I decided to just delete the piece and add the following about an American poet, but not one at the movies.-Ron
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TENACITY OF PLACE AND TIME
Part 1:
The American poet Robert Creeley wrote in one of his short essays that “I can no longer remember what it was led me to try to write poems. I had no articulateness, and no sense of a place where such activity might be possible. But I don't think one knows more than that one has to and/or does write as he can.”1 The words of Creeley aptly describe my experience, at least the experience as I recall it more than 40 years ago, when I wrote my first poem at 18, discounting the poem I wrote with the help of my mother for my English teacher in grade 12 at the age of 17.
I can hypothesize what gave birth to these first attempts at writing poetry. Did I “have to” write those poems? The attractive young woman I wrote with, a Cathy Saxe whom I have not seen now for over forty years(1964-2005), helped provide the mise en scene, a warm and stimulating landscape. I did write “as I could” and “what I did” back then in Dundas and George Town, but those poetic productions, those first flights into poetry, are long lost.
The tenacity of place in all its emotional and physical presence is at the epi-centre of my poetry my writing, now and then. There is an equal tenacity to time and circumstance which, with place, define the context for whatever I put on paper then or my memory of it now. And, yes, I believe with Ezra Pound that nothing counts save the quality of the affection and only emotion endures. But I’d add, though I’m not sure Ezra would agree, that intellect, mind, thought are “dazzling rays,” a “strange, heavenly power” and “luminous lights”2 behind all that is my poetry. –Ron Price with thanks to 1Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989; and 2’Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
Part 2:
Whether it is emotion
or whether it is thought
readers lives in a different
world of feeling and vision
whose clay of grief marks
the pot on the wheel
with unique lines, tones
and textures marked: his, hers.
And now, in my clay, no grief
at all is found as I look down,
back or through it all,
only a lofty tranquillity,
a deep beauty and pleasure
wrung unconsciously, insensibly,
unbeknownst from those long years
of sturm und drang, but now
this poem has a life of its own
and starts out on its independent
journey through the minds of others
into a future I will never know.
Ron Price
May 18th 2005
-------------------------------------------
TENACITY OF PLACE AND TIME
Part 1:
The American poet Robert Creeley wrote in one of his short essays that “I can no longer remember what it was led me to try to write poems. I had no articulateness, and no sense of a place where such activity might be possible. But I don't think one knows more than that one has to and/or does write as he can.”1 The words of Creeley aptly describe my experience, at least the experience as I recall it more than 40 years ago, when I wrote my first poem at 18, discounting the poem I wrote with the help of my mother for my English teacher in grade 12 at the age of 17.
I can hypothesize what gave birth to these first attempts at writing poetry. Did I “have to” write those poems? The attractive young woman I wrote with, a Cathy Saxe whom I have not seen now for over forty years(1964-2005), helped provide the mise en scene, a warm and stimulating landscape. I did write “as I could” and “what I did” back then in Dundas and George Town, but those poetic productions, those first flights into poetry, are long lost.
The tenacity of place in all its emotional and physical presence is at the epi-centre of my poetry my writing, now and then. There is an equal tenacity to time and circumstance which, with place, define the context for whatever I put on paper then or my memory of it now. And, yes, I believe with Ezra Pound that nothing counts save the quality of the affection and only emotion endures. But I’d add, though I’m not sure Ezra would agree, that intellect, mind, thought are “dazzling rays,” a “strange, heavenly power” and “luminous lights”2 behind all that is my poetry. –Ron Price with thanks to 1Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989; and 2’Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
Part 2:
Whether it is emotion
or whether it is thought
readers lives in a different
world of feeling and vision
whose clay of grief marks
the pot on the wheel
with unique lines, tones
and textures marked: his, hers.
And now, in my clay, no grief
at all is found as I look down,
back or through it all,
only a lofty tranquillity,
a deep beauty and pleasure
wrung unconsciously, insensibly,
unbeknownst from those long years
of sturm und drang, but now
this poem has a life of its own
and starts out on its independent
journey through the minds of others
into a future I will never know.
Ron Price
May 18th 2005
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