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Description of Ron Price's Blog at this Literature Network Forum

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Ron Price
, 01-15-2013 at 10:04 PM (102464 Views)
PIONEERING OVER FIVE EPOCHS

A. MY TYPE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

1. Everything I do with other people online is part of my particular type of social networking. My social networking is associated with three basic activities: (a) the creation of a personal webpage that serves as a home base, a central hub, for my writing, for teaching and consolidation, for service and social activism, as well as for feedback from others---should they wish; (b) the creation of a detailed personal profile(see Appendix 1 below) which I post at over 8000 internet sites which readers at these sites can access, again, if they wish; and finally (c) posting my writing at these 8000+ sites, and interacting with others about my posts and theirs. In the process I promote my website, and my writing, at these 8000+ internet sites.

2. In the last decade, 2003 to 2013, I have created an extensive audience or readership. I address myself to a circle, a crowd or single individuals. I try to make of my interactions more than the typical ones found at sites like Facebook and twitter. The interactions or connections at such popular social networking sites often reduce friendship to a feeling or an image, a sense of connection to faraway or nearby friends about everyday things based, for the most part, on very short, pithy posts. Such connections involve posts that often contain little about one’s true difficulties in life. A world of privacy and an image is created. There is nothing wrong with that, with this type of site and networking style, but it is not my style, not my approach, not my MO, modus operandi, to use a who-dun-it term.

3. I post a great deal about what I think in the form of prose and poetry, generally more extended pieces of writing than the posts found in the Facebook and twitter world. My posts are far beyond the one-liners and the jokes, the what I did today and what I ate for dinner, the I poke you and I like this, but I don’t like that, the ‘here are some photos of this’ and ‘here are some pictures of that’, ‘here is a video of this’ and ‘here is a piece of music,’ etc.

B. MY WEBSITE

1. My website has been on the internet for the last 17 years: 1997-2013. It is part of a tapestry, or perhaps a jig-saw puzzle is a more accurate word, for all my poetry and prose both at my website and elsewhere in cyberspace at those 8000+ sites mentioned above. I have dozens of links at my site, some linked to my writing at other internet sites, and some linked to resources created by others. I have created a large thread of words across the internet since leaving the world of jobs in the late 1990s and taking a sea-change at the age of 55. These last 14 years, 1999 to 2013, have been busy ones of self-publishing, to use a quite appropriate term for my extensive internet posting.

2. My cyberspace creation is made by a now self-employed individual: a retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, taxi-driver and ice-cream salesman. I am now a poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and scholar, researcher and reader, online blogger and journalist, scribbler and sampler within the immense commentariat and blogosphere that is the world-wide-web.

3. I am now 69 and I attempt to endow various themes and a wide range of subjects in the arts and sciences with many layers of meaning. In these last 17 years on the world-wide-web I have evoked a complex range of responses in readers who come upon my work, responses which range from lavish enthusiasm to utter indifference and quite intense criticism. The solitary work of literary creation requires a type of talent, some earned ability or unearned gift of grace which is almost never collaborative, except in the sense that I borrow ideas and special phrases and sentences from the works of others.

Social networking by most people at SNS like Facebook expose readers to this or that book, this or that video, this or that piece of music, this or that restaurant or food dish, this or that pleasurable activity, quotation or pithy post of some kind, this or that idea or cause. For the most part my social networking is of another kind.

3.1 The solitude I require to create an essay, a poem or a book requires my ability to draw on the globally interrelated, interdependent and interlocked system of the WWW to market my wares. Until my work is ready to be placed in cyberspace the activity is intensely private, although I often draw on the work of other writers in composing my own literary creations. The marketing of my work is also private, and then the feedback comes in or it does not as the case may be. Not everything I write in cyberspace is commented on by others.

B.1 MY WEBSITE AND OTHER INTERNET SITES

I will continue to use my website as the central hub for my literary work, for my internet teaching and learning activity, for my now several million words and many books on the internet in this 2nd decade of the 21st century. My writing is found in the form of: essays and blogs, poems and articles, ebooks and message boards, threads and special topic sites, indeed a myriad types of discussions. I do not engage, though, in any sort of aggressive proselytising or heated exchange at those 8000 websites that are part of this personal and industrious exercise. When what I write produces vehemence and invective, heated criticism at some site, I simply leave if I am unable to cool the emotional climate at the site. Sometimes I am banned before this occurs for a variety of reasons.

C. MY WRITING STYLE AND MY VALUES

1.I have tried over the last several decades of my life, looking back as far as my own junior youth in the 1950s, to develop a writing style which, while fusing together material from many academic disciplines, from my own life as well as from my value, belief and attitude base, aims to be both provocative and intellectually stimulating on the one hand and light and entertaining on the other. In writing, as in daily life though, one wins sometimes and one loses at other times; one’s writing appeals to some and not to others. One’s value, belief and attitude base is simply, or not-so-simply, another word for one’s religion. Faith, to put this another way, is a set of assumptions around which one places one’s emotions and then proceeds to act and argue one’s case before the court of life.

2.I possess an obvious enthusiasm for my evolving values, beliefs and attitudes as well as the several causes I promote or I would not have been associated with them in their overt form---for nearly 60 years; nor would I be promoting my ideas in a multitude of forms, subtle and not-so-subtle, on the internet as I do and have done since retiring from FT work in 1999, PT in 2003 and most casual-volunteer work in 2005.

D. MY READERSHIP

1.I now have several million readers on the internet. It is difficult to guesstimate readership precisely in cyberspace when there are now nearly 300 million sites and over 2 billion users, and when one writes at as many sites as I do. Many of the sites at which I post my writing and interact with others keep me informed about how many people click-on to what I have written.

2.I am engaged in varying degrees of frequency and intensity, in parts of this tapestry, this jig-saw puzzle, this literary product, this creation, this immense pile of words with hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. I keep most of this correspondence as infrequent as possible or I would drown in this new form of letter writing: the email and the internet post.

E. THE WWW AND PUBLISHING

1.This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success, this form of publishing, possible. This teaching and learning exercise, this form of service and often social activism, among the many other functions of my writing in the now wide and extensive dialogue I now have with diverse publics is an enriching one. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft-cover publishers, where it had been without success for the most part from 1981 to 2001, these publishing results with my now extensive readership would never have been achieved.

2.It is my hope that what I write as a result of this self-employment, this literary vocation and avocation, this pleasurable occupation of my leisure time, resonates with both the novitiate and the veteran on the one hand and the great diversity of people who are on a multitude of paths in their journey through life.

F. NOTE

When accessing what I write in cyberspace you can Google: Ron Price, but be aware that there are more than 4000 other Ron Prices now on the web. Some of them are men of fame and others of notoriety. You can also Google: Pioneering Over Five Epochs or 'Ron Price forums' or 'Ron Price' followed by…..many other words and phrases literally several 1000 possibilities to access what I have written. My website, to reiterate, is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ My email address is: [email protected] is you want to write to me.

APPENDIX 1:

EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2013

2010-2013-Retired and on a pension in George Town, Tasmania
1999-2009-Writer & Author, Poet & Publisher, Editor & Researcher. Retired Teacher & Lecturer, Tutor & Adult Educator, Taxi-Driver & Ice-Cream Salesman, George Town Tasmania Australia
2002-2005-Program Presenter City Park Radio Launceston
1999-2004-Tutor &/or President George Town School for Seniors Inc
-----------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS OF RETIREMENT FROM FT EMPLOYMENT--------
1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies & Human Services West Australian Department of Training
1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies & Co-ordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland WA
1982-1985 -Adult Educator Open College of Tafe Katherine NT
1981 -Maintenance Scheduler Renison Bell Zeehan Tasmania
1980-Unemployed due to illness and recovery
1979-Editor External Studies Unit Tasmanian CAE; Youth Worker Resource Centre Association; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC---all in Launceston Tasmania
1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities Ballarat CAE Ballarat, Victoria
1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill Victoria
1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies Tasmanian CAE Launceston, Tasmania
1972-1973 -High School Teacher South Australian Education Department
1971-Primary School Teacher Whyalla South Australia
--------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA AND BELOW MY YEARS IN CANADA--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1969-1971 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County Board of Education Picton Ontario Canada
1969-Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co Ltd Toronto Ontario
1967-68 -Community Teacher Department of Indian Affairs & Northern Development in Frobisher Bay NWT Canada
1959-67 -Summer jobs-1 to 4 months each- from grade 10 to end of university
1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni-1963-1966, Windsor Teachers’ College-1966/7
1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence (1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario
1943 to 1944-Conception in October 1943 to birth in July 1944 in Hamilton Ontario

2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA TO 2013

I have been married twice for a total of 46 years. My second wife is a Tasmanian, aged 66. We’ve had one child: age 35. I have two step-children: ages: 47 and 42, three step-grandchildren, ages 19, 17 and 2, as well as one grandchild aged 16 months. All of the above applies in January 2013. I am 69, am a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written several books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2003 and volunteer teaching/work in 2005 after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and another 18 as a student. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 53 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 230 lbs, eyes-brown/hair-grey, Caucasian.

My website is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ You can also go to any search engine and type: Ron Price followed by any one of a number of words in addition to: poetry, forums, religion, literature, history, bipolar disorder, psychology, sociology, Baha’i, inter alia, to access my writing________________________
End of document

Updated 04-11-2013 at 08:58 AM by Ron Price (to fine-tune some editing)

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  1. Ron Price's Avatar
    GLUCK AND ME: 1962 to 2012

    Two Different Leagues in the Sea of Poetry

    Part 1:

    As far back as I can remember, and my memories go back to the late 1940s when I was still in early childhood usually defined by developmental psychologists as the time period from the age of two until at least the age of five years, I have found that the people in my life had a wide-range of attitudes to, and beliefs about, me. This is a common human experience, is hardly surprising, and should not raise any eyebrows.

    In the last 30 years, 1983 to 2013, years during which I have had my poetry and prose published, this same range of appreciations exist: from high praise, to intense criticism and dislike, to outright indifference.

    In the last 24 hours I came across the poetry of Louise Gluck and found a similar range of reactions to her work. This prose-poem is about the reactions of others to both her life and work, and the reactions of others to mine.

    Part 2:

    “A Glück poem is determined to wrest meaning from circumstance, to force a pattern over the chaos of a lived life.” So writes Irish poet and novelist, Nick Laird(1975- ), about the poetry of Louise Gluck, and so I could write in the same vein about some of the purpose of my own prose-poetic output over the last thirty years.

    Gluck wrote, in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993, “poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response.”(1) In the case of my poetry, though, the trappings of chronology and comment are part and parcel of my modus operandi and style.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Nick Laird, “The Triumph of the Survivor”, a review of Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 in The New York Review of Books, 21/3/’13.

    Part 3:

    Louise Elisabeth Glück was born 15 months before I was not that far as the crow flies---on this planet that is gravitating slowly into a neighborhood---from where I was born. We both belong to that generation ‘the-war-babies’. She is an American poet and has been publishing her poetry since 1968. I had hardly scratched the surface of my poetic life by 1968, but I had begun to have the kind of experiences that, in part, led to the kind of poetry that was the Gluck trademark: suffering, depression and alienation. My experiences, my philosophy, my religion, my poetry went in very different directions.

    This most famous of modern American poets was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. I am not in Louise’s poetic league having only published poetry on the internet for the last decade: 2003 to 2013. My fame is measured in nanoseconds across the 200 to 300 million websites, and their 2 to 3 billion users.

    Gluck’s fame is measured across more than 40 years of publications, as well as the praise, the opinions, and opprobrium of many. My writing shares some similarities to her style and content, but we are very different people and poets.

    Part 4:

    The fragmentation of your work hints
    at a mind trying to order itself…wrest
    meaning from circumstance, & that’s(1)
    what I’ve been trying to do for decades.

    Our poetic works record a movement
    from emotional instability to regained
    control, and so much else. My poetry,
    too, is self-centered, often colloquial &
    in an idiom of ordinary speech. I write
    of both a fallen world as well as a new
    one that is embryonic, just been born:
    an embryogenesis, vivid planetization,
    globalization, a sense and sensibility of
    one world, one humanity, one religion.

    (1) Few poets have sounded as depressed or as alienated as Gluck; poetry and the visionary are intertwined; part of her impetus is Greek and Roman mythology; she writes poetry that leads readers to their inner world; it is poetry that uses straightforward language and can be understood by readers; it is close to the diction of ordinary speech, but it is far from colloquial.

    Her poetry is self-centered and comes directly from her life, her losses and tragedies, her inner life. She is the poet of a fallen world. Her work explores the agony of the self, failed love-affairs and existential despair.-Ron Price with thanks to Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/louise-gluck

    Part 5:

    In Brian Henry’s review of The Seven Ages (2001) by Louise Glück in Contemporary Poetry Review, entitled “Louise Gluck’s Monumental Narcissism”, 8 July 2003, he writes:

    “Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry. Louise Glück’s life might be richer than most, but in her continued fetishization of her life and her self--not the self that eats and sleeps and pays bills, but “Louise Glück The Poet” self--she demonstrates a disconcerting inability to find her way out of the cul-de-sac of subjectivity.”

    “She has forgotten how to imagine, or even re-imagine, her life. Instead, she looks upon her past in The Seven Ages (2001) and assumes it’s of interest solely because she is Louise Glück. Only poets accustomed to thinking of themselves as Poets would try to get away with this. In The Seven Ages Glück views herself not as a person but as a protagonist, the world not as a place but as a stage, as Shakespeare did in his 'all the world’s a stage'."

    "Whether or not this introspection is the result of years of psychoanalysis, the posturing becomes tedious. Increasingly at an imaginative loss, Glück mines her private life in a way both exhibitionist and narcissistic.(1)"

    Part 6:

    Is my poetry exhibitionist as it
    solicits interest? Is it narcissistic
    as it presumes the interest? Is it
    a naïve brand of obsessive self-
    reflection or self-love? Has my
    self-scrutiny become ridiculous
    in its perseverance and cavalier
    in its assumptions? Are these
    poems just a form of memoir?

    I use this genre to try to explain
    my life…explore my experience.
    Does my writing depend on my
    identity to be interesting?....My
    poems are successful to me but
    only, I’m sure, to a few readers.

    My poetry is, it seems to me, a
    matter of a certain marketing: is
    this art? Well, it is to me, and a
    few others who read my work.

    My poems embrace spheres beyond the self,
    transforming my life into a rich imaginative
    realm which illuminates the vast field of the
    psycho-emotional constructing as I travel
    this literary road: a life, society, a religion.

    Part 7:

    (1) Brian Henry has published poetry and criticism in numerous magazines around the world including: the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Stand, Overland, and Threepenny Review.

    His first book of poetry, Astronaut, appeared recently in the UK and in Slovenia in translation. Astronaut was published in 2000 in the US by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second book, Graft, was published in 2003 by New Issue Press and by Arc in England. He has edited the international magazine Verse since 1995, and was a Fulbright scholar in Australia in 1997-98, where he was Poetry Editor of Meanjin. He teaches at the University of Georgia.

    Ron Price
    10/4/’13 to 11/4/'13.
    Updated 04-11-2013 at 09:03 AM by Ron Price (to fine-tune some editing)