John Rolston Saul: Reflections

[RonPrice]

History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions like the potter's clay and has a genuine significance for our lives when its facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.1 It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.

Here was a bit of history,

came across it the other day

in a bookshop: some letters,

letters written by Van Gogh.



He was writing about

his ultimate goal

and feeling that he was

on the right track---

firmly convinced he was---

so convinced that

he paid little attention

to what people said of him.

He painted what he felt

and felt what he painted.



This is my story, too, of poetry....

except that......

few people say anything about my poetry

and I never know if I am exactly on track,

if I write precisely the best, the most apt

that can be written.



But.....

I fit my emotions around my assumptions:

that this poetry is at the core of my life,

that it expresses my essential relationships

with all that I know and love--

and I write--this is my faith.

-Ron Price 14/3/02.





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