Comment On The Evolution Of This Poetry

COMMENT ON THE EVOLUTION OF THIS POETRY ​

and ​

MY LIFE AS A HIPPY(1959-1969) AND AFTER​

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From 1959 to 1969 I was in my teens and early twenties. It was in this period that the term hippy became popularized. Until I was 23 I concentrated on getting an education and qualifications so I could enter the job market, the professions. This was a slow and complex process. Words were the only things I felt strong affinities for, besides people; but no obvious talents of significance emerged. From 1967 to 1982 I worked mostly as a teacher, suffered four hypomanic episodes, became settled into a first and then a second marriage, lived among Aboriginals and Eskimos and moved to Australia. By 1992, after 25 years of communicating with students, trying to expand and harmonize Baha’i communities and my personal life, I began to turn to poetry as a way of communicating with myself, with my inner life and private character with specificity and detail. The pull to writing, to poetry, seemed overwhelming. Perhaps this was to be my reward for thirty years of pioneering.



I tried, as far as I was able, to make what I wrote accessible, understandable, readable to others. Several things made this process difficult: the problem of publishing and without publishing 99.9% of the world would have no access at all to what I wrote; the dominantly religious orientation to what I wrote made it irrelevant to the dominant secular society of which I was a part; most people found poetry either uninteresting or in some way or other a genre that did not speak to them with much meaning; those that did read my poetry, at least in these earliest years of my writing, found it difficult to understand, even after I had simplified it as far as it was possible to do so; those that did understand it fell into two categories: one that did not like it and one that did. Keeping all of these factors in mind made me disinclined to want to share it, explain it or promote it with much enthusiasm. Any enthusiasm I did have for publishing was nipped in the bud by the several Baha’i publishing houses which either expressed no interest or felt it was not timely to publish since the market for poetry was too small. I did not see myself in the same league as Roger anyway. If only a few appreciated him, fewer would appreciate me I thought to myself. Publishing one’s own material was still too costly. Perhaps I’d put it on Internet.



And so I took a fundamentally different tack to Roger and to other Baha’i poets whom I saw publishing their own work in small volumes which by the 1990s were beginning to dot the intellectual and artistic horizon of the Baha’i community. After nearly two years of sending copies of my poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library I became more than a little conscious that my original autobiography, Pioneering Over Three Epochs(1), which I had already sent to this library early in 1993, was being added to at a much more profound level than my simple narrative in that original document. This poetry, subsumed under an autobiographical label and housed in that library, would serve as an archival statement for future generations. I had developed a keen interest in receiving the assistance of holy souls after their ascension, in the dozen or so years from 1980 to 1992, and I would aim to communicate with those yet unborn. Any communicating of my poetry that got done with those among my contemporaries I came to see as a bonus.



I occasionally got a poem published, perhaps half a dozen from the over two thousand I had written from September 1992 to September 1995. Occasionally I gave one, a few or a booklet to a friend, an interested inquirer, or an institution, in response to an expressed interest. But I became much more enamoured by the process than the content; the process was so personally enriching, invigorating, satisfying that I came to be less and less interested in promotion. I felt as if I was, to use Rilke’s metaphor, turning my memories and impressions into blood. Perhaps it was partly the sense of reliving past experiences, freshly minted as it were. Perhaps it was the struggle to transmute personal experience into rich, universal statements, insights, comment that I became entranced with; or the translation of knowledge into feeling and feeling into knowledge; perhaps I actually received assistance from holy souls; perhaps I would in fact provide a rich reservoir of archival poetry for some future age, a reservoir that would illumine these days before the Lesser Peace and would leave traces that would last forever. It was worth taking the shot. The goal was genuinely awe-inspiring and, although I’d never know if I succeeded, it satisfied my thrill-seeking propensities. Much of my work over the decades in the Administrative Order as a pioneer on the homefront and overseas had been quite a buzz; indeed, I often felt like a secret-agent man offering unobtrusively and as seductively as I could, the "fresh leaves, the bossoms and fruits of consecrated joy."(2) I needed a new elixir. And even if noone ever read my poetry, it gave me great joy to write it. I found a source of joy and I tried to give it a voice. It was like an enormous step-up transformer to my inner life and private experience, quite beyond anything I had ever known. As Robert Louis Stevenson said once: "to miss the joy is to miss all."(3)



However one defines or expresses this process, one thing stood out. I had come at last to discover what Shoghi Effendi had meant when he emphasized the one thing that would ensure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause. The extent to which one’s inner life and private character mirrored forth in their manifold aspects the splendour of those eternal principles proclaimed by Baha’u’llah. I was conscious of both my abasement and my glory. I was defining that inner life and what I wrote was clearly one definition, or many definitions, of the who that I was. There was a new freshness in the air after some stern tests in Baha’i community life, my personal life and my professional life.



I keep an eye, now, on that reader whom I hope will understand. I imagine him or her at some distant decade. But the other eye I close to the world and all that is therein. That eye on the reader I also try to open to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved, as Baha’u’llah puts it. With that open eye I wait, I listen, I ponder, until something shines, stirs, like an emerging spectacle of blessedness. Something in my inner life unfolds, some finely tempered sword comes out of its sheath and sometimes something becomes resplendent and manifest. I ensure that this manifest splendour gets into the Baha’i World Centre Library. Those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence may ensure that the publication of this poetry is endlessly deferred and that it becomes a simple archival specimen read by a few. For what is a manifest splendour to one person is dust and ashes to someone else.



If a future age finds here a forcible expression of the inescapable and massive realities of our moral and spiritual life in these early epochs of the Formative Age, as seen through the experience of one international Baha’i pioneer; if it sees a type of firm meditativeness, a supple and articulate historical sense; if it sees the awkward and tangled reality of our times laid out in all their dark and gleaming colours for everyone to interpret according to their abilities; if what is written here helps that age overcome the power of the past to elude the net of language, then what is found here may play some small and, as yet, indefinable part. I think the exercise if definitely worth the shot.

The lassez-faire, anti-institutionalism, anti-authority, of the hippy generation I had been part of and which, by 1969, represented O.2 per cent of the population of the USA, was headed for trouble. I was one of the lucky few who found a moral base and a sweet reasonableness. I will write more on this later.-Ron Price, Tasmania




______________________footnotes___________________________________

(1) a narrative sent to the Baha’i World Centre Library in April of 1993; poetry sent in January 1994 and periodically after that date; and essays and journal material also sent in 1994 and 1995. Together and with future additions they make the book Pioneering Over Three Epochs.

(2) ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, US, 1975, p.116.

(3) Robert Louis Stevenson, in Christopher Isherwood: Where Joy Resides, Don Bechardy and james Wite, eds., Methuen, London, 1989, .v.





Ron Price

4 December 1995