Hindunet: The Hindu Universe: Allen Ginsberg In India Chanting

More on Ginsberg....7 months after the above post, let me add another prose-poem about Ginsberg:
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FIRING A POETRY INDUSTRY

My conception of poetry in my teens and twenties changed as I got into my thirties and when I came across the poetry of Roger White at the age of thirty-five I found something which I could completely connect with. It was a rejuvenating experience. I had known poetry which was so obscure as to be quite indecipherable; I had known poetry which bored me to death; I had known poetry that for many years seemed to have the ultimate effect of turning me right off the genre. I began writing poetry in my mid-thirties, but not until my late forties did the experience really come alive for me. Much of my poetic writing had the style of improvisation. I wrote with my voice; for the most part there was an ease, a flow. I was what Robert Pinsky called an improvisatory poet.

There was an intensity in my poetry, in my philosophy, a poetry based on the cauldron of experience and the search for vivid fragments that would open doors of perception and conception. Perhaps this intensity was born in the shadow of the bomb, the cold war, in the fifties and sixties: the beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. when I was growing up, part of those times, those decades; perhaps it came from belonging to a religion which was nothing if it was not intense; perhaps it came from my relatively peripatetic existence which collected towns and people, that fired the cauldron of experience with enough vivid fragments to fertilize my poetry industry. -Ron Price with thanks to John Tranter, "An Interview with C.K. Tower," Riding the Meridian, The Internet, 18 November 2001.

I remember those strange lines,

shorter than most of the others,

so often obscure, quite beyond

my figuring them out and then,

in high school, the wet arm pits

and the anxiety over what does

it all mean, whatever does it mean?

It seemed to be a world beyond:

strange, unattractive, completely

without purpose, at least any

purpose I could connect with.

And then, after my brain got

lithium-stabilized and Roger

White's verse came into my life,

the whole picture changed.

Gradually, slowly, poetry

became a dominant force

in my life, a conduit for

my thought, my emotions,

my religion and all that was my life.

Ron Price
20 November 2001
(updated for Hindunet
22/1/08)
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Pioneering Over Four Epochs is the name of my website and those interested in my writing can go to: [url=http://www.users.on.net/~ronprice/ and they will find hundreds of pages of prose and poetry.

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