interview #3 with ron price

7/30/2019 INTERVIEW #3 with Ron Price

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Preamble-Part 1:

I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together asI was about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher after some 30years in the profession, 1967 to 1999. In the first dozen years of thereinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, a poetand publisher, an online journalist and blogger, an independent scholar andreader, the years from 1999 to 2012, I added more material to what youcould call this simulated interview. This is the 26th simulated interview in16 years, 1996 to 2012. There is no attempt in this particular series of Qs& As to be sequential, to follow themes or simulate a normal interview.

I have attempted a more logical-sequential pattern in my other 25interviews over those 16 years. I have posted literally millions of wordson the internet at 100s, indeed 1000s now, of sites. Readers who comeacross this particular interview of about 9000 words and 22 A-4 font-14

pages will gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read atthese sites on the world-wide-web. Readers wanting access to these sitesand my work, my posts at these sites, need to simply google my name

RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of others words like: forums,poetry, literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, inter alia.

There are more than 4000 other Ron Prices in cyberspace. Readers mustensure they are accessing my posts and my writing and not those of someother chap with the same name as mine. I have posted this interview forthe interest of what has become an extensive readership, my constituencyof readers, and others who come across my work for the first time, or forwhatever number of times for whatever particular person.

Preamble-Part 2:

2.1 The questionnaire concept which I utilize below was originated, so I

am informed, by French television personality Bernard Pivot after whatwas called the Proust Questionnaire. The Proust Questionnaire is aboutone's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview isowed to the responses given by Marcel Proust(1871-1922), the Frenchnovelist, critic, and essayist. At the end of the nineteenth century, whenProust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an English-language confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter offuture French President Flix Faure. The album was entitled "An Album toRecord Thoughts, Feelings, etc." At that time, it was popular amongEnglish families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastesand aspirations of the talker.


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2.2 James Lipton (b.1926) an American writer, poet, composer, actor anddean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in

New York City utilized this questionnaire in his series of interviewsentitled Inside the Actors Studio. The series premiered in 1994 and has

been broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89,000,000homes.

2.2.1 Lipton asked the following ten questions:

1. What is your favorite word?

2. What is your least favorite word?

3. What turns you on?

4. What turns you off?

5. What sound or noise do you love?

6. What sound or noise do you hate?

7. What is your favorite curse word?

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

9. What profession would you not like to do?

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when youarrive at the Pearly Gates?

2.2.2 My answers are:

1. God2. Fuck3. My instinctual and human needs for: food and drink, silence and

sounds, sensory and especially sexual stimulation, oxygen andphysical comfort, shelter and work, love and kindness, as well asthe pleasures that come from the satisfaction of these instinctual andhuman needs.

4. Noise, loud and aggressive people, conversation after one to twohours; most of the TV currently available to me, a great deal of

printed matter. When the needs referred to in #3 above are notsatisfied.

5. Some classical, jazz and popular music, some human voices andsilence.

6. Any loud sounds, some human voices.7. Fuck

8. I was a student and scholar, teacher and tutor, lecturer and adulteducator from 1949 to 1999. Now I am enjoying new roles: poet


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and publisher, writer and author, editor and research, onlinejournalist and blogger.

9. Law and medicine, work in the biological and physical sciences aswell as the trades.

10. Well done and now tell me about your troubles in life while tryingto serve Me.

Preamble-Part 3:

Below readers will find my own 31 questions, questions I began to askand answer back in 1998 or 1999, as I was about to retire from FTteaching, a career which began in 1967. These questions were lastupdated on 29 November 2012.

___________________________________________________________1.Do you have a favourite place to visit? Ive lived in 25 cities and

towns and visited over 100. I have lived in 37 houses and would enjoyvisiting both the houses and the towns again for their memory, theirnostalgia, their mnemonic, value. When writing about these places as I dofrom time to time, I would benefit from such visits, but it is not likely that Iwill visit any of them now in the evening of my life for many reasons notthe least of which is my lack of funds and my disinclination to travel anymore.

There are dozens of other places Id enjoy going as a tourist or travel-

teacher, circumstances permitting, circumstances like: plenty of money,good health, lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people inthose places. My health, my new medications for bipolar disorder,medications Ive now had for over five years, prevents me from travelling.

1.1 Tell us a little more about your health both before your writingbegan in earnest in the 1990s and before. Rather than go into detailhere I will simply refer you to my 90,000 word and 200 page(font-14)account of my experience of bipolar 1 disorder as well as the sectionof my website on the same subject. You can google Ron Price BPD.

2. Who are your favourite writers? The historians Edward Gibbon andArnold Toynbee, Manning Clark and Peter Gay, among a long list ofhistorians I keep in my notebooks; the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and

Nietzsche, Buber and Spinoza, among another long list I keep in mynotebooks; the Central Figures of the Bahai Faith and Their successorsShoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice; the poets Rainer MariaRilke and Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and Roger White; the

psychologists Rollo May and Alfred Adler, and a host of others notes

about whom I keep in my notebooks, as well as writers from many otherdisciplines.


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3. Who are your favorite artists? There are several dozen artmovements and hundreds if not thousands or artists that can be accessed in

both libraries and now, with a click or two, on the internet. I will name

two famous artists whose work I like and two whom I have knownpersonally: Cezanne and Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates. I find itjust about impossible to answer a question like this given my eclectictastes. I have tried in question #2, but found there were too many namesand so I do not intend to make such a long list here. As my years ofretirement from the world of jobs, community work, and nose to thegrindstone stuff, so to speak, lengthen as they have since 1999, I findthere are more and more artists in the history of art whose work I am justfinding out about and learning to appreciate.

4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists andsinger/songwriters? How can one choose from the thousands in thesecategories? It is the same problem as in the previous two questions.Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden come to mindas composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to list. I placed alist of my favourites at several sites in cyberspace. The list had more than100 people and 100s of their works. Over the years, Ive had at least adozen different favorite composers including: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvorak and

Rachmaninoff. My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musicalworld Ive been immersed in most deeply at any given time.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of translating melancholy and nostalgiainto a musical language. He was cured of a profound writers blockthrough hypnosis, and he dedicated his beloved Second Piano Concerto tohis psychiatrist, Dr Nikolai Dahl. I dedicate my love for music to mymother and father both of whom played the piano in our home as I wasgrowing-up.

5. Who are your heroes? The Central Figures of the Bahai Faith,Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in Abdul-Bahas Memorials of the Faithful(1970, 1927) and many more that Icome across in reading history and other social sciences, the humanities aswell as the physical and biological sciences. Again, the list is too long andits getting longer with the years as I head with what seems the speed oflight to the age of 70 in 2014.

6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and JohnHatcher in my middle age, Jameson Bond and Douglas Martin when I wasa young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too


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many to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 70. Now in my lateadulthood, the years after 60 in the lifespan according to some humandevelopment psychologists some new inspirations include: the essayistJoseph Epstein, the writers Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Udo Schaefer, a

number of poets and writers whose works I had never had time to read ordid not know even existed---again the list is getting longer since readingand research, writing and editing have become much more central to mylife, to my daily activities than during my years of employment: 1961 to2001.

7. If you could invite several people for dinner from any period inhistory, who would you choose and why? I would not invite anyone

because I dont like to talk while Im eating. After dinner these days I liketo watch TV for a few minutes and then go to bed. Id chose the following

people to have a chat with at some other time during the day, but I wouldnot have them all come at once. I would take them as follows:

7.1 Pericles: Id like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age,as he saw it. Ive come to know a great deal about Athens in the 5 th

century BC since I taught ancient history and I have many questionswhich, of course, I could answer by reading. But there are so many viewsof the man and the times.

7.2 Roger White: Id like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observethat real kindness which I could see in his letters and in his rare interviews.

7.3 My mother and father and my maternal grandparents: The pleasure ofseeing them again(except for my grandmother whom I never saw since shedied five years before I was born) after all these years would, I think, be

just overwhelming.

7.4.1 Douglas and Elizabeth Martin, 7.4.2 Jameson and Gale Bond and7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university

academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on mydeveloping values in the formative period of my late teens and earlytwenties.

7.5 There are many others in another list too long to include here.

8. What are you reading? In 1998, my last year of full-time employment,when I began to list these questions and provide the answers, I hadfourteen books on the go: eight biographies, four literary criticisms, one

book of philosophy and one of psychology. Now in these early years ontwo old age pensions, 2009 to 2012, I am reading mostly material on the


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internet and that reading list is too extensive to list here. I never go tolibraries any more and, due to a lack of money, I never buy any books,although my wife does occasionally and I browse through what she buys.The internet is overflowing with enough print to keep me happily occupied

until I die. My son bought me David Womersleys 3-volume edition(1994)of Gibbons famous work in 2010 and after 3 years Im up to page 140underlining as I go the passages that I may use one day in my own writing.

9. What do you enjoy listening to in the world of music? I listenedmainly to classical music on the classical FM station while living in Perthin the last dozen years of my FT employment(1988-1999) as well as somefrom the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George Townnorthern Tasmania in these years of the early evening of my life(1999 to2012) this is also true only hardly any pop, rock and folk and much more

jazz and classical. I have written about my tastes and interests in musicsince my adolescence in other places and I refer readers here to the sectionof my website on music for the kind of detail that would lead to prolixity ifI included it here.

10. What food could you not live without? I would miss my wifescooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must

be said, though,(answering this question 14 years after beginning toanswer it) now that I live in northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and

Mexican food. Now that I am retired I hardly miss these foods. I enjoythe food I get, that my wife and I prepare and only eat a Persian meal or aMexican meal perhaps once a year now. Do I miss it? Yes and no. I enjoyeating when I am hungry; hunger is the driving force and I enjoy many,many foods when I am hungry. If I could not have some of these foods Id

be happy with many others.

11. What do you do when you feel a poem coming on? I get a piece ofpaper and pen or go to my computer/word processor and start writing.Most of my poems take less than half an hour. My latest booklet of poetry

comes from my poetry factory, as I have occasionally come to call thislocation for my production of poetry in George Town Tasmania, Australiawhere I write these pieces. I have also calculated the number of poems Ihave written per day over the last 32 years after a hiatus of 18 years(1962-1980) in my pioneering life in which no record was kept even though I waswriting poetry very occasionally, very rarely, at the time.

In the first years of my life, 1943 to 1962, the influences on my writing ofpoetry included: my mother and grandfather, the primary and secondaryschool system in Ontario and the university I attended. The Bahai Faithafter 1953 was also a poetic force. All these poetic influences were


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completely unrecognized as poetic influences at the time since my interestswere mainly sport, getting high marks at school, having fun, and dealingwith lifes quotidian and sometimes anxious events.

A. From 1 August 1980 to 22 September 2012 there have been 11,734days(circa).B. The number of poems written per day is calculated using the

following data: 7075(circa) poems in 11,734 (circa) days to 22September 2012. That works out to: 1 poem in 1.65 days or 4.3

poems/week.C. The maths: 11,734(days) divided by 7075(poems)

11.How important is life-style and freedom from the demands ofemployment and other people to your creative life? These things

became absolutely crucial by my mid fifties. The Canadian poet,anarchist, literary critic and historian George Woodcock (1912-1995), once said in an interview that it was very important for hisliterary work that he could live as he wished to live. If a job wasoppressing him, he said, he had to leave it. Both Woodcock and Ihave done this on several occasions, but I did not leave the jobs Idid in order to writeexcept for the last job in 1999 when I was 55.

Woodcock broke with a university and I broke with three Tafe

colleges. It's a derogatory thing to say it's a form of evasion, ofavoidance or cowardice, said Woodcock, but you have to evadethose situations in life in which you become insubordinate to othersor situations in which others offend your dignity.

Woodcock went on to say in that same interview that when one actsdramatically or precipitatelylike resigning from a job or losing onestemper--it often has consequences that are very negative. He gaveexamples from his own life and I could give examples here; I could expandon this important theme but this is enough for now. Readers who are keen

to follow-up on this aspect of my life can read my memoirs. Everything inmy memoirs is true, but it has been "filtered and worked on". Readerstend to think a memoir is a chronicle or record of a life but, as thememoirist Kate Holden says, it's a much more subtle form. You'recompressing, eliding, using your craft. She uses her craft to present agood story and I use it to present what I hope is a good analysis, someaccurate and honest, useful and helpful reflections on life to those whoread them.

12.Were you popular at school, in your primary, secondary anduniversity days? I certainly was in primary and secondary school,


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but not at matriculation or university. I did not have the experiencemany writers and intellectuals have who received early woundsfrom the English school system among other influences in life. Itwasn't merely the discipline at these schools; it was the ways in

which boys got what was called the school spirit. In most Englishschools it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates againstthe intellectual who is looked on as a weakling. I was popular atschool because I was good at sport and I got on with everyone.

I certainly was not seen as, and I was not, an intellectual. I was good atmemorizing and that is why I did so well, but at university I could notsimply memorize; I had to think and write my own thoughts and my gradeswent from As to Cs. This was also due to the beginnings of episodesof bipolar I disorder which has afflicted me off and on all my life.

14. You did not flower early as a writer. Tell us something about theorigins of your prose and poetic writing. Many writers flower early.Many of them become largely forgotten whereas I have a different type ofcreativity which seems to be growing in meaning and personalsignificance, in power and vitality, literally decade by decade, again, likethe Canadian George Woodcock. This kind of creativity over the lifespanis actually quite abnormal, atypical. I seem to have been the tortoise or the

bull if you're going to use the Taurean symbol. I have been marching

forward slowly. I think what I am writing now is better than anything Iveever written in my life. Who knows what lies ahead.

Some years ago a reporter from Musician magazine asked jazz pianistAbdullah Ibrahim a question about when his interest in music began.Ibrahim said he understood the logic of the question but that he couldn'tanswer it because music had always been part of his day to day living. Ifeel in a similar way about my relationship to writing. I can't remember atime when I didn't have a deep investment in writing. From 1949 to 1967,the age of 5 to 23, writing was the very source of my success and survival

in school. If I had not developed the capacity to write well I would neverhave got good grades and gone up the academic ladderbut I had to workat the process back then. Any significant literary success, any publishedwork, did not come, really, until I was nearly forty.

15. What sort of relationships do you have these days? I was readingabout the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have alreadymentioned in this series of questions and answers. He said that he did nothave all that many friends who were writers. He knew their problems, buthe did not know the problems of painters. He said that he liked to moveamong painters, mathematicians, psychologists and people who could tell


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him something. By my mid-fifties I had had enough of people telling meabout things, any things. I had been both a listening post, a reader, and atalker for so many years I was a bit of a burnt-out case and wanted to shutmy ears to the endless chatter of life by the age of 55 in 1999.

If I wanted to know about stuff, about any particular person, I could read,watch TV, listen to the radio or google. If I wanted some social life Icould visit a small circle of people in the little town I live in, that I took asea-change to near the mouth of a river by the sea. After an hour or so ofconversation and various forms of social interaction I usually had enoughand looked forward to my return to solitude.

Due to my medications by the age of 65 and perhaps due to being in mymiddle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) I found more than two hours

with people in any form took me to the edge of my psychological stamina,patience, my coping capacity. It was better for me to seek out solitudeafter two hours to preserve the quality of my relationships and not to blot-my-copybook, as my wife often put it when I indulged in some emotionalexcess, some verbal criticism of others or gave vent to some kind of spleenwhich often resulted after that two hours---due to my mental illness, my

bipolar disorder. In the 13 years since I retired I have been on a series ofmedication shifts which have altered my psycho-emotional life. Now Ispend 12 hours a day in bed for an 8 to 9 hour sleep and work at literary

activity for 6 to 8 hours a day.

16. How would you describe the social outreach in your poetry? Irarely point a finger directly at some guilty party, organization, person ormovement; sometimes there is a subtle psychological base to a poem thathints at or implies some evil in someones court. My poetry is quiteexplicitly non-partisan. I have dealt with this issue several times in myseries of 26 interviews. It is an important question because the wider worldoften judges a person by the extent to which they engage with, or in, thequixotic tournament of social and political issues in our global community.

I dont shout at any multinational or rave for some environmental group.

When I do shout and rave it is about other things and there's nothing subtleabout my shouting and raving and, in the process, probably little depth inthose prose-poems of mine either. With millions of readers now incyberspace Id say I now have a social outreach wider, more extensive,than any Ive had in my life.

17. Some poets see their work as a form of social criticism and, likethe Canadian poet Irving Layton, for example, they rage against


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society and some of what they see as societys illnesses and injustices.Where does your poetry fit into this picture?

Many of Layton's more than forty published volumes of poetry are

prefaced by scathing attacks on those who would shackle a poet'simagination; over the years he has used the media and the lecture hall topassionately and publicly decry social injustice. But perhaps his loudestand most sustained protest has been against a restrictive puritanism thatinhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. My poetry isnot an expression of scathing attacks on anything; nor is it a passionateand public poetic vis--vis that quixotic tournament of social issues thatare paraded in front of me day after day in the print and electronic media.

I see my poetry as an extension of the whole Bah' approach to social

issues and individual engagement with these issues. There are severalBah' books which explore this quite complex subject. One of the bestwas published 25 years ago. It is entitled Circle of Unity: Bah'Approaches to Current Social Issues.1 I encourage readers to have alook at it if they would like a more complete answer to this question, aquestion that I cannot answer in a small paragraph.

As far as the imagination is concerned it is not, in my view, the opposite offacts or the enemy of facts. The imagination depends upon facts; it feeds

on them in order to produce beauty or invention, or discovery. The trueenemy of the imagination is laziness and habit, as well as an ineffectiveuse of leisure-time. The enemy of imagination is the idleness that providesfancy.2 I am not concerned, as Layton was, with a restrictive puritanismthat inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. I havemany concerns in the process of writing poetry and journals, essays andnarrative autobiography. I would like to emphasize here that authentichistorical documents, mine and those of others, are products of the humanmind and language; this is reality itself. Reality could be seen as a whitelight which each person sees on a spectrum of colour. Insofar as reality is

thought, I deal in human reality all the time when I am writing and reading.

17. Do you think travelling has been crucial to your writing?

1Circle of Unity: Bah' Approaches to Current Social Issues, editor,Anthony Lee, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1984.2 W. Kaye Lamb, "Vancouver, George," Dictionary of CanadianBiography, Volume IV; B. Anderson, The Life and Voyage of Captain

George Vancouver, Surveyor of the Sea (U of Toronto Press, Toronto,1966, p. 155.


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The Canadian poet Al Purdy(1918-2000) admitted quite clearly that if hehadn't travelled he wouldn't have written very much. He felt that he had togo further out in the world and experience place in order to write. He wasone of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century.

Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works includeover thirty books of poetry, a novel, two volumes of memoirs and fourbooks of correspondence. He has been called Canadas "unofficial poetlaureate" and, "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally inthe life of a culture."

I did not travel the way Purdy did. I just kept moving to new towns, sometwo dozen. For a great many reasons largely associated with my bipolardisorder as well as some inexplicable fatigue with talking and listening, I

became too tired, perhaps too old, too worn-out, too sick, too poor----

goodness---what a sad tale, eh? Now I travel in my head and through theprint and electronic media. And yes, travel in both these forms has beenabsolutely crucial to my productivity, but it ways that are difficult toexplain since they span several decades.

18. Do you like talking about poetry?

Gary Geddes tells(In Its Still Winter: A WEB JOURNAL OFCONTEMPORARY CANADIAN POETRY AND POETICS, Vol.

2 No. 1 Fall 1997) a great story of Douglas Dunn who was writer inresidence at Hull. Dunn wanted to meet the famous British poet Larkin.But Larkin was a curmudgeon. He hated poets! Douglas Dunn was told byfriends who knew Larkin that, if he wanted to meet Larkin then he had tomake sure he didn't ever talk about poetry. He could talk about jazz andanything else, but not poetry. So these friends arranged this meeting andleft the two of them in the pub. Finally, after a few beers, Larkin leanedacross the table and said, "there are too many poets in this university. Your

job as writer in residence is to get rid of them."

I dont feel like this at all, although I can appreciate Larkins sentiments. IfI want some congenial poetic spirits I read their poetry or I read aboutthem, but I have no strong desire to meet and have a chat. But I like towrite about poetry and that is why Ive simulated these 26 interviews. I amfascinated by the development of poetry in my life and seek to understandhow and why both my interest and my writing have arisen.

19. Do you like reading poetry?

Gary Geddes says in the same interview I quoted above that when he wastranslating a book of Chinese poetry with a George Leong, George would


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often bring him the most depressing and melancholic poems in Chinese totranslate. Geddes would say: "George you gotta give me something else, Ican't bear all of this stuff. I feel that same way about a lot of poetry,indeed, most contemporary, classical and poetry from any period of

history. I just dont connect with it. My mind and heart do not engage in itscontent or style, or both. Often I just dont understand what the poets aresaying. The poets I do engage with hit home quite deeply, but they arerelatively few. They are also people I am only now discovering since myretirement, since I have the time to read and not engage in a 60 to 80 houra week filled with people and responsibilities.

20. Do you use metaphor in your poetry to any extent?

Not anywhere near as much as Id like, as much as exists in its poetic

potential. Aristotle once wrote that the ability to see relationships betweenthings is the mark of poetic genius. I would not want to make the claim to

be a poetic genius; how could one ever make such a presumptuous,preposterous, claim. But I see relationships between things all over theplace. Its one of the great motivators in why I write. I want to develop myuse of metaphor in my poetry. I dont think Ive really taken off yet in myeffective use of metaphor.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur(1913-2005) sees mood and metaphor as the

basis of the unity of a poem, of poetry itself. Writing poetry is certainly amood thing for me and Id like to make it much more of a metaphor thingas well. When emotion and intellect converge in imaginative writing,writing for example that draws on metaphor, readers can be transported toanother life-world, a type of Gestalt, a Lebenswelt, to use the philosopherEdmund Husserls(1859-1938) term. Any transcendence that results forme and the reader of my work is not due to being taken to another realm atleast not consciously.

Any sense of transcendence that does take place is due to seeing meaning,

hidden meaning, meaning that did not exist before, in my or my readersexperience, in the things and thoughts themselves. One goes beyond thefamiliar and finds fleeting moments rich in imaginative detail. There is aworld outside language as the Canadian poet Don McKay(1942- ) asserts.It is very difficult to translate that world but some poetry can do this, canmake this translation, with conviction and delight.3 Id like to come backto this question several years from now when Im in my 70s or even 80s.

21. What do you see as the function of a poet?

3 Don McKay, Local Wilderness, editorial, The Fiddlehead, 1991,pp.5-6.


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A poet has many functions, but two functions of this poet that interest me,to answer this question off the cuff so to speak, is: (a) to discover anddistil the labour and the genius of the Bah' experience and (b) to give

expression to the delight and the love that are at the heart of writing. TheCanadian poet A.J. M. Smith wrote this in 1954.4 Smith had apreoccupation with death as I have, although not as intense and not in thesame way as Smiths. Out of his preoccupation with death he made

poetry. I have made my poetry out of this and other preoccupations.5 Themedications Ive taken in the last decade or so have softened my interest inthe subject of death.

From a Bah' perspective, of course, the arts and sciences in general, andpoetry in particular, should result in advantage to man, ensure his

progress, and elevate his rank6; that music is a ladder for our souls, ameans whereby they may be lifted up into the realm on high7; that the artof drama will become a great educational power8; that when a paintertakes up her paint brush, it is as if she were at prayer in the Temple9;that the arts fulfil their highest purpose when showing forth the praise ofGod; and that music, art and literature...are to represent and inspire thenoblest sentiments and highest aspirations.10 The leader of the Bahaicause from 1921-1957 saw such spiritual power in the arts that he

predicted they would eventually do much to help it spread the spirit of love

and unity. The poet, as I say, has those two functions and many othersthat I write about in the millions of words readers will find if they get intomy oeuvre.

22. When you talk about art and the arts what do you mean?

When I say art or the arts, I mainly have in mind those that are

4 A.J.M Smith, Refining Fire: The Meaning and Use of Poetry, OnPoetry and Poets: Selected Essays, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto,

1977, p.64.5 Anne Compton, Patterns for Poetry: Poetics in Seven Poems by A.J.M.Smith, in Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 28, spring/summer,1991.6 Tablets of Bahullh, p. 168.7 Kitb-i-Aqdas,paragraph 51.8 Abdul-Bah in London, p. 93.

9 Ludwig Tuman, Mirror of the Divine: Art in the Bah WorldCommunity, p. 45

10 Abdul-Bah in Blomfield, The Chosen Highway,p. 167.


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commonly referred to as fine arts such as poetry, painting, sculpture,theatrical drama, film, music, dance and others. But I also have in mindthe design arts, such as architecture and urban design as well as thecrafts, such as pottery and rug-weaving because these arts operate on a

spiritual as well as a material plane. Readers can now google the subjectat locations in cyberspace like Wikipedia for answers to factual questionslike this one.

23. What do you see when you look in the mirror?

I have a photo which I post at many internet sites. The caption, thedescriptive comment on this photo, reads: This full-frontal facial view-

photo, taken in 2004 when I was 60 in Hobart Tasmania, has a light sideand a dark side. It is an appropriate photo to symbolize my lower and

higher natures. These are natures that reach for spiritual, for intellectualand cultural attainment on the one hand and reach for and get caught-upin/with the world of mire and clay and its shadowy and ephemeralattachments.

Of course, when I look in the mirror there is not this clear dichotomy oflight and shadow. When I look in the mirror I see an external self, a facewhich bears a relationship with my real self, a self which is not my body.My real self is an unknown quantity and my face really tells me very little

about this real self. And so, to answer your question, I see what nearlyeveryone else sees: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, cheeks, etc. I also see that: Ineed a shave; I need to put some ointment on my skin; I need to comb myhair or cut my moustache.

24. What would you bring to this interview to show-and-tell if youcould bring only one item? And what would you say about that item.

My mother-in-law, who is now 93(i.e. 2012) and lives in a little towncalled Beauty Point in northern Tasmania across the Tamar River from

where I live, has a little figure in her lounge-room. It is a small figure ofthree monkeys. It has a label on it: see no evil, hear no evil and speak noevil. It always reminds me of a quotation from Bah'u'llhs book HiddenWords. The quotation goers like this and it is this of which I wish to tell:

O COMPANION OF MY THRONE! Hear no evil, and see no evil, abasenot thyself, neither sigh and weep. Speak no evil, that thou mayest nothear it spoken unto thee, and magnify not the faults of others that thineown faults may not appear great; and wish not the abasement of anyone,that thine own abasement be not exposed. Live then the days of thy life,that are less than a fleeting moment, with thy mind stainless, thy heart


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unsullied, thy thoughts pure, and thy nature sanctified, so that, free andcontent, thou mayest put away this mortal frame, and repair unto themystic paradise and abide in the eternal kingdom for evermore.-Bah'u'llh,Persian Hidden Words, p. 44.

25.1 Talk a little bit about the types of poetry written and read today?25.2Do you do any performance poetry?

25.1 Part 1:

The famous American essayist Joseph Epstein wrote over 20 years agothat: Sometimes it seems as if there isnt a poem written in this nationthat isnt subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation orthe government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or

another.11 Dana Gioia wrote that the first question one poet now asksanother upon being introduced is Where do you teach? Dana Gioia,Can Poetry Matter?, Atlantic Monthly, May 1991.

Gioia himself acknowledges a heritage of a commentary of concern for thehealth of poetry extending from Edmund Wilsons Is Verse a DyingTechnique?(1934) through to Joseph Epsteins Who Killed Poetry?(1988). But performance poetry is alive and well and, in contrast, is basedin speech. Walter J. Ong so eloquently demonstrated that this poetry is

fundamentally other than writing. Sound, he writes, is not simplyperishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.12

These are performances of poetry, some now call mic-poetry, that practicea poetics of openness and engagement, and in doing so inherently refuseofficial, institutional surveillance. This mic-poetry and its venues utilizespace not constructed for cultural displays, spaces such as bars andcoffeehouses.

I will draw on the words of Rollo May, the man who introduced existentialpsychology to the USA and whose writings influenced me back in the

1970s and still do. If you do not express your own original ideas, wroteMay, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayedyourself. Also you will have betrayed your community in failing to makeyour contribution to the whole.

Part 2:

11 Joseph Epstein, Who Killed Poetry?, Commentary, Volume86, No.2, 1988, p.15.12 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of theWord, Routledge, NY, 1982, p.32.


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A chief characteristic of this courage, he went on to say, is that itrequires a centeredness within ones own being. This is why we mustalways base our commitment in the centre of our own being, or else nocommitment will be ultimately authentic. Unconscious insights or

answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss. Theymay indeed occur at times of relaxation or in fantasy, or at other timeswhen we alternate play with work. But what is entirely clear to me is thatthey pertain to those areas in which a person consciously has workedlaboriously and with dedication.

The Dionysian principle of ecstasy is often the result: a magnificentsummit of creativity which achieves a union of form and passion withorder and vitality. I encourage readers to read Mays books. They wereand are an intellectual and spiritual delight for me and they answer much

more fully these topics for which you wanted a comment.

Count Basie's great drummer Jo Jones once said his job was not so muchto play the drums as it was to get himself into the kind of condition wherehe could play the things he could imagine. I think that's my job too, butimagination is only part of the story and perspiration, effort and work, isthe other 99 per cent.

25.2 I did some performance poetry back in the 1990s both in my

classroom as a teacher and in 1 or 2 places around Perth. In reading poetryone is into the world of entertainment. After more than 30 years in aclassroom as a teacher, a place where I was an entertainer among otherroles, I tired of the process. When I retired I had no desire to read my

poetry.

Public readings by Russian writers including Voznesensky andYevtushenko grew to the point that huge stadiums could hardly contain theaudiences clamouring to hear the new poetry. When Voznesensky readshis voice is equal to every music his language offers, and he whips his

poems toward the audience with a right arm like a tweed cobra; he delivershis lines with a passionate, almost frightening intensity.

During performances, crowds have been known to rush the podium totouch the cuffs of his trousers; after them, poetry groupies seek the kind of

backstage benediction the Irish poet Dylan Thomas used to like to give.His name shows up in literary journals while his face appears in fashionmagazines. He is a legend in Russia. With as many as 14,000 in a stadium,reading poetry was like a sport. Voznesensky said that this experiencewas a little boring because it was impossible for 14,000 people in a soccerstadium to hear you. Its impossible to speak intimately. He also said that


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before his generation of Russian poets there had never been that level ofpublic interest and response.

Reading poetry here in Australia, as I did back in the 1990s, was not that

much of a pleasure for me. Poetry cant compete with TV, the movies,having fun, and the entertainment ethos of our culture. Perhaps afterhaving a good rest from teaching I may want to be the entertainer again.The problem now is that with the new meds for my bipolar disorder I donthave much social stamina and reading my poetry in public would be tooexhausting.27. Popular and mass culture on the one hand and intellectual-elitisteducated-high culture on the other are both evidenced in the manymillions of words in your poems, essays and books. Could you

comment on this dichotomy in your life and writings?

Part 1:

In recent years, since my early retirement from FT and PT work in my latefifties---in the late 1990sand as we entered the 3rd millennium and evenmore so now that I am 68, on two old age pensions and have immersedmyself totally in reading and writing, research, editing and publishing, Ihave come to understand more clearly how my investments in these two

cultures were shaped as far back as my childhood.

My father became an adult in 1911 before the Great War and my motherduring that war in 1917. I was a child of a working class immigrant fatherand a mother who was also the child of a working class immigrant father.They viewed education, ideas, and culture with reverence. This wasespecially true of my mother. My mother, her brother, her sister and herfather read books, lots of books. They listened to classical music and wereinterested in the arts generally. They became reasonably knowledgeableabout the arts, although not academically so. Their formal education was

never beyond high school. They were what we call autodidacts.

This background created in them a disposition against popular culture tosome extent. Perhaps they had a fear that common tastes might make themappear undiscerning and unworthy. I dont know. They have been for morethan 30 years. My father had a number of working class jobs, was a

passionate gardener and read the newspaper more than books. He was noelitist. They both listened and danced to popular music, loved motion

pictures, and played and followed sports.

Part 2:


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The years after World War II transformed popular culture in importantways. The enormous expansion of consumer spending, the rise of newcommunications media especially TV, and the incorporation of distinct

European American ethnic cultures and communities into a moregeneralized white identity left me with a different view of culture than theone that made sense to my parents. The comfortable lower middle classhome, community, and culture in which I grew up was a happy one.

Before the age of 18 in 1962, I imagined that professional athletesinhabited a world I wanted to be a part of. In my late childhood and teensI lost myself in a Canadian culture defined by my small hometown: its

baseball, hockey and football players; pictures printed on the backs ofcards that I collected, and its trinity of orthodoxy: Catholic, Protestant and

Jew. I was drawn to rock and roll radio programs, movies, and that worldof sport. My little world was defined by the "down home" music andhumor of disc jockeys, by the quiet theatricality, festivity, and sensuality ofmass mediated working class culture and family, school and a little circleof friends.

Part 3:

I had my first symptoms of bi-polar disorder at the age of 18 and went on

to university: 1963-1967 still battling the disorder. While I was studyingthe social sciences at university in the working class, lunch-pail city ofHamilton, I began to see my culture like a kind of suffocating tyranny. Itwas during these years that my interests in the Bah' Faith developed andthese interests helped to give me a balance between the intellectual-highculture and the more populist aspects of culture. And the rest is history asthey say. I have now had half a century since then(1962-2012) of aninterest in both popular and high culture and am very, very far from beingan authority on either.

Part 4:

The Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, who championed the idea ofvariety of subjects and styles as a poetic virtue wrote in his essay onPoetic Interpretation (c. 1895), that: the perfect poet would have no setstyle. He would have a different one for everything he would write, amanner exactly suited to the subject. It seems to me, as I now survey thelast two decades of an enormous poetic output, that I have come to acquirea certain style, although the content is immensely varied from elitist to

popular culture.


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28. What do you think readers can learn from your prose that theycant from your poetry?

28. To answer this question, allow me to begin with the words of a leading

American critic of poetry Helen Vendler. She notes in her review ofAmerican poet Robert Hasss 500 page series of essays entitled What

Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World inThe New York Review of Books 27/9/12---that: Poets prose is in acategory all its own. It enlarges for readers the idea of a writers mind andalso demonstrates aspects of his character. To a reader knowing only the

poetry there can be surprises, for example:

Emersons aphoristic journals, Whitmans fact-filled memoranda of theCivil War, or Thoreaus memories of his dead brother in A Week on the

Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Poets prose can be formal and reticent,as is the case in T.S. Eliots writing; or it can be intimately painful as inRobert Lowells account of his time in Payne Whitney (From theUnbalanced Aquarium). What Light Can Do collects the poet RobertHasss essays of the last twenty years, in which we hear a disarming voicespeaking as if to friends. His prose has an unusually wide range: he haswritten not only on other poets but also on photographers (Robert Adams,Robert Buelteman, Laura McPhee) and fiction writers (Jack London,Chekhov, Cormac McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston).

Vendler continues: Hasss first instinct in writing prose is to take on themanner of a born storyteller, transporting us to a well-described setting

biographical, ecological, or personaland naturalizing us, so to speak,into an imaginative atmosphere. In other hands, an essay called WallaceStevens in the World might not begin: My nineteenth birthday was alsothe birthday of one of my college friends. Nor might a piece on the FirstEpistle of Saint John open with: In my grade-school classroom in

Northern California, there were pictures pinned to the bulletin boardsrepresenting the Last Supper. Other essays begin more straightforwardly,

but not without a deliberate will to surprise. The intriguing ChekhovsAnger invites us in with a blunt and unsettling opening: In his journalsChekhov notes two reasons why he doesnt like a lawyer of hisacquaintance. One is that he is very stupid; the other is that he is a reptile.

In my case, readers will find my prose exists in my poetry as well as in myessays and autobiography. To make a long story short, I think I could goso far as to say my prose and poetry are virtually indistinguishable. That iswhy I call it prose-poetry.

29. To what extent is your prose and poetry confessional?


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Jack Kerouac was asked once in an interview(Jack Kerouac,The Art of Fiction No. 41,Interviewed by Ted Berriganin the Paris Review where he got his spontaneousstyle for his book On the Road.

Kerouac said that he: got the idea for the spontaneousstyle ofOn the Roadfrom seeing how good old NealCassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast,mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed,with real names in his case, however since they wereletters. I remembered also Goethe's admonition, well,Goethe's prophecy that the future literature of theWest would be confessional in nature; also

Dostoyevsky prophesied as much and might havestarted in on that if he'd lived long enough to do hisprojected masterwork, The Life of a Great Sinner.Cassady also began his early youthful writing withattempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craftbusiness, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn'tgetting out his guts and heart the way it feltcomingout.

Thats too free and loose for my liking and whatever confessionalism thereis in my writing is what I have come to call a moderate confessionalism.I dont tell all from the rag-and-bone shop of my life. The general Bahaiteaching on confession guides me here.

30. What are your views on plagiarism and, on the internet, spam?

30.1 I rather like the poet Miltons view of piracy or plagiarism of a work.Milton had the view that: "if what is borrowed is not bettered by the

borrower, then it is plagiarism". Stravinsky added the right of possession

to Milton's distinction when he said: "A good composer does not imitate,he steals." An example of this better borrowing is Jim Tenney's "Collage1" (1961) in which Elvis Presley's hit record "Blue Suede Shoes" (itself

borrowed from Carl Perkins) is transformed by means of multi-speed taperecorders and razor blade. Tenney took an everyday piece of music andallowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherentlyElvis radically influenced our perception of Jim's piece.11 Marilyn Randall, Recycling, Recycling orplus a change...in OtherVoices, May 2007, Vol.3.1. For an excellent overview of this subject go

to this link: http://www.othervoices.org/3.1/mrandall/index.php
http://www.othervoices.org/3.1/mrandall/index.phphttp://www.othervoices.org/3.1/mrandall/index.php


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30.2 I have written a brief essay on spam since I have often been accusedof spamming in cyberspace. The piece is probably too long to includehere, but Ill include it anyway. The title of the brief essay is: A New

Product Hits the Market.

The original term spam was coined in 1937 by the Hormel corporation as aname for its Spam luncheon meat: a canned, precooked, spiced meat

product. The transition from meat product to internet term had a stop withthe comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus. In 1970 that BBC comedyshow aired a sketch that featured a cafe that had a menu which featureditems like: "egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam,

bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam; andfinally, lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished withtruffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam."

To make matters sillier in Monty Python style, the cafe was filled withVikings who periodically broke-out into song praising spam: "spam, spam,spam, spam: lovely spam, wonderful spam."

While the Hormel corporation was holding a competition to find a newname for their product, the North American Bah community wasformulating the details of its first teaching Plan in May 1937. Thisformulation took place just eight weeks before the introduction of Spam

onto the market. As of 2003 the Bahai Faith had spread to over 200countries and territories with the largest number of adherents in India, Iranand the USA. As of 2003, Spam was sold in 41 countries worldwide. Thelargest consumers of Spam were in the United States, the UK and SouthKorea.

Computer people adopted the term Spam from the Python sketch to mean,to include, the commercialization of the internet, the unwanted commercialmessages that come in the form of electronic junk mail or junk postings aswell as posts at Internet sites that: (a) nobody really wants to read/asks for

and/or (b) are basically some form of plagiarism. These have become theprimary meanings, among other meanings, of spam on the internet.-RonPrice with thanks to A History of the Term Spam, internet.com, 24 July2008.

31. How did you learn to write?

The science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury once said that "you cant learn towrite in college. Its a very bad place for writers because the teachersalways think they know more than you doand they dont. They have

prejudices." I never took any courses on writing, although I taught many


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courses myself from basic skills courses, individual tutoring to helpstudents write essays, and creative writing. I learned a few things as ateacher; I also read dozens of interviews with writers. Finally, as I gotolder, I wrote more and more, and I think that was the main way I learned:

by writing.

32. As a writer how do you view the past?

As George Steiner(1929- ), the influential European-born Americanliterary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator,wrote: it is not the past which rules us; it is our image of the past. This is

just another way of saying we construct our own past out of the facts, theevents that took place. Our freedom lies in how we view our experiences.Perhaps the idea of loving or battling with our fate is also involved here.

This question could also be worded as: how do I see history? Ive writtena great deal about a Bahai view of history. According to the Baha'i viewof human history, social conditions had changed sufficiently by the 19thcentury that humanity was in need of further guidance from God. Whilelesser degrees of unity had been achieved, up to and including the bringingtogether of peoples to create a nation, what was now needed was thedivine guidance necessary to move humanity forward to the next stage ofits development: global unity. Indeed, the messenger that was now to come

was the culmination of all of the religions that God had sent to differentregions of the world. Readers can examine a finely nuanced view with alittle googling in cyberspace.

Concluding Comment:

I began asking and answering these questions in 1998 as I indicated at thestart of this simulated interview. I added more questions and answers, as I

also said at the outset of this interview, more than a decade later from2009 to 2012. The last update to the above 28 questions, as well as the 10questions that opened this simulation, was made 14 years after beginningthis process of question and answer---on 2 October 2012. Total: 7900words and 20 A-4 pages.

End of document

interview #3 with ron price

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