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: : ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THIS EPIC POEM : In the three year period September 1997 to September 2000 the concept, the initial framework, the organizing principle, for what became my Pioneering Over Four Epochs, as epic, found its first shaping. Both the entire corpus of my poetry and one extended poem, the one here, I came to see, to define, as epic. This epithet is intended in rather loose tribute to what has become a poem of quite extensive dimensions, at last count some two million words. The first dozen pages of this specific, this extended, poem were completed in October 1997 and the introductory essay written and ‘finalized’ in September 2000, while I was between the ages of 53 to 56. I had been a Baha’i for about forty years at the time. How long I would continue writing this poem only time would tell. If I lived to be 98, this process, this journey, within the realms of belief, was now about half over. If I did live that long, much time remained to continue the work. Time would tell, of course, just where the writing and life, would carry me. : : Stephen Sicari describes how Ezra Pound “committed himself to something that he did not yet know how to achieve; moreover, he did not know what he would find along the way, what the implications of his search would be, and what material might become important to his quest.....he wanted to be able to include any possible set of events in his poem, and laboured to find a device that would allow him to change, revise, expand, and continue the journey of his life as a work of art. Whatever seemed interesting or important along his journey would have to be included and made part of the poem, not merely included but integrated into the artifice he was creating: such was his unique ambition as he began his ‘modern’ epic.” In the earliest stages of my own epic I think these words of Sicari aptly describe my own position, my view of my own epic. The nature, even the existence, of affinities between my own epic and the artistic forms called epics some three millennia ago did concern me, though it may concern students of this work should they one day arise. -Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 198. : Ron Price : 28 March 2002

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