Ron Price
07-01-2004, 09:17 AM
SECOND SIGHT
This passage tries to describe the origins of Price’s poetry in childhood, in his wanderings, in his emotional ups-and-downs, in fate and free will, in his reading, in an energetic pursuit of truth which eventually produced an ‘intoxication’ but ‘quiet’ and ‘ripe’ and in a ‘second sight’. The poem ends at this point because it is a surprise to Price, not understood and the result, perhaps, of all that went before. -Ron Price with appreciation to David G. Riede, Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority, Cornell UP, London, 1991, p.163.
He tries to describe the feelings he had
when he sat in his mother’s arms,
or when his father dried his hair,
or when he wandered over two continents
seeking seeds to plant in new hearts,
stirred to ecstasy or plummeted to
the depths of sorrow by incidents,
necessary, will-swept, fate-laden.
And then there was this new-found verse
with its deep cross-fertilized joy
with other verse and words
from men of genius and visionary power,
as if blown on the winds of mystery
across the sands of time.
Much of it was work,
but the context was more
of an orgy of acquisitiveness,
an exhilaration of thought,
reading and creation
amounting to an intoxication:
the quiet drinker
who gradually fades away
and is no trouble to anyone.
This shadowy-light-cast poetic
tells of some kind of change,
as if the fruit was ripe now
for the plucking,
ripe for the circumfusion
of form and substance,
perhaps by some veil of divine light
that helped these intricate turnings of verse
create a glory born of second sight.
Ron Price 1 July 1995
This passage tries to describe the origins of Price’s poetry in childhood, in his wanderings, in his emotional ups-and-downs, in fate and free will, in his reading, in an energetic pursuit of truth which eventually produced an ‘intoxication’ but ‘quiet’ and ‘ripe’ and in a ‘second sight’. The poem ends at this point because it is a surprise to Price, not understood and the result, perhaps, of all that went before. -Ron Price with appreciation to David G. Riede, Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority, Cornell UP, London, 1991, p.163.
He tries to describe the feelings he had
when he sat in his mother’s arms,
or when his father dried his hair,
or when he wandered over two continents
seeking seeds to plant in new hearts,
stirred to ecstasy or plummeted to
the depths of sorrow by incidents,
necessary, will-swept, fate-laden.
And then there was this new-found verse
with its deep cross-fertilized joy
with other verse and words
from men of genius and visionary power,
as if blown on the winds of mystery
across the sands of time.
Much of it was work,
but the context was more
of an orgy of acquisitiveness,
an exhilaration of thought,
reading and creation
amounting to an intoxication:
the quiet drinker
who gradually fades away
and is no trouble to anyone.
This shadowy-light-cast poetic
tells of some kind of change,
as if the fruit was ripe now
for the plucking,
ripe for the circumfusion
of form and substance,
perhaps by some veil of divine light
that helped these intricate turnings of verse
create a glory born of second sight.
Ron Price 1 July 1995