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- Feb 12, 2005
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- Location
- George Town Tasmania Australia
- Website
- www.ronpriceepoch.com
PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION
Part 1:
On 19 January 1984 in the middle of the oppressive heat of the Northern Territory of Australia's summer. I made my first diary entry. I had just received a copy of my maternal grandfather’s autobiography from a cousin in Canada. This autobiography was not the record of his entire life, just the part from his birth in England in 1872 to his marriage in 1901 in Hamilton Canada. I had browsed through but not read this one-hundred thousand word 400 page double-spaced narrative written "about 1921-1923," by an autodidact, a self-educated man, when he was fifty years of age. As my grandfather indicated in 1953 when he wrote a brief preface to that work while living in Burlington Ontario five years before his death, it was his hope that his story would "arouse interest." As I write this preface to the sixth edition of my autobiography or, more properly, this epic literary work, on 21 September 2007, my hope is that this work will also arouse interest. It is the vernal equinox today here in Australia and, hopefully, an auspicious beginning to this work for future readers.
I had no idea when I made that first diary entry in January 1984 that this literary beginning would become by insensible and sensible degrees an epic work containing: a five volume journal, a body of 6500 prose-poems; a collection of 5000 letters, emails and posts on the internet; a second collection of over 300 notebooks; a dozen unsuccessful attempts at a novel and; finally, in this narrative of 2600 pages, a total oeuvre that seems appropriate to refer to as an epic.
Part 2:
I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon, two of my favorite historians, acquired their initial conceptualization for what became their life’s magnum opus, their epic: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon. Ten years ago in 1997 I began to think of writing an epic poem and so fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. My total poetic output by September 2000 I began to envisage in terms of an epic. The sheer size of my epic work makes a comparison and contrast with the poetic opus of Ezra Pound a useful one. Unlike the poet Ezra Pound’s epic poem Cantos which had its embryo as a prospective work as early as 1904, but did not find any concrete and published form until 1917, my poetry by 2000 I had come to define as epic, firstly in retrospect as I gradually came to see my individual poetic pieces as part of one immense epic opus; and secondly in prospect by the inclusion as the years went by of all future prose-poetic efforts.....enough for now...Ron Price, Tasmania
Part 1:
On 19 January 1984 in the middle of the oppressive heat of the Northern Territory of Australia's summer. I made my first diary entry. I had just received a copy of my maternal grandfather’s autobiography from a cousin in Canada. This autobiography was not the record of his entire life, just the part from his birth in England in 1872 to his marriage in 1901 in Hamilton Canada. I had browsed through but not read this one-hundred thousand word 400 page double-spaced narrative written "about 1921-1923," by an autodidact, a self-educated man, when he was fifty years of age. As my grandfather indicated in 1953 when he wrote a brief preface to that work while living in Burlington Ontario five years before his death, it was his hope that his story would "arouse interest." As I write this preface to the sixth edition of my autobiography or, more properly, this epic literary work, on 21 September 2007, my hope is that this work will also arouse interest. It is the vernal equinox today here in Australia and, hopefully, an auspicious beginning to this work for future readers.
I had no idea when I made that first diary entry in January 1984 that this literary beginning would become by insensible and sensible degrees an epic work containing: a five volume journal, a body of 6500 prose-poems; a collection of 5000 letters, emails and posts on the internet; a second collection of over 300 notebooks; a dozen unsuccessful attempts at a novel and; finally, in this narrative of 2600 pages, a total oeuvre that seems appropriate to refer to as an epic.
Part 2:
I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon, two of my favorite historians, acquired their initial conceptualization for what became their life’s magnum opus, their epic: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon. Ten years ago in 1997 I began to think of writing an epic poem and so fashioned some ten pages as a beginning. My total poetic output by September 2000 I began to envisage in terms of an epic. The sheer size of my epic work makes a comparison and contrast with the poetic opus of Ezra Pound a useful one. Unlike the poet Ezra Pound’s epic poem Cantos which had its embryo as a prospective work as early as 1904, but did not find any concrete and published form until 1917, my poetry by 2000 I had come to define as epic, firstly in retrospect as I gradually came to see my individual poetic pieces as part of one immense epic opus; and secondly in prospect by the inclusion as the years went by of all future prose-poetic efforts.....enough for now...Ron Price, Tasmania
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