Keats: sex, the sensory, sensation and satisfaction.

VORTICES

John Press writes that “The origin of most poems worthy of the name will be either in an image or in a rhythm rather than in a concept, a thought, or a feeling.” It would seem that John Keats’ experience was the opposite. “Keats’ writing,” says Gittings, “is an almost instant transmutation of impressions, thoughts, reading and ideas into poetry….the poems are far from being a poetic diary of his life. They enrich the original impulse with a complete thought of their own. He regarded most of his day-to-day reading as ‘study’ for poetry. Some of his poetry was a record of his own poetic nature….writing frankly about himself and about his poetry.” By the early years of the new millennium most of my reading was, in fact, study for poetry and, like Keats, it was a record of my poetic nature, a narrative about myself, my poetry and my religion. –Ron Price with thanks to John Press, The Fire and the Fountain, Barnes and Noble Inc., Boston, p.166 and Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd. London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.

I think I’m about fifty-fifty; I’m taking
some very ordinary feelings and putting
them into poems; taking sinewy reason
and obscure states of being concealed on
the inside and putting them into poems;
taking what are often flat, banal utterances
in calm, neutral tones; what are sometimes
sense experiences of remarkable acuteness
and writing about them with a poignancy:
sex, the sensory, sensation and satisfaction.

I’m taking intellectual and emotional
complexes, vortices & clusters of ideas
endowing them with energy, with words.

Ron Price
28 August 1999
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