In 1973 I had moved into a type of celebrity status in my own little world as a high school teacher in South Australia. It was a status I enjoyed as a teacher, off and on, until 1999. If a biography was ever to be written about my life it would reveal, as it did of Eastwood, a man of strengths and weaknesses. I found the celebrity status, the endless talking and listening both in schools and in my private life, wore me out by century's end. My persona, my personality, my road to success, was the opposite to Eastwood's: people in community, ideas and words, wall to wall for years. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Michael Munn, Clint Eastwood: Hollywood's Loner, Robson Books, London, 1992, p.142.

You made your millions, Clint,
while I got through my career
after a somewhat shakey start.

Your quiet self, superhero persona,
man of action par excellence
took you to the top of the movie tree,
while this man of ideas and words,
endless words, produced poetry
and print with millions of phrases
and sentences on pages
and in relationships
enough to sink a ship.

My ship's ballast,
the ballast of my creativity,
was not the great Hollywood engine,
but an emerging world religion,
the centre of a psych-intellectual life
which drove me, eventually, it seems,
to find poetry everywhere.