Ginsbeg, Me and Our 'Collected Works'

SETTLING DOWN



Ginsberg’s autobiographical poetry, his Collected Works: 1947-1980, gives a shape to his life. There is a sense here of theatre, of playing to the crowd, of the location of the self in place and time. There are many anatomies of loneliness. There are our embarrassments at his self-revelations. From drugs to Buddhist meditation, Ginsberg gives us themes which are now somewhat passe; surface superficialities with little depth; philosophy with hardly any detail, growth or complexity. This bardic-comic-poet gives us formlessness and over-simplification, ugliness and courseness, the impolite and the imprecise, but he also serves up an incredible energy from a vortex of power. -Ron Price with thanks to Marjorie Perloff, Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern UP, Evanston, Illinois, 1990, pp. 199-230.



Price’s autobiographical poetry, his Unpublished Works: 1992-2002, give a shape to his life that is not available in his other autobiographical genres. There is a sense of history and of the future, of locating himself and his Faith in the moving flow of history, of time. There are, too, a multitude of anatomies here: anatomies of his poetry, his self, his religion, his times and past times. He rarely embarrasses his readers with awkward self-revelations. His Faith seems just about always at the vortex, at the centre, or the perifery, for he has a passion for conveying its story. There is a sense, too, of new beginnings whose roots are in the past and whose branches are in a utopian world which looks increasingly like a world of realism with a recipe for our survival. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 2002.



I saw my own mind destroyed, temporarily,

by some frazzling chemical dysfunction,

burnt-out after jogging

through suburban streets at dawn,

as suggested by Jimmy Fixx

and friends concerned with my health.

I’d asked the House for prayers

and, although answers usually came slowly in life,

this one popped out of the answer box with haste.



Then, I settled down to an ease I’d never known

and only quiet burn-outs:

just the slow, quiet, laid-back reduction of high spirits,

excited enthusiasm and intensities

to memorable and meticulously chosen words,

observing the melancholy outlook and the propitious events

leading our world community to influence the processes

towards the Lesser Peace

and helping our concentrated endeavour

and the magnificent progress

of the projects on Mount Carmel.



Ron Price

1 June 1996