RonPrice
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In anticipation, a quasi-eulogy to dear old Billy:
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WHO IS PRAYING FOR WHOM?
Since there is only one God and all prayers are answered with some combination of “yes”, “no” and “wait”, as one clever writer put it, one concludes that there is something which Baha’is call “God’s Plan” and which others might call “destiny”, or “determinism”, or “fate”. In this poem I make an unlikely connection drawing on this large-scale view. I was reading Graham’s autobiography published recently in 1997 and my mind was drawn to what for me is a humorous, serendipitous and, possibly, impossible connection between my life in the Baha’i community and the prayers of Dr. Billy Graham, world-famous evangelist. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 1999.
I became A Baha’i
just after Billy Graham
completed his Australian tour.*
He returned to Australia twice,
in 1968 and 1969,
before I arrived in 1971
and started to refocus
all the prayers Dr. Graham had raised up
in his endless and genuinely inspired invocations.
Did the scattering angels of the Almighty
scatter abroad his words, too, and touch
the hearts of righteous men?**
I went pioneering on 1 September 1962
just after the final rally in
Graham’s historic Chicago Crusade at Soldier Field
where 116,000 gathered
in one hundred degree plus heat.^
Was Graham praying for me?
Ron Price
19 September 1999
* he completed his tour in June 1959; I became a Baha’i in October, while investigating this new religion during the early months of 1959.
** See the front page of Baha’i Prayers, USA, 1985.
^ See Billy Graham, Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham, Harper-Collins Pub. Ltd., 1997, p.325 and p. 369.
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It's a little late for a eulogy to Stanley but, some 150 days after his passing I offer the following in appreciation for his life and his work.
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I would gladly give my life if I could advance the cause of truth. -Stanley Kunitz in Rollo May, The Courage to Create, G.J. McLeod Ltd., Toronto, 1975, p.16.
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CHESTNUT TREES
Poetry has its source, deep under the layers of a life, in the primordial self. It is the task of the poet to fold back these layers to recover the self, to walk through his many selves, some not his own. For it would seem that the poet writing is not the person who he once was. Some residual self remains; some principle of being abides through the immense layers of universal time. Like the universe this being, too, seems to be expanding. -Ron Price with thanks to Stanley Kunitz in The Dismantling of Time In Contemporary Poetry, Richard Jackson, The University of Alabama Press, London, 1988, p.5.
They gave me the past right back
to that little map of residual heat(1)
after the big bang, a massive
expanse of world, of universe,
immense, intricate, awesome.
They gave me the past right back
to Adam and what you might call
recorded history, the wheel,
and those civilizations in all
their Toynbeean complexity.2
They gave me the past in the
burning bush, the sigh on the
Cross and the blood-stained line
of martyrs even unto today,
knife-cut-candles burning
sub-cutaneous fat.
They gave me the past in those
burning leaves, joyous, light,
in snowforts, playing, in the country,
by the river flowing to the lake
in summer and then the chestnut
trees where I now float on a hill
of sweetness that I cannot touch,
awesome mystery, residual heat
on the computer screen of my brain.
Ron Price
6 March 1999
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That's all Stanley!
1 In a series of TV programs called “Stephen Hawking’s Universe”, recent discoveries regarding the big-bang theory of the universe were outlined, thereby popularising what was hitherto knowledge confined to ‘experts’: physicists and astrophysicists, etc.
2 Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History in 12 volumes describes the 21 civilizations making a host of comparisons and contrasts.
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Just to remind those of you who might have forgetten a few key episodes in Taylor's life, I submit these two paragraphs from a piece I wrote a while back.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
________The year I was eighteen, in 1962, Richard Burton had just begun a relationship, the epic romance of the century, with Elizabeth Taylor. Each would eventually divorce their spouses and in 1964 marry. By August 1962 when my pioneering life began, the film Cleopatra had been in the making for more than a year. Taylor and Burton were the first celebrities to have the paparazzi following them wherever they went. At least that was the way English actor-director Guy Masterson put it in an interview on ABC Radio National.
Film-makers in 1962-1963 were struggling to get a handle on the epic as an art form. During this struggle they tried Cleopatra, a film first screened in June 1963. Despite its many gargantuan flaws the film remains a compelling story of tremendous spectacle and power. The film went for four hours after being cut from six. It won four oscars. The film delivers visual spectacle on a scale few pictures can rival. By today’s standards the 44 million it cost 20th Century Fox to produce would be $400 million. Seven weeks before Cleopatra was first released in New York, the Universal House of Justice was elected. -Ron Price with thanks to Margaret Throsby, ABC Radio National, October 19th, 2004, 10:00-11:00 am and to the Movie Review Querie Engine(MRQE).
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Billy Graham in the 1950s and 1960s against the backdrop of my life--a prose-poetic comment.
THE FIFTIES
In the fifties, the decade my family contacted and joined the Baha'i Faith in Canada, this new Faith grew slowly from under three hundred to nearly a thousand. In the United States, in the same period, the various forms of Christianity grew from strength to strength according to Robert Elwood in his book The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace. The fifties were, he wrote, the decade of Catholic triumphalism, of mass evangelism within Protestantism and of the rise of the Black Church as a platform for the nascent Civil Rights movement. -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Elwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace, reviewed on "The Religion Report," ABC Radio National, 18 April 2001, 8:30-9:00 am.
It was a booming business
below the border
when my family contacted
a new world religion
with a temple in Chicago
in the fifties in this
most conservative culture.1
Ours was a much quieter world
back then, little of that
mass evangelism,
Billy Graham never came near us,
not as far as I remember.
There was none of that
Catholic triumphalism
from New York to L.A.,
at least none that I could see,
not that I was looking that hard
back then when life was simple
and safe and sweet-at-home,
at least most of the time.
All I wanted to know in those days
of Ike Eisenhower and Doris Day
was who was playing on Saturday,
whether the Maple Leafs were still
at the top of the National League
and whether the Tiger Cats game
was being televised this week.
Slowly a new wind blew,
I guess from about '53.
It was nothing flash,
natural, organic, as everyday
as the hot soup the Dixons
brought over when we were sick.
And slowly I began thinking
about those birds flying over Akka,
about history since the Enlightenment,
early Christianity especially around Nicea
and the future of mankind.
And I tasted from sweet-scented streams,
always wondering just what they were
And my little blue prayer book
seemed to get thinner and thinner
before I gave it away to an Eskimo,
Josephee Teemotee in, what was it, '67?
1 Canada is well-known for its conservatism in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ron Price
18 April 2001
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I have posted this piece that found its origins in Salinger, just to place one of the issues that his life raises on this thread. As someone who was a teacher for 30 years and as someone who is more than a little aware that many know little to nothing about Salinger, I post this item here. I was 8 when Catcher hit the market and it was many years later that I frist read that book.
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WITHDRAWAL AND RETURN
Many writers, artists, poets, people in the world of culture and the arts, go into seclusion after their early successes. In a radio program today, Arts Today, two such writers were mentioned: J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Others go into seclusion later in their careers. It is part of a general pattern which the historian Arnold Toynbee calls "withdrawal-and-return." Others call the axis along which specific changes or rhythms take place 'approach-and-separation.' Sometimes the artist will withdraw and never return. Sometimes he will return or approach in a more moderate way than he had originally. I have, recently, withdrawn or separated from quite an intense milieux of employment and community work and I have returned in a moderate way. The pressure of the times predisposed me to go inward. This process works in solitude and is, for the most part, not observable to others. Insight comes from an inner gestation, a Socratic wisdom associated with knowing yourself, a personal growth. Reversal brings drama, change, intensification, landmarks on a personal quest. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 March 2001.
Shocking public events
have inspired this poetic,
catastrophic happenings
to someone born in 1944,
to someone who tried
to find the Kingdom
come with power
and has now seen
nearly half a century
of its slow establishment
around the world.
Here are enough themes
to occupy the time, energy
and genius of a dozen historians,
the inspiration from another realm,
a most wonderful and thrilling motion,
fifty years of it, drying out my
intellectual eyes with a series of
barren fields and psychically
winding my mind with a new fertility
that surpassed all that I had experienced
in life and filled my days
with a revivifying breath
or I would have died in
the wasteland without a wimper.
Ron Price 30 March 2001
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The feedback at this site is, at the very least, consistent. For 30 years I was a teacher in primary, secondary and post-secondary schools. 90% of my students found the poetry in the world's Holy Books: The Bible, The Koran, The Bhagavad Gita, among others and the world's great poetic works like those of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickinson, Wordsworth and too many more to list--pretentious twaddle, boring, not rhyming, the list of pejorative terms is long--as is the list of writers.
I rarely post my poetry at sites with such consistent negative feedback. It makes me feel I am worthy of joining the greats of poetry in the last 3000 years. But I must give you all credit for your honesty. Let me place my autobiographical prose-poetry in some context:
"Autobiographical poetry is about our past and a hell of a lot of it is true. Perhaps factual errors, false imaginative alternations, even dishonesty slips in. Each of us visits our past, our childhood for example, in different ways, with varying frequency. We each experience a sense of loss, sadness, pleasure, or even relief, in contemplating the past. Writing redeems these feelings. These feelings are exploited in poetry. We visit our past; we revisit it again and again."
-ABC Radio, Books and Writing, 19 December 1997, 7:00-8:00 pm.
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As far as doorhandles are concerned let me make some justification for my brief inclusion of that reference. Doorhandles all require keys to open them and keys often do not seem to open doors as simply as one would like. When a person like me has lived in 37 houses in 22 towns since he was born over 60 years ago and visited numberless other homes requiring keys to get in with the owners' permission--and found the key-door combination a hassle, I felt the reference to doorhandles in a poem, for me anyway, justified.
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Christine Slovey, the editor of Poetry Criticism(Vol.15, NY, 1997) quotes Theodore Roethke on poetry: "Poetry is an instrument which can sharpen one’s understanding. Writing poetry allows one to play with the confusion, the chaos, the order, the necessary, the arbitrary, the factual, the patterns, the humiliating and transform it all into truth, beauty, ugliness and horror depending on the mood and the music of life. For the poet finds in the sensed and unsensed universe a mirror in which he meets himself. During this meeting he creates a world, his world, sometimes ‘our’ world. Hopefully the poet’s voice is unique, an expression of the real person." The poet's voice for those responding to my stuff thusfar is clearly not meeting the voices of others. But that, as I said above, is a most common reality in our world. One wins some and loses some.-Ron
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A BALANCING FACTOR
The writing of a poem is, to me, a task of construction following on from an impulse, an inspiration, an idea. It's like an energy source that turns on a light and the poem is an attempt to give that light form, containment, a compartment from which it can continue to shine when it is brought out and read. Sometimes the light that is turned on is faint and the poem a simple narrative conventionalism; sometimes the light shines more strongly after experiencing an intense dialogue with silence; and sometimes the light is so bright I have the opinion it can bring light to the world of its readers. -Ron Price with thanks to Dylan Thomas in Dylan Thomas: The Poet and his Critics, R.B. Kershner, Jr., American Library Association, Chicago, 1976, p.193.
This may be a simple narrative,
conventionalism, and a laxative,
a part of a day that occupied my inner life,
my silence, my conversation and inside my wife,
with myself in the early hours of this morning,
when I am given to endless mourning,
down low, sucking the guilt,
the shame, the ugly, the dark quilt,
the twisted, the inadequateness of what I am,
what I live, breath, seek during my time in 'Nam
the spinning moments of my life:
where I bring myself to account fife,
here I am summoned to a reckoning.
I would not want to be judged by Mr. Felding,
in this mood of darkness for I would always,
be found wanting and would descend even though I can't use doorways,
to the lowest abyss day after day, perhaps
simply due to a chemical deficiency in my fax,
imbalance that sends me into the most profound state of feeling and thought
amounting to a sickness unto death to which I fought,
pure physiology, a balancing factor
that keeps my ego from being run over by a tractor
which, in the end, will shut out the Light.
Ron Price
10 May 1998
*rogue editor*
16 September 2005
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in DeathList Forum
Posted
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I'll post the following prose-poem inspired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn--before he goes into a hole for those who speak no more:
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ACUTELY GRIM
On Nov. 20, 1962, in the midst of the Soviet Premier Nikita S. Krushchev's de-Stalinization campaigns, Mr. Solzhenitsyn's short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published--with, it is said, the Premier's explicit approval. Solzhenitsyn became the lion of Soviet letters and "Ivan Denisovich" the first novel to deal with the acutely grim realities of Soviet labour camps. The book was also the account of his eight years experience in such a forced labor camp. The book won him the praise not only of politically motivated de-Stalinizers but of literary critics around the world.
I was only 18 at the time, doing my matriculation studies in Ontario and eleven weeks into my life as a Bahá’í pioneer. Four years later my lecturer in the philosophy of education at Windsor Teachers' College sold me a copy of this book. I had just left the towns where I had grown up in southern Ontario and nine months later I left Ontario for Baffin Island and a job teaching Inuit children in a grade three primary classroom. -Ron Price with thanks to James F. Clarity,"Unpublished At Home," The New York Times on the Web, 9 October 1970.
No one told me and I never asked
about the novels coming out of
Russia back then--or anywhere else
for that matter. I was as busy as
a proverbial beaver getting through
9 subjects in my last year of high
school, wishing I could have it off
with some girl somewhere, anywhere,
but keeping my libido well-under
control in those early pioneering
days at the end of the 9th stage of
history and the outset of the 10th.
Labour camps would never be part
of my story, although there would be
much labour and many camps, none
of your physical pain and torture,
but more mental tests that I could
ever have imagined back in 1962,
tests that would last for some 50
years and, indeed, much more??
Ron Price
20 December 2006