Poetry and 'A Certain Type of Architecture'

[Bahaichap]

A CERTAIN OTHERNESS


In the end poetry rests with the poet, at the end of some long line of cultural influences, culture in the widest sense as defined anthropologically. In the end poetry is what we are, and what we are has a great deal to do with culture—and genetics of course. Poetry is a celebration of life, of the intellect and the feeling, of the whole man; it is an expression of the whole man and of a time in h istory. It can not be imparted in a three credit course; it is the slow accumulation of endless acts, thoughts in a wonderfully mysterious interaction with a biological-genetic input.

John Metcalf, a Canadian writer, says that little poetry is taught any more in high schools. What was taught before about 1950 rested on an architecture of hierarchy and authority, a hierarchy that was in its last days. He says his own writing attracts few readers; he does not worry about his readers at all. Poetry, he argues, tends to be elusive, difficult , hard to pin down, baffling sometimes.
-Ron Price with thanks to John Metcalf, Kicking Against the Pricks, ECW Press, Downsview Ontario, 1982.

There’s a certain otherness I find
when I pick it1 up again, a kind of
“who was this?”, a distant cousin,
intimacy, definition, from those days,
occasional embarrassment, surprise.
This going back amidst tons of reading
is a part of my digging in for the long
siege that, hopefully, will finish out my
days, ordering my life as I must amidst
the endless acts and thoughts of thirty
thousand days and a flow, clear and right,
from, within , a vision, nourishing and
ongoing, life in the rivers and streams,
the rivulettes and creeks, not yet dry.


Ron Price
86 Fitzroy Road
Rivervale WA6103
30 August 1997

1 my poetry from days gone by.

[Bahaichap]

More on 'Poetry and Architecture.'

EARLY PACKAGING BY AN EAGLE’S WINGS

All the sad young men of Scott Fitzgerald and the lost generation of Ernest Hemingway are seekers for landmarks and bearings in a terrain for which the maps have been mislaid. Theirs is the God-abandoned world of modernity where individuals define their own code, summon the necessary discipline, if possible, and make their story: tragic, pitiful, human, an infinity of secular hurrings through space, with nature as all and nothing at the centre, except perhaps a slowly crafted self with all its ambiguities and mysteries. -Ron Price, with thanks to Robert Penn Warren for his “Ernest Hemingway”, Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway, editor, Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp.35-62.


The Order was just taking form, then,
and happiness far removed from the
glitter-and-tinsel of mere sensations,
astonishing immediacy, the flourishing
moments of now. Freshness was found
in depth and poingancy in a vision of
oneness quite profound against a back
ground of civilization gone to pot, war
and death with gratification raised to
cult-status-sensation. A whole new basis
for the intellect deeply laid in the life of
a new God-man, two God-men, three God-men
now all gone: charisma institutionalizing,
just beginning to form in this new body.

For this new Form had been watered
with the blood of martyrs and more than
a century* of searching, finding, intense
discouragement, sweat and tears. Here was
new meaning, new wine in new bottles,
not just the accidents, changes and chances
that seem to form this mortal coil and human
nature struggling intensely within the confines
of private spaces with fate, self and all that makes
this life of grandeur and emptiness, pleasure and
pain, simplicity and staggering complexity, small
places and an infinite universe. Here were the
faintest beginnings back then, the earliest architecture:
all that pain and wonder packaged in an eagle’s wings.

Ron Price
26 February 1996

* Shayhk Ahmad left his home in 1792 and there followed a century of searching for the Promised One until 1892 when Baha’u’llah died. Slowly, after Baha’u’llah’s passing, the institutions of a new world Order began to form, especially after 1921. In the 1920s and 1930s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway did most of their writing, the Administrative Order, the precursor of that World Order, took the form which was necessary for the international teaching plan to operate within.