RonPrice
June 19th 2007, 08:32 AM
DIMINISHED TONES AND FLATTENED EDGES
John Keats said that when he went into a room full of people he was in a very short time annihiated. This was partly why he could say he had no identity. Poetry was for him, as it was for all the romantic and post-romantic poets, largely a self-referential body of work which responded to monuments of its own magnificence as much as to personal experience.-In Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Paul Kane, Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 119-140.
I get the distinct feeling I have been away for awhile,
that I have disappeared in another,
that I have become this to that person
and that to this person,
the interlocutor
the transmitter, the blender,
the facilitator,
the manager of words.
I have been a hundred thousand people now,
a tincture of this and a touch of that
and now I want to be me;
in the deepest solitude
I want to reach the other;
with yearning’s keenest note
I want to reexperience past moments
of pause and epiphany,
to renovate and redeem
the diminished tones,
the flattened edges of existence:
with books, with nature,
with the sweetness of my own melody.
Kindling my own soul
with the dance of language,
His and mine and others;
exploring my vision
I will regenerate
through poetry’s powers,
seize the meaning of the moment
with intense imagination
and translate, as best I can,
into words that otherness
which is my soul.
Perhaps, God-willing,
I will see things afresh
in this new cosmology
and speak for others
through my world
of emotion and mind.
Ron Price
6 March 1999
John Keats said that when he went into a room full of people he was in a very short time annihiated. This was partly why he could say he had no identity. Poetry was for him, as it was for all the romantic and post-romantic poets, largely a self-referential body of work which responded to monuments of its own magnificence as much as to personal experience.-In Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, Paul Kane, Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 119-140.
I get the distinct feeling I have been away for awhile,
that I have disappeared in another,
that I have become this to that person
and that to this person,
the interlocutor
the transmitter, the blender,
the facilitator,
the manager of words.
I have been a hundred thousand people now,
a tincture of this and a touch of that
and now I want to be me;
in the deepest solitude
I want to reach the other;
with yearning’s keenest note
I want to reexperience past moments
of pause and epiphany,
to renovate and redeem
the diminished tones,
the flattened edges of existence:
with books, with nature,
with the sweetness of my own melody.
Kindling my own soul
with the dance of language,
His and mine and others;
exploring my vision
I will regenerate
through poetry’s powers,
seize the meaning of the moment
with intense imagination
and translate, as best I can,
into words that otherness
which is my soul.
Perhaps, God-willing,
I will see things afresh
in this new cosmology
and speak for others
through my world
of emotion and mind.
Ron Price
6 March 1999