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#11
By
RonPrice
on
11-28-2014
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Re: Interview With Tasmanian Writer and Poet Ron Price
I drop into this thread, and this website, occasionally as I go through my 70s. I'll post below a piece I wrote today, FYI, fellow travelers here at Thomas Ligotti Online.-Ron Price, Tasmania
--------------------------------------------- JOHN ASHBERY Part 1: Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still one of its most controversial. I am in the group who has always and at least, thusfar, found him incomprehensible. He and his work intrigue me more and more since I first came across him while teaching English Literature in the 1990s to matriculation students in Perth Western Australia and now, in these years of my retirement from the world of FT, PT and casual-paid employment: 2006 to 2014. The play of the human mind, which is the subject of a great many of his poems, is also the subject of my poems. Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about." I, too, find it difficult to talk about his poetry, but I talk about what others say and have written about his work because I find their talk, their writing, throws light, in an indirect sort of way, on my pieces of poetic-writing. Part 2: John Ashbery's poetry is about the experience of having subjective experience: Ashbery’s poetry is about 'aboutness'. This is an obscure way of putting it, but Ashbery’s ways are obscure. My poetry is also about my subjective experience, but in quite a very different sort of way to Ashbery's. Both he and I recognise that poetry is a vehicle for thinking about mental action; his poems live in the history of poetry the way a turtle lives in its shell. I am not sure how my poems live in the history of poetry. Time will tell when I leave this mortal coil; for now, though, I and my work are as obscure in the fame and celebrity world as Ashbery's poetry is obscure in popular culture. Though he has always had a goofy and difficult side, Ashbery is one of the great poetic explorers of the human interior, diving into the human cognitive wreck and returning with weird phenomenological salvage. On the cover of his second, highly disjunctive, book, The Tennis Court Oath, he announced: ‘I attempt to use words abstractly, as an abstract painter would use paint.’ That book of poetry came out in 1962, the year I wrote my first poem at the age of 18. That same year I: entered matriculation studies, brought my eight year baseball, hockey and football careers to an end, went a little further in the intimate world of sex than I had done to that point in my adolescent life, and began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha'i community. Part 3: Not a straightforwardly autobiographical or confessional poet, Ashbery has kept his real self withdrawn from the poems. Both W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore, with their ironically projected and protected poetic personae, have been important in this respect and they are acknowledged by Ashbery as major influences. Ashbery clearly does not revel in self-promotion. Although I do not aim at self-promotion, my work is explicitly autobiographical, and mildly confessional. Ashbery’s poetry has always accepted the aspiration of music toward a degree of formal perfection and toward maintaining an air of making sense without incurring the obligation of any particular meaning. That is also part of the aim in his poetry. Helen Vendler, the famous poetry critic, sees the development of ‘poetry’ as a form of re-negotiation of the self’s relationship with shifting ‘reality.' She is interested in the nature of renegotiation itslef rather than in the terms arrived at in the end. Vendler says that most contemporary American poetry wants to offer ‘an interior state clarified in language’. In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy that suggests meaning without doing anything so banal as to actually attempt to introduce meaning and narrative, direction and purpose. Poetic syntax for Ashbery is constructed to express, with a certain intensity, a notion of the meaningful. But it does not actually convey any meaning. My poetry, too, is a continuous renegotiation of self with the shifting reality of existence, although I do not eschew meaning. Part 4: Ashbery’s poetry is warmly admired by that erudite Harold Bloom(1930-), the American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Ashbery's work perfectly illustrates Bloom’s own thesis that ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ The ghost or shadow poetry of that other famous poet of recent times, Wallace Stevens, as well as Ashbery among others, can equally claim the title of art, but that claim is based upon the premise that: we can never see the object or the poem as it really is; we can never quite know what we see or see what we know. Such art in modern times is born from a uniquely American mixture of at least two influences: (i) the metaphysical climate of Coleridge’s, of Wordsworth’s and of Shelley’s poetry as transmuted by Thoreau and Emerson; and (ii) the scientific climate of physics and semantics which has de-stabilised the confidences of art. The American poet knows that nothing exists on its own and in its own self; Heisenberg’s electrons cannot be objectively observed because the act of observation changes their nature. Such mental attitudes produce their own techniques, which rapidly become as conventionalised as any other attitudes in the history of poetry. Part 5: John Berryman and Robert Lowell were great contemporary poetic narrators who I came across long before Ashbery; they were compulsive tellers of stories about the self, and their style was sharply and wholly comprehensive, comprehensible, and perfectly expressing what Berryman’s mentor R.P. Blackmur called ‘the matter in hand’, as well as ‘adding to the stock of available reality’. This is not where Ashbery is at. His stories do not add to the stock of available reality and, if it is argued that they do, they do so in a highly complex and highly convoluted way. I have begun to read Ashbery's prose, and I've had much more success with it than with his poetry. Ashbery's art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman. This prose came onto the market just as I was settling-down to teaching a range of humanities subjects at a Polytechnic in Perth Western Australia. I have no intentions of trying to read his novel, A Nest of Ninnies. I have never been a novel reader at the best of times, and especially not now in the evening of my life. I do not intend to have a look at his several plays which he wrote in his 20s and 30s, three of which have been collected in Three Plays (1978). Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000. A larger collection of his prose writings, Selected Prose came out in 2005. I'm on my way through these works. His poetry volume Where shall I wander? appeared in 2005. In 2008, his Collected Poems 1956–1987 was published as part of the Library of America series. But they will both go unread.-Ron Price with thanks to 1several reviews of Ashbery's work in the London Review of Books, 28/11/'14, and 2that useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Part 6: Some people find my poetry strange but, compared to this work of John Ashbery I'm as clear as the sun at noon-day. I, too, have been writing for a half a century, but, compared to this poet, I am an unknown poet about as obscure as this poet's incomprehensible work. Some find him maddeningly beautiful....like some diarist with an intriguing charm & an elliptical text with some psychic history implicit in his multitude of metaphors. He is like an autobiographer in an abstract form telling us where we are and where he is. Sadly, he's so indecipherable in his obscurity; he perplexes, neither serenades nor comforts, provides no vision or chronicle of our time as he thrives on the oddities, slang, slogans, jargon of our age, difficult to penetrate.1 1 Helen Vendler, "The Democratic Eye," The New York Review of Books, 29/3/'07. This is a review of A Worldly Country: New Poems by John Ashbery. Ron Price 29 November 20 14 |
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#12
By
RonPrice
on
12-21-2014
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Re: Interview With Tasmanian Writer and Poet Ron Price
Thomas Ligotti Online has provided a fine venue for the marketing of my prose and poetry. For that I am very appreciative.-Ron Price
--------------------------------------------- RIMBAUD Part 1: One hundred years after the death of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud(1854-1891), a French poet, I was just beginning to find my way in the world of poetry. Rimbaud influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his late teens. His "genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes."1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Cecil Hackett, Rimbaud: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, (1981). In 1991, on the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death, I was teaching English Literature at a polytechnic in Western Australia and had begun to turn to studying and writing poetry. Unlike Rimbaud I did not really find my home in poetry until well into my middle age, and after I had turned away from novel-writing. I also turned toward poetry as several fires were also beginning to go out in my career-life, my sex-life and my emotional life. By 1991 I was fully compliant on my medications for bipolar disorder. In these last two decades my emotional life has gone through a series of smoothing-out of the edges due to changes in my medications. There were some difficult transitions but, as I write these words, my intellectual-emotional-sensory world has become more balanced than in all the previous stages and phases of my life-narrative. Part 2: I gradually came to know more about this French poet in the last two decades as I studied more and more of the western intellectual-poetic tradition. But Rimbaud's work is far too eccentric, wild, and lacking in common sense for my liking. The French poet Paul Valery made this same point in Graham Robb's book, Rimbaud, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. I find that making comparisons and contrasts between myself and other poets provides insights and understandings into my own life and my own poetic work. It is this desire that has led to this particular prose-poem and many others of a similar nature. Rimbaud, like me, was a restless soul who travelled on three continents. I, too, had a restless quality especially in my young adulthood. I travelled extensively on two continents from my 20s to my 50s; in later life, after taking an early retirement at the age of 55, I travelled briefly in Europe and the Middle East. I had bohemian and libertine tendencies in my late teens and early 20s, but they were nothing like those of this French poet whose tendencies continued to a wide range of excesses; he died before he was 40. My tendencies to excess were largely curtailed, muted, conventionalised, by my two marriages, my career in the teaching profession, medications for my mental health problems, and my religious proclivities by sensible and insensible degrees over several decades. Rimbaud's mother was authoritarian and controlling. He ran away from her as soon as he could. My mother, on the other hand, was kind and understanding; indeed, she was a liberating and encouraging force in my life. Still, as I look back to my early 20s, it seemed that I had to break the umbilical cord, and it was not easy. My publishing life was just beginning in my late 30s as Rimbaud was heading into a hole for those who speak no more, as that prolific Iranian figure, the Bab, put it so succinctly. Part 3: Rimbaud's poetic philosophy had several facets quite unlike my approach to poetry. "The idea," he stated, "is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses." Any derangement of my senses, which was the result of my bipolar disorder, was not something I wanted to replicate and encourage and, by the age of 24, I began a lifetime of medications that kept my sensory experience in the bounds of normality. "Being a real poet involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet," so wrote Rimbaud. "I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer," he continued; "the poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. To be a seer he also must experience every form of love, of suffering, and of madness. The poet must search himself, consume all the poisons in him, and keep only their quintessence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, and the great learned one, among men." Part 3.1: "Only then will be he arrive at the unknown because he has cultivated his own soul, which was rich to begin with, more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed."2-Ron Price with thanks to 2Wikipedia, 21/12/'14. Part 4: I can go with you, Arthur, on some of your ideas, but my approach to unknowns in life has taken a different course with senses firmly in tact, and not at all deranged. I, too, will die charging into and through my visions and all those named & unnamed things.....And, yes, Arthur... there is a madness in it all, but the world knows much more about madness now. I have had to deal with the poisons you mention, but now I only keep a little of their quintessence as I go into the evening of my life. Ron Price 21/12/'14. |
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Last edited by RonPrice; 12-21-2014 at 04:18 AM..
Reason: To update the wording
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