[RonPrice]

I wrote the following appreciation/statement after reading/browsing through "Adrienne Rich, What I Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics."
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CRYSTALLIZATION AND THE OCTOPUS

The octopus is the most ambidextrous creature alive. Man, in his ability to live and work within a multitude of polarities, has the most flexible mind of all living creatures. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Incredible Sickers”, 6:00 pm, Sunday, 25 August 1996.

I feel no division between art and action, no social fragmentation of poetry from life, no ivory tower, no barricades. I work in solitude surrounded by community, many communities, in dialogue and silence, alternating between myself and some collectivity. This poetry and this action moves through my solitude and its membrances. I experience the pull of the inner and the outer, voices often wrenching me between poles, between the dichotomy of active and contemplative. This dichotomy, part of the very mystery of polarity, is at the heart of oneness. The experience of oneness is the experiencing of an alternation between the active and the contemplative, an alternation as necessary as day following night. For this is oneness. -Ron Price, thanks to Adrienne Rich, What I Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, WW Norton and Co, NY, 1993, p.53.

If you want an experience of an alien life form,
you could just dive into the sea in the right
places and meet the Houdini of the ocean deeps.
This hunter and gatherer of the last frontier on
earth-the great abyss-this cephalopod, the octopus,
a skeemy predator, swimming and foraging as he
has for one hundred and fifty million years. He was
a professional long before homo sapiens sapiens
emerged looking like the mammals of yesteryear.
He is still a professional, as we learn to map his
life in this most recent epoch of the Formative Age
when knowledge continues its explosive journey from
these abyssal depths to the edges of the universe,
pioneering processes crystallized by other pioneers.1

26 August 1996

PS. I often wonder what the relationship is between the extension of the Baha’i Faith and the extension of knowledge on this earth. I like to think that the Baha’i pioneer has been a critical variable in this complex equation. Pioneers have been so critical to the extension of the new light that their true value is largely unappreciated, even by themselves.
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This book wasalso useful to me as a poet:Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas

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MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS

We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London, 1968(1965), p. 26.

I feel as if I have become
more introverted with the years.
I bring the world’s wonders
into myself.
I put words around
every atom in existence
and the essence of all created things,
as much as I can,
within my limitations,
except what the garment of words
can not clothe
and what those mystic tongues
and their mysterious melodies
find no ear with which to hear.

9 October 1999
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