GLUCK AND ME: 1962 to 2012

[RonPrice]

Two Different Leagues in the Sea of Poetry

Part 1:

As far back as I can remember, and my memories go back to the late 1940s when I was still in early childhood usually defined by developmental psychologists as the time period from the age of two until at least the age of five years, I have found that the people in my life had a wide-range of attitudes to, and beliefs about, me. This is a common human experience, is hardly surprising, and should not raise any eyebrows.

In the last 30 years, 1983 to 2013, years during which I have had my poetry and prose published, this same range of appreciations exist: from high praise, to intense criticism and dislike, to outright indifference.

In the last 24 hours I came across the poetry of Louise Gluck and found a similar range of reactions to her work. This prose-poem is about the reactions of others to both her life and work, and the reactions of others to mine.

Part 2:

“A Glück poem is determined to wrest meaning from circumstance, to force a pattern over the chaos of a lived life.” So writes Irish poet and novelist, Nick Laird(1975- ), about the poetry of Louise Gluck, and so I could write in the same vein about some of the purpose of my own prose-poetic output over the last thirty years.

Gluck wrote, in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993, “poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response.”1 In the case of my poetry, though, the trappings of chronology and comment are part and parcel of my modus operandi and style.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Nick Laird, “The Triumph of the Survivor”, a review of Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 in The New York Review of Books, 21/3/’13.

Part 3:

Louise Elisabeth Glück was born 15 months before I was not that far as the crow flies---on this planet that is gravitating slowly into a neighborhood---from where I was born. We both belong to that generation ‘the-war-babies’. She is an American poet and has been publishing her poetry since 1968. I had hardly scratched the surface of my poetic life by 1968, but I had begun to have the kind of experiences that, in part, led to the kind of poetry that was the Gluck trademark: suffering, depression and alienation. My experiences, my philosophy, my religion, my poetry went in very different directions.

This most famous of modern American poets was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. I am not in Louise’s poetic league having only published poetry on the internet for the last decade: 2003 to 2013. My fame is measured in nanoseconds across the 200 to 300 million websites, and their 2 to 3 billion users. Gluck’s fame is measured across more than 40 years of publications, as well as the praise, the opinions, and opprobrium of many. My writing shares some similarities to her style and content, but we are very different people and poets.



Part 4:



The fragmentation of your work hints

at a mind trying to order itself…wrest

meaning from circumstance,1 and that’s

what I’ve been trying to do for decades.



Our poetic works record a movement

from emotional instability to regained

control, and so much else. My poetry,

too, is self-centred, often colloquial &

in an idiom of ordinary speech. I write

of both a fallen world as well as a new

one that is embryonic, just been born:

an embryogenesis, vivid planetization,

globalization, a sense and sensibility of

one world, one humanity, one religion.

1 Few poets have sounded as depressed or as alienated as Gluck; poetry and the visionary are intertwined; part of her impetus is Greek and Roman mythology; she writes poetry that leads readers to their inner world; it is poetry that uses straightforward language and can be understood by readers; it is close to the diction of ordinary speech, but it is far from colloquial.

Her poetry is self-centred and comes directly from her life, her losses and tragedies, her inner life. She is the poet of a fallen world. Her work explores the agony of the self, failed love-affairs and existential despair.-Ron Price with thanks to Poetry Foundation: upthebumnoharmdone.com


Part 5:


In Brian Henry’s review of The Seven Ages (2001)by Louise Glück in Contemporary Poetry Review, entitled “Louise Gluck’s Monumental Narcissism”, 8 July 2003, he writes:


“Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry. Louise Glück’s life might be richer than most, but in her continued fetishization of her life and her self--not the self that eats and sleeps and pays bills, but “Louise Glück The Poet” self--she demonstrates a disconcerting inability to find her way out of the cul-de-sac of subjectivity.”



“She has forgotten how to imagine, or even re-imagine, her life. Instead, she looks upon her past in The Seven Ages (2001) and assumes it’s of interest solely because she is Louise Glück. Only poets accustomed to thinking of themselves as Poets would try to get away with this. In The Seven Ages Glück views herself not as a person but as a protagonist, the world not as a place but as a stage, as Shakespeare did in his “all the world’s a stage.”



Whether or not this introspection is the result of years of psychoanalysis, the posturing becomes tedious. Increasingly at an imaginative loss, Glück mines her private life in a way both exhibitionist and narcissistic.1


Part 6:


Is my poetry exhibitionist as it
solicits interest? Is it narcissistic
as it presumes the interest? Is it
a naïve brand of obsessive self-
reflection or self-love? Has my
self-scrutiny become ridiculous
in its perseverance and cavalier
in its assumptions? Are these
poems just a form of memoir?

I use this genre to try to explain
my life…explore my experience.
Does my writing depend on my
identity to be interesting?....My
poems are successful to me but
only, I’m sure, to a few readers.

My poetry is, it seems to me, a
matter of a certain marketing: is
this art? Well, it is to me, and a
few others who read my work.

My poems embrace spheres beyond the self,
transforming my life into a rich imaginative
realm which illuminates the vast field of the
psycho-emotional constructing as I travel
this literary road: a life, society, a religion.


Part 7:


1 Brian Henry has published poetry and criticism in numerous magazines around the world including: the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Stand, Overland, and Threepenny Review.



His first book of poetry, Astronaut,appeared recently in the UK and in Slovenia in translation. Astronaut was published in 2000 in the US by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second book, Graft, was published in 2003 by New Issue Press and by Arc in England. He has edited the international magazine Verse since 1995, and was a Fulbright scholar in Australia in 1997-98, where he was Poetry Editor of Meanjin. He teaches at the University of Georgia.


Ron Price
10/4/’13.

[brocktonblockbust]

Ronny you need some punctuation and grammar proofreading here mate: (just at first glance and for starters)---

1. you forgot that this is a nondefining relative clause and you needed parentheses mate to offset it from the main sentence (which I have added for you)

2. 1983 to 2003 cannot effectively be offset with commas, since you are then adding the nondefining relative clause beginning with "years during which....." which is also offset with commas......you cannot use commas for both, but one would need to be in parentheses

3. range is 3rd person singular mate, so you cannot use the conjugation "exist", rather it should be "exists"

Mate there are so many errors in this I cannot believe you got so many articles published ol' boy. Sorry.

Two Different Leagues in the Sea of Poetry

Part 1:

As far back as I can remember, and my memories go back to the late 1940s when I was still in early childhood (usually defined by developmental psychologists as the time period from the age of two until at least the age of five years), I have found that the people in my life had a wide-range of attitudes to, and beliefs about, me. This is a common human experience, is hardly surprising, and should not raise any eyebrows.

In the last 30 years, 1983 to 2013, years during which I have had my poetry and prose published, this same range of appreciations exist: from high praise, to intense criticism and dislike, to outright indifference.

In the last 24 hours I came across the poetry of Louise Gluck and found a similar range of reactions to her work. This prose-poem is about the reactions of others to both her life and work, and the reactions of others to mine.

Part 2:

“A Glück poem is determined to wrest meaning from circumstance, to force a pattern over the chaos of a lived life.” So writes Irish poet and novelist, Nick Laird(1975- ), about the poetry of Louise Gluck, and so I could write in the same vein about some of the purpose of my own prose-poetic output over the last thirty years.

Gluck wrote, in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993, “poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response.”1 In the case of my poetry, though, the trappings of chronology and comment are part and parcel of my modus operandi and style.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Nick Laird, “The Triumph of the Survivor”, a review of Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 in The New York Review of Books, 21/3/’13.

Part 3:

Louise Elisabeth Glück was born 15 months before I was not that far as the crow flies---on this planet that is gravitating slowly into a neighborhood---from where I was born. We both belong to that generation ‘the-war-babies’. She is an American poet and has been publishing her poetry since 1968. I had hardly scratched the surface of my poetic life by 1968, but I had begun to have the kind of experiences that, in part, led to the kind of poetry that was the Gluck trademark: suffering, depression and alienation. My experiences, my philosophy, my religion, my poetry went in very different directions.

This most famous of modern American poets was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. I am not in Louise’s poetic league having only published poetry on the internet for the last decade: 2003 to 2013. My fame is measured in nanoseconds across the 200 to 300 million websites, and their 2 to 3 billion users. Gluck’s fame is measured across more than 40 years of publications, as well as the praise, the opinions, and opprobrium of many. My writing shares some similarities to her style and content, but we are very different people and poets.



Part 4:



The fragmentation of your work hints

at a mind trying to order itself…wrest

meaning from circumstance,1 and that’s

what I’ve been trying to do for decades.



Our poetic works record a movement

from emotional instability to regained

control, and so much else. My poetry,

too, is self-centred, often colloquial &

in an idiom of ordinary speech. I write

of both a fallen world as well as a new

one that is embryonic, just been born:

an embryogenesis, vivid planetization,

globalization, a sense and sensibility of

one world, one humanity, one religion.

1 Few poets have sounded as depressed or as alienated as Gluck; poetry and the visionary are intertwined; part of her impetus is Greek and Roman mythology; she writes poetry that leads readers to their inner world; it is poetry that uses straightforward language and can be understood by readers; it is close to the diction of ordinary speech, but it is far from colloquial.

Her poetry is self-centred and comes directly from her life, her losses and tragedies, her inner life. She is the poet of a fallen world. Her work explores the agony of the self, failed love-affairs and existential despair.-Ron Price with thanks to Poetry Foundation: upthebumnoharmdone.com


Part 5:

In Brian Henry’s review of The Seven Ages (2001)by Louise Glück in Contemporary Poetry Review, entitled “Louise Gluck’s Monumental Narcissism”, 8 July 2003, he writes:


“Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry. Louise Glück’s life might be richer than most, but in her continued fetishization of her life and her self--not the self that eats and sleeps and pays bills, but “Louise Glück The Poet” self--she demonstrates a disconcerting inability to find her way out of the cul-de-sac of subjectivity.”



“She has forgotten how to imagine, or even re-imagine, her life. Instead, she looks upon her past in The Seven Ages (2001) and assumes it’s of interest solely because she is Louise Glück. Only poets accustomed to thinking of themselves as Poets would try to get away with this. In The Seven Ages Glück views herself not as a person but as a protagonist, the world not as a place but as a stage, as Shakespeare did in his “all the world’s a stage.”



Whether or not this introspection is the result of years of psychoanalysis, the posturing becomes tedious. Increasingly at an imaginative loss, Glück mines her private life in a way both exhibitionist and narcissistic.1


Part 6:


Is my poetry exhibitionist as it
solicits interest? Is it narcissistic
as it presumes the interest? Is it
a naïve brand of obsessive self-
reflection or self-love? Has my
self-scrutiny become ridiculous
in its perseverance and cavalier
in its assumptions? Are these
poems just a form of memoir?

I use this genre to try to explain
my life…explore my experience.
Does my writing depend on my
identity to be interesting?....My
poems are successful to me but
only, I’m sure, to a few readers.

My poetry is, it seems to me, a
matter of a certain marketing: is
this art? Well, it is to me, and a
few others who read my work.

My poems embrace spheres beyond the self,
transforming my life into a rich imaginative
realm which illuminates the vast field of the
psycho-emotional constructing as I travel
this literary road: a life, society, a religion.


Part 7:


1 Brian Henry has published poetry and criticism in numerous magazines around the world including: the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Stand, Overland, and Threepenny Review.



His first book of poetry, Astronaut,appeared recently in the UK and in Slovenia in translation. Astronaut was published in 2000 in the US by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second book, Graft, was published in 2003 by New Issue Press and by Arc in England. He has edited the international magazine Verse since 1995, and was a Fulbright scholar in Australia in 1997-98, where he was Poetry Editor of Meanjin. He teaches at the University of Georgia.


Ron Price
10/4/’13.

[brocktonblockbust]

Andre is he an astronaut? That would explain the angles he hits.

[Youngblood]

[Saddo]

I personally really look forward to Ron's posts..... mainly so I can edit the links he drops into his threads into something else

[Andre]

Andre is he an astronaut? That would explain the angles he hits.

I have no idea mate. The whole thing went over my head like a fart in a space ship.

[brocktonblockbust]

Andre is he an astronaut? That would explain the angles he hits.

I have no idea mate. The whole thing went over my head like a fart in a space ship.

Saddo what might be some of that bugger's links mate? Pray do tell!

[RonPrice]

An Interview with Ron Price....something for readers here to "chew-over".-Ron
----------------------------------------
I think the interview is the new art form. I think the self-interview is the essence of creativity.-Jim Morrison, “Prologue: Self-Interview,” Wilderness , Volume I - The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison1

1 James Douglas "Jim" Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was the lead singer and lyricist of rock band The Doors, as well as a poet. Following The Doors' explosive rise to fame in 1967-8 when I was teaching among the Inuit on Baffin Island and pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community, Morrison developed a severe alcohol and drug dependency which culminated in his untimely death in Paris in 1971 at age 27 due to a suspected heroin overdose. I was just about to begin my international pioneering life in Australia when he was buried. The events surrounding his death continue to be the subject of controversy, as no autopsy was performed on the body after his death, and the exact cause of his death is disputed by many to this day.

Preamble-Part 1:

Ron Price was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1944. He received his primary and secondary education in Burlington Ontario, went to McMaster and Windsor Universities where he got a BA and a B Ed in 1966 and 1967, respectively. In July 1971, at the age of 26, he pioneered-travelled to Australia with his first wife after teaching primary school in Canada for three years, one year of which was on Baffin Island among the Inuit.

Ron continued his education in Australia in several post-graduate studies programs. He also continued teaching: first at primary, then at secondary and then at many post-secondary educational institutions. At the age of forty, while living in Australia’s Northern Territory and working in technical and further education in a position entitled, adult educator, he started to write for people who were not his students, his employers or his Baha’i community, the religion he had been associated with by then for 30 years. By the time he was fifty in 1994, he had begun to write poetry extensively, although not exclusively. By the 1990s he was living in Perth, Western Australia. In 1999 he retired from FT employment; in 2003 from PT work and in 2005 from most casual and volunteer work. He became by degrees, a FT writer and author, poet and publisher, researcher and editor, scholar and online journalist and blogger, as well as his own office-assistant with the help of his wife.
His second wife, Christine, is a Tasmanian and as of 2012 they have been married for 37 years. They have raised three children whose ages in 2012 were: 46, 42 and 35. Ron became a member of the Baha’i Faith in 1959. He gave the following interview, the first in a series of 26, in Perth Western Australia after he had been writing poetry seriously for four years(1992-1995). When this interview was recorded he had just finished his twenty-fifth year working as a teacher and/or lecturer. At the time of the interview he was enjoying a summer holiday at his home in the suburb of Belmont in Perth.

Preamble-Part 2:

This interview and the 25 others now total some 150,000 words; 40,000 of these words are a statement of thanks and acknowledgements. Some of these interviews are on the internet. Ron revised this initial interview several times over the next 17 years: 1995 to 2012. Ron would have been happy to have the interview taped even if, as he put it, “the moment I know the interview is being taped, my attitude changes to being somewhat defensive and or histrionic, that is deliberately affected or self-consciously emotional, or overly dramatic in behavior or speech.”

But his feeling that, because interviews contain within their method and style a demand for rapid, improvised, on the spot responses, the interview makes it difficult to say anything particularly complex or sophisticated. His sense of ambivalence also has something to do with the way in which, adopting a role as one does in an interview, seems in some ways a somewhat dishonest way to act.

One good way to do an interview, someone once suggested, is to have a long conversation without the interviewer taking notes. Then the interviewer can, if he or she so desires, reminisce about the conversation and write down his or her impression of what he or she felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. But Ron did not go for this method during these 26 interviews.

Preamble-Part 3:

What ticked-Ron-off about the tape recording process, he said, was that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed because “it records and remembers what in retrospect one may feel are quite inaccurate or inappropriate remarks.” “That’s why, when there is a tape recorder,” he said, “I am conscious that I’m being interviewed; when there isn’t a tape recorder, I can talk in an unconscious and completely natural way.” As the American novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick once put the content of interviews: “conversation is air.” This simulated interview approach was the closest Ron could get, he said, to a much more natural approach: reflective, honest, sincere and useful to future readers.1

In September 2003 Edward Said(1935-2003), Professor of English and comparative Literature at Columbia for 40 years, gave an interview. For more than three days he spoke about his life and work. This interview, entitled The Last Interview, begins with a quotation from Roland Barthes(1915-1980), a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician: "The only sort of interview that one could, if forced to, defend would be one where the author is asked to articulate what he cannot write."2

[Andre]

I had a car that preambled once so we shot it.

[RonPrice]

Belated apologies, Andre, for not getting back to you. "Preambles" take place before one "ambles". I do much ambling in these years of my retirement and late adulthood, the years 60 to 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists.-Ron