Ron Price
Mr RonPrice
sub specie pioneeringi
Price knew he did not need to construct a new mythic base to replace the symbolic base of Western culture that had existed in Christianity. His religion provided that new mythic base, that new metaphysical frame for his vision, that new metaphorical basis of spiritual reality. His poetry helped provide him with a channel to express his awakened intellectual faculties, his enlarged aesthetic appreciation and his unseen intimations of immortality. His poetry tried to embrace a language appropriate to these intimations; it tried to be an extended meditation on reality, the reality of history and the reality of his own story. In all of this Price’s understanding of the metaphorical nature of physical reality contributed greatly to both his mythic base and his individual vision. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, June 5, 1996.
Have my days of dramatic adventure finished?
All those towns and people and that excitement
sub specie pioneeringi? Age, these late years
of middle adulthood, has left me flat but still
playing the game sub specie aeternitatis-for
it is partly a game, a battle, a war and much else.
I felt tears come to my eyes last night
when she read about the poet ‘Aqa Muhammad-Ibrahim,
but no similar tears came when I reflected
on the burden of my sins. I once thought
I could pray and, by God, I did, as long,
as intense as any man, but it seems like
a new road now, one carved in bone
with a delirium of fever
in a place that I call home,
although my words often chill or burn me,
usually when alone. As I try to tell of this story,
its configuration, the way meaning plays,
my vulnerability: I wonder.
Ron Price
5 June 1996
Price knew he did not need to construct a new mythic base to replace the symbolic base of Western culture that had existed in Christianity. His religion provided that new mythic base, that new metaphysical frame for his vision, that new metaphorical basis of spiritual reality. His poetry helped provide him with a channel to express his awakened intellectual faculties, his enlarged aesthetic appreciation and his unseen intimations of immortality. His poetry tried to embrace a language appropriate to these intimations; it tried to be an extended meditation on reality, the reality of history and the reality of his own story. In all of this Price’s understanding of the metaphorical nature of physical reality contributed greatly to both his mythic base and his individual vision. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, June 5, 1996.
Have my days of dramatic adventure finished?
All those towns and people and that excitement
sub specie pioneeringi? Age, these late years
of middle adulthood, has left me flat but still
playing the game sub specie aeternitatis-for
it is partly a game, a battle, a war and much else.
I felt tears come to my eyes last night
when she read about the poet ‘Aqa Muhammad-Ibrahim,
but no similar tears came when I reflected
on the burden of my sins. I once thought
I could pray and, by God, I did, as long,
as intense as any man, but it seems like
a new road now, one carved in bone
with a delirium of fever
in a place that I call home,
although my words often chill or burn me,
usually when alone. As I try to tell of this story,
its configuration, the way meaning plays,
my vulnerability: I wonder.
Ron Price
5 June 1996