Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick: Getting It Together

[Ron Price]

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE AND BLACK

Anthony Burgess has bookshelves which sag under what looks like a story of blistering success: more than thirty novels, many published to international critical acclaim; dozens of non-fiction titles, from a discursive study of beds to a two-volume, 1,200-page history of English literature, written in Italian; the long entry for the Novel in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; librettos and musical scores: symphonies, song settings, sonatas; translations into and out of English; screenplays, documentaries and lectures; and countless reviews, thousands and thousands of them, a sample to be found in two collections, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986). Penguin have awarded modern classic status to Earthly Powers (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). The latter owes its fame to Stanley Kubrick's brutal, stylish film. The musical score of this film insinuated itself into my psyche quite unbeknownst to my waking self.
-Ron Price with thanks to Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Life, 2004.

As I come to my late adulthood
I look back to 1962
as the year of great beginnings,
not that I knew it at the time.
I did not know much then, at 18
as the world came close to the edge
of giving it all to the cockroaches.
Was it Kennedy who saved us in October?

Was Clockwork Orange a wake-up call
to a new anti-utopian world
of violence and state control
emerging, then, as I struggled
to control a embryonically massive id
that was exercising its own control?

I did not know, then, busy as I was
trying to pass nine grade 13 subjects
in my last months of freedom before
a bi-polar disorder rushed into my life
with its own controlling factor,
its own clockwork orange and black,
its own violence, emotional disarray
and a fear and confusion as deep as
the one you portrayed Anthony/Stanley.

Ron Price
16 April 2004

 

[tungtied2u]

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE AND BLACK

Anthony Burgess has bookshelves which sag under what looks like a story of blistering success: more than thirty novels, many published to international critical acclaim; dozens of non-fiction titles, from a discursive study of beds to a two-volume, 1,200-page history of English literature, written in Italian; the long entry for the Novel in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; librettos and musical scores: symphonies, song settings, sonatas; translations into and out of English; screenplays, documentaries and lectures; and countless reviews, thousands and thousands of them, a sample to be found in two collections, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986). Penguin have awarded modern classic status to Earthly Powers (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). The latter owes its fame to Stanley Kubrick's brutal, stylish film. The musical score of this film insinuated itself into my psyche quite unbeknownst to my waking self.
-Ron Price with thanks to Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Life, 2004.

As I come to my late adulthood
I look back to 1962
as the year of great beginnings,
not that I knew it at the time.
I did not know much then, at 18
as the world came close to the edge
of giving it all to the cockroaches.
Was it Kennedy who saved us in October?

Was Clockwork Orange a wake-up call
to a new anti-utopian world
of violence and state control
emerging, then, as I struggled
to control a embryonically massive id
that was exercising its own control?

I did not know, then, busy as I was
trying to pass nine grade 13 subjects
in my last months of freedom before
a bi-polar disorder rushed into my life
with its own controlling factor,
its own clockwork orange and black,
its own violence, emotional disarray
and a fear and confusion as deep as
the one you portrayed Anthony/Stanley.

Ron Price
16 April 2004

Thanks for your poem Ron. I hope the years have found you putting a positive spin back on "Singin' in the Rain".

 

[Ron Price]

Thanks Tonguetied2u

Yes, there has been some singing in the rain, as you put it so well. Without the singing, I don't think there would have been much point to it all. "It is joy that is remembered," as one poet put it. Of course, the joy is tempered. As another poet put it: "with fire We test the gold and with gold We test Our servants."-Ron Price, Tasmania.

 

[Morwen]

...

 

[Ron Price]

Reply to Morwen

It has become obvious to me, sensibly and insensibly in the last several years, that my poetry--for some readers anyway--tries to pack in too much. To combine the personal, some aspect of society(in this case Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick) and other aspects of the social and the psychological is, as you say, distracting. I've had some readers advise me to take the prose-preambles right out of my pieces of poetry--and on occasion I do.

I think writing has a certain idiosyncratic aspect. The poet John Keats, arguably England's most famous poet, once said: "The heart is the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks identity."(In 'The Opposing Self,' L. Trilling, Secker & Warburg, London, 1955, p.19) Since my wife has had two masectomies perhaps the teat I want to suck on is a wide information/ knowledge base. I don't know. Anyway, that's all for now. -Ron Price, Tasmania.