FALLING INTO LIFE with Clint Eastwood
Sometimes after wathcing a doco on a celebrity I feel as if I have met them. Here is one such meeting in a prose-peom.
FALLING INTO LIFE
What A Run Its All Been, Eh Clint?
Several days ago I watched a documentary Clint Eastwood: A Life in Film with its special emphasis on the movies he made and his philosophy of life and of making films. This French doco was screened on SBS in Australia on 6 October 2007 at 1:55 to 3:20 p.m. I made a few notes because I have seen many of Eastwoods films as an actor and as a director; I had also seen one or two docos about him in previous years and this was a new one for me. I printed out a Wikipedia(internet encyclopedia) outline of his life, gathered my notes from the TV program and after 80+ hours of quasi and semi-gestation I set about to write following prose-poem. -Ron Price, Section VIII Poetry, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 10 October 2007.
As you say, Clint, there is a certain
falling into life, fate if you like and
trying to make the parts of life come
together may be, as you said in your
last lines, impossible. And yet we try.
We both got our first big breaks in 59:
you in the TV series Rawhide and me
in the early stages of an emerging world
religion that had been in Canada for just
on 60 years with only 700 members then.
While you were becoming one of those
instant international stars back in the 60s
I was going to uni and trying to work out
the enigmas of a bipolar disorder which
had no name thenjust a lot of trouble,
angst and a series of crises that threatened
to arrest my lifes unfoldment and blast
all hopes which my progress engendered.
I was finishing my career teaching in high
schools when Dirty Harry appeared and
was settling down into Perth Western
Australia when that series of four films
finished in 1988.....and what a run those
years were for me, too, Clint, me too....
You had your Escape from Alcatraz
in 79 about a real escape back in 62
when I began my pioneering life and
my escape from the normalities of a
middle class life. In 79 I began my
escape from BPD, a lifelong journey.
You were redefining yourself as director
and I was redefining myself as a writer
and poet little by little beginning in the
early 1970s. You achieved so much,
Clint. Ive got to take my hat off to you.
Way back to your first marriage in 1953
when the Kingdom of God was getting
its kick-start in Chicago, I was in grade
four and in love with Susan Gregory:
what a run its all been, eh Clint, eh?
Ron Price 10 October 2007
