(NEW YORK YEARS Cont.)
Those who would additionally see parallels between Ron’s works and Chinese verse -- particularly as translated by American imagist founder, Ezra Pound -- are not far off; and, in fact, Ron was much taken with T’ang dynasty master Po Chu-I, who so influenced the likes of Pound and William Carlos Williams. (It is Po, for example, whom Ron references in his text ART when speaking of the Chinese master who would publish nothing unless “approved” by the corner flower lady.) But Ron’s use of a solitary image with Asian brevity was not derived from the imagists. Rather, having spent two critical years in Asia, and actually studied both Japanese and Chinese dialects, he was legitimately tapping the source of the modernist trend. Otherwise he experimented with older Western forms, notably the romantic and medieval. As a word on such experimentation, he tells of intentionally pushing the pulp “envelope” with tenth to sixteenth century cadences. That the stories sold, he explains, “didn’t prove too much because I never had any trouble with that. But that they were understood at all was surprising to me for their prose types (ranging from Shakespeare to ‘Beowulf’) were at wild variance with anything currently being published.” In terms of verse, the same employment of the archaic yielded such hauntingly formal works as “The Garden” and “Tomorrow.” In either case, as he elsewhere remarked, “all kinds of lines keep rambling through my mind.”
