ROAMING IN THE FIELDS

This poet can not always be that high-soaring glider-pilot. Sometimes there is sheer dullness gaping amidst the lines and sections of great force and beauty scattered through his poetry. A vast fire has kept the cauldron boiling for four years now and there is no sign of any recession of the sprawling energies, the vitality and effervescence bubbling up from the cauldron.

Starting from scratch, really, at forty-eight, after a slow kindling of a decade, I brought a fully developed imagination and massive reading to this work. But I’ve had to find a technique, a form, a style, a language that would enable my ideas and sensations to move freely in verse. I think I am still hunting about in the fields. It took James Dickie a decade to reach his full powers.(1) I have no idea how long it will take me.-Peter Davison, “The Difficulties of Being Major: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and James Dickey”, One of the Dangerous Trades, University of Michigan Press, 1991.

What a time to be roaming free
in the fields searching
for the right manner, mode, arrangement,
to beat and pulsate in the body of the world
on the road of solid thinking
toward a perspective, an attitude,
a deep appreciation, a nobler and ampler
manifestation of human achievement
within a structure of freedom,
a mutuality of benefits in what we call
‘the Administrative Order’, free
of arid secularization and
the inordinate skepticism of authority,
but requiring an acute exercise
of judgement and a profound change
in the standard of public discussion
where dissidence is a moral and intellectual
contradiction for we who are the harbingers
of unity and love.

And so through the fields I go
looking to profit from serendipity
and synergy in the sprawling cities
measuring my tone, volume, style,
tact, wisdom and timeliness in
some magnificent etiquette of expression
that meets the right and left wings
of the armies of the world.
Touching occasionally the influence of spring,
finding the fresh and verdant flowers
more and more, I slowly learn to avoid
the blight that brings the withered leaves
to the trees of men’s lives.

Ron Price
8 September 1996