Dante's Paradiso and My Poetry: Juxtaposed

KNEADED

The whole of Dante’s Paradiso is an opening and a clearing of Dante's eyes. I could very well see my own poetic opus with this aphoristic note. To return to God, a man must open his eyes, open them to and into a just self-love. Bahá'u'lláh says in one of His many aphorisms on introspection and the love of self and God: “man must open one eye to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved and close the other to the world and all that is therein.” And again: “One speck of chastity is greater than a hundred thousand years of worship and a sea of knowledge.” The mystic vision and narcissism are perilously similar in their function and structure. Dante, profound theologian as well as poet, acknowledges that this peril is a crucial element in life’s pilgrimage. This theme is also mentioned again and again in my poetry. I discuss again and again the poet’s, the pilgrim's, slow and painful emergence from narcissism to a just, a necessary, self-love and to the acquisition of chastity. Scribe that he is (Paradiso, 10.27), Dante transcribes his memory and his vision in his canto. I transcribe my view, my reflection, in booklet after booklet of my poetry. The whole movement of vision in Paradiso is from sight to reflection. In my poetry the movement is back and forth, up and down, around and around in an interdependence of diverse points of view rather than the totality of a single vision. -Ron Price with thanks to R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry, Pilgrim Books, 1983.

I’d like to think I had the power
of precise statement found in all
great poets and again and again
in every new phrase but, sadly,
I describe things hazily with an
intense personal way of feeling
because I feel but do not see
with the necessary particularity.

But out of what seems a slimy mud
of words, a lotus-flower grows
and with it imprecisions which
approximate my thoughts and
feelings to some order of speech
which springs like an incantation
with its beauty and truth to all
that I feel, to complex states,
recreated for readers by the letter
and the symbolic spirit rooted in
and nourished by my emotions.

I put so much down as if by
mystic vision and narcissism
so firmly intertwined, kneaded
into the very clay of everyman.

Ron Price
May 28th 2006