They Came: The Origins of My Poetry

[Ron Price]

THEY CAME

They came as separate poems and when I had what seemed like a sizeable number, I think it was usually somewhere between about fifty and a hundred, I made them into a little booklet. The plastic binding cost me five dollars at a local Xerox shop; the paper and the ink cartridge had another cost, let's say seven or eight dollars all up. From 1992 to 2004 I produced 53 booklets of some 6000 poems. It works out to a little more than a poem a day. I started writing poems back in 1962 at the age of eighteen with Cathy Saxe who lived in George Town Ontario. Then, in 1980, I started saving the poems I wrote. I was thirty-six at the time. At 48 I became even more serious about poetry. It was then 1992. As far as direction in my poetry was concerned, well, I really didn’t know where it was going. I had, from time to time, several senses or intimations of direction and, after one period of strong intimation in the mid-1990s, I organized my poetry into four time periods, each with a different heading or title drawing on the historical construction of the Shrine of the Bab and its embellishments in the gardens and terraces on Mt. Carmel as my metaphor, my physwical analogue.

I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like, say, my autobiography, or my critical work on the study of Roger White's poetry. I don't lay them out like my website, my letters, my essays or my attempts at novels. My poetry has some inner evolution which, even after 42 years, is essentially mysterious.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 12, 2004.

Back in the '80s
I took little interest
in rhyming bed & head:
there were enough, I thought,
banalities in life
without my adding to them.

There was so much
I did not need to know:
the Hang Seng, the FTSE
the price of gold,
the price of a new hoe.

My eye, as Shakespeare said,
was in a fine frenzy rolling
from earth to heaven and
heaven to earth........,with
my imagination bodying forth,
turning things I did know
into a shape, giving them a name,
a habitation--something more
than airy nothing.

Ron Price
May 12 2004

[Koa]

I don’t write books of poetry as books. I don’t write them like, say, my autobiography, or my critical work on the study of Roger White's poetry.

I sometimes think of putting my poems in order and make a little book, just photocopies, just 1 or 2 copies, just for me...(I'm not aiming at hoping for publication, I don't care). As a diary indeed. I think it's a cool thing, very insightful if this makes sense (probably not).
They may be a memory even for others...even later (i wouldnt mind being an admired poet when I'm dead ).

So...thanks for sharing this, it's nice

[jessw]

wow i have at least 20-25 poems but since i moved i lost most of em
but i dont like sharing mine i dunno why i guess because its from my heart and i dont open up easily i have a damn manic disorder but meh its one of those days but i gotta say thats cheap to make your own book

[Ron Price]

I did not see your response until tonight, some 13 months after you wrote. I guess it's better late than never. Sharing poetry can be a problem; it is not a simple thing like sharing news about weather or belief in God. In a way it's a like a lot of things in life. As Baha'u'llah writes:

"Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed is timely and not every timely utterance is suited to the ears of the hearer."