Ron Price
Mr RonPrice
RENAISSANCE
San Francisco as a literary frontier has been a contentious place....these tensions are worked out within the myth of a "city on a hill" that claims belatedness as a sign of divine largess. Because that community was founded late in the history of a corrupt world, it might serve as a fulfillment of an ancient covenant. -Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge UP, 1989, pp.217-218.
Haifa as a religious frontier has been part of a contentious place...these tensions will be worked out within the myth of a "city on a hill". Perhaps belatedness is a sign of divine largess here too, a sign of a fulfillment on an ancient covenant. -Ron Price, Comment on the poem below which compares the origins of the Baha’i Administrative Order and a new renaissance in poetry.
We* were born---the Order that is---
amidst the immense panorama
of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history,
that constellated world
of shattered shibboleths;
by the time the Kingdom of God
really got going with
that manifest Standard**
a renaissance of poetry had begun
amidst vertiginous spirals
of contradictions and restatements,
a babel of noise in bars, cellars,
jazz sounds, cafeterias, readings,
primitive energy, instinctual forces,
hostility to civilization,
mystiques of participation
and an unholy holiness:
It looked like the real thing---
those beatniks, Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac who searched
for a realm of comfort and vitality
in the great urban brontissaurismus,
Zen Buddhism, poetry, McCarthy,
Eisenhower and a post-war
sleepiness and apathy.
The alternative was being born,
then, amidst his herculean labours,
a miasmal ooze in lounge rooms,
in a thousand homes around
the world, with a healthy terror
where humbling summits
were assulted by men and women
painfully inching their consequential
and necessary way past chasms:
dry-mouthed, ragged semi-circles,
equipollent, in contact with some
unseen kingdom of oneness;
learning about fire, submission,
humility, some supreme angels
and mysterious holy ones.
And still the world slept on
amidst the fiercest conflagration
and that still unobtrusive Order.
Ron Price
21 January 1996
* By the early1920s a new poetry had been born; a second renaissance occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Baha’i Administrative Order was also born by the early 1920s with a significant thrust taking place in the early 1950s.
** ’Abdu’l-Baha refers to the completed Baha’i temple in Chicago (1953) as, among other things, the ‘manifest Standard’.
San Francisco as a literary frontier has been a contentious place....these tensions are worked out within the myth of a "city on a hill" that claims belatedness as a sign of divine largess. Because that community was founded late in the history of a corrupt world, it might serve as a fulfillment of an ancient covenant. -Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge UP, 1989, pp.217-218.
Haifa as a religious frontier has been part of a contentious place...these tensions will be worked out within the myth of a "city on a hill". Perhaps belatedness is a sign of divine largess here too, a sign of a fulfillment on an ancient covenant. -Ron Price, Comment on the poem below which compares the origins of the Baha’i Administrative Order and a new renaissance in poetry.
We* were born---the Order that is---
amidst the immense panorama
of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history,
that constellated world
of shattered shibboleths;
by the time the Kingdom of God
really got going with
that manifest Standard**
a renaissance of poetry had begun
amidst vertiginous spirals
of contradictions and restatements,
a babel of noise in bars, cellars,
jazz sounds, cafeterias, readings,
primitive energy, instinctual forces,
hostility to civilization,
mystiques of participation
and an unholy holiness:
It looked like the real thing---
those beatniks, Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac who searched
for a realm of comfort and vitality
in the great urban brontissaurismus,
Zen Buddhism, poetry, McCarthy,
Eisenhower and a post-war
sleepiness and apathy.
The alternative was being born,
then, amidst his herculean labours,
a miasmal ooze in lounge rooms,
in a thousand homes around
the world, with a healthy terror
where humbling summits
were assulted by men and women
painfully inching their consequential
and necessary way past chasms:
dry-mouthed, ragged semi-circles,
equipollent, in contact with some
unseen kingdom of oneness;
learning about fire, submission,
humility, some supreme angels
and mysterious holy ones.
And still the world slept on
amidst the fiercest conflagration
and that still unobtrusive Order.
Ron Price
21 January 1996
* By the early1920s a new poetry had been born; a second renaissance occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Baha’i Administrative Order was also born by the early 1920s with a significant thrust taking place in the early 1950s.
** ’Abdu’l-Baha refers to the completed Baha’i temple in Chicago (1953) as, among other things, the ‘manifest Standard’.
