INTERVIEW NUMBER FIVE WITH RON PRICE

This is the fifth interview in fifteen months. It resulted from reading a series of interviews with Edward Albee, interviews held over the twenty-five year period 1961 to 1987 and published in Conversations With Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin, University of Mississippi Press, London,1988. Knowing as I do that these are historic days, days of infinite preciousness in the brief span of time before the end of the century, days of urgent and inescapable responsibility as I strive toward my God-promised destiny in the midst of a spiritual drama(1), has provided some of the motivational matrix for the comments that follow.

(1) Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message, 1997.

Questionner(Q):Are you conscious of influences on your poetry?Price(P): Yes and no. My religion, my reading, 'big' events in my life, people(family, friends, associations) are each and all important but quite unquantifiable influences on what I write. Given the time and the inclination I'm sure I could point to literally hundreds of poems that have direct links to one of these four influences. That's the 'yes' part. The 'no' part would go something like this: often I begin a poem and I have no idea how it will end and I have no idea just where it came from, the germ of the idea. It's like the birth of a baby; you know where it came from but the process is as mysterious as it is founded in knowledge. Keats put it well in a letter he wrote in 1820 and which I often quote, or paraphrase. Once a poet gets to a certain intellectual maturity etherial finger-paintings can be engendered, voyages of conception he calls them, which arise out of the most mundane experiences. Of course what is an etherial finger-painting to me may be meaningless to a reader. But that's the way with much in the arts and in life in general.

Q: Are there any serious problems with the interview method?P: The viewer or the reader who comes across a transcript must keep in mind that answers change. Truth is relative. Individuals change. Ways of thinking about things go through processes of complete overhauling. As Edward Albee put it in an interview with Peter Adam in 1980, an interviewee finds as he is giving an answer, one he has given many a time, and in mid-stream he realizes he does not believe that answer any longer, or it may not have been true in the first place. The interviewer also has to keep in mind that we all have many selves, many 'positions'; we are many things to many different people. I find a position, a point of view, evolves with each poem; it's an organic process.

Also, the concept that the spark of truth comes from the clash of differing opinions means that the interviewee often will play the devil's advocate just to generate that truth spoken of above. A sociologist with an interaction perspective might say something like "a sense of self, a sense of the answer given to a question, results from the process of interaction". Putting this a little differently, he might say the interviewer strongly influences the way the interviewee comes across. There are many things that affect an apparently neutral or objective interview. There's a whole literature available now on the subject of interviewing. I often play the devil's advocate game when my wife and I are in company. My wife used to find it quite annoying and still does sometimes, but she's getting more used to it now. We've been married for 22 years now.

Q: Do you prefer the ambiguities of life or the factual in your poetry?P: You really need both in poetry. They compliment each other over and over again. As Carl Jung says most of the really important things in life don't admit to answers. Of course, people come up with answers. But these answers make for many of life's debates and they define much of the content of poetry. Jung says that it's better that answers are more enigmatic; they give us something to work on right to the end of our days. They help us grow. The endless analysis of issues helps to fill life's spaces in with challenges, enigmas, paradoxes that the mind can play with forever; so much of the everyday is factual and beyond analysis, the routine, the sensory, better just enjoyed without too much thought.

Q: What do you like to do when you're not writing?P: I don't consider writing as work. I like to read, eat, drink, sleep, walk; I like my job as a teacher; I enjoy relationships, some of the time; I enjoy shopping, although my wife would never believe that; I enjoy driving in air-conditioning on a hot day; I like swimming, sauna-bathing, good grief, I could go on and on. "The usual stuff," as Edward Albee put it when he was asked the same question.

Q: Why did you stop sending your poetry to the Baha'i World Centre Library?P: After sending nearly 3000 poems in less than five years: 1992-97--I felt a little pretentious that so much of my work was being stored there and me not being either famous or rich. I felt I had expressed my enthusiasm to a sufficient degree for the marvellous developments on the Arc and it was time to leave it off, so to speak. I got the idea of sending my poetry to other places and this is what I plan to do since it is really impossible to get my poetry published at the various publishing houses around the Baha'i world.

Q: Do you think much of your audience as you write?P: They drift somewhere out on the perifery. Our society is largely a film and television culture with poetry just about irrelevant, 'cauterized, coterized'. Millions write the stuff, on the net, in little magazines, probably more poetry being written than in all history. But, like the theatre, it's not mainstream, although when I read Pamela Brown's description of poetry as 'close to popular culture', I understand what she's driving at.1 My concern is with the reality, the honesty, the poem I'm writing. It's quite an introspective process. It's not about popularity. I'm in there but the audience hardly exists, except in a peripheral even a posthumous sense. I like to think what I write may be valued, as W.H. Auden put it once, by some future generation. Time will tell.

Q: The Polish poet Cszeslaw Milosz said that poetry should be written rarely and reluctantly under unbearable duress and only in the hope that good spirits choose us for their instruments. Your poetry would seem to testify to the opposite of this philosophy?

P: I like the last part of the idea. I like the concept of being a channel for good spirits beyond the grave, although it is always difficult to know for sure when you are serving in such a capacity. As far as the frequency of writing is concerned, I think that is quite an ideosyncratic issue. The opus of each poet is different; the published portion varies from virtually nothing to many volumes; for still others, like Emily Dickinson, it all gets published after their death. For still others it happens, like Keats, when they are young, like a flood; or like me, in middle age, another flood. In some ways I think poetry chooses you; it is not forced. I think the confluence of the death of Roger White and the anchorage I found here in Perth after years, three decades, of moving from town to town and job to job allowed my poetry to find a home in this world.

I must say, though, that Milosz has put his finger on part of the essence of poetry-the pain of life, the suffering in human existence. But this is only part of the story. There is also the public pain in this dark heart of an age of transition, as the Guardian calls our times. There is also the joy, the adventure, the knowledge and understanding and so much, much more.

Q: Do you plan any of your poetry? Do you worry about where the next one will come from?

P: Ralph Waldo Emerson used to worry about the ending of his creativity. I come across this idea from time to time in reading about

other poets, not frequently, but occasionally. The only time I worried significantly about creativity was when I used in argue with myself about taking lithium which seemed to have an effect on my creative edge. That was in the 1980s, by the '90s I did not concern myself at all. If I lose interest in writing poetry, I will probably miss it because it has been such a source of pleasure, for at least five years now. One can't predict this sort of thing in life any more than one can plan the next poem. Poems seem to pop out of some intuitive, cognitive-emotional zone. The only planning that takes place is while I write but, even then, the whole thing usually comes pretty fast, like the rushing current of a river. It is very cathartic.

I don't have time to worry about the process, although occasionally I agonize--no that is too strong a word--struggle over a phrase, an ending, a word. I've been averaging a little under two poems a day for five years. I'm awake for about 16 hours a day and two poems does not sound like much: a poem every eight hours. But given the fact that I'm a teacher, a parent, a husband and am involved in the local Baha'i community, I would not want the process to be any faster. When I retire in a few years perhaps the production rate will increase. I'm not sure who controls the assembly line. I have a central role and certainly push alot of buttons. Perhaps, if the stuff is not very good I can blame Ford's assembly line.

Q: Gwen Harwood the Australian poet who died two years ago in Hobart said she did not think about her position in the literary field; she did not intellectualize about her writing. What sort of attitude do you have to your writing?

P: I don't really have a position in the literary field, not yet anyway. I am a solitary person after I leave my various professional and public responsibilities. I am not against the idea of a public definition, fame or wealth and if it comes my way that will be fine, but I don't seek it out. One of the reasons I have put these interviews together, though, is that I think about what I write. I seek out a sense of definition; I want to be able to put into words what I'm trying to do. It is part of being articulate, part of the autobiographical process. But it is not just an autobiographical surge of the spirit.

Gwen calls herself a Romantic. She said she thought it was "a nice thing to be called."2 I've always thought of W.B. Yeats as the last of the Romantics, although certain Romantic tendencies linger: the desire to reform humanity, messianic interests. I have such interests. It would be difficult for a Baha'i not to have them. These interviews express a certain

intellectualization of what I do, where I'm at. My writing is also a bi-product of tranquillity, emotions recollected in tranquillity as Wordsworth put in 200 years ago. After three decades of the hectic, the problems of maturity, marriage and career I feel a certain peace, what one poet called the golden years.

Q: Why do you write poetry when you are obviously an effective communicator in your profession as a teacher? I would have thought you'd had enough 'communicating' at the end of the day.

P: Yes, for twenty years, beginning in 1973, I've seen myself as an effective communicator in the classroom, although it took me several years to achieve this sense of success. Student evaluations of my work also support my own view and I enjoy the teaching process immensely. But I have found communication in my two marriages has not been easy. Also the general difficulty I have had with the rest of the Baha'i community in the West, in communicating the Baha'i teachings to the people we contact each day-and the importance given by the Baha'i community to this teaching process-creates a pressure that the Baha'i lives with year after year. I think writing poetry has partly been a response to this pressure, my health problems and the tensions in my two marraiges over more than twenty-five years. I also read an average of a book a day and have for years and my mind just gets so full of stuff-in addition to the endless output of the media and what one gets from the seemingly endless conversations with people as a teacher-that I need some outlet. Ideas build up, float around, scratch about.

I should say something, too, about Rilke in closing because so many things he said in his 'advice to poets' explain the reasons I write. Perhaps another time I can go into more detail on his influence.

Q: Why the sudden outburst in poetry in your late 40s and early 50s?

P: I'd written 150,000 words of published essays in Katherine from 1983-1986 when I wrote for newspapers in the Territory. I'd written enough academic essays to sink a ship from 1962 to 1987, although I still did not have a Master's Degree. I'd tried writing sci-fi, but ran out of ideas and found it too demanding. I think I got to 40,000 words one summer holiday; I even went off my lithium in the hope that the creative edge would be sharper. But I found the exercise too onerous. A lady in California, Betty Conow, who had edited some of my essays on the request of Roger White, suggested I write poetry. I had been doing a little poetry writing, perhaps two dozen poems a year from mid-1981 to early

1992. Then the surge started. In the last four months of 1992 I wrote 75 poems; in 1993, 700 poems; in 1994, 708 poems; from 1995 to April 1997 another 1500 poems. I have tried to answer this question in other interviews in other ways. This is yet another stab at it.

Q: Would you say your poetry is strongly 'message oriented'?

P: It's mostly didactic. I've got something to say about a thousand-and-one things. There are probably several major themes which I've commented on before in other interviews(Volumes 17, 20, 21 and 24) I try to be humorous when it comes naturally; I try to contextualize the message in history, in my own life and ideas. But I don't worry too much about how people are going to react. I did in the early years of my writing and I think the worry was useful because I wound up simplifying my poetry so people could understand it and, in the main, I achieved this. I've had several public readings of my poetry in Fremantle and I was well received. I felt like I was in a classroom. Of course, not everyone is going to understand what you write and there will often be interpretations of your words that you had no intention of putting in. But I think you have to let it go, let it travel on its own, wild and free so to speak.

Q: How would you label yourself as a poet?

P: I don't like labels. I'm a Baha'i who writes poetry, or should I say I'm trying to be a Baha'i and I try to write poetry. I find the term 'poet' a little pretentious. Even with the terms 'husband' and 'father' I sense a gap. They are roles you only partially fill. Being a poet is not a career position, a career move, part of a trajectory. It's an occasional experience. It is not loaded with expectations; you don't have to prove anything. Occasionally when I read in public I feel like a performer, an entertainer. The label 'poet' is not one I wear comfortably. In some ways writing is more what you hear than what you write. Labels tie things down too much; I want to savour the experience in all its complexity and expansiveness in a living world. A poem can not be summed up in a glance, any more than a painting. It needs time and patience. The more time and patience, the more labels disappear. I don't like to see a break between the aesthetic, the poetic, the sociological, the historical, the psychological. The whole of existence is multi-dimensional, interdisciplinary, incredibly complex and utterly simple all at once. It can't be reduced to some label, although I like Judith Rodriguez's definition of poetry as "the habit of squeezing for the essence."3

Poetry has a long history now of movements, positions, ideas, approaches, styles. It's like many other disciplines: there is alot going on in them when you study them seriously. I'm teaching a course now in sociological theory; I used to teach philosophy. I took an eclectic approach to these subjects and I do the same with poetry.

Q: You have been asked many times abouth the influence of the Baha'i Faith on your poetry. Could you answer this question again?

P: Some poets are ambivalent about the influence of religion. Fay Zwicky thinks of religion as one great confidence trick, for example. Other poets are clearly Christian in some way or other; sometimes the influence is obvious; sometimes it's indirect. Sometimes poets talk about how Taoism or Buddhism influences their perspectives. Anyone who reads my poetry to any extent will know that the Baha'i teachings, Baha'i history, its organization, its philosophy, inter alia are manifest again and again in my poetry. In fact, I would say if you are not interested in the Baha'i Faith you would have to cut away, what, fifty to ninety per cent of my poetry? So much of what I write is inspired by, a comment on, a wrestle with, some aspect of this Cause that I have belonged to for nearly forty years.

Q: How do you cope with all the personalities that come into your life?

P: I try to cut off when I'm finished with the 'duty' side of my life. I'm a little like Keats in the sense that I absorb alot of my environment when I'm out in it. It's like being fully turned on, ultra-receptive; things impinge, sometimes quite acutely. So I try to turn that whole world off and read and write. This way I can control the input as much as I can. I like to think this will be a permanent diet when I retire. For now I can only get a few weeks, a few days, a few hours, of solitude. I desire invisibility for the next dip into the jungle of life and all its complexity and stimulation. When I have had humanity in and out of every corner of my being, then I seek silence, solitude. It's then that I read about poetry, but I rarely read poetry itself. I want to listen to my own voice; the voice of others gets in the road, or it's just plain uninteresting. But some poetry you want in your head so you read and reread it: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats, Dawe, etcetera.

Q: You plan to read at the July 1997 Conference on Global Governance in Perth?

P: Yes, I have not read publicly in the Baha'i community yet. I've given many Baha'is a poem or two, or more. I've read a poem once or twice in Belmont at a Feast or a deepening. I've written many essays about poetry, especially Roger White's. I've got nearly 3000 of my poems at the Baha'i World Centre Library. I've read publicly, as I've said before, at a cafe in Fremantle. But no official exercise like this conference in Perth. I read rarely because I find it limits the text of my poetry; it is too oriented to the trivial, to entertainment. It must be if it will be heard and enjoyed. It limits the reader's reaction by imposing the author's view, although being a teacher I'm used to doing that. You have to when you're on the stage with an audience. I'm not a performance poet, although on those occasions when I have been 'performing', it has been quite successful. I enjoy pleasing people but, after twenty-seven years of teaching on a thousand platforms, it does not have the turn-on it used to. I prefer the page, the book, kept, preserved.

I think my general lack of interest in self-promotion, voyeurism as some call it, begins in the desire for solitude. I'm not interested in being a personality. I've done this for nearly thirty years as a teacher and lecturer. Public reading tends to put a portrait around the poetry. Tagore or White would have preferred a focus on the poetry not the personality. Some publishers prefer it that way too. They don't even put photographs in with the poetry. Maybe in the next five years of writing poetry I may find myself with a more public profile. We shall see.

Q: Thank you again for your time. I wish you well in the years ahead and to many more years of writing poetry.

P: Thank you; I hope the buzz continues to enrich my middle years.

Ron Price25 April 1997

1 Pamela Brown in A Woman's Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets, Jenny Digby, University of Queensland Press, 1996, p.183.2Gwen Harwood in A Woman's Voice: Conversations With Australian Poets, Jenny Digby, University of Queensland Press, 1996, p. 45.3Judith Roriguez, ibid., p.164. Ron Price23 April 1997