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PERSONAL REMINISCENCES
All attempts to write about persons or events, however important, to which the poet is not intimately related in a personal way are now doomed to failure....The poet Auden’s elegies are linguistic homes in which the dead continue to adide, their words and ideas held fast among the words and ideas of the living poet. For this reason, I find writing about the history of China or about my experience of China in modern times "doomed to failure." But still I try.-Ron Price with thanks to Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, pp.201-203.
I often wondered why writing about, say,
Julius Caesar or Churchill, was so difficult;
or even the old starving China boys that
my mother used to talk about when trying
to get me to eat my vegetables,
or the disaster in Dneipropetrovsk
or Novosibirsk, or the Chukchi people
and their rain dance: one needs some
kind of intimacy, connection, really.
We each have different worlds.
Now, Mr. Auden, I find writing begins
both from the sense of separateness
in time and the sense of continuity
of the dead, the living and the still-to-be-born.
It all goes on and on, virtually, forever,
Although my short span will soon end
and, as you say, these words are like
carving my initials on my desk, maybe
someone will read them one day: ‘tis a
type of rising from the dead, or as some say
...an ever-advancing civilization in the making.
If this is too pretentious then--just some
personal reminiscences, just reminiscences?
Is this all my writing is here, Mr. Auden?
Ron Price
30 June 1995
(updated for China History Forum
21/7/'08)
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THE GREYING OF THE RED AND YELLOW PERIL
We grew up at a time
when Karkhov, Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk
were black foot-prints in the snow
-Bruce Dawe, “What Lies on Us”, Sometimes Gladness, 3rd edition, Longman, 1988, p.142.
Some of us grew up at a time
when Krushev, Kiev and Kennedy
were part of the language of the big world
that we only ever partly understood at best.
The yellow beast and her red friend
gradually became greyer and greyer
and then the whole thing fell apart
in a brave new world for which
most of us had lost whatever
bravery we had back then.
By then, I’d lived in so many houses,
in so many towns, known too many
women and thousands of people
that I was never shocked by headlines
or news from the lighted chirping box
and its anonymous deaths, or private
griefs immortalized yet again for the
zillionth time on film or on TV.
I clean my teeth and wind the clock
for I am still living. I have just
returned from another evening
where I watch merchandised desire
and rented embraces exhaust the
night air, where frightened cries
rise occasionally and pierce the
quiet suburban landscape.
What is happening now that the land
has become grey and the red and
yellow hues do not threaten us still?
What does all this mean for us who
have seen a century bathed in blood
and tears on television and in movies?
Ron Price
17 December 1995
(updated for China History Forum)
