Slowly acquired consciousness

Listening to Clive James and Peter Porter, two Australian poets, this afternoon,(1) discussing Australian literature in the last half of the twentieth century; to a reading of poetry on 'Poetica,' poetry in the last quarter of that century; and reading, shortly thereafter, about Bob Dylan and the release of his first album in 1962, took me back to my earliest Baha'i experience in 1962 when I started pioneering, to my first major pieces of writing in that same year in grade 12 English class and how, in my writing in the last forty years and like most of my fellow Australian writers, I have learned from the contemporary and everyday world in developing my talent.

During these years a world literature has developed. Australian literature has developed a strength and a separateness and possesses a good vantage point in relation to the whole of world literature. Two of Australia's major writers in this half century, Patrick White and Les Murray, attempt to assuage their demons, the massacres that take place in their heads and so do I, although in recent years these massacres have been lessening in intensity and in their painful affects.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC Radio National, 2:05-3:30 pm, 26 May 2001.

This consciousness was slowly acquired;
I took it for granted, mostly, back then.
I breathed its air and took it in
like the bread and butter
that I always liked for dinner.
I could not have told you
about my 'national' experience
or what it meant to 'be a Baha'i',
for these were pre-articulate days,
a little like Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon
days when all I could make were sounds.

But my world was saturated with language.
Words came in from dawn to dusk
and at bed time, everyday, day-after-day.
These were the ninth and tenth stages of history.
The Kingdom of God on earth had begun,1
little did I know, back then.

And slowly I became conscious;
I began to know things about what I knew,
know what it meant to be a Canadian,
an Australian and a Baha'i,
my brain was on a sort of white-heat.
I did not put it down on a series of albums
but, beginning in 1962,
I engaged in a battle so old
as to know no name.
I was a sorry soldier,
so often my camp in ruins.

Perhaps it was those shining names
on scattered tombs, a legion
stretching to horizon's end,
champions of the Peerless,
darlings of the Friend2
did leaven my world
and furnish it with power.

1 1953 according to the Guardian
2 Roger White, "Lines from a Battlefield," Another Song Another Season, 1979, p.112.

Ron Price
26 May 2001

Thanks for posting Ron. I'm a fan of Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter and have yet to graduate to Les Murray (probably a gender bias is at work here!) but I'm working my way through.

Loved the lines:

I breathed its air and took it in
like the bread and butter
that I always liked for dinner.

I engaged in a battle so old
as to know no name.
I was a sorry soldier,
so often my camp in ruins.

and the final stanza. I'm going to read more and write less for a while.

Belated thanks, Delta40. I did not see your post of some 9 months ago until this afternoon. I'll say something about Gwen before passing on to my afternoon's jobs.-Ron
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Q: Gwen Harwood the Australian poet who died two years ago in Hobart said she did not think about her position in the literary field; she did not intellectualize about her writing. You appear to do some intellectualizing about your work. How would you describe your attitude to your writing?

P: Until I retired in 1999 I really did not have a position in the literary field. I was a solitary person after I left my various professional and public responsibilities. I was not against the idea of a public definition, fame or wealth and if it comes my way that will be fine, but I don’t seek it out. One of the reasons I have put more than 2 dozen interviews together, though, is that I think about what I write. I seek out a sense of definition, a sense of an articulated perspective. I want to be able to put into words what I’m trying to do. It is part of being a wordsmith, part of the autobiographical process. But it is not just an autobiographical surge of the spirit. What I write is, among other things, part of the common task we all have to trying to express our spiritual understandings to each other.

Gwen called herself a Romantic. She said she thought it was “a nice thing to be called.”2 I’ve always thought of W.B. Yeats as the last of the Romantics, although certain Romantic tendencies linger: the desire to reform humanity, messianic interests. I have such interests. It would be difficult for a Baha’i not to have them. These interviews express a certain intellectualization of what I do, where I’m at. My writing is also a bi-product of tranquillity, emotions recollected in tranquillity as Wordsworth put in 200 years ago. After three decades of the hectic, the problems of maturity, marriage and career I feel a certain peace, what one poet called the golden years.
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'nuff for now...