GUITAR + SHOCKS = POETRY
Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig down deeper. One would say that the shock of suffering and vision breaks down, one after another, the living sensitive partitions behind which his identity is hiding. He is harassed, he is tracked down, he is destroyed...He dies and is reborn in and with poetry.....He discovers an essentially free, objectless, creativity in poetry. With each poem, the poet creates a world and savours it. -Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, New American Library, NY, 1953, pp.130-177.
I was soaked in music in the ‘60s
and like a wandering minstrel
for twenty-five years I took
that ubiquitous guitar, moved to
sing, to song, the pioneer singer.
But the shocks kept coming,
the fires died; there was
nothing left to sing, except dry
bones deep down on the edges
of my tongue, somewhere in my heart.
In my brain a new music did I find,
a certain verbal sound filled with thought
and meaning deep in the womb of some
poetic intuition with tact, subtlety, to express
the inexpressible in common speech, human voice:
close to my heart and defining what my thoughts
are like, conferring nobility on words.
Ron Price
22 December 1995
