An Interview With Australian-Canadian Hybid Poet Ron Price

Use this forum to have philosophical discussions about aesthetics and art. What is art? What is beauty? What makes art good? You can also use this forum to discuss philosophy in the arts, namely to discuss the philosophical points in any particular movie, TV show, book or story.
Post Reply
User avatar
RonPrice
Posts: 43
Joined: August 9th, 2009, 8:17 am
Favorite Philosopher: Plato
Location: George town Tasmania Australia
Contact:

An Interview With Australian-Canadian Hybid Poet Ron Price

Post by RonPrice »

INTERVIEW FOCUSING ON POETRY & PHENOMENOLOGY

I have written a great deal on my philosophy of poetry. It is a philosophy of organism, drawing on A.N. Whitehead, in which creativity is guided by purpose and is expressed by two capacities: loving and knowing. It is a philosophy which draws on many thinkers, writers, artists, sculptors, philosophers, historians, sociologists, psychologists, too many to summarize here. This interview, though, focuses on one particular philosophy which is a part of my approach to poetry. It is a complex one with very large words, but I want to give it special attention, special focus here. In addition, this interview closes with a brief discussion of some of the psychology underlying my poetry. Please note that this is a simulated interview.

Interviewer(I):

Over the years you have been aware of the philosophy of phenomenology as an influence on your poetry but, more recently, it has become more obvious, more articulate, more specifically influential. Could you describe this development, this increasing focus on, and inspiration from, phenomenology?

Price(P):

Yes, it wasn’t just phenomenology. During all my teaching life my focus was in the social sciences. It wasn’t until the last decade of my career as a teacher than the humanities, literature and poetry, found a place. And they found a place in an interdisciplinary mix. I came across phenomenology when I was teaching sociological theory in the mid-1990s. I had been writing poetry seriously for two or three years by then. I had just started working on a collection of poetry that came to be called The Terraces. The relationship between the poetry I was writing and the ideas in phenomenology did not really begin to come together, to connect, until after I had retired from teaching in 1999. It was then that I was able to focus on the philosophy of phenomenology and underpin my writing with a clear and articulate set of ideas albeit complex and not all that easy to put into words. Anyone familiar with my work will know that many strands of philosophy and psychology, indeed from a number of the social sciences, make up the basis of my writing, but phenomenology has come into focus more recently, say, in 2000 and 2001. I think it is interesting that this happened just as the Arc Project was completed. Phenomenology involves the study of how perception shapes a person’s reality and the tapestry of beauty that was created in the 1990s on Mt. Carmel had a profound affect on me—as a man who was coming to the end of his working-employment life, to the end of the process of raising three kids and was devoting his time increasingly to writing.

I: The history of the philosophy of phenomenology goes back to the early years after the passing of Baha'u'llah. I understand you see an interesting parallel development between significant events in the history of this philosophy and the history of the Baha'i Faith and your own life.

P: Yes, phenomenology began as a movement, a strand, a field, in philosophy about three years after the passing of Baha'ullah and spread, like the Baha'i Faith did, to many countries in the next few decades. One of the first major books in the field was published when 'Abdu'l-Baha was on His western tour, in 1913. It was called Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl. A second major book by Martin Heidegger was translated into English and published the year I began my pioneering life, 1962. It was called Being and Time. Phenomenology is now in the first decade of its second century. I don't want to highlight or summarize this history here. The story is too long. The above will suffice for now.

I: I believe there are several tendencies or stages in this multidisciplinary movement called phenomenology. Your poetry seems to fit into two of them: existential phenomenology and hermeneutical phenomenology. The first, the existential strand, focuses on the issues and questions of existence; the second on systems of interpretation. It draws on thinkers like: Heidegger, Marcel, Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur. For the most part, their writings came after WW2. Do you see this as an accurate overview?

P: Yes, I don't have any trouble with that. But when you start to examine the details of the writings of these thinkers and how their ideas are expressions of the philosophy of existential phenomenology or hermeneutical phenomenology you get into a long and complex story. It is hard enough just saying the words, the basic terms. A poetry which is based on an existential phenomenology emphasizes the tension between existence and essence. It also emphasizes choice, responsibility, freedom and the joys and angst of existence. A poetry which draws on a hermeneutical phenomenology emphasizes the poet's interpretive systems, his flexible orienting frameworks, his own changing perspectives, the illumination and the dark patches in individual experience and a concern for and an interest in virtually every aspect of existence--on some sliding scale of varying degrees of course.

Let me outline some core ideas, core concepts, in phenomenology to give you an idea of what it is about. There is an emphasis on 'pure description.' In my poetry, therefore, I place a strong emphasis on the pure description of experience. In phenomenology there should be an attempt to manifest what is hidden in ordinary, everyday existence. In my poetry, then, I try to get at what might be called the structure of everydayness, an interconnected system of things, ideas, roles and purposes and an introspective examination of my own intellectual processes as they experience the phenomena of existence. That's enough of a mouthful for now.

I: There seems to me to be a very strong social construction to reality, what you might call a sociological phenomenology. The means by which humans orient themselves to life situations through their stock of knowledge, their store of experience, their structure of experience, the historical patterns of life-experience, the landscape of judgements by which they fix their place in the world, the inner stream of consciousness. All these strands of thought seem to be involved in what phenomenology is all about.

P: You put it well. There are many ways of expressing phenomenological philosophy. One of these ways is by means of the discipline of sociological theory. Much of it seems to be useful in expressing what I am trying to do in my poetry. The process involves what it means to be human, to be alive, to find meaning within life; it involves pursuing concepts; it involves the possibilities that flow from perceiving, believing and thinking. It involves truth as process and emerging as a person in the process of describing experience. Many of the names I mentioned earlier in this interview one can find in the field of philosophy or in sociological theory. I have found in the years since I wrote my first poem in the early 1960s, that there is a strong interdisciplinary tendency in the social sciences. My poetry is partly a reflection of this.

I: For Heidegger an intricate and mysterious connection existed between finding a sense of self and the natural world. He sought refuge from the pervasive hauntings of the idle chatter of town and group life. This was also true of Thoreau. This is also true in your poetry as well, is there not, a search for solitude, a fatigue with chatter?

P: Yes, both Thoreau and Heidegger sought refuge in withdrawal from the social domain, into nature, into solitude, into silence, into reflection, into writing, into moments of vision of what it means to be human, to ask the questions in order to situate oneself in the world, to pluck the finer fruits of life, to move beyond the factitious cares and the superfluously coarse labours of life, beyond the slumber, the mindless mechanical motions of living, and so enter the poetic, the divine life. In a perpetual openness, like Thoreau and Heidegger, my life becomes my stage and I become both actor and audience. And involvement in what Horace Holley calls 'the social religion' requires the kind of solitude and silence I am talking about here from time to time. In life one needs both: the social and the solitary. Over the last 60 years I’ve had plenty of both.

I: So your life becomes your amusement, your novelty, a drama of many scenes with fresh and often not so fresh prospects every hour. You become the artisan of your own reality in which you hear faint echos of simplicity winding their way through the paths of complexity in your everyday life. Your poetic understandings revolve around the mystery, the simplicity and the complexity of being itself. This poetry also revolves around analysis and juxtaposition. Life itself becomes a poetic dwelling, with its sometimes mundane and simplified moments, its sometimes etherial and complex moments. They all sing and reverberate the meaning of one’s existence. That is how Timothy Riley describes the process in his article "Heidegger and Thoreau: Questing for the Authentic Translation of Dasein." Does this come close to your way of experiencing it?

P: I like the way you put it. It's a little complex, but then phenomenology as a philosophy of poetry is not simple. Phenomenology provides for poetry a philosophic-poetic base which creates, as Heidegger puts it, a world space that sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. It also involves seeking our humanness, our mortality, in a relation to the immortals which in a Baha'i context is a relation to the Central Figures of the Cause and those who have been faithful to the Covenant and have passed on to the next life. They are the sources of inspiration for the poet who is a Baha'i. They are also the source of inspiration to Heidegger, although he would call them angels or muses. The poet occupies his private space only by simultaneously occupying the space of meaning belonging to the wider community. Community and privacy is a dichotomy that must be integrated in the life of the poet as well as anyone else.

I: There is another aspect of poetry that has its roots in a philosophy or sociology of phenomenology and that is its subjective orientation. Subjective meaning in the interpretation of social action, of history, of life and of reflexivity is at the centre of this poetic philosophy. Would you agree?

P: There is no question about the essentially subjective nature of this poetry. There is also an objective aspect, a facticity, the kind of objectivity that Ricoeur emphasizes. The self which writes or is written about exists in an institutional system, a complex of relationships, dwells in a pattern of social control exerted by the poet, the person himself and by others. This self is defined and described through the centrality of language as the organizing medium of the lived-in-world. There is an essential precariousness, an ultimately symbolic aspect, to the definitions of reality, to the social worlds, described by the poet. Truthfulness lies in this mix, in this complex web. And I like to think for my particular philosophy there is some truth in every manifestation of existence, of the human spirit, however polarized, eccentric and apparently absurd that manifestation is. Synthesis, amplification, engendering, context—all these are words that are representative of my aim not obliteration, criticism, blight.

I: Of course, there is much more to the philosophical underpinnings of your poetry. Could you comment briefly on these other bases?

P: I have written thousands of words on the philosophy behind my poetry. I seem to have developed a concern for writing poetry and for commenting on its nature, its purpose, its philosophy, its direction, et cetera. I would encourage readers to dip into my poetry. I've got some two hundred thousand words at a website: poetry and prose. It explains a great deal of what I'm trying to do. Phenomenology is a key but, for me, there are many keys. The whole thing is far too complex to reduce it to one approach, no matter how big the word is and how subtle, intricate and useful its reach. I like to think the philosophy behind my poetry goes back to both Plato and Aristotle and the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, at least in the Western tradition.

I: We could approach this whole business of the underpinnings of your poetry by means of psychology instead of philosophy or sociology. What sorts of things would you say, if we were to take this approach?

P: In my four years of tertiary education and training(1963-1967) I studied psychology in three courses. In the 1970s and 1980s I taught psychology six or seven times as part of social science and behavioural studies programs and twice as courses in psychology itself. The notes from all these courses are lost to me now. From 1992 to 1994 I taught an introduction to psychology unit at Thornlie Tafe College in Perth. I kept a core of the notes from that course when I retired in 1999. In the decade since last teaching psychology I have widened the scope of my notes, especially since my retirement in 1999.

I have found psychology to be a fertile field of study during these initial years of my retirement. As was so often the case when I taught a subject, I never really had a chance to get my teeth into it with one eye on the student and another on just getting "up" on the basic course content. Now that is still the case but for quite different reasons, the main one being an interest in a host of other subjects as well, subjects that occupy my attention across a wide spectrum of disciplines.

There is always so much to learn and the focus on. It has been forty-two years since I first came across this subject at university in the autumn of 1963 and it would appear this interest will continue well into the future. It certainly provides some useful foundations to my poetry. But what specifically would you like me to focus on here?

I: There are so many ways of looking at it. Why don’t we do the same as we did with philosophy and sociology, that is, look at some of the theoretical stances, ideas, concepts in psychology that you find useful, relevant to your writing of poetry?

P: Fine. Back in those eight months of 1963-64 when I was first introduced to psychology we just touched on the field of theories in psychology. Even now I recall the following from that first dalliance with psychology: learning theories, personality theories, trait theory. As the years went on: leadership, interpersonal, socio-historical, cultural, gestault and transpersonal theories, good-god, the list is as long as your arm. I think each one of these theories contributes something to my understanding of self, society and my value system—the basic content of my poetry writing. I don’t think I could even begin here and provide a succinct statement. I’d need several pages,

I: Okay; let’s take a different tack. Let’s look at some of the major thinkers who have had an influence of some significance.

P: Fine. I’ll list a core of psychologists but, again, it might be difficult to be brief in articulating their influences. Adler, Freud, Jung, Fromm, May, Rogers, Erikson, Piaget. I’ll stop there because these eight men have written enough stuff to sink a ship and each of them has at least two or three central ideas that I can not ignore in their influence on both what I write and how I write it.

I: Fair enough. Why don’t you pick your favorite over the years and talk about his influences?

P: That would be easy. I have enjoyed Rollo May, the man who introduced existential psychology to America. I came across his book Love and Will in about 1970. I had started writing poetry in the early sixties and, by 1970, I had entered the longest period when I actually wrote no poetry, the years 1964-1979. But when I did start again in the 1980s and 1990s, I found May’s analysis of self, society, values, beliefs and attitudes in his many books very helpful. In 1992 Roger White sent me a copy of May’s The Courage to Create. It was about the psychology of the creative process, about courage, about much that is involved in living, working, loving and being. It is difficult to summarize May. I think the best I can do is encourage others to read his books.

I: I think that’s enough for now. There is so much we can explore and we will do so in future interviews. I’ll come back to these issues and I look forward to future exchanges on the philosophy and the psychology underpinning your poetry, Ron

P: No problemo, as the governor of California once said.
__________________________________________________ _
FOOTNOTES

The bibliography that could be written here is extensive. The reader is advised, should he or she want to follow-up on the subject of phenomenology, to go to a good university library or look it up on the Internet using some of the key words from this interview.

Ron Price, Begun: 23/12/01
Completed: 11/6/05.
Belinda
Premium Member
Posts: 13818
Joined: July 10th, 2008, 7:02 pm
Location: UK

Post by Belinda »

Re#1
In my poetry, then, I try to get at what might be called the structure of everydayness, an interconnected system of things, ideas, roles and purposes and an introspective examination of my own intellectual processes as they experience the phenomena of existence. That's enough of a mouthful for now.
I dont know your poetry, Ron, but this would describe the Romantic genre that includes individualism, the intrinsic worth of the individual, which is where your interest in personal psychology would enter your poetry, I suppose. Romanticism also includes everydayness etc as in TS Elliot Four Quartets, or the work of Robert Burns or Wordworth.

I wished that you had illustrated your ideas in the interview with bits of your own poetry.

What I infer from your mention of Gadamer's shaping your ideas is that I think that the main thing about Gadamer is the worth of subjective experience within the total of human wisdon and knowledge.
That is, without the subjective experience the transmitter of an idea would lack any basis for comparison with other ideas, and the receiver of the transmission likewise needs a basis for comparison.The perceived world is a relative world within which a claim that it's possible to be totally objective is untrue.I do wonder, though, what is the truth of, say the flight of a wren, as it seems, for all my philosophy, to occur somewhere between the transmission and the reception of the idea.
Socialist
User avatar
RonPrice
Posts: 43
Joined: August 9th, 2009, 8:17 am
Favorite Philosopher: Plato
Location: George town Tasmania Australia
Contact:

Thoughtful Comment

Post by RonPrice »

I appreciated your Thoughtful Comment, Socialist. I will include two of my prose-poems in response--make that 1 poem since it is a long one for this little box-Ron in Tasmania 8)
-----------------
THE LAST WORD

In order for the novelist Marcel Proust to seriously begin writing his famous novel In Search of Lost Time he had to create an imaginary deadline.1 Proust did this by coming to see and understand his writing as a race against and a defiance of time. In this way he confronted the temporality of his writing, his publishing, and whatever he and others read by producing a novel which resists simplification and analysis. In this confrontation with time Proust created a sense of urgency, an intensity and a build-up of meaning in relation to what he was writing at any particular time.

Proust gave a sense of fixity and facticity to his life’s precariousness and the inevitability of its endless process and duration by using writing. Writing helped him to see his life as an existence which was soon to run out. By slowly coming to perceive his life in terms of its transformation into a work of art and by trying to recapture his past moment by moment, he aimed to bring the myriad of moments in his life under a microscope, to halt time and wrestle it from the flux of duration. By fixing the events of his life forever in a semblance of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis, much like the work of a photographer, he created what for some was a romantic reminiscence in a plotless labyrinth, in a vast ediface of a life and autobiography; and what for others felt like “a conspiracy against readers” with its “clumsy centipedalian crawling of interminable sentences.”2

I, too, had had a sense of urgency and was always in a rush as my father pointed out to me especially at dinner-time when I gobbled-up yet another evening meal. By my mid-thirties this sense of urgency was supplemented by a death-wish, due mainly to the affects of a bipolar disorder, a wish which was especially strong just before going to bed. The effect of this combination, this death-wish and this sense of urgency, was to create in my mind these same imaginary deadlines, this race against time, this sense of the precariousness of my present state and so propel me into thinking that these words, the ones I had written that day, might just be my last.

Proust warmed-up to write his great opus of some 3200 pages with nineteen years(1890-1909 circa) of writing reviews, fiction and doing translations. From 1909 to his death in 1922 he worked on his seven volume work of nostalgia, a work acknowledged by some as the greatest piece of fiction by the greatest novelist of the 20th century. I, too, warmed-up to the writing of my autobiography with at least nineteen years of literary plodding(1983-2002 circa). By the literary recreation of my life, by the transformation of the transformation that had been my life, by the immersing of myself in memories of what was lost and what was gained in the process of living my life over more than six decades, I slowly came to see my lifetime as the only adequate unit in which to express my succession of selves. It was an irresistible autobiographical impulse; it took possession of me from 2002 and showed no sign of diminishing seven years later at the age of 65. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 January 2009 with thanks to 1Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline, University of Illinios Press, 2006 and 2Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust: Chapter 1, Penguin.

I can hear them say: life is too short
and Price is too long. And who can
blame them? Millions of words and
more pages than I would even want
to try and count any more. There are
two kinds of writer-poets which I try,
quite unconsciously, to combine, or so
it seems to me, thanks to Mr.Aciman’s
review of Proust in that fine journal---
The New York Review of Books.1

The swallow’s quick, agile, speedy
travel across long, tireless stretches
of the world, taking it in the ways
whales take in water and plankton,
with mistakes easily corrected, bad
times put to good use, judgements
which are unwise just tweaked here
and there in some implacable line
of words where the only pieces that
are thrown away are those which had
problems with the printer or were lost
in cyberspace because I pressed those
wrong keys---and then---the snail’s
slow, deliberate, fussy, cramped and
burrowing into itself, ingesting choice
bits down some multichambered spiral
and with an appetite for a whorled vision.

1 Andre Aciman, “Proust’s Way?” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No. 19, 1 December, 2005.

Ron Price
4 January 2009
married for 46 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 14, and a Baha'i for 54(in 2013)
Belinda
Premium Member
Posts: 13818
Joined: July 10th, 2008, 7:02 pm
Location: UK

Post by Belinda »

Swallows, whales and snails have no consciousness of transience. Arguably , then, they are not conscious in the important way that humans are conscious. Proust was, of course, conscious of transience which is what his nostalgia was all about. Too much nostalgia is not good for my health.Ghosts are great as characters in scary stories, but not in real life.
Socialist
User avatar
RonPrice
Posts: 43
Joined: August 9th, 2009, 8:17 am
Favorite Philosopher: Plato
Location: George town Tasmania Australia
Contact:

To Each Their Own

Post by RonPrice »

To Each Their Own, eh Belinda. To write autobiography, obviously nostalgia is useful. But it is not everyone's "bag," as they say, as you say.-Ron

8)
married for 46 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 14, and a Baha'i for 54(in 2013)
Belinda
Premium Member
Posts: 13818
Joined: July 10th, 2008, 7:02 pm
Location: UK

Post by Belinda »

Indeed it's good to write about nostalgia because nostalgia is a human experience.Also a good poet can evoke nostagia in the same way that a Christmas carol, or the scent of woodsmoke, or the song of a robin in the autumn, replay the feeling of the sad transience of beauty.

What is an autobiography for if not to write it for the benefit of readers?
Socialist
User avatar
RonPrice
Posts: 43
Joined: August 9th, 2009, 8:17 am
Favorite Philosopher: Plato
Location: George town Tasmania Australia
Contact:

Some Thoughts On Autobiography

Post by RonPrice »

Thanks again, Belinda, for your comment. I'll include below some recent thoughts on the process of writing autobiography. The essay is somewhat long for an internet post on a thread but you can skim and scan as you desire--read what catches your fancy so to speak.-Ron in Tasmania 8)
----------------------------
ESSAY ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY

In 1995 I wrote my first essay on the nature of autobiography. It was some two years after completing the first edition of my own autobiography, a work which had taken me eight years to write(1984-1993). I am now working on the 6th edition of that autobiography more than twenty-five years after the inception of this project in 1984. I trust this 6th edition will be the final one, but only time will tell. I was overwhelmed for many years by a sense of the complexity of the task, by feelings of indifference for the process of putting my life story on paper and by a vision of the magnitude of the task at hand if it was to be of any relevance to readers as well as, in some ways more importantly, to me. I struggled to find an authentic, inspired response for my words, for the phrasing, for my voice as it is often called. This struggle to achieve the right feeling in my writing life, something we all have to do as well in our non-literary daily lives, was—as I look back now—an essential prerequisite for this autobiographical enterprize.

For ten years, from 1993 to 2003 I lost a sense of direction in writing my autobiography and was unable to move beyond that first edition which I had found, as I said, very unsatisfactory. During these same ten years, though, I read about autobiography and after reading studies of process and method, of philosophy and psychology, of the sociology and literary problems in autobiography, I was able to write a cohesive and, for me anyway, stimulating second edition. I certainly hope that this work will become of practical use to my fellow-man in the decades and even centuries ahead and of use to me as I add to it in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as the developmental psychologists called the years of the lifespan from 60 to 80. Vision creates reality, as one of my co-religionists once said. This idea of the future relevance of my work seems presumptuous and this sense of my/its presumptuousness at first militated against the pursuit of the goals I began with when I set out to write this autobiography in 1984. But I pursued these goals anyway and that emotional and intellectual problem, hurdle, was overcome, at least for the most part.

Since I found the study of autobiography more interesting that the writing of it in the years 1993 to 2003, I wrote a series of essays on the nature of autobiography during those years and continued to write about autobiography as the years went on. This is the first in that series begun some time in mid-1995. I wrote and revised a series of some fourteen essays in the fourteen years: 2005-2009. I have the long range aim of drawing my ideas together into some meaningful whole in future essays. This essay, now revised several times, just gets the analytical ball rolling so to speak. Each of these 14 essays is about 2500 words—on average as of 10/10/’09.

Even as a retired person with far fewer responsibilities on my plate than during my forty years of employment(1961-2001) and forty years of student life(1949-1989), my day-to-day life still takes me into corners of activity that keep me away from the kind of serious and extended academic pursuits that this brief essay and other writing involves. I settle for short forays into this autobiographical-analytical field. My several years teaching creative writing at a local Seniors School, these last years as a volunteer-teacher; my several years as a presenter of radio programs for the LSA of Launceston; my work in a local singing group and my work for the local Baha’i Group kept me busy until 2003 to 2005. My wife's illness over many years, my solo-singing work at an aged-care facility, the inevitable family duties and obligations of home and hearth however minimal, a necessary amount of physical activity to keep a sound mind in a sound body, fatigue in the evening and afternoon after more than eight hours of reading and writing or a poor sleep the night before--and an endless assortment of odds and ends that inevitably crop up in life--have kept me from continuing this simple task at any degree of depth beyond what I have done and in all likelihood will do.

The concentration, the focus, the time I have been able to devote to all of my research and independent scholarship, my writing and reading, my study and editing, my filing and the wide range of clerical activity has been improving as the years of my late adulthood(60-80) have entered their middle half(65-75). After ten years of warming-up, from the age of 55 to 65 after taking an early retirement, I have developed some excellent routines for serious scholarship and writing.

In the last four years, by 2005, I was able to free myself from virtually most of life’s encumbrances, except those necessary to maintain my physical existence in a home and in a relationship. The years 1999 to 2005 became, then, a second stage, a transition stage, before an even fuller retirement at the age of 60--and fuller still by 65--from the demands of social, employment and community life. After years, decades, of being up-front in family life, in employment, in classrooms, in Bahá'í community life, of being a person who wanted to be up-front, to give talks in Bahá'í communities and who wanted to excel as a teacher, I became, by degrees into my late fifties and mid-sixties, what we used to call a "back-room boy", beavering away to as great an effect as possible but with little personal fanfare and little public face—except in my case on the internet at literally 1000s of sites.

Being free to write autobiography and to study its labyrinthine channels in the literature, in the sub-discipline of literary studies in which autobiography is found, has made me aware of the errors, omissions, even lies, that are part of the fiction or imposture that many theorists see at the centre of autobiography. One of the main trains of thought in the literature on autobiography emphasizes these problems in writing autobiography. The creative writer turns to autobiography out of some creative longing that can not be satisfied through fiction, but it is impossible to avoid inaccuracies and impossible to avoid other problems and blind spots which the enthusiastic autobiographer is simply not aware of. These blind spots and problems make of autobiographical writing something far less a reality, far less true accounts of people’s lives than writers are aware of as they write their story.

Autobiographers find some peculiar closeness and intensity of effect as they write, but it is difficult in writing autobiography to keep history and fiction distinct. The Russian writer Nabokov says that the tracing of images of one’s personal life into intricate harmonies is what autobiography does. In the process hard edges of facticity rub off. Writers try to repossess the realities of their past from what often appears to be a sterile and even fictive world. They try to repossess that past to which they have often sacrificed themselves, lived their days or, if lucky, lost themselves in literature, in life and in living, as if in some perpetual orgy, as the writer Flaubert put it in one of his letters.

The historical transaction that is autobiography does not contain the total freedom or imaginative response of, say, poetry or fiction. Unreliability is an inescapable condition of autobiography given the play of freedom and imagination that is involved. The reader can watch the writer wrestle with truth but only to a degree because, for the most part, the reader does not know what the truth is. Readers must rely on the autobiographers and their version of the truth of their lives. Errors, omissions, even lies, are part of the fiction or imposture that is autobiography—at least to some extent. Such has been one of the main trains of thought in the literature on autobiography in the last several decades. It is difficult in writing autobiography to keep history and fiction distinct; it is also impossible to avoid various kinds of inaccuracies.

I don’t invent anything when I write. I can't write fiction. I’ve tried and end up in a dry gulch. I got to 30,000 words once in a sci-fi piece back about 1990. It's very interesting to me that a novelist can just walk down the street and see some stranger and make up a whole story and take off into a novel or like Harold Pinter he can take off into in a play. That doesn't happen to me.

I am not shy or retiring when it comes to advocating a new literary project. I can be both vociferous and voracious in my writing and it seems to me that my writing speaks for itself. It’s a vehicle for my energy and voraciousness. I pursued my various missions in life with a determination which almost always saw results to some degree for the fifty years from 5 to 55. Most of my missions after the age of 55 became results on the internet measured in nanoseconds and spread across thousands of sites.

In the Baha’i community quantitative results have always been slow--for decades and all my life--and they are still slow as measured by an increase in numbers of new Baha’is at the local or even at the cluster level here in northern Tasmania. I give to this Faith, though, even now in the evening of my life when virtually no one ever joins the Cause locally perhaps two dozen hours per month in cultivating relationships with people in this town and engaging in Bahá'í activity at the local level. All of my life is not writing and reading, however hermetically sealed my life is or however private and asocial I prefer it to be.

For many writers today the only meaning is meaninglessness. If God is gone and the big questions are unanswerable, even unaskable, then experience remains both the subject of writing and the stuff in which, rather than from which, redemption must be seized. The paradigmatic writer of what might be called this immanentist ethos was Wordsworth whose Prelude is the epic of imagination's redemption of matter. Modern writers since Wordsworth have built on his ground. I, too, build on Wordsworth but my foundation has much much more. My foundation is built on a new Revelation, the latest Revelation in the Abrahamic tradition. I have accepted a particular body of theological knowledge.

The material in my 62 booklets of poetry and in my 2500 page autobiography allows for an ongoing reshaping of my self. I constantly select anew and the selections, while not feeling richer than the ones that went before certainly provide a varied portrait and set of vignettes, while giving a clear focus to my autobiographical and poetic centre.

It is important for the critic to understand the organizing principle or purpose behind the work of an autobiographer. For the conscious shaping of a life, an informing purpose, principle, context, must exist behind the work. A voyage of genuine self-discovery is an essential component of such a work for the writer. It certainly was for me; it enabled me to rise from the ashes of a dried-out first edition, an edition I could well have thrown away. But in the second edition of my memoiristic autobiography my literary voyage began to take place in a narrative past juxtaposed with a dramatic present. Confession, apology and memoir came to exist side by side as various contradictory and often unstable selves battled it out. This battle ground was part of the very fertility and the freshness that resurrected that first edition.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self, a book about the modern identity, notes an "essential link between identity and a kind of personal orientation to life and its spaces. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space. There are signs that the link with spatial orientation lies very deep in the human psyche." The multiple-self that is born from or expressed in my poetry--open to the world, embedded in it but capable of seeing the many levels of its reality--is the self of a post-national world, an interdependent and interconnected world, indeed, one world, a oneness that exists in and behind the anarchous confusion.

These are just some of the ideas I wanted to put down as part of one, of the first, in this series of essays on the autobiographical process. These ideas are just some found in an array of writing which has appeared in the literature on autobiographical writing especially since the decade 1950 to 1960 when my Bahá'í pioneering-travelling life began in earnest. I summarize much of my reading in these essays for those with an interest in the process, the exercise, of writing autobiography. I hope a few here on the internet find my words of some value to them, if not in their own effort to write their autobiography, at least as part of their general interest inventory.

Ron Price
First written on 5 May 2005 and
updated/edited occasionally until 10/10/’09
(2200 words)
married for 46 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 14, and a Baha'i for 54(in 2013)
Belinda
Premium Member
Posts: 13818
Joined: July 10th, 2008, 7:02 pm
Location: UK

Post by Belinda »

For many writers today the only meaning is meaninglessness. If God is gone and the big questions are unanswerable, even unaskable, then experience remains both the subject of writing and the stuff in which, rather than from which, redemption must be seized. The paradigmatic writer of what might be called this immanentist ethos was Wordsworth whose Prelude is the epic of imagination's redemption of matter. Modern writers since Wordsworth have built on his ground. I, too, build on Wordsworth but my foundation has much much more. My foundation is built on a new Revelation, the latest Revelation in the Abrahamic tradition. I have accepted a particular body of theological knowledge.

That bit of The Prelude where the boy sees deep and far reflections in the still lake water is redemption of matter because matter is , if it is anything at all, infinite in its wholeness.Reflections within reflections.This is the metaphysic that I take from this paragraph. Thanks.

Baha'i is possibly unknown to many readers at philosophy club including me. You say that it is a revealed religion. The Abrahamic tradition is fine by me, but I have to query the credal status of any revealed religion, although the little that I have heard about Baha'i is that it is not unduly dogmatic, is ethically pure according the Golden Rule and is not burdened by superstition or worldliness.

You say in another paragraph to the effect that autobiography is for self revelation. I accept this, and will add it to the benefit for the reader as a justification for writing an autobiography.
Socialist
User avatar
RonPrice
Posts: 43
Joined: August 9th, 2009, 8:17 am
Favorite Philosopher: Plato
Location: George town Tasmania Australia
Contact:

Thanks, again, Belinda

Post by RonPrice »

Thanks, again, Belinda for your succinct and thoughtful response. For anyone wanting to know about the Baha'i Faith they can log onto the official international Baha'i site at: bahai.org. Indeed there is an extensive Baha'i presence on the internet and one can google all sorts of stuff and read to one's heart's and one's mind's content or discontent, as the case may be.-Ron 8)

-- Updated Sun Dec 09, 2012 11:34 am to add the following --

It has been more than three years since I was last at this thread. I have just written, in the last several days, a reflection on the writing and life of Frederich Nietzsche and I post this reflection here as part and parcel of the several thrusts of this thread here at Philosophy Forums.-Ron Price, Australia

NIETZSCHE and THE PROBLEM OF VALUES

Part 1:

What has made, and what now makes, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900) so important, is that he recognized with great force, clarity and impressive foresight the most troubling and persistent problem of modernity: the problem of values. His writings, though, at least for millions in the last century or more, lack a simplicity for readers. For millions of others, of course, they know nothing of Nietzsche and, like so many things in our knowledge explosion, they will not miss what they don’t know.

As a teacher of philosophy over several decades, 1974-2012, first in the classroom and then in cyberspace, I have found that Nietzsche’s writings have kept both me, my students, and my many colleagues in cyberspace, busy unravelling what is often the obscure and enigmatic literary idiom of this 19th century philosopher. Nietzsche uncovered many of the depths and complexities of value-issues, and these value-issues have defeated generations of the best efforts of philosophers and social scientists to articulate for modern man, a basis for both the individual and community rooted in a coherent set of relevant values.

Nietzsche saw modern man’s values as an incoherent pastiche of bits and pieces from a hundred sources. He called this collection of values that most people possess “a multi-coloured cow”. The smorgasbord of faiths and value systems on offer in the West today wonderfully illustrates what Nietzsche foresaw: values as mix-and-match consumer goods, a type of marketplace for the consumer society. The mix on offer, however ingenious it often is in the internet marketplace, is an absurd collection of stuff, and the results are pitifully anaemic for a mass society in search of a central survival core, in search of a map for the human journey ahead.

Just how and where human beings are to find the set of values on which to base a life of meaning and coherence is still an enigma, a dilemma. In some ways our global society is a victim of over-choice. We have so much information, at least those with WWW access, but what is the big-picture in which we are to place this plethora of wisdoms, this vast soup of knowledge. Vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, are not enough. Some explicit agreement on principles is required for any co-ordinated progress. And principles are often iffy-things.

Part 2:

Nietzsche’s dilemma is our dilemma. His analysis of our modern situation has become an explicit dilemma, a conundrum, for modern humanity, just as he predicted. Nietzsche is the author of the expression God Is Dead. What he meant by these words is that Western culture no longer places God at the centre of things. The death of God has knocked the pins out from under Western value systems, and revealed an abyss below. The values we have continued to live by, that we have put in the place of tradition, in the place of those values that have lost their meaning, result in our being cast adrift, whether we realize it or not. The question is, what do we do now?

Since 1900 we have done many things in our state of being cast adrift. One thing we have done, that western society has put in the place of that tradition, can be seen in the expression: be yourself.1 It is an absurd dream of contemporary culture that people, just by being themselves, can try to live according to what Nietzsche calls their own values. The values people choose are usually not their own values: they are bits and pieces picked up in the bazaar of modernity, and they usually have no idea where these values come from and, even when they do, the package is pastiche and panorama, a panoply of pluralism.

Nothing is more obvious to Nietzsche than the fact that people don’t generally know how to create values. Due to this fact, they fall back on tradition. Fundamentalism in all its forms afflicts a beleaguered humanity. There have been many values and meaning systems in the last century or more that have had great power to move great numbers of people. Modern 20th and 21st century history is littered with the results of these values. To Nietzsche, values have power and they spring from power: like works of art, their greatness is in their power to move us. The plethora of schools of philosophy and art, literature and culture, music and medicine, are a testimony to some of these powerful systems of ideas.

Part 3:

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The world has long been struggling with enormous new social and material forces. The context for this struggle increasingly is pointing toward the necessity of unity in diversity or the world will tear itself apart in its attachment to sectarian, political, nationalistic, and racial loyalties of the past. This it is doing with greater and greater efficiency.

The values of materialism are built on the enormous power of science. I take a deep satisfaction and personal meaning in the advances that society has made in the last century or more, and particularly from the processes that have knit together the earth’s peoples and nations through science and technology. But humanity yearns desperately, and it has all my life, for its Soul, for the God that Nietzsche said so presciently had died.

I was born in July 1944, in the midst of a war that saw the death of some 60 million people. The one Power that can fulfil the ultimate longing of the peoples of the world for peace and unity, is to find that God again. But in our pluralistic secular and sacred world individuals and societies have found many gods. The print and electronic media present modern man with a cornucopia of values and gods. Nietzsche sees media as a manipulator of popular sentiment and as possessing the power to create all sorts of values and meanings. The result, at least for this 19th century philosopher, is that almost everybody is merely a member of the herd or the proponent of an individualism that gets in the way of any genuine sense of community, a community of communities. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Eric Walther, Nietzsche, Our Contemporary, Philosophy Now, November/December 2012. Eric Walther taught philosophy from 1967, and computer science from 1983, at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University; he retired in 2003. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University, and an MS in Computer Science from Polytechnic University.

As I was studying history and philosophy in the fall of ’64, the counter-culture began to be felt in the USA,1 visibly at Berkeley with the free-speech movement.2…I got caught-up in this student movement & got my picture on the front-page of the local newspaper.3 ...But I could not be identified with this counter- culture because of my religion which was the ultimate source of my worldview, my physical & social reality--that the world was but one country & human- kind, mankind, world citizens.4

1 The term counterculture is attributed to professor emeritus of history at California Theodore Roszak(1903-2011), author of The Making of a Counter Culture. The term became prominent in the news media amid the social revolution that swept North and South America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1960s and early 1970s. In North America the counterculture of the 1960s became identified with the rejection of conventional social norms of the 1950s. 2 Gary North, Robert Nisbet: Conservative Sociologist, LewRockwell.com, 2002.

3 The Civil Rights Act of July 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education. It outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. In the summer of 1964, over forty Freedom Schools opened in Mississippi. These schools were part of Freedom Summer, a project of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, with the goal to empower African Americans in Mississippi to become active citizens and agents of social change. In the late summer and early autumn I was associated with the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee which, at the time, had a philosophy of nonviolence. But after the mid-1960s that philosophy migrated to one of greater militancy. In October of 1964 Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and, by the end of the autumn semester in December 1964, I had ceased my participation in that movement.

4 As a student of sociology both at university as a student, after university as a teacher, and on retirement, I came to read: Toqueville, Nisbet, Durkheim, Bell, and many other social theorists. They each and all reinforced the views I had begun university with as a Baha’i. See Robert Nisbet, Dogma and Democracy, The Sociological Tradition, Heinemann, London, 1966, pp. 232-237.

Ron Price 4 November 2012 to 9 December 2012

-- Updated Sun Dec 09, 2012 12:28 pm to add the following --

Before leaving this thread with some 3 weeks to go in the year 2012, I'll add one more interview in this already somewhat long thread. For those with an interest in the underpinnings of my poetry, this interview below will be of value.-Ron :arrow: -------------------------- QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Preamble-Part 1:

I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together as I was about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher after some 30 years in the profession, 1967 to 1999. In the first dozen years of the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, a poet and publisher, an online journalist and blogger, an independent scholar and reader, the years from 1999 to 2012, I added more material to what you could call this simulated interview. This is the 26th simulated interview in 16 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 25 interviews over those 16 years. I have posted literally millions of words on the internet at 100s, indeed 1000s now, of sites. Readers who come across 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 at these sites on the world-wide-web. Readers wanting access to these sites and 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 must ensure they are accessing my posts and my writing and not those of some other chap with the same name as mine. I have posted this interview for the interest of what has become an extensive readership, my constituency of readers, and others who come across my work for the first time, or for whatever 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 in what was called The Proust Questionnaire. The Proust Questionnaire is about one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by Marcel Proust(1871-1922), the French novelist, critic, and essayist. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an English-language confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Félix Faure. The album was entitled "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings". At that time, it was popular among English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the talker.

2.2 James Lipton (1926- ) an American writer, poet, composer, actor and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City utilized this questionnaire in his series of interviews entitled Inside the Actors Studio. The series premiered in 1994 and has been broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89,000,000 homes, so I am informed on that internet encyclopedia Wikipedia.

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 you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

2.2.2 My answers are:

1. God 2. **** 3. My instinctual and human needs for: food and drink, silence and sounds, sensory and especially sexual stimulation, oxygen and physical comfort, shelter and work, love and kindness, as well as the pleasures that come from the satisfaction of these instinctual and human needs. 4. Noise, loud and aggressive people, conversation after one to two hours; most of the TV currently available to me, a great deal of printed matter. When the needs referred to in #3 above are not satisfied. 5. Some classical, jazz and popular music, some human voices and silence. 6. Any loud sounds, some human voices. 7. **** 8. I was a student and scholar, teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator from 1949 to 1999. Now I am enjoying new roles: poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and research, online journalist and blogger. 9. Law and medicine, work in the biological and physical sciences as well as the trades. 10. Well done and now tell me about your troubles in life while trying to serve Me.

Preamble-Part 3:

Below readers will find my own 32 questions, questions I began to ask and answer back in 1998 or 1999, as I was about to retire from FT teaching, a career which began in 1967. These questions were last updated on 29 November 2012. ___________________________________________________________ 1.Do you have a favourite place to visit? I’ve lived in 25 cities and towns and visited over 100. I have lived in 37 houses and would enjoy visiting both the houses and the towns again for their memory, their nostalgia, their mnemonic, value. When writing about these places as I do from time to time, I would benefit from such visits, but it is not likely that I will visit any of them now in the evening of my life for many reasons not the least of which is my lack of funds and my disinclination to travel any more.

There are dozens of other places I’d 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 in those places. My health, my new medications for bipolar disorder, medications I’ve now had for over five years, prevents me from travelling.

1.1 Tell us a little more about your health both before your writing began in earnest in the 1990s and before. Rather than go into detail here 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 section of my website on the same subject. You can google “Ron Price BPD”.

2. Who are your favourite writers? The historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, Manning Clark and Peter Gay, among a long list of historians I keep in my notebooks; the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche, Buber and Spinoza, among another long list I keep in my notebooks; the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their successors Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice; the poets Rainer Maria Rilke 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 other disciplines.

3. Who are your favorite artists? There are several dozen art movements 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 known personally: Cezanne and Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates. I find it just about impossible to answer a question like this given my eclectic tastes. I have tried in question #2, but found there were too many names and so I do not intend to make such a long list here. As my years of retirement from the world of jobs, community work, and nose to the grindstone stuff, so to speak, lengthen as they have since 1999, I find there are more and more artists in the history of art whose work I am just finding out about and learning to appreciate.

4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists and singer/songwriters? How can one choose from the thousands in these categories? It is the same problem as in the previous two questions. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden come to mind as composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to list. I placed a list of my favourites at several sites in cyberspace. The list had more than 100 people and 100s of their works. Over the years, I’ve had at least a dozen different favorite composers including: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff. My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musical world I’ve been immersed in most deeply at any given time.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of translating melancholy and nostalgia into a musical language. He was cured of a profound writer’s block through hypnosis, and he dedicated his beloved Second Piano Concerto to his psychiatrist, Dr Nikolai Dahl. I dedicate my love for music to my mother and father both of whom played the piano in our home as I was growing-up.

5. Who are your heroes? The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Memorials of the Faithful(1970, 1927) and many more that I come across in reading history and other social sciences, the humanities as well as the physical and biological sciences. Again, the list is too long and its getting longer with the years as I head with what seems the speed of light to the age of 70 in 2014.

6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and John Hatcher in my middle age, Jameson Bond and Douglas Martin when I was a young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too many to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 70. Now in my late adulthood, the years after 60 in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists some new inspirations include: the essayist Joseph Epstein, the writers Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Udo Schaefer, a number of poets and writers whose works I had never had time to read or did not know even existed---again the list is getting longer since reading and research, writing and editing have become much more central to my life, to my daily activities than during my years of employment: 1961 to 2001.

7. If you could invite several people for dinner from any period in history, who would you choose and why? I would not invite anyone because I don’t like to talk while I’m eating. After dinner these days I like to watch TV for a few minutes and then go to bed. I’d chose the following people to have a chat with at some other time during the day, but I would not have them all come at once. I would take them as follows:

7.1 Pericles: I’d like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age, as he saw it. I’ve come to know a great deal about Athens in the 5th century BC since I taught ancient history and I have many questions which, of course, I could answer by reading. But there are so many views of the man and the times.

7.2 Roger White: I’d like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observe that 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 of seeing them again(except for my grandmother whom I never saw since she died 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 and 7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on my developing values in the formative period of my late teens and early twenties.

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 had fourteen books on the go: eight biographies, four literary criticisms, one book of philosophy and one of psychology. Now in these early years on two old age pensions, 2009 to 2012, I am reading mostly material on the internet and that reading list is too extensive to list here. I never go to libraries 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 Womersley’s 3-volume edition(1994) of Gibbon’s famous work in 2010 and after 3 years I’m up to page 140 underlining 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 listened mainly to classical music on the classical FM station while living in Perth in the last dozen years of my FT employment(1988-1999) as well as some from the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George Town northern Tasmania in these years of the early evening of my life(1999 to 2012) 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 music since my adolescence in other places and I refer readers here to the section of my website on music for the kind of detail that would lead to prolixity if I included it here.

10. What food could you not live without? I would miss my wife’s cooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must be said, though,(answering this question 14 years after beginning to answer 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 enjoy the food I get, that my wife and I prepare and only eat a Persian meal or a Mexican meal perhaps once a year now. Do I miss it? Yes and no. I enjoy eating 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 I’d be happy with many others.

11. What do you do when you feel a poem coming on? I get a piece of paper 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 this location for my production of poetry in George Town Tasmania, Australia where I write these pieces. I have also calculated the number of poems I have 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 was writing poetry very occasionally, very rarely, at the time.

In the first years of my life, 1943 to 1962, the influences on my writing of poetry included: my mother and grandfather, the primary and secondary school system in Ontario and the university I attended. The Baha’i Faith after 1953 was also a poetic force. All these poetic influences were completely unrecognized as poetic influences at the time since my interests were mainly sport, getting high marks at school, having fun, and dealing with life’s quotidian and sometimes anxious events.

A. From 1 August 1980 to 22 September 2012 there have been 11,734 days(circa). B. The number of poems written per day is calculated using the following data: 7075(circa) poems in 11,734 (circa) days to 22 September 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 of employment 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 his literary work that he could live as he wished to live. If a job was oppressing him, he said, he had to leave it. Both Woodcock and I have done this on several occasions, but I did not leave the jobs I did in order to write—except 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, of avoidance or cowardice, said Woodcock, but you have to evade those situations in life in which you become insubordinate to others or situations in which others offend your dignity.

Woodcock went on to say in that same interview that when one acts dramatically or precipitately—like resigning from a job or losing one’s temper--it often has consequences that are very negative. He gave examples from his own life and I could give examples here; I could expand on 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 in my memoirs is true, but it has been "filtered and worked on". Readers tend to think a memoir is a chronicle or record of a life but, as the memoirist Kate Holden says, “it's a much more subtle form. You're compressing, eliding, using your craft.” She uses her craft to present a good story and I use it to present what I hope is a good analysis, some accurate and honest, useful and helpful reflections on life to those who read them.

12. Were you popular at school, in your primary, secondary and university days? I certainly was in primary and secondary school, but not at matriculation or university. I did not have the experience many writers and intellectuals have who received early wounds from the English school system among other influences in life. It wasn't merely the discipline at these schools; it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit. In most English schools it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates against the intellectual who is looked on as a weakling. I was popular at school 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 at memorizing and that is why I did so well, but at university I could not simply memorize; I had to think and write my own thoughts and my grades went from ‘A’s’ to ‘C’s. This was also due to the beginnings of episodes of 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 the origins of your prose and poetic writing. Many writers flower early. Many of them become largely forgotten whereas I have a different type of creativity which seems to be growing in meaning and personal significance, in power and vitality, literally decade by decade, again, like the Canadian George Woodcock. This kind of creativity over the lifespan is 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 I’ve ever written in my life. Who knows what lies ahead.

Some years ago a reporter from Musician magazine asked jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim a question about when his interest in music began. Ibrahim said he understood the logic of the question but that he couldn't answer it because music had always been part of his day to day living. I feel in a similar way about my relationship to writing. I can't remember a time 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 never have got good grades and gone up the academic ladder—but I had to work at the process back then. Any significant literary success, any published work, did not come, really, until I was nearly forty.

15. What sort of relationships do you have these days? I was reading about the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have already mentioned in this series of questions and answers. He said that he did not have all that many friends who were writers. He knew their problems, but he did not know the problems of painters. He said that he liked to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists and people who could tell him something. By my mid-fifties I had had enough of people telling me about things, any things. I had been both a listening post, a reader, and a talker for so many years I was a bit of a burnt-out case and wanted to shut my 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 I could visit a small circle of people in the little town I live in, that I took a sea-change to near the mouth of a river by the sea. After an hour or so of conversation and various forms of social interaction I usually had enough and looked forward to my return to solitude.

Due to my medications by the age of 65 and perhaps due to being in my middle 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 solitude after 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 emotional excess, some verbal criticism of others or gave vent to some kind of spleen which 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 of medication shifts which have altered my psycho-emotional life. Now I spend 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? I rarely point a finger directly at some guilty party, organization, person or movement; sometimes there is a subtle psychological base to a poem that hints at or implies some evil in someone’s court. My poetry is quite explicitly non-partisan. I have dealt with this issue several times in my series of 26 interviews. It is an important question because the wider world often judges a person by the extent to which they engage with, or in, the quixotic tournament of social and political issues in our global community. I don’t 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 subtle about my shouting and raving and, in the process, probably little depth in those prose-poems of mine either. With millions of readers now in cyberspace I’d say I now have a social outreach wider, more extensive, than any I’ve had in my life.

17. Some poets see their work as a form of social criticism and, like the Canadian poet Irving Layton, for example, they rage against society and some of what they see as society’s 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's imagination; over the years he has used the media and the lecture hall to passionately and publicly decry social injustice. But perhaps his loudest and most sustained protest has been against a restrictive puritanism that inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. My poetry is not an expression of scathing attacks on anything; nor is it a passionate and public poetic vis-à-vis that quixotic tournament of social issues that are paraded in front of me day after day in the print and electronic media.

I see my poetry as an extension of the whole Bahá'í approach to social issues and individual engagement with these issues. There are several Bahá'í books which explore this quite complex subject. One of the best was published 25 years ago. It is entitled Circle of Unity: Bahá'í Approaches to Current Social Issues. I encourage readers to have a look at it if they would like a more complete answer to this question, a question that I cannot answer in a small paragraph.

As far as the imagination is concerned it is not, in my view, the opposite of facts or the enemy of facts. The imagination depends upon facts; it feeds on them in order to produce beauty or invention, or discovery. The true enemy of the imagination is laziness and habit, as well as an ineffective use of leisure-time. The enemy of imagination is the idleness that provides fancy. I am not concerned, as Layton was, with a restrictive puritanism that inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. I have many concerns in the process of writing poetry and journals, essays and narrative autobiography. I would like to emphasize here that authentic historical documents, mine and those of others, are products of the human mind and language; this is reality itself. Reality could be seen as a white light 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?

The Canadian poet Al Purdy(1918-2000) admitted quite clearly that if he hadn't travelled he wouldn't have written very much. He felt that he had to go further out in the world and experience place in order to write. He was one of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century. Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works include over thirty books of poetry, a novel, two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence. He has been called Canada’s "unofficial poet laureate" and, "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."

I did not travel the way Purdy did. I just kept moving to new towns, some two dozen. For a great many reasons largely associated with my bipolar disorder 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 the print and electronic media. And yes, travel in both these forms has been absolutely crucial to my productivity, but it ways that are difficult to explain since they span several decades.

18. Do you like talking about poetry?

Gary Geddes tells(In It’s Still Winter: A WEB JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN POETRY AND POETICS, Vol. 2 No. 1 Fall 1997) a great story of Douglas Dunn who was writer in residence at Hull. Dunn wanted to meet the famous British poet Larkin. But Larkin was a curmudgeon. He hated poets! Douglas Dunn was told by friends who knew Larkin that, if he wanted to meet Larkin then he had to make sure he didn't ever talk about poetry. He could talk about jazz and anything else, but not poetry. So these friends arranged this meeting and left the two of them in the pub. Finally, after a few beers, Larkin leaned across 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 don’t feel like this at all, although I can appreciate Larkin’s sentiments. If I want some congenial poetic spirits I read their poetry or I read about them, but I have no strong desire to meet and have a chat. But I like to write about poetry and that is why I’ve simulated these 26 interviews. I am fascinated by the development of poetry in my life and seek to understand how 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 was translating a book of Chinese poetry with a George Leong, George would often bring him the most depressing and melancholic poems in Chinese to translate. Geddes would say: "George you gotta give me something else, I can'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 don’t connect with it. My mind and heart do not engage in its content or style, or both. Often I just don’t understand what the poets are saying. The poets I do engage with hit home quite deeply, but they are relatively few. They are also people I am only now discovering since my retirement, since I have the time to read and not engage in a 60 to 80 hour a week filled with people and responsibilities.

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

Not anywhere near as much as I’d like, as much as exists in its poetic potential. Aristotle once wrote that the ability to see relationships between things 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 the place. It’s one of the great motivators in why I write. I want to develop my use of metaphor in my poetry. I don’t think I’ve really taken off yet in my effective 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 a mood thing for me and I’d like to make it much more of a metaphor thing as well. When emotion and intellect converge in imaginative writing, writing for example that draws on metaphor, readers can be transported to another life-world, a type of Gestalt, a Lebenswelt, to use the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s(1859-1938) term. Any transcendence that results for me and the reader of my work is not due to being taken to another realm at least 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 reader’s experience, in the things and thoughts themselves. One goes beyond the familiar and finds fleeting moments rich in imaginative detail. There is a world outside language as the Canadian poet Don McKay(1942- ) asserts. It is very difficult to translate that world but some poetry can do this, can make this translation, with conviction and delight. I’d like to come back to this question several years from now when I’m in my 70s or even 80s.

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

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 and distil the labour and the genius of the Bahá'í experience and (b) to give expression to the delight and the love that are at the heart of writing. The Canadian poet A.J. M. Smith wrote this in 1954. Smith had a preoccupation with death as I have, although not as intense and not in the same way as Smith’s. Out of his preoccupation with death he made poetry. I have made my poetry out of this and other preoccupations. The medications I’ve taken in the last decade or so have softened my interest in the subject of death.

From a Bahá'í perspective, of course, the arts and sciences in general, and poetry in particular, should “result in advantage to man,” “ensure his progress,” and “elevate his rank” ; that music is a ladder for our souls, “a means whereby they may be lifted up into the realm on high” ; that the art of drama will become “a great educational power” ; that when a painter takes up her paint brush, it is as if she were “at prayer in the Temple” ; that the arts fulfil “their highest purpose when showing forth the praise of God”; and that “music, art and literature...are to represent and inspire the noblest sentiments and highest aspirations.” The leader of the Baha’i cause 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 others that I write about in the millions of words readers will find if they get into my 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 commonly referred to as “fine arts” such as poetry, painting, sculpture, theatrical drama, film, music, dance and others. But I also have in mind the “design arts,” such as architecture and urban design as well as the crafts, such as pottery and rug-weaving because these arts operate on a spiritual as well as a material plane. Readers can now google the subject at locations in cyberspace like Wikipedia for answers to factual questions like 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, the descriptive comment on this photo, reads: “This full-frontal facial view-photo, taken in 2004 when I was 60 in Hobart Tasmania, has a light side and a dark side. It is an appropriate photo to symbolize my lower and higher natures. These are natures that reach for spiritual, for intellectual and cultural attainment on the one hand and reach for and get caught-up in/with the world of mire and clay and its shadowy and ephemeral attachments.

Of course, when I look in the mirror there is not this clear dichotomy of light and shadow. When I look in the mirror I see an external self, a face which 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 nearly everyone else sees: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, cheeks, etc. I also see that: I need a shave; I need to put some ointment on my skin; I need to comb my hair or cut my moustache.

24. What would you bring to this interview to ‘show-and-tell’ if you could 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 town called 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 of three monkeys. It has a label on it: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. It always reminds me of a quotation from Bahá'u'lláh’s book Hidden Words. 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, abase not thyself, neither sigh and weep. Speak no evil, that thou mayest not hear it spoken unto thee, and magnify not the faults of others that thine own 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 unsullied, thy thoughts pure, and thy nature sanctified, so that, free and content, thou mayest put away this mortal frame, and repair unto the mystic paradise and abide in the eternal kingdom for evermore.” -Bahá'u'lláh, 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 ago that: “Sometimes it seems as if there isn’t a poem written in this nation that isn’t subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation or the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or another.” Dana Gioia wrote that “the first question one poet now asks another 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 the health of poetry extending from Edmund Wilson’s “Is Verse a Dying Technique?”(1934) through to Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry?” (1988). But performance poetry is alive and well and, in contrast, is based in speech. Walter J. Ong so eloquently demonstrated that this poetry is fundamentally other than writing. Sound, he writes, “is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.” These are performances of poetry, some now call mic-poetry, that practice a poetics of openness and engagement, and in doing so inherently refuse official, institutional surveillance. This mic-poetry and its venues utilize space not constructed for cultural displays, spaces such as bars and coffeehouses.

I will draw on the words of Rollo May, the man who introduced existential psychology to the USA and whose writings influenced me back in the 1970s and still do. “If you do not express your own original ideas,” wrote May, “if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.”

Part 2:

“A chief characteristic of this courage,” he went on to say, “is that it requires a centeredness within one’s own being. This is why we must always base our commitment in the centre of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.” Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss. They may indeed occur at times of relaxation or in fantasy, or at other times when we alternate play with work. But what is entirely clear to me is that they pertain to those areas in which a person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.

The Dionysian principle of ecstasy is often the result: a magnificent summit of creativity which achieves a union of form and passion with order and vitality. I encourage readers to read May’s books. They were and 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 much to play the drums as it was to get himself into the kind of condition where he could play the things he could imagine. I think that's my job too, but imagination is only part of the story and perspiration, effort and work, is the 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 poetry one is into the world of entertainment. After more than 30 years in a classroom as a teacher, a place where I was an entertainer among other roles, I tired of the process. When I retired I had no desire to read my poetry.

Public readings by Russian writers including Voznesensky and Yevtushenko grew to the point that huge stadiums could hardly contain the audiences clamouring to hear the new poetry. When Voznesensky reads his 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 delivers his lines with a passionate, almost frightening intensity.

During performances, crowds have been known to rush the podium to touch 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 fashion magazines. 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 experience was a little boring because it was impossible for 14,000 people in a soccer stadium to hear you. It’s impossible to speak intimately. He also said that before his generation of Russian poets there had never been that level of public 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 can’t compete with TV, the movies, having fun, and the entertainment ethos of our culture. Perhaps after having 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 don’t have much social stamina and reading my poetry in public would be too exhausting. 27. Popular and mass culture on the one hand and intellectual-elitist educated-high culture on the other are both evidenced in the many millions 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 late fifties---in the late 1990s—and as we entered the 3rd millennium and even more so now that I am 68, on two old age pensions and have immersed myself totally in reading and writing, research, editing and publishing, I have 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 mother during that war in 1917. I was a child of a working class immigrant father and a mother who was also the child of a working class immigrant father. They viewed education, ideas, and culture with reverence. This was especially true of my mother. My mother, her brother, her sister and her father read books, lots of books. They listened to classical music and were interested in the arts generally. They became reasonably knowledgeable about 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 to some extent. Perhaps they had a fear that common tastes might make them appear undiscerning and unworthy. I don’t know. They have been for more than 30 years. My father had a number of working class jobs, was a passionate gardener and read the newspaper more than books. He was no elitist. They both listened and danced to popular music, loved motion pictures, and played and followed sports.

Part 2:

The years after World War II transformed popular culture in important ways. The enormous expansion of consumer spending, the rise of new communications media especially TV, and the incorporation of distinct European American ethnic cultures and communities into a more generalized white identity left me with a different view of culture than the one that made sense to my parents. The comfortable lower middle class home, community, and culture in which I grew up was a happy one.

Before the age of 18 in 1962, I imagined that professional athletes inhabited a world I wanted to be a part of. In my late childhood and teens I lost myself in a Canadian culture defined by my small hometown: its baseball, hockey and football players; pictures printed on the backs of cards that I collected, and its trinity of orthodoxy: Catholic, Protestant and Jew. I was drawn to rock and roll radio programs, movies, and that world of sport. My little world was defined by the "down home" music and humor of disc jockeys, by the quiet theatricality, festivity, and sensuality of mass mediated working class culture and family, school and a little circle of 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 studying the social sciences at university in the working class, ‘ lunch-pail’ city of Hamilton, I began to see my culture like a kind of suffocating tyranny. It was during these years that my interests in the Bahá'í Faith developed and these interests helped to give me a balance between the intellectual-high culture and the more populist aspects of culture. And the rest is history as they say. I have now had half a century since then(1962-2012) of an interest in both popular and high culture and am very, very far from being an authority on either.

Part 4:

The Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, who championed the idea of variety of subjects and styles as a poetic virtue wrote in his essay on “Poetic Interpretation” (c. 1895), that: “the perfect poet would have no set style. He would have a different one for everything he would write, a manner exactly suited to the subject.” It seems to me, as I now survey the last two decades of an enormous poetic output, that I have come to acquire a certain style, although the content is immensely varied from elitist to popular culture.

28. What do you think readers can learn from your prose that they can’t 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 of American poet Robert Hass’s 500 page series of essays entitled What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World in The New York Review of Books 27/9/’12---that: “Poets’ prose is in a category all its own. It enlarges for readers the idea of a writer’s mind and also demonstrates aspects of his character. To a reader knowing only the poetry there can be surprises, for example: Emerson’s aphoristic journals, Whitman’s fact-filled memoranda of the Civil War, or Thoreau’s 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. Eliot’s writing; or it can be intimately painful as in Robert Lowell’s account of his time in Payne Whitney (“From the Unbalanced Aquarium”). What Light Can Do collects the poet Robert Hass’s essays of the last twenty years, in which we hear a disarming voice speaking as if to friends. His prose has an unusually wide range: he has written 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: “Hass’s first instinct in writing prose is to take on the manner of a born storyteller, transporting us to a well-described setting—biographical, ecological, or personal—and naturalizing us, so to speak, into an imaginative atmosphere. In other hands, an essay called “Wallace Stevens in the World” might not begin: “My nineteenth birthday was also the birthday of one of my college friends.” Nor might a piece on the First Epistle of Saint John open with: “In my grade-school classroom in Northern California, there were pictures pinned to the bulletin boards representing the Last Supper.” Other essays begin more straightforwardly, but not without a deliberate will to surprise. The intriguing “Chekhov’s Anger” invites us in with a blunt and unsettling opening: “In his journals Chekhov notes two reasons why he doesn’t like a lawyer of his acquaintance. 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 my essays and autobiography. To make a long story short, I think I could go so far as to say my prose and poetry are virtually indistinguishable. That is why I call it prose-poetry.

29. To what extent is your prose and poetry confessional? Jack Kerouac was asked once in an interview(Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41,Interviewed by Ted Berrigan in the Paris Review where he got his spontaneous style for his book On the Road. Kerouac said that he: “got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed, with real names in his case, however since they were letters. I remembered also Goethe's admonition, well, Goethe's prophecy that the future literature of the West would be confessional in nature; also Dostoyevsky prophesied as much and might have started in on that if he'd lived long enough to do his projected masterwork, The Life of a Great Sinner. Cassady also began his early youthful writing with attempts at slow, painstaking, and all-that-crap craft business, but got sick of it like I did, seeing it wasn't getting out his guts and heart the way it felt coming out”.

That’s too free and loose for my liking and whatever confessionalism there is in my writing is what I have come to call “a moderate confessionalism”. I don’t tell all from the rag-and-bone shop of my life. The general Baha’i teaching on confession guides me here.

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

30.1 I rather like the poet Milton’s 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 "Collage 1" (1961) in which Elvis Presley's hit record "Blue Suede Shoes" (itself borrowed from Carl Perkins) is transformed by means of multi-speed tape recorders and razor blade. Tenney took an everyday piece of music and allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim's piece.1 1 Marilyn Randall, “Recycling, Recycling or plus ça change...”in Other Voices, 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

30.2 I have written a brief essay on spam since I have often been accused of ‘spamming in cyberspace’. The piece is probably too long to include here, but I’ll 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 a name for its Spam luncheon meat: a canned, precooked, spiced meat product. The transition from meat product to internet term had a stop with the comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus. In 1970 that BBC comedy show aired a sketch that featured a cafe that had a menu which featured items like: "egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam; and finally, lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam."

To make matters sillier in Monty Python style, the cafe was filled with Vikings 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 new name for their product, the North American Bahá’í community was formulating the details of its first teaching Plan in May 1937. This formulation took place just eight weeks before the introduction of Spam onto the market. As of 2003 the Baha’i Faith had spread to over 200 countries and territories with the largest number of adherents in India, Iran and the USA. As of 2003, Spam was sold in 41 countries worldwide. The largest consumers of Spam were in the United States, the UK and South Korea.

Computer people adopted the term Spam from the Python sketch to mean, to include, the commercialization of the internet, the unwanted commercial messages that come in the form of electronic junk mail or junk postings as well 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 the primary meanings, among other meanings, of spam on the internet.-Ron Price with thanks to “A History of the Term Spam,” internet.com, 24 July 2008.

31. How did you learn to write?

The science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury once said that "you can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices." I never took any courses on writing, although I taught many courses myself from basic skills courses, individual tutoring to help students write essays, and creative writing. I learned a few things as a teacher; I also read dozens of interviews with writers. Finally, as I got older, 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 American literary 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, the events 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? I’ve written a great deal about a Baha’i view of history. According to the Baha'i view of human history, social conditions had changed sufficiently by the 19th century that humanity was in need of further guidance from God. While lesser degrees of unity had been achieved, up to and including the bringing together of peoples to create a nation, what was now needed was the divine guidance necessary to move humanity forward to the next stage of its development: global unity. Indeed, the messenger that was now to come was the culmination of all of the religions that God had sent to different regions of the world. Readers can examine a finely nuanced view with a little googling in cyberspace.

Concluding Comment:

I began asking and answering these questions in 1998 as I indicated at the start 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 from 2009 to 2012. The last update to the above 32 questions, as well as the 10 questions that opened this simulation, was made 14 years after beginning this process of question and answer---on 2 October 2012. Total: 7900 words and 20 A-4 pages. ----------------------------- End of document

-- Updated Mon Feb 03, 2014 5:32 pm to add the following --

I'll post a final piece which i wrote today on the subject of autobiography and, unless someone responds, this post will bring this thread to a close.-Ron Price, Australia ----------------------------------------------------

STAYING IN THE PICTURE

Part 1:

The Kid Stays in the Picture is the name the 1994 autobiography by film producer Robert Evans(1930- ). It is also the title of the 2002 film adaptation of the same book. Last night I watched this film adaptation.1 By 1994 I had my eye on an early retirement; by 2002 I had taken a sea-change and retired to a small town by the sea, about 5 kms from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean. Robert Evans had been part of my life since the 1950s, but he had always been far in the background beginning with the 3 films: Man of a Thousand Faces, The Sun Also Rises, and The Best of Everything.

He has been so far in the background of my life that, until last night, I had never even heard of him. This should tell readers more about me than it does about Evans because Evans was at the centre of Hollywood life for decades. He has been called 'the Godfather of Hollywood'. During his 60 years in film, from the 1950s to the turn of the 21st century, the cinema was not that central to my life. I was no connoisseur of the celebrity circuit, and watching either TV or films was always a relatively peripheral part of my life. At least this was the case for the half-century from about 1954 until the last ten years, 2004 to 2014. By 2004 I had retired from all FT and PT paid employment. I had retired by degrees from FT, PT and most volunteer work, as well as the endless meetings involved. All of these occupations occupied me for 60 to 80 hours a week for more than half a century. My student-working life had lasted from 1949 to 1999.

Going to "the pictures", as cinema is often called Downunder, and watching TV were both only occasional activities, certainly not definite parts of my daily diet. That has no longer been the case for the last decade.

Part 2:

Many elements from Evans' 1994 autobiography, such as his childhood and all but one of his seven marriages, were dropped from this doco because the producers felt that their inclusion would slow things down, and not move the visual-auditory-experience along with the pace required for modern audiences.

Evans started writing his autobiography when he was in his 60s. I started writing mine, my memoirs and autobiography, in my 40s and there was much I also had to leave out for many reasons mainly associated with moving my story along in the direction I wanted it to go.

A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, important though that is, nor in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's autobiography or biography, if he or she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. The person must continually integrate events which occur in both their internal-world and the wider-external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.'2

Part 3:

I want to thank 1ABC1TV, 10:20-11:50 p.m., 2/2/'14 for this stimulating doco, and 2Anthony Giddens(1938-), a British sociologist who is known for his holistic view of modern societies, for this idea and many of the ideas in this prose-poem. Giddens is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities.

Giddens links the rise of the narrative of the self, biography and autobiography, with the emergence of romantic love. Passion and sex have, of course, been around virtually forever, but the discourse of romantic love is said to have developed from the late eighteenth century.1 Romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual's life, a story about two individuals with little connection to wider social processes. Giddens connects this development with the simultaneous emergence of the novel, a relatively early form of mass media, that suggests ideal, and less than ideal, romantic life narratives.

Part 4:

All of this sociological theory is, of course, arguable. These stories of romantic love did not construct love as a partnership of equals, of course. Instead, women were associated with a world of femininity and motherhood which was supposedly unknowable to men. Nevertheless, the female protagonists were usually independent and spirited. The masculine world, meanwhile, was detached from the domestic sphere, both emotionally and physically, and involved a decisive sense of purpose in the outside world.

Whilst passionate affairs might come and go, rather unpredictably, the more long-term and future-oriented narrative of romantic love created a 'shared history' which made sense of two lives and gave their relationship an important and recognised role. The rise of this 'mutual narrative biography' led individuals to construct accounts of their lives so that, even if the relationship with their partner went awry, a story still had to be maintained. And so now the biography of the self has taken on a life of its own. Giddens has much to say about the narrative of the life-span which I have found useful in the three decades, 1984 to 2014, during which I have been engaged in writing my memoirs.

The self is made, only partly inherited, partly static in our post-traditional order.....It's a reflective project, a project we continuously work on--reflect. We create, maintain, revise our set of autobiographical narratives...the story of who we are, how we came to be where we are. This is our self- identity, our understanding of who is this self that we are, the account of our life, actions and influences which make sense to us and is also oriented towards our anticipated.... future. Perhaps this all began with the Greeks and those Romans, way back in the Middle Ages, or in what some historians call modern times.1

1 To Giddens modern times began in the late 18th century. There are, of course, many takes on the modern and when it began, as well as on the post-modern, and if it began. In my own literary work I take the modern and the post-modern to be the last two-and-a-half centuries associated, as those 250 years are, with the lives of the two precursors of the Babi-Baha'i revelations and Babi-Baha'i history into the 21st century.

Ron Price 3/2/'14.

-- Updated Mon Feb 03, 2014 5:32 pm to add the following --

I'll post a final piece which i wrote today on the subject of autobiography and, unless someone responds, this post will bring this thread to a close.-Ron Price, Australia ----------------------------------------------------

STAYING IN THE PICTURE

Part 1:

The Kid Stays in the Picture is the name the 1994 autobiography by film producer Robert Evans(1930- ). It is also the title of the 2002 film adaptation of the same book. Last night I watched this film adaptation.1 By 1994 I had my eye on an early retirement; by 2002 I had taken a sea-change and retired to a small town by the sea, about 5 kms from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean. Robert Evans had been part of my life since the 1950s, but he had always been far in the background beginning with the 3 films: Man of a Thousand Faces, The Sun Also Rises, and The Best of Everything.

He has been so far in the background of my life that, until last night, I had never even heard of him. This should tell readers more about me than it does about Evans because Evans was at the centre of Hollywood life for decades. He has been called 'the Godfather of Hollywood'. During his 60 years in film, from the 1950s to the turn of the 21st century, the cinema was not that central to my life. I was no connoisseur of the celebrity circuit, and watching either TV or films was always a relatively peripheral part of my life. At least this was the case for the half-century from about 1954 until the last ten years, 2004 to 2014. By 2004 I had retired from all FT and PT paid employment. I had retired by degrees from FT, PT and most volunteer work, as well as the endless meetings involved. All of these occupations occupied me for 60 to 80 hours a week for more than half a century. My student-working life had lasted from 1949 to 1999.

Going to "the pictures", as cinema is often called Downunder, and watching TV were both only occasional activities, certainly not definite parts of my daily diet. That has no longer been the case for the last decade.

Part 2:

Many elements from Evans' 1994 autobiography, such as his childhood and all but one of his seven marriages, were dropped from this doco because the producers felt that their inclusion would slow things down, and not move the visual-auditory-experience along with the pace required for modern audiences.

Evans started writing his autobiography when he was in his 60s. I started writing mine, my memoirs and autobiography, in my 40s and there was much I also had to leave out for many reasons mainly associated with moving my story along in the direction I wanted it to go.

A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, important though that is, nor in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's autobiography or biography, if he or she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. The person must continually integrate events which occur in both their internal-world and the wider-external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.'2

Part 3:

I want to thank 1ABC1TV, 10:20-11:50 p.m., 2/2/'14 for this stimulating doco, and 2Anthony Giddens(1938-), a British sociologist who is known for his holistic view of modern societies, for this idea and many of the ideas in this prose-poem. Giddens is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities.

Giddens links the rise of the narrative of the self, biography and autobiography, with the emergence of romantic love. Passion and sex have, of course, been around virtually forever, but the discourse of romantic love is said to have developed from the late eighteenth century.1 Romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual's life, a story about two individuals with little connection to wider social processes. Giddens connects this development with the simultaneous emergence of the novel, a relatively early form of mass media, that suggests ideal, and less than ideal, romantic life narratives.

Part 4:

All of this sociological theory is, of course, arguable. These stories of romantic love did not construct love as a partnership of equals, of course. Instead, women were associated with a world of femininity and motherhood which was supposedly unknowable to men. Nevertheless, the female protagonists were usually independent and spirited. The masculine world, meanwhile, was detached from the domestic sphere, both emotionally and physically, and involved a decisive sense of purpose in the outside world.

Whilst passionate affairs might come and go, rather unpredictably, the more long-term and future-oriented narrative of romantic love created a 'shared history' which made sense of two lives and gave their relationship an important and recognised role. The rise of this 'mutual narrative biography' led individuals to construct accounts of their lives so that, even if the relationship with their partner went awry, a story still had to be maintained. And so now the biography of the self has taken on a life of its own. Giddens has much to say about the narrative of the life-span which I have found useful in the three decades, 1984 to 2014, during which I have been engaged in writing my memoirs.

The self is made, only partly inherited, partly static in our post-traditional order.....It's a reflective project, a project we continuously work on--reflect. We create, maintain, revise our set of autobiographical narratives...the story of who we are, how we came to be where we are. This is our self- identity, our understanding of who is this self that we are, the account of our life, actions and influences which make sense to us and is also oriented towards our anticipated.... future. Perhaps this all began with the Greeks and those Romans, way back in the Middle Ages, or in what some historians call modern times.1

1 To Giddens modern times began in the late 18th century. There are, of course, many takes on the modern and when it began, as well as on the post-modern, and if it began. In my own literary work I take the modern and the post-modern to be the last two-and-a-half centuries associated, as those 250 years are, with the lives of the two precursors of the Babi-Baha'i revelations and Babi-Baha'i history into the 21st century.

Ron Price 3/2/'14.

-- Updated Sat Jun 14, 2014 7:47 pm to add the following --

I must apologize to all those readers who have Facebook-twitter proclivities, a literary world which has become the dominant form of communication for billions.-Ron Price
married for 46 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 14, and a Baha'i for 54(in 2013)
Post Reply

Return to “Philosophy of the Arts and Philosophy in the Arts”

2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month

Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise

Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise
by John K Danenbarger
January 2023

Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul

Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023

Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness

Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023

The Unfakeable Code®

The Unfakeable Code®
by Tony Jeton Selimi
April 2023

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts
May 2023

Killing Abel

Killing Abel
by Michael Tieman
June 2023

Reconfigurement: Reconfiguring Your Life at Any Stage and Planning Ahead

Reconfigurement: Reconfiguring Your Life at Any Stage and Planning Ahead
by E. Alan Fleischauer
July 2023

First Survivor: The Impossible Childhood Cancer Breakthrough

First Survivor: The Impossible Childhood Cancer Breakthrough
by Mark Unger
August 2023

Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
September 2023

Artwords

Artwords
by Beatriz M. Robles
November 2023

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope
by Dr. Randy Ross
December 2023

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes
by Ali Master
February 2024

2022 Philosophy Books of the Month

Emotional Intelligence At Work

Emotional Intelligence At Work
by Richard M Contino & Penelope J Holt
January 2022

Free Will, Do You Have It?

Free Will, Do You Have It?
by Albertus Kral
February 2022

My Enemy in Vietnam

My Enemy in Vietnam
by Billy Springer
March 2022

2X2 on the Ark

2X2 on the Ark
by Mary J Giuffra, PhD
April 2022

The Maestro Monologue

The Maestro Monologue
by Rob White
May 2022

What Makes America Great

What Makes America Great
by Bob Dowell
June 2022

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!
by Jerry Durr
July 2022

Living in Color

Living in Color
by Mike Murphy
August 2022 (tentative)

The Not So Great American Novel

The Not So Great American Novel
by James E Doucette
September 2022

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches
by John N. (Jake) Ferris
October 2022

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All
by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
November 2022

The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity

The Smartest Person in the Room
by Christian Espinosa
December 2022

2021 Philosophy Books of the Month

The Biblical Clock: The Untold Secrets Linking the Universe and Humanity with God's Plan

The Biblical Clock
by Daniel Friedmann
March 2021

Wilderness Cry: A Scientific and Philosophical Approach to Understanding God and the Universe

Wilderness Cry
by Dr. Hilary L Hunt M.D.
April 2021

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute: Tools To Spark Your Dream And Ignite Your Follow-Through

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute
by Jeff Meyer
May 2021

Surviving the Business of Healthcare: Knowledge is Power

Surviving the Business of Healthcare
by Barbara Galutia Regis M.S. PA-C
June 2021

Winning the War on Cancer: The Epic Journey Towards a Natural Cure

Winning the War on Cancer
by Sylvie Beljanski
July 2021

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream
by Dr Frank L Douglas
August 2021

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts
by Mark L. Wdowiak
September 2021

The Preppers Medical Handbook

The Preppers Medical Handbook
by Dr. William W Forgey M.D.
October 2021

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress: A Practical Guide

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress
by Dr. Gustavo Kinrys, MD
November 2021

Dream For Peace: An Ambassador Memoir

Dream For Peace
by Dr. Ghoulem Berrah
December 2021