QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Preamble:

I began asking and answering these questions about myself and writing in
1998 and added more in the summer of 2009/10. This is the 26th
simulated interview in 14 years, 1996 to 2010. 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
most other interviews. I have posted literally millions of words on the
internet and readers who come across this interview of 3500 words will
gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read at sites on this
world-wide-web, sites they can access by simply googling the words:
RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of others words like: poetry,
literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, inter alia.
1. Do you have a favourite place to visit? I’ve lived in 25 cities and
towns and in 37 houses and would enjoy visiting them again for their
mnemonic value. There are dozens of other places I’d enjoy going
circumstances permitting, circumstances like: lots of money, good health,
lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people in those places.

2. Who are your favourite writers? Edward Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee,

Ortega y Gasset, the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Rollo May, Alfred Adler, inter alter.

3. Who are your favorite artists? There are several dozen art
movements and hundreds if not thousands or artists. I will name two
famous artists whose work I like and two whom I have known personally:
Cezanne, Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates.

4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists and

singer/songwriters? How can one choose from the thousands in these
categories? Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden
come to mind as composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to
list.

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 and many more that I come
across in reading history, the social sciences and the humanities.

6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and John
Hatcher in my middle age, Jamie 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 65.

7. If you could invite several people(a dozen) for dinner from any
period in history, who would you choose and why?

I’d chose the following people 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.

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.

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.

8. What are you reading? At the moment, in 1998, my last year of full-
time employment, I have fourteen books on the go: eight biographies,
four literary criticisms, one book of philosophy and one of psychology.
Now in the first year on two old age pensions a decade later, I am reading
only material on the internet and that reading list is too extensive to list
here.

9. What do you enjoy listening to in the world of music? I listen

mainly to classical music on the classical FM station here in Perth as well
as some from the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George
Town northern Tasmania this is also true only much less pop and folk and
more jazz.

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 ten years later) now that I live in
northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and Mexican food. Now that I am
retired I hardly miss these foods.
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.

12. How Important is Life-Style and Freedom From the Demands of

Employment and Other People?

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. He 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.

13. 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 things. 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 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.

14. You did not flower early as a writer, did you?

Many writers flower early. Many of them become largely forgotten

whereas I have a different type of creativity which seems to be growing in
power, literally decade by decade, again, like the Canadian George
Woodcock. This kind of creativity over the lifespan is actually quite
abnormal. 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.

15. What sort of relationships do you have these days?

I was reading about the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have
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. If I wanted to know about stuff 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 but, after an hour or so I usually had
enough of conversation. 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 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.

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 this
series of 26 interviews. It is an important question because the wider
world often judges a person by the extent to which one engages 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.

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.1 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, habit, leisure. The enemy of
imagination is the idleness that provides fancy.2 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 even authentic historical documents, mine and
those of others, are products of a human mind and its language, not of
reality itself. Reality could be seen as a white light which each person
sees on a spectrum of colour.

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

The Canadian poet Al Purdy(1918-2000) admitted pretty 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 these places. He was one of
the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century.
1
Circle of Unity: Bahá'í Approaches to Current Social Issues, editor,
Anthony Lee, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1984.
2
W. Kaye Lamb, "Vancouver, George," Dictionary of Canadian
Biography, Volume IV; B. Anderson, The Life and Voyage of Captain
George Vancouver, Surveyor of the Sea (U of Toronto Press, Toronto,
1966, p. 155.
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, and for a great many reasons until I was too tired, 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.

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 and 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 you wanted to meet Larkin
then you had to make sure you didn't ever talk about poetry. You could
talk about jazz and anything else. So these friends arranged this meeting
and left the two of them in the pub. Finally, after a few beers, Larkin
leans across the table and says, "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 spirit I read his poetry or I read about him
but I have no strong desire to meet and have a chat. But I like to talk
about poetry and that is why I’ve simulated these 26 interviews.

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 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.
The poets I do engage with hit home quite deeply, but they are relatively
few.

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
the writer and the reader here is not due to being taken to another realm,
although this can occur but, more importantly or just as importantly, it is
due to seeing meaning, hidden meaning, meaning that did not exist
before, in one’s experience, in the things and thoughts themselves, to go
beyond the familiar, to make 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.3

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 1954.4 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.5
3
Don McKay, “Local Wilderness,” editorial, The Fiddlehead, 1991,
pp.5-6.
4
A.J.M Smith, “Refining Fire: The Meaning and Use of Poetry,” On
Poetry and Poets: Selected Essays, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto,
1977, p.64.
5
Anne Compton, “Patterns for Poetry: Poetics in Seven Poems by A.J.M.
Smith,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 28, spring/summer,
1991.
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”6; that music is a ladder for our souls, “a
means whereby they may be lifted up into the realm on high” 7; that the art
of drama will become “a great educational power”8; that when a painter
takes up her paint brush, it is as if she were “at prayer in the Temple” 9;
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.”10 The beloved
Guardian(Bahá'í leader from 1921-1957) saw such spiritual power in the
arts that he predicted they would eventually do much to help the Cause
spread the spirit of love and unity.

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.

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
6
Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 168.
7
Kitáb-i-Aqdas, paragraph 51.
8
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London, p. 93.
9
Ludwig Tuman, Mirror of the Divine: Art in the Bahá’í World
Community, p. 45
10
‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Blomfield, The Chosen Highway, p. 167.
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.

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 90 and lives in a little town called Beauty

Point in northern Tasmania, 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. Talk a little bit about the types of poetry written and read today?

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.”11 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
11
Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?,” Commentary, Volume 86, No.
2, 1988, p.15.
fundamentally other than writing. Sound, he writes, “is not simply
perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.”12
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,
coffeehouses, galleries and bookstores.

I used to go to such places in the early to mid-1990s. I don’t have the

social-synergy to do so any more. If I had come to them sooner and to
poetry sooner I might have found them right up my alley.

I’ll close with some words from American poet William Carlos Williams:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.13

26. Talk a little about courage, creativity, ecstasy and fantasy if you
can.

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. “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 our community in failing to make
your contribution to the whole.”

“A chief characteristic of this courage,” he went on to say, “is that it

requires a centeredness within our 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 is that they
pertain to those areas in which a person consciously has worked
laboriously and with dedication. The Dionysian principle of ecstasy is
12
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word, Routledge, NY, 1982, p.32.
13
William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” The
Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II, New
Directions, NY, 1988, Book I, lines 317-21, 318.
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.

Concluding Comment:

I began asking and answering these questions in 1998, as I indicated in

the preamble to this simulated interview. I added more questions and
answers, as I also said at the outset of this interview, a decade later in
2009 and 2010.(Last update made: 1 February 2010. Total: 4100 words)