MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - AWAY FROM HER: THE UNDYING CHALICE--A Movie

RonPrice · 04-08-2011, 01:23 AM

Your responses were appreciated, folks. I post the following prose-poem as a way of indicating how I spend my time as I head into the late evening of my own life.-Ron Price, Australia
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DOROTHY PORTER

Unlike the Australian performance poet par excellence Dorothy Porter who died at the age of 54 this week, as the year 2008 was heading into oblivion, in 1999 I headed for a bunker, head down at the age of 55 after decades of performing. Yes, I put my head down, but put my periscopes up into cyberspace. Like Porter, I enjoy reading my own poetry and I revise it frequently with the feeling, as W.B. Yeats once put it, that each time I revise a poem I create a new one. Unlike Porter, though, I often write at night, indeed just about any time except when I’m: hungry, thirsty, tired, concupiscibly aroused and occupied with the social responsibilities of family, friends and community life.

I like to think that my poetry is, as dear Dorothy Porter emphasized poetry should be, “lucid.” Lucidity implies: lightness, expansiveness, a shining quality, brightness, clarity, transparency, rationality, sanity, perceptiveness and understanding’s wise inner voice. I am as addicted to writing as was Porter. This addiction I have been feeding more and more as my fifties turned into my sixties in this new millennium and I became free, at last, from the duties and tasks involved in: being jobbed, raising a family, taking part in the demands of a large and active Baha’i community life and life’s socialising that seemed to never end during the years of my middle adulthood: age 40 to 60. By the time I went on an old age pension at the age of 65 I was a word-addict.

I write for the common reader and I write to be understood after years of a more obscure poetic, a poetry that made it difficult for readers--or so I was told. I write with the clear intention of finding and holding an audience, a readership. I know this audience is inevitably a coterie as it is for virtually everyone who writes these days. I like to think that, with Dorothy Porter, my poetic lucidity, has “a tongue of fire.” But I know that is not the case, at least as most readers of my work feel the edges of my literary tongue. I am not, like Dylan Thomas or W.B. Yeats, raging against the night in these years of the evening of my life.

I do have a sense of urgency inspired by and related to what I feel must be said but, at the same time, I am sensitive to a myriad of factors that moderates the expression of this urgency. The dictum of Bahá’u’lláh that: “not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed can be regarded as timely nor should every timely utterance be seen as suited to the ears of the hearer.”-Ron Price with appreciation to the life and poetry of Dorothy Porter written on hearing of her passing in the last week of December 2008.

04-08-2011, 01:23 AM	#4
RonPrice Mr RonPrice Posts: 26 Karma: 1010100 Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: George Town Tasmania Australia Device: I have 2 ebooks on the internet	Thanks Folks Your responses were appreciated, folks. I post the following prose-poem as a way of indicating how I spend my time as I head into the late evening of my own life.-Ron Price, Australia ------------------------------- DOROTHY PORTER Unlike the Australian performance poet par excellence Dorothy Porter who died at the age of 54 this week, as the year 2008 was heading into oblivion, in 1999 I headed for a bunker, head down at the age of 55 after decades of performing. Yes, I put my head down, but put my periscopes up into cyberspace. Like Porter, I enjoy reading my own poetry and I revise it frequently with the feeling, as W.B. Yeats once put it, that each time I revise a poem I create a new one. Unlike Porter, though, I often write at night, indeed just about any time except when I’m: hungry, thirsty, tired, concupiscibly aroused and occupied with the social responsibilities of family, friends and community life. I like to think that my poetry is, as dear Dorothy Porter emphasized poetry should be, “lucid.” Lucidity implies: lightness, expansiveness, a shining quality, brightness, clarity, transparency, rationality, sanity, perceptiveness and understanding’s wise inner voice. I am as addicted to writing as was Porter. This addiction I have been feeding more and more as my fifties turned into my sixties in this new millennium and I became free, at last, from the duties and tasks involved in: being jobbed, raising a family, taking part in the demands of a large and active Baha’i community life and life’s socialising that seemed to never end during the years of my middle adulthood: age 40 to 60. By the time I went on an old age pension at the age of 65 I was a word-addict. I write for the common reader and I write to be understood after years of a more obscure poetic, a poetry that made it difficult for readers--or so I was told. I write with the clear intention of finding and holding an audience, a readership. I know this audience is inevitably a coterie as it is for virtually everyone who writes these days. I like to think that, with Dorothy Porter, my poetic lucidity, has “a tongue of fire.” But I know that is not the case, at least as most readers of my work feel the edges of my literary tongue. I am not, like Dylan Thomas or W.B. Yeats, raging against the night in these years of the evening of my life. I do have a sense of urgency inspired by and related to what I feel must be said but, at the same time, I am sensitive to a myriad of factors that moderates the expression of this urgency. The dictum of Bahá’u’lláh that: “not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed can be regarded as timely nor should every timely utterance be seen as suited to the ears of the hearer.”-Ron Price with appreciation to the life and poetry of Dorothy Porter written on hearing of her passing in the last week of December 2008.