Thread: AN IMMENSE MULTIPLICITY

It isnt necessary for you to understand astrophysics or inorganic chemistry or even my poetry. Its only necessary that the astrophysicist, the chemist or, in my case, the reader of poetry understand it. If my writing is of value to those who are capable of assuming or willing to assume my point of view, those who are members of what might be called a certain community of understanding and who can participate in a specific framework of interpretation, then it will be read. People will read it because it is of value to them. If it is of no value to them, it will not be read, except by me. -Ron Price with thanks to William Hatcher, The Science of Religion, Bahai Studies, Vol.2, September 1977, pp.35-6.

When language and vision
coalesced in this poetry
a new attitude was born
and there gradually evolved,
at least I trusted it to be so,
a stylisation: unique, fresh,
complex, rich in coherence
and embedded comment,
with my finger on the pulse,
the causative principle,
of history, with a unity of form
that was buried beneath
line after line of an immense,
a staggering multiplicity.

Ron Price
3 November 2000

Originally Posted by RonPrice

If it is of no value to them, it will not be read

You got that right! Poetry ain't my bag. No offense intended, I'm sure it's marvelous to those who, you know, read poetry.

Words written on a paper napkin
Trying to make the scansion fit in
Wondering if Neutrino’s graspin
All the work I’ve had to put in

Fighting to empower the perfect word.
Pen is truly mightier than the sword?
Are my readers getting bored?
Oh, Lord.

So my efforts run its course
Worth the bother?.... No remorse.
Three verse shorties, there for me,
Quickly written, time for tea.




I offer this as evidence that I haven't been writing poetry for twenty five years.

Here is a poem I wrote in memory of a friend named Roger White who died in 1993 aged 63. It may be useful here with some of the historian Collingwood's ideas to introduce it.
__________________

HOME

The art of writing or poetry says the historian R.G. Collingwood, is not craft, not amusement, not magic, not representation. All the arts, he says, are an expression of emotion. Expression, he defines, as a process in which one comes to be aware of what the emotion is one felt the need to express.� In this way a writer or poet rids himself of the oppression, the helplessness, the sense of inadequacy underlying the emotion. Of course, he does not rid himself of the entirety of these traits. Nor would he want to, it seems to me anyway. There is a clarification going on in writing and this clarification is the result of the exercise of the imaginative faculty. To Collingwood, all utterance and all gesture is art. The writing process “creates language as it goes along.1 The fundamental basis for true expression is sincerity, purity, independence and freedom, not education, learning, the degree of talent or articulateness. “R.G. Collingwood in the Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music, Peter Kivy, Cambridge UP, 1993, p. 147.

Ive always liked the idea
that we are all artists
in our own way to each
his own as they say
in expression and gesture.

Thats how you would
have put it, Roger, eh?
Just bring a little chocolate
along and we can all be in it.

But its not a free-for-all,
eh Roger? Its an invitation
to cry, laugh, reflect, strive,
rejoice, adapt, develop, grow,
care and, above all, be!

This poet calls you away
from formulas, cautions
you against the fake,
wants to accustom you
to an unpredictability
that is at the root of life.

He want to help link you
to history, to your dreams
and aspirations, to alert
you to divine intimations
and that inner self, but
he wants to do it in such
a way that you do these
things yourself and he
becomes just a gentle
breeze along the way.

For years now I have been travelling
home to my place in this community.
I am always travelling home
to that safe, secure place
with its sweet memories,
where passion wins the sought caress.
But on the way home danger lurks
and I must often travel over untracked land,
where murky bats career and lean wolves prey.
Reason is often victim and desire takes my soul
too often into concupiscence; thankfully though--
irascibility does not colour my path as frequently.

Faiths bricks and planks and rusted nails
bestrew my path, but theres gold in them
there hills. Ive seen it for myself and Im
travelling home to get it so dont worry!

Ron Price
28/9/'05 to 14/1/'13.

I tried to fix the apostrophes....can't be done....administrators might like to try after nearly five years.-Ron in Tasmania 8)