Bahaichap
New member
Poetry and \'A Certain Type of Architecture\'
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 cultureand 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.
Theres 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.
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 cultureand 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.
Theres 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.