Imagine for a second right that you are the only
son of absolute Hollywood royalty. Okay, so you're
born in Los Angeles in 1940 Your mom is the actress
Edith Barrett and your dad is well He's none
other than the legendary horror icon Vincent
Price. Oh, wow That is quite the shadow to grow
up in. Right. I mean, the path for your life
is practically already paved in red carpets and,
you know, silver screens. The expectation, the
sheer momentum of that world is just pulling
you toward the spotlight. Naturally. But instead
of stepping into that whole technicolor machinery,
you just pack up, turn your back on Hollywood
entirely, and flee to the stark, sun -baked desert
of the American Southwest. Just a complete pivot.
Exactly. You decide you're going to become a
poet. and a fierce environmental critic, and
eventually like the literary conscience of New
Mexico. It's just the ultimate rejection of an
inherited narrative, isn't it? Yeah. I mean,
walking away from an engineered reality to find
something infinitely more grounded that requires
a massive leap of faith. And that is exactly
the leap that Vincent Barrett Price, who went
by V .B. Price, actually took. So we're looking
at a stack of sources today centered around his
life and work, largely starting with his Wikipedia
biography. And the mission of this deep dive
is to explore how a person's identity can become
so completely. you know, inextricably intertwined
with the landscape and the culture of a specific
place. That's right. And we really want to look
at how paying microscopic attention to your surroundings
can actually transform you into a relentless
advocate for them. Exactly. Because we are tracing
a fascinating arc today. We will follow Price's
journey from that 1940s Los Angeles childhood
straight through to his arrival in New Mexico
in 1958. We'll impact the massive literary ecosystem
he built, analyze his really blistering heavily
researched critique of the Cold War's environmental
toll on the American West, and finally, Look
at how we process the ultimate frontier, which
is human mortality. OK, let's unpack this. We
have to start with this Hollywood prince fleeing
to the desert. So he's born in L .A., August
30th, 1940. Right. He makes this really pivotal
move to New Mexico in 1958, which is right around
the time he'd be heading to college. Right. Yeah,
he's 18. And he ends up graduating from the University
of New Mexico UNM in 1962. And the source material
specifically notes here that Price came to deeply
identify with New Mexico's, quote, isolation.
and eccentricity. Oh, I love that phrase. Right.
He identified with its people, its traditional
cultures, the architecture, the harsh beauty
of the landscape. He didn't just, you know, relocate
to get away from his parents. Yeah, it wasn't
just a teenage rebellion thing. Exactly. He found
a mirror for his own soul. Yeah. He found a geography
that just resonated with his internal frequency.
In a way, the studio backlots of Hollywood just
never could. It's honestly like a reverse Wizard
of Oz. How do you mean? Well, think about it.
Dorothy gets sucked out of the drab black and
white dust bowl of Kansas, right, and drops into
this hyper saturated artificial technicolor dream
world of Oz. Oh, right. Yeah. Price did the exact
opposite. He left the manufactured, glamorous
technicolor illusions of mid -century Los Angeles
and deliberately chose the raw, stark reality
of the desert. That's a great way to look at
it. And the degree he gets from UNM in 1962.
It's a BA in anthropology. which fundamentally
dictates literally everything he does next. See,
I have to push back on that a little bit. Okay,
go for it. Does studying anthropology, the academic
study of human societies and cultures, does that
actually make someone a better poet? Or does
it just run the risk of making their poetry incredibly
academic and dense and dry? I see where you're
going. Right, because you usually think of poets
studying romantic literature or fine arts, not
digging through the structural history of human
migration patterns. Well, anthropology didn't
make his poetry clinical at all. What it did
was give him a really rigorous framework for
observation. It taught him how to look at human
history, built environments and natural landscapes,
not as isolated backdrops, but as an interconnected
web, like a web of survival and culture. Give
me an example. Take his relationship with Chaco
Canyon, for instance. He first visited this massive
ancient Puebloan complex in New Mexico back in
1961. Now, if you go as a tourist, you just see
beautiful stone ruins. But if you go with an
anthropological lens, you see the weight. of
deep time. Oh, I see. You see how a civilization
organized itself around the sun and, you know,
the scarcity of water. And decades later, in
1992, he published his seminal work of poetry,
Choco Body, alongside the photographer Kirk Giddings.
Wow. So it stayed with him that long. Absolutely.
The anthropology taught him how to look at the
bones of the landscape so his poetry could express
the heartbeat that was still echoing there. It's
the difference between merely looking at a landscape
and actually reading it. Precisely. Which brings
up a question for you listening right now. Have
you ever visited a place that instantly felt
more like you than the place where you were actually
born? That's a powerful feeling. Yeah, like a
city, a forest, a coastline where you just stepped
out of the car and thought, oh, this is where
my brain finally makes sense. Because that is
exactly what happened to V .B. Price in 1958.
And because he looked so closely at the land
for his poetry, he began to see the mechanics
of how the modern state of New Mexico was functioning.
Right. Deep observation, inevitably. forces you
into documentation. You don't just passively
observe a place you love and stay quiet about
it when things start changing. which perfectly
explains his evolution from just an observer
to a really relentless journalist, teacher, and
literary champion. Exactly. So he publishes his
first poem in 1962, the same year he graduates.
But by 1971, he starts a weekly column in New
Mexico. And when I say he started a weekly column,
I mean, he started a column that has run almost
continuously from 1971 to the present day. It's
wild. That is over half a century of weekly output.
What's fascinating here is the sheer required
to maintain a weekly column for 50 years. It's
almost difficult to comprehend. Seriously. He's
writing through multiple presidencies, economic
booms and busts, the whole rise of the internet,
and massive demographic shifts in the Southwest.
Not to mention his other jobs. He served as an
architecture critic for the Albuquerque Journal
in the mid -80s and contributed regularly to
the Albuquerque Tribune for 30 years until it
closed in 2008. Yeah, and he co -founded the
New Mexico Mercury online platform, where his
Mercury Messenger column still runs. His output
wasn't just about his own voice. No, and that
is actually the most striking part of his resume
to me Oh, yeah. Yeah as the series editor for
the Mary Burritt poetry series at the University
of New Mexico Press This was from 2004 to 2012
He brought the work of more than 500 new mexican
authors poets and scholars into print 500 yes
Plus he was the architecture editor for art space
magazine the editor of New Mexico magazine and
the city editor for the New Mexico Independent
Think about this through, like, an agricultural
lens, okay? Price wasn't just a farmer content
to plant his own crops, you know, his own poems
and columns. He looked around at the literary
desert of the Southwest and realized that if
the culture was going to survive, it needed an
irrigation system. Oh, I love that. Bye. editing
those magazines and curating that poetry series,
he was literally building the aqueducts. He was
creating the infrastructure and the economic
conditions for 500 other voices to thrive in
a landscape that the broader East Coast publishing
world just completely ignored. Which explains
how he managed not to burn out. It's like a marathon
runner who decides to also paved the road they're
running on. He wasn't just screaming into a void,
he was cultivating a massive conversation. He
was writing his own works, like Albuquerque,
a city at the end of the world, which won the
Free Francisco Adonacio Dominguez Award, while
simultaneously teaching in the UNM School of
Architecture and Planning and the Honors College.
He was just constantly feeding the ecosystem
he helped build. You know, when you spend decades
building an irrigation system for a culture and
paying that kind of microscopic attention to
the health of a landscape, you inevitably start
to see the poison in the water. You cannot be
a fiercely protective local advocate without
eventually confronting the macro threats imposed
by outside forces. And this marks a massive pivot
in his body of work. It really does. So in 2011,
the University of New Mexico Press published
Price's heavily researched book, The Orphaned
Land. New Mexico's environment since the Manhattan
Project. Such a heavy title. It is. And now,
before we dive into the contents of this book,
I really want to make it unequivocally clear
to you listening. Yes, important disclaimer here.
We are strictly reporting the historical analysis
and the arguments presented in Price's text regarding
the military industrial complex and corporate
pollution. Right. We are not taking any political
sides, nor are we endorsing a specific environmental
platform. Our role today is just to synthesize
how Price utilized years of his own journalistic
observations and archival research to formulate
his thesis. And the methodology behind the orphan
land is staggering. I mean, Price analyzed half
a century of newspaper articles, government reports,
and environmental data to expose the toll of
military munitions testing, uranium mining, and
just unsustainable population growth. The scale
of it is hard to grasp. It really is. Yeah. To
understand the scale, The book documents 2 ,100
waste sites at Los Alamos National Laboratories
in northern New Mexico. 2 ,100. Yes. And another
400 waste sites at Sandia National Laboratories
in Albuquerque. Wow. And Price stated in an interview
on KNMETV's New Mexico in Focus that the Manhattan
Project both transformed and deformed the American
West. Transformed and deformed. Yeah, because
it elevated New Mexico into one of the intellectual
and scientific epicenters of the Cold War, right?
Drawing the absolute brightest minds on the planet.
But it came at a massive, often hidden environmental
cost. It's like inviting a brilliant, world -famous
scientist to be your roommate. OK, I like this
analogy. Right, like they make you look incredibly
smart to all the neighbors, but you eventually
realize they're leaving toxic radioactive trash
in your living room that will persist for 10
,000 years. Yeah, that's exactly it. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, the core argument
in the orphan land is that New Mexico serves
as a microcosm of global ecological degradation.
A microcosm. Yes. Price uses the state to illustrate
the mechanics of how multinational corporations
and military interests extract resources from
local environments. It is a story about the systematic
strain on a fundamentally limited resource, which
is water in the desert and the persistent breaches
of public trust. But I want to challenge Price's
thesis here for a second. Go ahead. Is it really
fair to judge the desperate you know, existential
actions of the Cold War military industrial complex
through the lens of modern 21st century environmentalism.
It's a valid question. Because during the 1940s
and 50s, the government felt it was literally
fighting for the survival of the free world.
Environmental impact studies weren't exactly
the top priority when you're facing down the
threat of global nuclear annihilation, right?
Well, historians grapple with that exact tension
constantly. But Price's critique, as outlined
in the text, isn't just retroactive finger pointing
at the panic of World War II. Okay, what is it
then? He is analyzing the momentum of those initial
decisions. The military industrial complex effectively
viewed the American Southwest as an empty sandbox.
They looked at the vast expanses of the desert
and saw a void where they could test their weapons
and bury their waste. They didn't have his anthropological
lens. Exactly the point. They lacked the anthropological
framework Price had cultivated. They didn't see
the ancient indigenous cultures that had stewarded
the land for millennia. And they completely ignored
the profound fragility of the desert water table.
Wow. And Price argues that this empty sandbox
mentality didn't just stop when the Cold War
ended. It established a really dangerous precedent
for development planning that persisted for decades,
basically normalizing the sacrifice of local
ecosystems for the sake of abstract national
or corporate interests. So he's truly documenting
the physical life and death of his state's environment.
He is. And the passion and rigor behind that
journalism is exactly why he won the ACLU -NM
First Amendment Award for Excellence in Journalism
in 1996. And later, he won the Paul Bartlett
Ray Peace Prize for lifetime achievement. All
deserved. Yeah. But as we move into the later
chapters of his life, the focus of his writing
undergoes this really profound, deeply personal
shift. It does. After spending decades fighting
for the macro survival of the environment and
the civic soul of Albuquerque, the lens pulls
focus. Yeah. It moves from the massive geopolitical
fallout of the atomic age all the way down to
the micro survival of the individual. His work
becomes a reflection on mortality, intimate collaboration,
and the concept of rebirth. So what does this
all mean? How does this shift manifest? Well,
a massive part of this introspective era is directly
tied to his wife. Rene Price. Right. They were
married in 1969 and were fierce lifelong collaborators.
Rene was an accomplished artist and starting
in the early 1970s their professional and personal
lives just merged completely. They worked side
by side at Century magazine which he founded
in the 80s. Yes and she created the visual covers
for the majority of his books of poetry. Their
disciplines were in this constant dialogue like
his 2005 book of poetry Death Self prominently
features her paintings. She wasn't just decorating
his books, you know, her visual art was providing
the atmospheric context for his words. They built
this shared, unified legacy until she passed
away in 2019. And the loss of a partner of 50
years, I mean, that completely reorients a person's
universe. Completely. In January 2021, at the
age of 80, Price appeared on the KNME TV series,
Caloris. Yeah. And he didn't go on television
to talk about civic architecture or uranium mining.
He went on to discuss the most universal human
experience, dying. grief, and the agonizing process
of coming back to life. He actually read from
an unpublished poem titled Travel Notes on Coming
Back to Life. Which is just beautiful. And his
recent bibliography is entirely defined by this
exploration of the internal frontier. He published
a collection of selected poems spanning 2008
to 2020 called Polishing the Mountain or Catching
Balance Just in Time. In 2020 he released Innocence
Regained. Christmas poems. Oh, which was a compilation
of 50 years of intimate work. Exactly. And it
became a finalist for the New Mexico and Arizona
Book Awards. Yeah. And then came Lucretius and
the Logic of Venus in 2023. And his upcoming
poetry volume, which is scheduled for 2025, is
titled... Orpheus the Healer. The mythological
weight of that title is staggering. It really
is because Orpheus is the legendary poet of Greek
myth who is so consumed by grief that he literally
travels down into the underworld to try and bring
his wife, Eurydice, back to the land of the living.
Right. His music is so beautiful, it temporarily
suspends the torments of hell. You simply cannot
separate a title like Orpheus the Healer from
the loss of Witte and Price's own meditations
on attempting to heal through the power of verse.
It's incredible. It proves that while Price really
cherished the isolation of the desert, his art
was fundamentally born of connection. Yeah. He
was in constant conversation with the physical
landscape, with the 500 authors he shepherded
into print, with the thousands of citizens reading
his weekly column, and most intimately with his
wife. The legacy he built is a testament to the
power of deliberate sustained attention. Which
makes me wonder, and for you listening, think
about this. How do the people you collaborate
with, whether that's in your career, in your
creative pursuits, or just in your daily life,
shape the legacy you will eventually leave behind?
Because Reni literally illustrated VB's words,
intertwining her vision with his voice forever.
Yeah. Let's take a step back and look at the
entirety of the terrain we've covered today.
You've covered a lot. We really have. We started
with a young man born into the artificial glow
of Los Angeles royalty. We watched him flee that
manufactured reality for the stark unforgiving
truth of the New Mexico desert in 1958. Right.
We saw how a degree in anthropology equipped
him with the framework to read the deep history
of his new home, transforming him from a passive
observer into a foundational pillar of a regional
literary ecosystem. A literal aqueduct builder.
Yes. We tracked the mind bending stamina of a
50 year column. We unpacked his unflinching methodical
exposure of the atomic age's toxic legacy in
the orphaned land. And finally, we witnessed
a poet turning his gaze inward, utilizing the
mythic power of his craft to navigate the deepest
grief and his own mortality. It is a master class
in what happens when a human being refuses to
look away. Yeah. And that brings up a final thought
to consider. Early on in this deep dive, we noted
that the source material emphasized Price's identification
with New Mexico's isolation and eccentricity.
Right. Well, we live in a modern world that is
aggressively hyper -connected. We are driven
by algorithms designed to smooth out our rough
edges, encouraging us to just blend in, follow
the prevailing trend, become easily categorizable
data points. Definitely. It is, in many ways,
the digital equivalent of the suffocating Hollywood
machine price ran away from in the 1950s. The
pressure to be universally palatable today is
immense. So the question becomes, in our algorithm
-driven reality, is finding our own personal
New Mexico -like, a physical place, or perhaps
just a fiercely protected mindset of deliberate
isolation and eccentricity, is that the absolute
prerequisite for cultivating a voice that actually
matters. If you never disconnect from the relentless
noise of the consensus, can you ever observe
anything deeply enough to write about it with
conviction for half a century? That's a great
point. You cannot write Choco Body or investigate
the orphan land if your attention is constantly
fractured by a social media feed. Right. You
have to be willing to be a little eccentric.
You have to be willing to sit in the quiet and
read the bones of the landscape. Exactly. So
tomorrow, when you walk out your front door,
take a moment to look a little closer at your
own surroundings. Look past the obvious everyday
utility of your environment. Notice the architecture.
Consider the hidden history buried in the dirt
beneath the pavement. recognize the people actively
shaping it. Because as the son of Hollywood's
greatest horror villain proved, the most terrifying
and beautiful things in this world aren't found
on a silver screen. They are revealed when you
finally decide to open your eyes to the stark,
unvarnished reality of the place you choose to
call home.