
His name shows up in literary journals while his face appears in fashion
magazines. He is a legend in Russia. With as many as 14,000 in a stadium,
reading poetry was like a sport. Voznesensky said that this experience
was a little boring because it was impossible for 14,000 people in a soccer
stadium to hear you. It’s impossible to speak intimately. He also said that

before his generation of Russian poets there had never been that level of
public interest and response.
Reading poetry here in Australia, as I did back in the 1990s, was not that
much of a pleasure for me. Poetry can’t compete with TV, the movies,
having fun, and the entertainment ethos of our culture. Perhaps after
having a good rest from teaching I may want to be the entertainer again.
The problem now is that with the new meds for my bipolar disorder I don’t
have much social stamina and reading my poetry in public would be too
exhausting.
27. Popular and mass culture on the one hand and intellectual-elitist
educated-high culture on the other are both evidenced in the many
millions of words in your poems, essays and books. Could you
comment on this dichotomy in your life and writings?
Part 1:
In recent years, since my early retirement from FT and PT work in my late
fifties---in the late 1990s—and as we entered the 3rd millennium and even
more so now that I am 68, on two old age pensions and have immersed
myself totally in reading and writing, research, editing and publishing, I
have come to understand more clearly how my investments in these two
cultures were shaped as far back as my childhood.
My father became an adult in 1911 before the Great War and my mother
during that war in 1917. I was a child of a working class immigrant father
and a mother who was also the child of a working class immigrant father.
They viewed education, ideas, and culture with reverence. This was
especially true of my mother. My mother, her brother, her sister and her
father read books, lots of books. They listened to classical music and were
interested in the arts generally. They became reasonably knowledgeable
about the arts, although not academically so. Their formal education was
never beyond high school. They were what we call autodidacts.
This background created in them a disposition against popular culture to
some extent. Perhaps they had a fear that common tastes might make them
appear undiscerning and unworthy. I don’t know. They have been for more
than 30 years. My father had a number of working class jobs, was a
passionate gardener and read the newspaper more than books. He was no
elitist. They both listened and danced to popular music, loved motion
pictures, and played and followed sports.
Part 2:

The years after World War II transformed popular culture in important
ways. The enormous expansion of consumer spending, the rise of new
communications media especially TV, and the incorporation of distinct
European American ethnic cultures and communities into a more
generalized white identity left me with a different view of culture than the
one that made sense to my parents. The comfortable lower middle class
home, community, and culture in which I grew up was a happy one.
Before the age of 18 in 1962, I imagined that professional athletes
inhabited a world I wanted to be a part of. In my late childhood and teens
I lost myself in a Canadian culture defined by my small hometown: its
baseball, hockey and football players; pictures printed on the backs of
cards that I collected, and its trinity of orthodoxy: Catholic, Protestant and
Jew. I was drawn to rock and roll radio programs, movies, and that world
of sport. My little world was defined by the "down home" music and
humor of disc jockeys, by the quiet theatricality, festivity, and sensuality of
mass mediated working class culture and family, school and a little circle
of friends.
Part 3:
I had my first symptoms of bi-polar disorder at the age of 18 and went on
to university: 1963-1967 still battling the disorder. While I was studying
the social sciences at university in the working class, ‘ lunch-pail’ city of
Hamilton, I began to see my culture like a kind of suffocating tyranny. It
was during these years that my interests in the Bahá'í Faith developed and
these interests helped to give me a balance between the intellectual-high
culture and the more populist aspects of culture. And the rest is history as
they say. I have now had half a century since then(1962-2012) of an
interest in both popular and high culture and am very, very far from being
an authority on either.
Part 4:
The Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, who championed the idea of
variety of subjects and styles as a poetic virtue wrote in his essay on
“Poetic Interpretation” (c. 1895), that: “the perfect poet would have no set
style. He would have a different one for everything he would write, a
manner exactly suited to the subject.” It seems to me, as I now survey the
last two decades of an enormous poetic output, that I have come to acquire
a certain style, although the content is immensely varied from elitist to
popular culture.

28. What do you think readers can learn from your prose that they
can’t from your poetry?
28. To answer this question, allow me to begin with the words of a leading
American critic of poetry Helen Vendler. She notes in her review of
American poet Robert Hass’s 500 page series of essays entitled What
Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World in
The New York Review of Books 27/9/’12---that: “Poets’ prose is in a
category all its own. It enlarges for readers the idea of a writer’s mind and
also demonstrates aspects of his character. To a reader knowing only the
poetry there can be surprises, for example:
Emerson’s aphoristic journals, Whitman’s fact-filled memoranda of the
Civil War, or Thoreau’s memories of his dead brother in A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Poets’ prose can be formal and reticent,
as is the case in T.S. Eliot’s writing; or it can be intimately painful as in
Robert Lowell’s account of his time in Payne Whitney (“From the
Unbalanced Aquarium”). What Light Can Do collects the poet Robert
Hass’s essays of the last twenty years, in which we hear a disarming voice
speaking as if to friends. His prose has an unusually wide range: he has
written not only on other poets but also on photographers (Robert Adams,
Robert Buelteman, Laura McPhee) and fiction writers (Jack London,
Chekhov, Cormac McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston).”
Vendler continues: “Hass’s first instinct in writing prose is to take on the
manner of a born storyteller, transporting us to a well-described setting—
biographical, ecological, or personal—and naturalizing us, so to speak,
into an imaginative atmosphere. In other hands, an essay called “Wallace
Stevens in the World” might not begin: “My nineteenth birthday was also
the birthday of one of my college friends.” Nor might a piece on the First
Epistle of Saint John open with: “In my grade-school classroom in
Northern California, there were pictures pinned to the bulletin boards
representing the Last Supper.” Other essays begin more straightforwardly,
but not without a deliberate will to surprise. The intriguing “Chekhov’s
Anger” invites us in with a blunt and unsettling opening: “In his journals
Chekhov notes two reasons why he doesn’t like a lawyer of his
acquaintance. One is that he is very stupid; the other is that he is a reptile.”
In my case, readers will find my prose exists in my poetry as well as in my
essays and autobiography. To make a long story short, I think I could go
so far as to say my prose and poetry are virtually indistinguishable. That is
why I call it prose-poetry.
29. To what extent is your prose and poetry confessional?

Jack Kerouac was asked once in an interview(Jack Kerouac, The Art of
Fiction No. 41,Interviewed by Ted Berrigan in the Paris
Review where he got his spontaneous style for his book On the
Road.
Kerouac said that he: “got the idea for the spontaneous style of On
the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his
letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely
serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however since
they were letters. I remembered also Goethe's admonition, well,
Goethe's prophecy that the future literature of the West would
be confessional in nature; also Dostoyevsky prophesied as
much and might have started in on that if he'd lived long
enough to do his projected masterwork, The Life of a Great
Sinner. Cassady also began his early youthful writing with
attempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craft business,
but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn't getting out his guts
and heart the way it felt coming out”.
That’s too free and loose for my liking and whatever confessionalism there
is in my writing is what I have come to call “a moderate confessionalism”.
I don’t tell all from the rag-and-bone shop of my life. The general Baha’i
teaching on confession guides me here.
30. What are your views on plagiarism and, on the internet, spam?
30.1 I rather like the poet Milton’s view of piracy or plagiarism of a work.
Milton had the view that: "if what is borrowed is not bettered by the
borrower, then it is plagiarism". Stravinsky added the right of possession
to Milton's distinction when he said: "A good composer does not imitate,
he steals." An example of this better borrowing is Jim Tenney's "Collage
1" (1961) in which Elvis Presley's hit record "Blue Suede Shoes" (itself
borrowed from Carl Perkins) is transformed by means of multi-speed tape
recorders and razor blade. Tenney took an everyday piece of music and
allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently
Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim's piece.1
1
Marilyn Randall, “Recycling, Recycling or plus ça change...”in Other
Voices, May 2007, Vol.3.1. For an excellent overview of this subject go
to this link: http://www.othervoices.org/3.1/mrandall/index.php
30.2 I have written a brief essay on spam since I have often been accused
of ‘spamming in cyberspace’. The piece is probably too long to include

here, but I’ll include it anyway. The title of the brief essay is: “A New
Product Hits the Market”.
The original term spam was coined in 1937 by the Hormel corporation as a
name for its Spam luncheon meat: a canned, precooked, spiced meat
product. The transition from meat product to internet term had a stop with
the comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus. In 1970 that BBC comedy
show aired a sketch that featured a cafe that had a menu which featured
items like: "egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam,
bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam; and
finally, lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with
truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam."
To make matters sillier in Monty Python style, the cafe was filled with
Vikings who periodically broke-out into song praising spam: "spam, spam,
spam, spam: lovely spam, wonderful spam."
While the Hormel corporation was holding a competition to find a new
name for their product, the North American Bahá’í community was
formulating the details of its first teaching Plan in May 1937. This
formulation took place just eight weeks before the introduction of Spam
onto the market. As of 2003 the Baha’i Faith had spread to over 200
countries and territories with the largest number of adherents in India, Iran
and the USA. As of 2003, Spam was sold in 41 countries worldwide. The
largest consumers of Spam were in the United States, the UK and South
Korea.
Computer people adopted the term Spam from the Python sketch to mean,
to include, the commercialization of the internet, the unwanted commercial
messages that come in the form of electronic junk mail or junk postings as
well as posts at Internet sites that: (a) nobody really wants to read/asks for
and/or (b) are basically some form of plagiarism. These have become the
primary meanings, among other meanings, of spam on the internet.-Ron
Price with thanks to “A History of the Term Spam,” internet.com, 24 July
2008.
31. How did you learn to write?
The science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury once said that "you can’t learn to
write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers
always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have
prejudices." I never took any courses on writing, although I taught many
courses myself from basic skills courses, individual tutoring to help
students write essays, and creative writing. I learned a few things as a

teacher; I also read dozens of interviews with writers. Finally, as I got
older, I wrote more and more, and I think that was the main way I learned:
by writing.
32. As a writer how do you view the past?
As George Steiner(1929- ), the influential European-born American
literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator,
wrote: “it is not the past which rules us; it is our image of the past.” This is
just another way of saying we construct our own past out of the facts, the
events that took place. Our freedom lies in how we view our experiences.
Perhaps the idea of loving or battling with our fate is also involved here.
This question could also be worded as: how do I see history? I’ve written
a great deal about a Baha’i view of history. According to the Baha'i view
of human history, social conditions had changed sufficiently by the 19th
century that humanity was in need of further guidance from God. While
lesser degrees of unity had been achieved, up to and including the bringing
together of peoples to create a nation, what was now needed was the
divine guidance necessary to move humanity forward to the next stage of
its development: global unity. Indeed, the messenger that was now to come
was the culmination of all of the religions that God had sent to different
regions of the world. Readers can examine a finely nuanced view with a
little googling in cyberspace.

33. Now that you have completely retired from FT, PT and most
volunteer work, how would you describe your life-style?
I revel in my solitude after 50 years in classrooms as a student and/or
teacher with wall-to-wall people in my life, to say nothing of my
involvement in family and community. Being free of somewhere between
50 and 80 hours every week with the necessities of the normal nose-to-thegrindstone sort of stuff, the human responsibilities of holding down a job,
taking-care of one’s family, and attending to my community demands,
especially in the Baha’i groups I belonged to for decades, has been the
basis of the recreation of another me, if one defines one’s me by one’s
lifestyle.
I revel in going out of the house for little visits, little cameos. My life is, to
most people, quite obscure. Having rather reclusive impulses, and spend
6 to 8 hours a day in literary engagements, keeps my social profile very
low. I do go out and live a normal life visiting, perhaps two dozen people

in their homes over a 12 month period, and having my family visit me and
me them, at least some of them.
You remember Flaubert’s dictum, “Live like a bourgeois so that you can
write like a God.” Although I have a somewhat hermetic life these days, I
still have enough contact with everyday people to keep my feet on the
ground of ordinariness and the content of what you might call popular,
populist culture. I think Flaubert means, in part, that you hoard, you buildup, life’s experiences, and use them for your writing. That’s not all that he
mean in that remark.
Concluding Comment:
I began asking and answering these questions in 1998 as I indicated at the
start of this simulated interview. I added more questions and answers, as I
also said at the outset of this interview, more than a decade later from
2009 to 2012. The last update to the above 28 questions, as well as the 10
questions that opened this simulation, was made 14 years after beginning
this process of question and answer---on 2 October 2012. Total: 7900
words and 20 A-4 pages.
End of document

Interview With Ron Price: The Poet and His Poetry

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Interview With Ron Price: The Poet and His Poetry