THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

RonPrice

Because of Wallace Stevens’s emphasis on the importance of the imagination, he is sometimes criticized for being little in touch with social issues and political realities.1 Some who read Price's poetry extensively may find a similar 'out-of-touchness.' Certainly there are relatively few poems about particular and explicit social problems like: war, poverty, unemployment, violence, etc. Price tends to write about social problems in an explicit sense in his prose, his essays, his books -Ron Price with thanks to 1Alan Shucard, Modern American Poetry: 1865-1950, Alan Shucard, et al., Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1989, p.149.

I wrote about social and political issues once,
but am now concerned with expressing
my experience within a new Order,
with defining its reality and ambience,
its future, its past, its present construct,
with giving language to all that I am
and all that this System represents
in a poetry of heightened visual,
imaginative and intellectual sensibility,
giving words to things others never notice
in the everyday, paying attention to colours,
shapes, textures, objects, relationships
in time that are right in front of me,
hard and clear and real:
that incorporate what is me
into all that I can integrate.

What can we call it:
the social construction of reality?

Ron Price
4 February 2005

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