Big Stuff and Poetry

WAITING FOR THINGS TO HAPPEN

We must wait for things to happen to us big, or occur to us big....when you get a good one, given out of nowhere, you can almost trust it to do itself in poetry....the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other...We need the help of context-meaning-subject matter to achieve this difference....there can be no creative imagination unless there is a summoning up of experience, fresh from life, which has not hitherto been invoked. The power, however, to do this does not last very long in the life of a poet.....be serious...but don’t take yourself seriously, with the gentlest twinkle like Longfellow...-Robert Frost in Robert Frost on Writing, Elaine Barry, Rutgers University, 1973.


Being threatened and being saved
are at the heart of writing and life.
When you write it down
there’s a certain delight;
you incline to the impulse
and assume direction
with the first line
laid down on the page.

It runs a course and ends
in some clarification of life,
some momentary stay against confusion.
In the last four years there’s been
so much that’s big to write about,
but how long it will last
is any man’s guess. So far,
there’s just so much to summon up.
I’m better at twinkling thanks
to a persistent Aussi undercurrent
that forever twinkles and,
in the process, deals with tragedy.

Ron Price
21 December 1995