Politics:More than What You See On TV-Perspectives on Political Consciousness

[Ron Price]

STANCE AND WITHDRAWAL



History is a series of snapshots with the poet in every scene.....going right back to the Iliad or the writers in the Old Testament. Genuine narrative must (i) respect time, (ii) locate elements of private or collective struggle and (iii) observe without sentiment, escaping if it can the conscious and unconscious conventions of society. These are the basic elements of a genuine political consciousness. This consciousness is sensitive and enriched by a great wealth of science, philosophy, religion, in a word, culture. In this wondrous milieux is found the new poet. His home, at least for some and necessarily some of the time for all who would claim to be a poet, is one of solitude and inwardness, emotion and reason, many selves and many moods. -Ron Price with appreciation to Frederick Pollack, "Poetry and Politics" in Poetry After Modernism, Robert McDowell, editor, Story Line Press, Brownsville, Oregon, 1991.



Poetry is about something;

poetry seeks a public voice

commensurate with its

political subject-matter.



And, so, I try to connect

with other stories.

What I create is a record

of oblique, hesitant approaches

to a new politics, a new stance

and withdrawals from that stance.1



1 Robert Lowell, arguably the major American poet of the 1950s and 1960s, wrote poetry that tried to be political in this way, as do I in my poetry. I see my poetry as suggestive of a Baha'i political and social consciousness. See ibid., p.9.



Ron Price

26 November 1996
Revised July 5th 2004