Two Poems for the School for Seniors

GETTING ON THE WHEEL

Like the potter who digs his own clay from the geological location where he lives, obtaining clay which you could call indigenous, finding out what this particular local clay can and can’t do and giving expression to these materials and the processes by which he shapes the clay, as a poet I give expression to the experiences I have where I live and move and have my being. But unlike that potter who likes to work only with local materials, I work with anything I can find, anywhere, that moves me. Ideas that other men and women have I often use and call them my own and am not troubled in the least by what some might call plagiarism.

This poem was written for my wife who is a potter and for Ada, Moira and Mary at the George Town School for Seniors where we talk about creative writing and narrative and poetic autobiography. -Ron Price with thanks to Colin Levy in Nine Artist Potters, Alison Littlemore and Kraig Carlstrom, Jack Pollard Pty. Ltd., North Sydney, 1973, p.11.

Colin,1 you’re right:
you’ve got to want
to live with it and
enjoy it in the myriad
ways it can be enjoyed,
slowly discovering more
and more, absorbing and
understanding more and more.

Colin, you get on the wheel
and the pot evolves; as I get
on the page or the screen
and the poem evolves. And,
as you say, if you work
honestly and truthfully, then
your work--my work—will last
as something beautiful
which people can use and enjoy.

Ron Price
3 November 1999

1 Colin here is talking about pottery; I’m talking about poetry.
A NARRATIVE VOICE AND ITS COHERENCE

Although Price felt himself to be quite self-contained, especially after his temporary retirement at the age of fifty-five, he did enjoy meeting, every four to eight weeks, a small group of between fifteen and thirty Baha’is spread across the rest of Tasmania, two other Baha’is in George Town where he lived every ten days or so, his wife’s family located at several points along the Tamar River, a small handful of neighbours whom he met while on his evening walks, and one or two dozen ‘seniors’, as they were now called, at the School for Seniors where he came to teach creative writing in the first year of his stay in this latest of pioneer locations.

In telling his own story, his autobiography, he was not recklessly candid, but he was honest to an extent which would be seen by some as startling and by others as not frank enough. He certainly did not go into the kind of detail in relation to his private life which many contemporary and conventional autobiographies were want to do, about self and others. But he did cover the range of human emotions and attitudes from the melancholy, solemn end of things to the place where joy and even ecstacy did enter.

Price felt he had given a considered account of his experience, had extracted whatever value he could from his disappointments, gathering in, sometimes complacently, sometimes with thought and ingenuity, all their compensations. This tall man, just a shade under six feet, over two hundred pounds in weight, some forty more than he started with at the outset of his pioneering life in 1962, gazing as he did, imperturbably at his life as a pioneer and the rise and development of the religion he had joined more than forty years before, could be trusted to continue his massive poetic after the insensible evolution of eight foundation years of writing, if only for the intense pleasure it gave him to provide sense, balance and judiciousness for future generations when the Cause he had devoted his life to had, in fact, revolutionized its fortunes-as inevitably it would-a thousandfold.
-Ron Price with thanks to V.S. Pritchett, The Complete Essays, Chatto and Windus, London, 1991, pp.1-5; and Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith, p.117.

Can I convey the immensity and wonder
of these epochal shifts,
of this great existential horror,
violence and chaos
that I have witnessed
since I entered the scene
on the edge of destruction?
What observations and images
can impregnate my poetic and
thus explain a life, a time, a day?

Can this narrative voice and its coherence1
take me and my world
beyond some encumbering theory, some epithet,
into the glaring light of an immense complexity,
the fullness of human contradiction
and inconsistency,
with its twistings and turnings,
beyond simplifying and narrow experience
into imagination’s enlarging circle
and reason’s rigour?

Ron Price
4 March 2000

1 David Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1988, p.101.