KMC Forums - Science and Religion: Some Personal Views

NEW CLARITY AND WONDER

Price thought that his poetry should be in harmony with the most advanced thought and knowledge. Like Whitman1 as far back as the 1850s and Zukofsky2 in the twentieth century, he saw poetry�s aims and those of science as not opposed. The content that defines poetry makes it seem more imprecise compared to science. The most complicated standards of science are, in fact, poetic. The desire to render sense-perceptions with exquisite precision, with impeccable accuracy, is common to both good science and good poetry. The need to draw on the rational faculty in as systematic a way as possible defines science and is crucial to Price�s poetic. Both poet and scientist, with the help of an essential intellectual vitality, try to render their worlds according to a fresh, imaginative ordering. Just as a poem intersects with the world, with a history, with a place, with a tradition, with intuited experience, so, too, does science intersect with a body of knowledge. Interest, motivation, desire, emotion, perception are all essential to both poet and scientist. Their world is one and the same. Price entertains doubt as a means of arriving at certainty, as Descartes did centuries before.
-Ron Price with thanks to Newton Arvin in Walt Whitman, editor, Francis Murphy, Penguin Books, 1969, p. 263; and Edward Larrissy, Reading Twentieth Century Poetry: the Language of Gender and Objects, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp.100-105.

We work alone and in groups
and pour imagination and memory,
reconstituting our worlds
in as striking and ingenious a way
as possible thereby finding no meaning
except what reflection discovers.
An admiring delight accompanies
some daily and disciplined effort.
And, over many years,
there is an identification
of the work
with the substance of our life.
Out of repetition, imperfection
and the dry bones of life
come moments of creation
where the axe cleaves the living wood,
the sap wells like tears1
and from the bottom of pools
in those sweet-scented streams
can be found new clarity and wonder.

1Sylvia Plath, �Words,� written a few days before her death in February 1963.

Ron Price
20 February 2000