INTRODUCTION TO INTERVIEWS 1 TO 26

Preamble:

In the thirteen years from 1/9/96 to 1/9/09 I simulated twenty-six interviews, on average of two a year.  The simulations were stimulated by a range of experiences I had in relation to my writing of prose-poetry. Some of these experiences involved reading interviews in poetry magazines like Poets and Writers and Courtland Review.  Other experiences involved my desires and motivations to relate ideas in the social sciences and the humanities to my writing.  The simple interest to express to others what I was trying to do in my writing of poetry was among what I came to see as one among the many reasons why I wrote these interviews and, in the process, act as both the interviewer and the interviewee.  The result was some 85,000 words, a small book, of background prose that discusses my poetry, a body of work now found in some 63 booklets and their 6600 prose-poems.

Should I wish, as I say, I could easily fashion a small interview-based book, an account of my life and career with adeptly(hopefully) selected material from a number of these interviews.  I could fashion a book that covers most of my life, work and writing neatly dividing said book into chapters with different subject matter as foci.  I have seen this method adopted by other writers and I rather like this way of presenting a selection of one’s work.  With the internet all the rage these days and with my posting on this world-wide-web now amounting to extensive proportions I feel no need, though, to publish a book in this fashion.  More importantly, I’m confident I would find no publisher anyway, even if I made all the efforts in my world or at least the few efforts I would be prepared to make, after years of trying without success.

Since retirement from full-time work in 1999, from part-time work in 2003 and from most volunteer work in 2005, I have created and developed two additional volumes of interviews by other interviewers with other poets and writers.  These volumes serve as my archive for interviews with poets.  There are also hundreds of interviews now available on the internet and in the last ten years, 1999 to 2009, I’ve read many of them.   I’ve been reading interviews in books and magazines for nearly fifty years, since my days at university in the early 1960s.  But my recent focus on interviews with poets, a focus in which I collected the text, the content, of the interviews is, at the most, a fifteen year study: 1994-2009, a period largely coextensive with these simulated interviews.   Reading interviews with other poets is part of my reason for continuing this interview process here in these simulated interviews.  Other poets often say why, how, when, where and what they write about in ways that find an echo in my own mind and emotions and I often selectively borrow, some might say, plagiarise, their phraseology.

In interviews one frequently has the opportunity to reflect on what one has written and is writing, to compare and contrast this writing with the thoughts of other writers and poets and express as precisely as possible one’s view of what one has put into print. Perhaps others may read these views and find them a helpful backdrop for understanding why I go about doing what I do and how I go about the process. 

This series of interviews has given me the opportunity to synthesize my ideas and to deal with questions and issues I have not dealt with before.  The interviews have helped me try to state as specifically as I can what I am on about.  They have also helped me gain fresh perspectives on the writing process and how I can make that process more useful, more real, to myself and others.   The more than two dozen interviews I have provided here are, I hope, useful for other writers and poets to give them insights into how the creative process works for me.  May the content of these interviews also be of broader interest to readers who are not writers and who come across my poetry in their travels.

Readers should not be too concerned with the sequence of the twenty-six interviews.  I found as I went to gather them together into a unified form after thirteen years that the dates and the numbering, one to twenty-six, were impossible to sequence chronologically.  I tried in vain to obtain a consistency of chronology, but was unable to do so with as much accuracy as i would have liked.  Given that I am a relative unknown in the poetry world, even on the internet with my thousands of poems and prose pieces; given the widespread nature of my work on the world-wide-web over literally thousands of sites; given that I may remain an unknown  until, and quite possibly after, the roll is called up yonder, so to speak;  I'm not sure how important is the accuracy of these dates and numbers, this sequence, of the interviews.  I leave the exercise to future literary analysts to ponder over the sequencing should posthumous interest in my work come my posthumous way.

I spent some eight years, 2001-2009, posting dozens and dozens of pieces of poetry and prose, interviews and essays, on internet sites. I’ve completed, as I say, 63 booklets of poetry since beginning my collection of poems in 1980.  My collection has just taken me to the 6600 poem mark and two million words, a guesstimation at best.  My poetic and prose work goes on and will go on, I trust, until my passing from this mortal coil.  I may even add some more interviews. 

My poetry is and has its own program.  It speaks for itself. I also try and take my hermetically sealed autobiographical poetic mode, produced in the silence of this chamber, and give it a good mix and shake with the historical, the psychological, the sociological, the spiritual, indeed, much that exists in the world of the social sciences and the humanities. I mention this cross-fertilization because these interviews exist in a context of other writings.  In addition, publishing on the internet has been a very gradual trajectory for me; I’ve been at it for eight years. I have built an audience one person and one site at a time.  There is a semi or quasi-interview process that takes place at many internet sites, especially forums or discussion sites.  Here I get feedback or comment on my writing and people ask questions about my work.   You could also call much of the interchange at these sites a type of poetry workshop. 

Self-Publishing and Non-Poetry Writings:

I have just completed a 2500 page, five volume, autobiography or memoir written during these years of writing and collecting my poetry.  Most of this memoiristic writing took place during the years when these interviews were recorded, that is, since the 1994. This autobiographical work can be found at many internet sites in whole or in part. Self-publishing on the internet, in prose and poetry, got me introduced to a wide public.  The process of internet posting resulted in literally hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people reading my work.  It is very difficult to count/to assess the extent of the readership I now have on the world-wide-web.  A whole new public now reads my work, a public which is not my students, not my fellow colleagues-teachers and not my fellow Baha’is.

Publishing in an ebook form at an ebook site took my self-publishing to another level, although those who read my ebooks are small.  Poetry audiences are generally small but, with various forms of self-publishing, I have gained a large audience, albeit a fractured one.  So much in today’s world is fractured and so this is not a significant concern.  I enjoy the process; I find it useful for my writing to be put into electronic print and then I move on and on to other sites and other publics.  It helps me to look at my poetry in something other than in print-manuscript form, to see it typeset on the internet and, instead of bound, set out in an attractive framework at some internet site in lovely colours and settings.  All of this has happened in the last eight years as I was finishing these interviews and as they were rapidly becoming an archive that has now set my poetry into a general context or perspective for interested readers.

Ebooks moved my work to another level in 2006 at Lulu.com and eBookMall.  Hardcover publishing had long been a conscious part of my writing initiatives and interests, part of my aims and purposes, to widen the exposure, exposure to both my writings and my religion.   But that kind of publishing took a back seat; indeed no seat at all on my literary horizons.

What I Try To Do When I Write:

I try to make use of what is known and give a fresh take on it by means of juxtaposition, blending, contrasting, comparing, mixing, et cetera, and take what is not known and give readers a sense of surprise.  The world of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first is full of surprises and the competition I must deal with is extensive. Indeed, I possess only a tiny corner of a vast market. My corner is so small, microscopic, but that is true of nearly everyone who writes these days.

I create, in the process, what you might call my own personal aesthetic, my voice. I define my heritage, my historical inheritance, my life and my community. Some readers can come with me and others, inevitably, can’t relate to my voice. Such is life. Such a situation is as common as air; it’s true in poetry and in interpersonal relationships and it’s true of all who write and work in the world of the arts.

The poet Richard Howard said in a recent interview that “one writes the way one has to.”   He also made the point, talking about his own writing, that in recent years the manner of his prose has simplified and become a little stronger and more direct.  He said he was pleased with that process, that direction to his writing.  He also said that he thought his poetry was getting a little better with the years.  This was Howard’s description of how his writing was coming along, how it was changing.  These sentiments are helpful to me as I reflect on my own work over the years?

There certainly seems some inner imperative when one writes.  I’d have to agree with Howard there. I think, too, that my writing has got simpler with the years, both my poetry and prose.  I find it hard, though, to evaluate what I write. Something inner comes out, but whether it is good, bad or indifferent seems to be largely defined by the readers and these readers possess such a various and mixed bag of opinions.  In the end the term quality is a bit of an enigma. Some of the joy in what one writes lies, as W.B. Yeats put it, outside oneself and some of the joy lies within and other stuff is found in the mix between the two.

Failed Poetry & Assessing the Poetry of Others:

I’m not sure I could define or describe a failed poem, although I can easily say some things about poems that move me, that have special meaning and ones that don’t.   Some of my poems I particularly enjoy when I reread them and others don’t.  Some seem to give me the sense that I am saying something interesting, unique, persuasive, provocative.  I wrote one today as I was summarizing all these interviews.  It was based on the movie The Way We Were.  I even had my wife help me after the first draft. I rarely do this, but she and I shared a common experience and I thought she could be helpful.  And she was. But the poem was still flat and ultimately not very satisfactory. 

There are many internet sites at which I am asked to give an evaluation of someone else’s poetry.  What gives me the sense of a fine poem that someone else has written occurs when I feel the person is saying something new or any one or mix of those adjectives I referred to above.  Poetry which says stuff you know only too well, poetry which is banal, trite, commonplace or, on the other hand, is so complicated you can’t understand it--that is poor poetry or failed poetry, at least for me.  It’s a poem, then, that has failed to attract my attention or give me pleasure.

The Practice of Poetry

There are probably as many ways of practicing poetry as there are poets.  Some poets don't think they have to take themselves as seriously as other artists do.  They think that just because they feel something, they can turn that feeling into a poem.  They have not got a sense of apprenticing themselves to their art.  I think that poets need to be like violinists and ballerinas as well as carpenters and mechanics.  Poets have to keep their tools sharp, immerse ourselves in good and great poems, good and great literature, be ready to respond to life’s stimuli and be sensitive enough to be stimulated in the first place.  Such are some of my own views and preferences. The poet’s world is words, not paint and visual forms, or needle and thread or clay or cloth. One’s heart and head has got to be full; at least it helps to have something going on in these sections of the anatomy.

My History of Writing Poetry--A Context:

I wrote poems from 1962 to 1992 and, looking back 17 years later in 2009, I have a sense of those first thirty years serving as a type of apprenticeship.   For the sort of poetry I write I need to draw on a vast range of print: books, articles, essays, poetry, magazines; much from the electronic media: film, TV, radio, CDs, et cetera and a good deal of everyday life. I was nearly 50, the middle of middle-age,  before I took my first steps as a serious poet, that I even began to consider myself a poet.

By the time, as I say, that I began writing in any serious way, I was nearly fifty and by the time I retired from full-time employment and had the time to write in any full-time sense I was in my mid-to-late fifties.  By then I had had enough experience of the strange, the weird and the wild for a lifetime, for my lifetime. I wanted to stop having experience of that kind.  I felt no need to travel, to have deep and meaningful relationships; I could get that from the print and electronic media if I wanted to see the bizarre, the eccentric, the romantic, the unusual.  I was beginning to feel old.  Retirement is not a word I back away from; rather, it is a word that aptly describes my current state: I have retired from so many things in life that filled my days to overflowing for half a century: student life, teaching, meetings, endless chats/conversations, going-out, going somewhere, going here, going there, worrying about not enough sex, not enough money, not enough fun/excitement, et cetera.

I think Dana Gioia put some of what I want to say here about my history of writing in her recent essay in The Hudson Review(Spring, 2003). The average amount of time millions of people spend with print is much less than an hour a day, with several hours devoted to the electronic media.  In the last several decades there has been a shift from print to electronic media as the medium for information and entertainment--and poetry.  Gioia defined the shift as ‘the end of print culture.’  I would not put the process as bleakly as Gioia does.  I think there is a lot of print being consumed, not much of it is poetry. Celebrities, personalities and human drama are all the rage in the media and, if poetry gets a mention at all, it is usually in the context of these rages, these themes.  But, as Gioia emphasizes, the bulk of the new poetry today is not literary poetry but popular; it is oral: rap, cowboy poetry, slam poetry and the poetry of song, says Gioia; even advertising and sociology could be added as poetry, if one can believe some critics.  And much of it is to be found in the oral media, the electronic media.  This oral poetry is a big money spinner and is found in cafes, bars, on TV and the radio. It courts the public and the emphasis is on entertainment.

I started writing poetry, first casually and then seriously, going back to the early 1960s.  My work, my poetry, is not part of this popular poetic culture, although I did play with this culture on its edges with several poetry readings beginning in the 1960s and 1970s continuing into the ‘90s, with playing the guitar, with sing-alongs, with listening to popular music for 30 to 40 years before writing poetry seriously.  My work is predominantly written not oral. It fitted into the post-secondary and secondary educational scene where I worked for decades.  Whatever reputation I have--and it is quite small--has been made in print and, for the most part, on the internet not in academia and not in the popular culture, although much of my writing on the internet certainly has what you could call a populist note, emphasis and content.

If I want to fit my poetry into the popular culture or the Bahá'í culture where I live and have my being in Tasmania I will have to make a move back into the oral domain, engage in performance poetry as it is called.  If I do, this will be at some time in the future in performance, oral, poetry.  If I am able I may get into an audio-visual and visual poetry.  Time will tell.  How successful I will be at engaging a wider public remains to be seen. I am certainly not going after it these days except, as I say, on the internet. There I am having more than a little success.

Categorizing My Poetry:

I’ve always liked Auden’s fourfold division of poetry which he outlined in the preface to his 1945 Collected Poetry. My division is not the same as his, but I am indebted to his idea, to his concept, for some of my framework. The first category is “pure rubbish” which I regret having conceived.  The second is poetry containing good ideas but “never really coming to much.”  The third are “satisfactory poems,” the bulk of my poetry, “but not important” in any way. The fourth category contains those poems for which I am “honestly grateful.”  I could also make a twofold division of my poetry: “Baha’i themes and secular or themes for other interest groups.”  I have a “time-frame division” in which my booklets of poetry are divided into four time periods beginning in 1980 and ending in the present. One could also divide my poetry up into “historical time periods,” some involving the Baha’i Faith, some involving history’s phases.

I have a wide range of titles: some fabulous, some downright obfuscating, some complex, some simple, some suggestive, some direct.  They unfold and reverberate in the reader on so many levels at once.  Sometimes the reader simply stops reading because he or she can’t connect with a particular title.  I like to think of my titles as bridges or walls, bridges between my life, my society, my religion, my notions of the political, the social, the individual, or walls that can’t be jumped over without a lot of work.  They seem to create a meeting place, at least for those who want to try, between all of the titles when they are put in a booklet or a book.

I think this is one of the most interesting of the topics I’ve discussed in the 26 interviews I’ve had in the last thirteen years. A title involves the meaning of a thing, its happening.  It occurs or predicts something that is going to occur with the language itself and with the subject matter. Finally, a title really ought to bring into balance the whole, the rest of the poem.  The title is associative, as opposed to figurative. Quite literally something results from the title’s association with something else or its association with the specificity inherent in the title.  Sometimes in selecting the title I am interested in raising difference and sometimes in comparing one thing to another, directly or indirectly. A title needn't be picturesque, although sometimes I aim for that quality. I also aim for what you might call an independent gesture, one that is sure, fresh, provocative, humorous. Even indifference in a title is a form of distance which I believe a poem requires occasionally in its title. This indifference, even disinterestedness, will eventually collapse, if the poem works.  The title becomes a small, dignified ritual and is therefore not servile in relation to the whole poem. It is substantive, sometimes displays intention.

Bipolar Disorder OCD and Writing Poetry:

Recently the New Scientist(2004) had an interview with a psychiatrist who also suffered from bi-polar disorder. Part of the interview involved an attempt to distinguish mania from exuberance.  A significant percentage of people who have manic-depressive illness also have an underlying exuberant temperament and not just at the high end of their swings.  But most people who are exuberant do not have manic-depressive illness. So exuberance is far from a pathological state for most people who have it.   It is a highly-valued and integral part of who they are. And if you understand the role of exuberance in manic-depression then you do get a perspective on exuberance because extremes in behaviour will always illuminate normal behaviour.   Of course, there are limits to the comparisons.  Exuberance, energy, enthusiasm, intensity were critical to my success as a teacher and in other roles in life.  But after 50 years of bi-polar experience(1943-1993) I came to know when the energy was pathological. After 66 years(1943-2009) of life in the bi-polar world, I preferred the energy to be expressed in solitary pursuits like writing rather than the social where they had been centred until at least my mid-fifties from, say, 5 to 55.

When the Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges was interviewed in Montreal in 1968 he was asked by the interviewer why the knife as an object appeared so frequently in his short stories and if he was obsessed with the knife. Borges gave a fine, a logical answer.  I admit to a certain obsession with time which derives from a number of sources. I think I have answered this question before in previous interviews somewhere. I grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb; I was a teacher for 30 years; I’ve been a Baha’i and my adult life has been divided into plans, epochs, stages and phases, 19 day months, annual holidays, holy days, birthdays, equinoxes, solstices, seasons, sunset times, sunrise times, endless meetings, my culture worships the clock. I could go on and on. I think that’s enough.

My Aim In Writing Poetry-Revisited:

I want my poems to be as intimate as a couple making love at night on a beach, and I'd like the reader to roll off of them afterward, completing the triangulated relationship, to feel the sandy curve of the earth with his or her own belly. Of course, I don’t always or even often achieve this aim.  I could also express my aim in more intellectual, more cognitive terms. But I want to be as brief as possible.  The height of a warm summer and the cold mathematical abstraction of a winter in one of my poems are meant sometimes as a commentary on our lives and sometimes as an experience of them.  The rhythm, the beat, of the poem is but another way to interpret the beating of the heart.  I am trying to make, to bring, something alive, to be experienced physically, in the mind or the feelings. Roland Barthes talks about how this moment is like a child pointing to an object, but the object itself is nothing special.  I like to think I am providing a moment of enlightenment about our age, our natures. Yet it's "nothing special," simply beautiful. This is the work, that is, the play, of language, the meaning of my life and, hopefully something of meaning to readers.1

My Religion and My Poetry:

I’ve been teaching about it, talking about it and thinking about it for decades. I’ll probably be a little complex here, but let me forge ahead anyway. I’ll try to be brief:  my religious identity as a Baha’i acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of my particular subjectivity, my particular sense of who I am.  I also acknowledge that all discourse, all writing, is placed, positioned and situated and all of my knowledge is contextual.   I find it helpful, fertile, useful if this way of looking at my Baha’i identity is contested, subjected to a dialectic, if it arises from an assertion of a difference, a clash, of opinions.  In this way my identity is based on, develops from, is clarified by a process of engaging and asserting difference rather than suppressing it.  But this process of assertion requires an etiquette of expression, one that most people have yet to develop. And, of course, we don’t want to disagree on absolutely everything we say.

This identity acknowledges the reality of decentralised, diffuse but sometimes systematized knowledge; power which also has a diffuse set of sources and at the same time accepts the useful concepts of periphery and centre, margins and depths, surfaces and heights.  Once we clarify the notion of identity, once it is redefined in a universal and non-derogatory way, once it engages difference without implying superiority and hierarchy, with due regard for the tenderness of language and the fragility of human personality, it is hoped that this will help the Baha’i community express its group consciousness, help it to develop in a manner which is unfettered by the accrued and often inaccurate associations of history and culture, tradition and ignorance.

Ron Price
Updated on: 30/8/’09
4100 words

Hi Ron.  :)
 
Awesome wealth of information.  Don't think I know that much about life
much less poetry and poets.  I do think we've met and if so, I certainly
enjoy your poetry and appreciate your critique.  You'll love it here at
PC.  Welcome!

cheryl

Moved to the Interview Board

I must give a belated thanks to those who have replied so positively to my interview-posts.  I do not know the musician and author Elinor Morrisby in Hobart.  I get to Hobart about once every three years and, then, usually only for the day.  It's about a 3 hour drive and, after living in 37 houses and 24 towns, my inclination is to travel on the internet, on TV and the radio and--in my head.-Ron

Just dropped into this site. I'll leave posting more material until more comments come in---if they come in---and thanks again for your responses.-Ron, George Town, Tasmania, Australia's oldest town.