“A poet writes always of his personal life,” wrote W.B. Yeats.(1) “In his finest work,” Yeats continues, “he writes out of tragedy.” That is partly true of me and my writing coming as much of it does from: tragedy, remorse, despair, a bitter-sweet joyfulness, humanity’s many-coloured coat, lost love, sins of omission and commission and, as Roger White poetizes, the rusted nails of life that wound. But tragedy in its many forms and guises is not all that is at the backdrop and in the raison d’etre of my poetry. I also write of history which hangs like a great tapestry behind the comings-and-goings of our present life, Baha’i mythology and metaphor in the history and writings of this new world Faith in the writings of its Central Figures and I also write, as far as I am able, in an everyday speech that is highly personal and autobiographical. I write frequently about the same themes and some might say that they find my writing far too repetitive and, if not repetitive, at least marred by an excess of personal conviction incompatible with contemporary literary tast and hence difficult to place in a literary journal.(2) I write of my years of teaching, of marriage, of raising children and teaching them, of reading, of talking, of writing, of listening, of walking in the fields of a new system for humanity that captured by spirit and my mind by insensible degrees nearly fifty years ago. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) W.B. Yeats: Essays and Introductions, MacMillan, London, 1971(1961), p.viii; and (2) Roger White, The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.126.

I take pleasure in finding
random events cohering
in a serendipitous pattern
of ordered meaning--even
if I am the only one who
creates and sees this
meaning and the pattern.
In the end one has to
please oneself or one
writes in a condition like a
dry boneyard transfering
words from one graveyard to another.

1  out of 1 found this valuable. Do you find this valuable? Do you?