Some Thoughts About Poetry in a Prose-Poem

[RonPrice]

The artist drafts his own destiny as he drafts his music, his art, his sculpture or his poetry, at least in part. And he is never sure, as Stephen Spender puts it, however confident he may be, whether he has misdirected his energy, or whether his poetry is insignificant and irrelevant or great and important. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 8 August 2000.


A mind lively and at ease
is a gift of fortune
and gives meaning and value
to perceived experience,1
to the deep and rich satisfaction
of my own writing and to the slow
charting of the progress toward our
destiny, our meaning and our fate.

The unperturbed mind is quickest
and can deal with the vanity of vanities:
life, which we must both accept and reject,
which pierces us with its nonsense and its
strange relations, its unending moments
until that last syllable of our recorded time.

1 Jane Austen, Emma.

Ron Price
8 August 2000

ADDENDUM OR EPILOGUE


Having completed my autobiography or, at least, completed a fifth edition in a form that is satisfactory to me in the first two volumes and keeping in mind that I will in all likelihood make additions to it in the years ahead, I want to write a sort of addendum or epilogue in the pages which follow. This addendum will make some comments on my years as a teacher, as a teacher of teachers, an an ESL teacher, as a student and, now, as a retired teacher.

I write this epilogue in part because I need a network of intersecting tributaries of memory and speculation before returning to my main theme. I need to return to my main theme again and again as well. It is not so much that my record and my insights are unique or especially articulate. The world is overflowing with words from perceptive and very clever people. But my mind seems easily stirred and with the new medications of the last six years(2001-2007) for my bipolar disorder I experience a certain tranquillity never before enjoyed.


This tranquillity is, I think, like that recollection in tranquillity that Wordsworth said allowed him to withdraw his thought and his life while witnessing its spectacle with the dominion of words, the incarnation of his thoughts. The essential passions of Wordsworth’s heart—and mine---speak, hopefully, a plainer and more emphatic language. There is, too, a language which arises out of one’s repeated experience and regular feelings which is, for me at least, a more permanent and philosophical language. My feelings seem at last to be more regular and easy and I can reflect on past feelings and absent things often as if they were present. This is not a special talent; indeed it is quite common, but it is very useful, essential, when writing one’s memoirs.


I want to contribute this memoir to the world and I want audiences to read my work hoping, among other things, that readers will find a new or at least an altered perspective on their own lives. This is probably a somewhat pretentious aim, trying to stake out a fresh territory for readers, a territory that requires my voice, a voice that has similarities to others but is, in the end, uniquely mine. I feel I have done this to some extent in the first two volumes and I hope some readers find some of this uniqueness and enjoy it. --Just a taste for now.-Ron Price, Tasmania

 

[Batfink]

I think you are slightly mistaken in your reference to "tranquility" and Wordsworth. He was not referring to the therapeutic value in tranquility et cetera, per se, he was referring to a definition of the creation of poetry in the Romantic tradition.
I paraphrase where this phraseology emanates from (forgive me, it is a long time since I studied Romanticism at university), he wrote that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of emotion captured in tranquil thought". Lyrical Ballads, er, 1798. Written with Coleridge in response to the French Revolution.

I agree with your point on the use of a plainer and more emphatic language, but it must be noted that the Romantic tradition was also a response to the rigidity and coldness of the Classical tradition.

 

[Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim]

I think you are slightly mistaken in your reference to "tranquility" and Wordsworth. He was not referring to the therapeutic value in tranquility et cetera, per se, he was referring to a definition of the creation of poetry in the Romantic tradition.
I paraphrase where this phraseology emanates from (forgive me, it is a long time since I studied Romanticism at university), he wrote that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of emotion captured in tranquil thought". Lyrical Ballads, er, 1798. Written with Coleridge in response to the French Revolution.

I agree with your point on the use of a plainer and more emphatic language, but it must be noted that the Romantic tradition was also a response to the rigidity and coldness of the Classical tradition.

The overflow of emotion is recollected in tranquility and certainly can be used therapeutically depending upon your mood. The lines composed at the scene like the "overflow of emotion" are run-on lines. Compare the daffodils

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils