RonPrice
10-15-2006, 08:53 PM
A film with some of the flavour of the Western, this gangster movie set in the 1930s in a small Texas town had some good lines. In the midst of the violence, blood and guts some finely scripted lines stood out. They were useful lines for the troubled world I live in with its own forms of violence, blood and guts and the troubled souls whose paths I cross, have crossed and will cross. I will conclude this opening preamble to my poem with two of these somewhat simple, yet philosophically relevant lines:
Sometimes you just have to play a bad hand.
and
......something will turn up. It always does.
-Ron Price with thanks to Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing(1996), WIN TV, 10:30-12:30 am, August 16th, 2004.
No matter how difficult your life
the movies you always have with you.
No matter what you don’t understand:
your wife, your children, your life,
the technicolour treats still surround you.
Scripted, flawless and implausible
poetic creations of a different sort
than yours you’ve put on paper---
in a profession nothing like this one
which requires you to be alone---
more the product of a group.
An enthusiasm for poetry
is not like an enthusiasm for movies,
somehow the poet has to find a way
of keeping that spark, that fire, alive:
to keep on writing with the years---
even when the hand you’ve got is bad
and even when nothing turns up.
I find I can escape into some aeroplane
when I watch a good movie,
but in poetry I can fly after a lifetime
of crawling on my hands and knees.1
1 James Dickey in Poets At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, editor, George Plimpton, Viking Press, 1989, p. 361.
Ron Price
16 August 2004
Sometimes you just have to play a bad hand.
and
......something will turn up. It always does.
-Ron Price with thanks to Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing(1996), WIN TV, 10:30-12:30 am, August 16th, 2004.
No matter how difficult your life
the movies you always have with you.
No matter what you don’t understand:
your wife, your children, your life,
the technicolour treats still surround you.
Scripted, flawless and implausible
poetic creations of a different sort
than yours you’ve put on paper---
in a profession nothing like this one
which requires you to be alone---
more the product of a group.
An enthusiasm for poetry
is not like an enthusiasm for movies,
somehow the poet has to find a way
of keeping that spark, that fire, alive:
to keep on writing with the years---
even when the hand you’ve got is bad
and even when nothing turns up.
I find I can escape into some aeroplane
when I watch a good movie,
but in poetry I can fly after a lifetime
of crawling on my hands and knees.1
1 James Dickey in Poets At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, editor, George Plimpton, Viking Press, 1989, p. 361.
Ron Price
16 August 2004