The Lyre In The Pawnshop: Essays In Literature....

[RonPrice]

You may have trouble finding this book in a DC bookshop, but if the shop is worth its salt, it will order this book for you from the UWA press--that's the University of Western Australia.

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NO THINGS BUT IN IDEAS*

 

There is a tension between transience and permanence; resolution is often out of reach. The complex and estranging social and political realities of our crazy age create separation, loss and increased awareness. In all of this lies our vulnerability, our privacy and our fragmented memory and perception. -RonPrice with thanks to Fay Zwicky, The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays in Literature and Survival: 1974-1984, UWA Press, 1986, p.186.

 

Can I clearly express the mixed feelings

of this staggering complexity,

this pervasive estrangement that reaches

everywhere because so much is going on

everywhere on this tortured planet.

You can’t convert emotion into art

with the slip of a pen, the drop of

a few keys on your word processor,

you know? But by God, I’ll try to say

something about my vulnerability and

all its ifs, buts, maybes, not quiets, shifts;

my privacy and its quiet darknesses,

its holes and its climbing into light

with a memory and perception

that come together in mysterious ways

that often seem to just happen.

 

Ron Price

16 December 1995 :)

 

* William Carlos Williams’ now famous line ‘No ideas but in things!’ is turned around in much of my poetry.