Bahaichap
Member
REALITY :arrow:
History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions as history, has genuine significance for our lives, when these facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.1 It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.
Here was a bit of history,
came across it the other day
in a bookshop: some letters,
letters written by Van Gogh.
He was writing about
his ultimate goal
and feeling that he was
on the right track---
firmly convinced he was---
so convinced that he paid
little attention to what people
said of him. He painted what
he felt and felt what he painted.
This is my story, too, of poetry....
except that......
few people say anything about my poetry
and I never know if I am exactly on track,
if I write precisely the best,
the most apt that can be written.
But.....
I fit my emotions around my assumptions:
that this poetry is at the core of my life,
that it expresses my essential relationships
with all that I know and love--and I write--
this is my faith. -Ron Price 14/3/02. :arrow:
History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions as history, has genuine significance for our lives, when these facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.1 It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.
Here was a bit of history,
came across it the other day
in a bookshop: some letters,
letters written by Van Gogh.
He was writing about
his ultimate goal
and feeling that he was
on the right track---
firmly convinced he was---
so convinced that he paid
little attention to what people
said of him. He painted what
he felt and felt what he painted.
This is my story, too, of poetry....
except that......
few people say anything about my poetry
and I never know if I am exactly on track,
if I write precisely the best,
the most apt that can be written.
But.....
I fit my emotions around my assumptions:
that this poetry is at the core of my life,
that it expresses my essential relationships
with all that I know and love--and I write--
this is my faith. -Ron Price 14/3/02. :arrow:
