Autobiographical Poetry 1997: Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Section VIII: Booklets 23-28
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After 30 years of writing occasional pieces of poetry(1962-1992), I have now written  poetry 13 years much more extensively and intensively(1993-2005). The poetry here comes from just one year. It does not represent all the poetry I wrote that year. I hope, in the months and years ahead, to place all the poetry I wrote each year in the respective location at BARL.                                                         

  THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN AGE

As the Revelation which flowed out from the souls of these twin manifestations pierced the atmosphere of the nineteenth century a new poetry began to find its way into the souls of other men.  This Revelation gradually unfolded over a period of half a century. Bahá'u'lláh's creative energies witnessed an unbelievable expansion over some forty years.  Poetry during these years went through a radical redefinition. It slowly became a large domain, containing multitudes, contradictions, a spaciousness,  huge possibilities, hidden languages, unnamed strangeness and a newness that touched old words with difference and fresh diversity.
        -Ron Price with thanks to Ed Folsom, "Introduction: Recruiting the American Past", A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry, editors, Jack Myers and David Wojahn, Southern Illinois UP, Carbondale, 1991, pp. 1-22.
And not just in the world of poetry.
Perhaps the process started in the
mind and heart of Shaykh Ahmad
in those years 1753-1793, those years
of gestation before his journey, his years
of anguish and expectation, his dream of 
Imam Hasan, his perfumed and honeyed 
tongue, an inward light, some revolutionizing
Word about to begin its transmission trans-
forming all of creation to its very depths and 
unveiling signs of universal discord. Perhaps in 
his irrepressible yearnings he could see that Hell 
itself was about to blaze and Paradise made visible 
to people's eyes. A new romance was in the air.1
Ron Price
8 January 1997
1 Bahá'u'lláh refers to these images of Hell and Paradise in Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1969(1938), p. 296. The worlds of music and poetry, politics and the writing of history, industry, science, etc. saw a quickening, an increase in pace and change. At the same time, I am more than a little aware of the whole metaphor of change beginning with the Greeks as outlined by Robert Nisbet in his History and Social Change, 1969; and his critique of  developmentalism in The Making of Modern Society, Wheatsheaf Books Ltd., Sussex, 1986. 'Abdu'l-Bahá's description of the role of religion in the origins of western civilization in His The Secret of Divine Civilization cannot be ignored here.

                            RING LARDNER AND THE EVOLUTION OF A NEW ORDER 
Ring Lardner* was a popular humorist, the funny-man of the 1920s, an authentic commentator on American society in its frantic flowering. He was the chronicler of a moribund social order, of the diversions of a period bent grimly on pleasure. While he was chronicling the material successes of the wealthiest nation on earth,  the Bahá'í Cause evolved into a distinctive and exclusive religion under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi.  -Ron Price with thanks to Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crisis: The American Novel 1925-1940, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971, pp.3-36; and Peter Smith, "Reality Magazine: Editorship and Ownership of an American Bahá'í Periodical",  From Iran East and West: Vol.2, Kalimat Press, 1984, pp. 135-155.

You told of the complacency, Ring*,
that kept a generation, an age, 
from getting even close to the new light
that had cast its first rays of Order
over a western sky.
You told of a vanity, of an incapacity
to learn, even survive, as people jumped 
into chasms that over-confidence had hidden, 
into a narcissism that closed down
the bigger picture, hid the light of that Order.
You told us of the Jazz Age, its myths
and beliefs, your anger and disillusionment,
your hatred of aggressive American capitalism,
its final covered wagon, camping ground 
and an outrageous individualism 
always covering the light.
Such an emptiness in your portraits;
no deeper answers found here, 
no historical perspective, spiritual stability.
The whole scene was all too fast, too new,
fleeing the Calvanist fires, on a merry-go-round.
A cultic milieux of religious esotericism 
and inclusivism had given us a sense of being part
of a forceful current of social change 
not some small religious collectivity, but slowly
organizational exclusivity changed that ethos.
You could say we became a religion back then,
Ring, not just a spiritual attitude; 
we acquired a communal cohesion 
and distinctiveness, throwing off 
an extreme epistomological individualism 
and any cult of personality 
as an undesirable heterodoxy.
Ron Price
4 March 1996
                                                                      STARS OF THE MOST GREAT GUIDANCE
All my beautiful safe world blew up....
   -F. Scott Fitzgerlad,Tender is the Night.
It is truely breathtaking to contemplate the devising(26 March to 22 April 1916)  of the Divine Strategy for the redemption of the planet in the midst of the din and destruction of the old order.
       -Amin Banani, Tablets of the Divine Plan, 1977, p.x.

After fifty-two slaughterous months
that changed the world another kind
of place emerged and with it a new poetry
of war. All the poetry since then has been war
poetry.* It was about this time that a new Order 
was visibly emerging, its white buildings and its
poetry of war for the spiritual conquest of the planet.
Explosive tensions and energies, at hysterical intensities,
formerly bottled up, were released and canalized into His
Plan sending people all around the world which many saw 
as a wasteland and which others saw as a garden about to
bloom at new thresholds, new anatomies, as millions sought
to escape from self and others a framework for their self in a
world where God was clearly dead but being born anew with
stars of the most great guidance.**
Ron Price
3 June 1996

*Francis Hope in A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry, Jack Myers and David Wojahn, editors, 1991, p.54.
** 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, 1977, p.5.
                                                                             HISTORY IN THE SHADOWS

As the world's great Depression was beginning to let up and as that apocalyptic second war was becoming a tangible reality in the late 1930s, in those few years between two kinds of hell, with humanity entering the outer fringes of the most perilous stage of its history, a stage we have not yet left,  the Bahá'í community turned its energies toward worldwide expansion, its first organized international missionary campaign.
        -Ron Price with appreciation to Loni Bransom-Lerche, "Development of Bahá'í Administration", Studies in Babi and Bahá'í History, Vol.1, editor Moojan Momen, Kalimat Press, 1982, p. 295; and Shoghi Effendi, "Message to 1936 Convention", Messages to America 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.6.
 
We had the pattern for our Order, our instrument ,
for Administration, in place, we in North America; 
we had the fear of God stirring in our soul due to 
that devastating crash and wondering when the next
great shake-up was coming---when this vast Plan was
sprung on us from his teeming brain from which sprang
just about our whole conception of what it was all about,
for so little was the little that we knew in that first century.
This wondrous pearl, born from Twin resplendent seas,
having swum in His ocean1 of vision, of mystic intercourse,
our brother who comforted us, though we did not comfort you,
through your books, letters and translations we gained deeper
understandings of the spiritual base of our embryonic order, while
history's hunkered spectre brooded watchfully in shadows as
millions died chrysalis-birth to an order the world still scarcely knows.2

Ron Price
5 June 1996
1'Abdu'l-Bahá was like an ocean in the sense that he could receive and give without any sign of disturbance, Priceless Pearl, 1969, p.21.
2 In the dozen years 1933 to 1945 millions perished in Stalin's purges and in the battles of WWII: the greatest bloodletting in all of history.
                                                                                   PROSECUTED, AT LAST       

...Prosecute uninterruptedly teaching campaign...in accordance with Divine Plan.
        -Shoghi Effendi, "Message to 1937 Convention", Messages to America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p. 9.
I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of remembering...than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective.
        -Thomas Mann, 11 February 1934, in Thomas Mann: Diaries-1918-1939, Andre Deutsche, editor, London, 1983, p.vi.

While Hitler was getting very serious
and Stalin was mowing them down;
and Scott Fitfgerald was moving to
Holleywood. Dorothy Parker was
working hard for the Communist
Party and the Screen Writers Guild.
Ernest Hemingway was making a
film about the Spanish Civil War;
the New Deal was speeding through
its second phase;  physics was
deciding the age of the earth and 
producing its immortal work--the
international teaching plan was
prosecuted, at last, throughout the world.

Ron Price
4 October 1995

PIONEERS COMING OUT
1 September 1962
This was the first day of my pioneering life, although I could take it back to about August 20th when I left Burlington to go to a Bahá'í camp at Kashabog in northern Ontario. I was eighteen and I was about to start my matriculation year at high school. The world was warming up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 1 September 1992.
When I started pioneering,
wandering as I was 
between two worlds: 
one dead, the other 
having just been born,
seeking my own identity, 
trying to give birth to myself, 
so tentative, so new, so fragile, 
so alone and by myself 
in a vast and spacious land:
marginal, inferior, inadequate, mute,
invisible, just-about-non-existent,
dissolving, a nobody. That's how 
it was back then at the end 
of the Ten Year Crusade 
when I was 18.
I felt like some quintessence of nothingness,
some empty shell, cavity, social vacuity,
humanly crippled, passive, 
like a water colour 
which does not exist, 
at the end of a conversation,
an after-thought, 
with a tongue half in shadow 
and half like a frozen bone. 
I passed through groups 
like a breeze at room temperature, 
unobtrusively blank,
could be a missing person 
noone missed, modest, 
in the picture somewhere, 
difficult to say where precisely, 
but you can find me if you look 
long enough. I'm that fellow
you can hardly see, right there--see?
PS Thirty years after pioneering, at the age of 48, my world had been transformed so many times. I was a different man, different person.
So many had come out in these years:
women, blacks, ethnics, lesbians, gays
and another generation of pioneers. 
I'd been crushed and blown 
to the ends of the earth, 
but a new man had been born,
a new gold of some worth, 
a chalice of pure light 
had made me drunk 
from far up in the north 
way down to places that stunk.
Part of a new race of men 
slowly coming to birth; 
it's gone on to great progress 
in these first decades 
at the end of this tenth stage of history.  
We're mapping the cosmos 
and the human brain 
as knowledge expands 
beyond what anyone can attain: 
the fruit of these years
with the rain coming down, 
in a dark heart of transition 
with a whole world of new sound.
The journey's been swift; 
the journey's been long,
on a tortuous road 
with my paths yet to lift me 
up and away to a world quite beyond, 
to that sweet undiscovered country, 
far away from this abyss.
Ron Price
1 September 1992/
16 June 1996  

                                                                 QUITE A BIG YEAR: 1963

The pulsar's most vital function seems to be to serve as an empyreal enzyme inside the quasar, which in turn must ultimately...nourish the cell-plasm of the greatest celestial outburst ever dreamed: that of the whole exploding universe. Since the 1960s astronomy has developed so fast that thousands of quasars are known and ten million are estimated...all of life seems to have passed at some stage through the cauldron of the stars.
       -Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life,  Houghton Mifflin, 1978, Boston, pp.396-402

We came from the stars by some
vast and circuitous route of exploded
stellar material, super-nova, some
extraordinary sequence of events for
atom-rich molecules. So the astro-
physicists tell us and the molecular
astronomers as they study star dust,
ice crystals and tiny diamonds by the
quadrillions in the 200 billion star
families in this Milky Way. As if in
some giant maternity ward stars are
born, celestial swaddling stars, have growing
pains and childhood diseases and in some
exploding brilliance they shoot out whole
worlds at 100,000 miles a second in crucibles
of brewing life, mystic sanctums of the universe
and exploding galaxies, a thousand supernovas
blowing up in one great chain-reaction which
were called quasars in 1963: the most astounding
astronomical development since Galileo saw the
moons of Jupiter.

Ron Price
16 March 1996

                                                                             1963 WAS A COMPLEX YEAR

The Bahá'í community in 1963, when the apex of its administration was elected, had about half a million adherents.  The deep conservatism of society just about everywhere was beginning to undergo a tremendous shift. The question and the issues in relation to this shift are immensely complex.  The last several decades are, among other things, the story of this shift. This poem is written from a perspective looking back thirty-four years to London in 1963.
        -Ron Price with thanks to Spencer Pearce and Don Piper, editors, Literature of Europe and America in the 1960s, Cambridge UP, NY, 1989.

The Beatles, the government and 
the flower children got it wrong
back then in '631: it was a thousand
times more complex than they ever
imagined and right outside everyone's
perspective—except for a few—as the
tenth stage of history opened as if in
some second generation Garden of Eden.

This grand design2, a million miles from
the Profumo affair, obscenity issues3 and 
confessional poetry, 4 was so much more 
than Adam and Eve could ever be, a new
beginning with new forces to deploy as 
history pursued its predestined course.

Ron Price
26 July 1997

1 The Beatles released their first LP in 1963: Please Please Me.
2 The Universal House of Justice refers to Shoghi Effendi's vision as 'the grand design' in its first letter 30 April 1963,  in Wellspring of Guidance, Universal House of Justice, USA, 1969, p.1.
3  In the summer of 1963 a sex scandal dominated English news, the Profumo affair. In 1960 Lady Chatterley's Lover was established as 'not obscene';  in 1962 the Vassall case, involving obscenity and homosexuality, titillated English sensibilities.
4 The New Poetry was published in 1962 by Al Alvarez. It contained a strong confessional element.

 THE WINDS SURE DO BLOW COLD AWAY OUT THERE*

...we must applaud the good sense of the Christian princes, who viewed with a smile of contempt the last struggles of superstition and despair....so rapid, yet so gentle, was the fall of Paganism that only twenty-eight years after the death of Theodosius the faint and minute vestiges were no longer visible to the eye of the legislator.
   -Edward Gibbon, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chatto and Windus, 1960, p.421.

The wind blew fiercely through those days
while some obscure Light began to shine 
in the smallest corners of a vast and sprawling
world: warm and quiet, hardly seen, opening
up some kingdom of heaven to minds afflicted
by calamity's firey scourge while worldly wise
continued in doubt with their vain superiority.

Sages, a long list, rejected this new perfection,
or overlooked in silence or contempt, what
was then diffusing itself to the remotest and
fairest regions of those dominions through the
efforts of obstinate and perverse enthusiasts
who persisted in their submission to a simple
Truth and revelation which excited the wonder,
the curiosity and devotion of that chosen few.

And even now, in this latter day, when winds
blow cold over a larger land and calamity's
unprecedented violence runs its scourging
fires through new seasons of pacem et
circenses1,  a new force insinuates itself 
in all the corners of this global politic and 
establishes its holy seat with supernal splendour. 

Ron Price
27 December 1996

* line from a popular folk song in the 1960s, "Four Strong Winds".
1 bread and circuses

                                                                                                                         5 AM ON A RAINY NIGHT

Those who feel compelled at some time in their life to embark on autobiographical writing do so because they have no choice: they must do it.
        -S. R. Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, Harvard UP, London, 1994, p.212.

This poem was written on getting up on a rainy morning at 5 am in the last weeks of autumn in Perth Western Australia.
       -Ron Price

The night is dark; the wind blows
a driving rain onto the roof and eves.
I hear the trees, like generations of
men tossed, lonely and alone, again 
and again until, at last, silence falls
and the leaves and branches of lives
are at peace again, still, tranquil,
at ease, in a great quietness that
descends on their bones and marrow. 

This night world is often bathed in moonlight; 
even the stars seem to carry an easy glow.
But tonight all is blackness, only the faintest
street-lighted zone; only a cold, wet, darkness,
one that I have often known.  And so the
world waits out this darkness;  soon the rains
will cease their pelting down.  Shortly the trees
won't blow in blackness. The sun will shine
on a blue sky, tinted white, one we know as home.

Ron Price
8 May 1996

                                                                      A BEAUTY THAT ELUDES ME

I draw in on myself in acute joy, again to ransack the self for the dispensable. Today-ah, today, the clamorous will, hardest to relinquish.
       -Roger White, "Letting Go", Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, 1992, p.60.

Another blazing beauty dazzling 
in the sun by the ocean,
golden hair falling
on athletic shoulders,
perfect everywhere 
before my eyes.

Tell me this is not 
a gift from God,
a gift of such intense loveliness
yet cannot be touched,
does not touch
my concupiscible appetite
on its long journey to
the acme of mature contemplation,
reminding me that 
walking humbly with my God 
in this universe 
presents me with endless signs, 
doors, symbols, tokens and means 
to access His flawless beauty, 
irradiated by blue-perfection 
and a brightness that fills existence 
with gleaming, radiant, burning, light.

Tell me, this aging man, 
flawed from head to toe,
stomach distended, false teeth,
balding, far, far, from such radiance
and beauty, that this creature 
does not touch my soul. 
She fills my upturned branches rapturously
with light and the roots of my tree
gorge silently in her brown 
and solid soil, but alas 
it does not fatten nor appease the hunger.

For this creature of perfection
has a beauty close to soul,
could raise me to the music
of my real existence-presence-                                                 
dearest ingot, gold. But, somehow,                                     
that beauty eludes me, 
as love rages to subdue me, 
hazards all around me.                                    
I hear her say with head turned, 
hair golden with trapped sunlight:
ignore your dreams, forget the rainbow. 

Ron Price
28 December 1997
-- Autobiographical Poetry 1997: Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Section VIII: Booklets 23-28 (Used by permission of the curator)