Today we’d like to introduce you to James Ragan, Ph.D, Litt.D. They and their team share their story with us below:
James Ragan’s poems have been celebrated by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney “for sparing no passion in believing they sing.” Born in Duquesne, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh, to immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia, Ragan grew up with English as his second language. He earned an MA and PhD in English Literature from Ohio University (1971) and Honorary Doctorates from St. Vincent College (1990) and London’s Richmond University (2001) where his poetry was praised for exploring subjects “with compassion, and with a single voice one trusts. His is poetry of conscience.” Czech Nobel nominee, Miroslav Holub, lauds his poetry “for dominating the art of poetic narration with insight that marks major poets” (1990) and Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Taylor calls Ragan “a snake charmer whose words work real magic.” His ten poetry collections include In the Talking Hours (1979), Womb-Weary (1990), The Hunger Wall (1995) Lusions (1997), The Tallinn Poems, Selected (2005), Too Long a Solitude (2009), The World Shouldering I (2013), The Chanter’s Reed (2020), Nothing Disappears (2021), To Sing us out of Silence (2022), and Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Collected Poetry (1991), co-edited from Russian, which the NY Times praised as “a passionate and essential edition.” His dramas, “Saints” and “Commedia,” have been staged internationally in the U.S, Moscow, Beijing, Athens, etc. He is the subject of the Arina Films documentary “Flowers and Roots: An Ambassador of the Arts,” awarded 17 Int. Film Festival recognitions, including the Platinum Prize at the 49th Houston Int’l Film Festival in 2016. A multiple poetry award winner with readings in 34 nations, poems in 32 anthologies, and translated into 15 languages, critics have recognized him as one of the leading voices of his generation. In 1996 BUZZ Magazine named Ragan one of the “100 Coolest People of Los Angeles: Those Who Make a Difference.”
HOW I GOT HERE
Growing up speaking Slovak as the twelfth of 13 children, I felt the sting of bigotry at a tender age. As a child of immigrant Czechoslovakian parents, I was the target of grade school taunting, the name “hunky” often used as daily derision. On learning English, I discovered language as a matter of survival, a weapon more powerful than fighting with fists. This shaped my respect for the power of words and, by extension, the art of poetry as a way of engaging global suffering and prejudice. At an early age, I never felt “local,” I felt that I existed “for the world.” I credit my father, a farmer turned Pittsburgh steelworker who loved his violin, and my mother’s artistry as a seamstress as my earliest artistic inspirations. I’m always fond of saying, “We were so poor, they just forgot to tell us.” Everything was handed down, from books to baseball gloves. I earned an academic/athletic scholarship to Saint Vincent College (BA, 1966) where, starting as a pre-med student, I wrote for the student newspaper, earning an internship at Time Magazine, but, instead, accepted a grant to work for a Munich publisher in order to be near enough to visit our family villages in Slovakia.
“In the Talking Hours” (1979), my first of 10 books of poetry, engaged the past and growing cancers of a world raging with conflict: Viet Nam, U.S. Race Riots, and Cold War nuclear threats. The poem “Aryan Devolution,” dedicated to 11 Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, resulted in national radio interviews. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner described the book as “dry ice smoking from contact.” Poems protesting the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia received international attention. Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko called it “a testament to universal brotherhood. He is my brother.” My poetry soon sought a marriage with my passion for teaching. I accepted the Directorship of the Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, lasting 25 years (1982- 2007), including three years as Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Cal Tech. During this period, I edited “The Southern California Anthology” (20 years) and reviewed for the L.A. Times.
The nine books that followed continued my soul-searching odyssey through the international landscape of human joy and suffering— the world’s homeless, apartheid, and the Tiananmen uprising. I believed then, as I do now, that the artist must prick the conscience of society and engage the powers of a larger world. In 1988, during my Fulbright teaching at Beijing University, I was one of 10 Fulbright scholars expelled from China as having influenced the Tien An Men student protests. The poem “Debris Stone” centers on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres of nearly 3,400 victims. In a turn of irony, 20 years later I was invited back to address the 2008 World Literature Today Conference at Beijing’s Normal U. and witnessed my play Commedia staged at Renmin University.
In 1991, I met Czech President Vaclav Havel, who was invited to speak at UCLA. Praising my banned activism in the former communist Czechoslovakia, Havel, formerly a jailed dissident, extended his hand, saying, “We are colleagues,” I cherish that moment. He then invited me to teach each summer as Distinguished Professor of Poetry and Film at Charles University in Prague (currently 27 yrs). I was invited also to reside each summer at his childhood home where I’ve enjoyed the most productive period of my writing life: a play and six books of poetry.
In 2000, I was invited to read at the Lyric Festival at Carnegie Hall and again in 2002. Interviews followed with CNN, C-Span, NPR, PBS, and BBC, culminating with delivering a keynote address at the United Nations with Joyce Carol Oates for UNESCO’s World Poetry Day (2001). I continue to pursue a democracy of vision when exploring my subjects and in my readings to audiences in countries as diverse as England, France, Spain, Sweden, Greece, Slovakia, Brazil, Japan, India, Thailand, China, Korea, among others. U.S Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur praised my artistic vision to cross world borders to bring people together through the arts as “poetry of distinction.”
In “Too Long a Solitude,” a runner-up for the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award, my poems migrate from isolation in a world tinged with war and an aching sense of global alienation to achieve, through the “breaking down” of racial borders, a communion of human connections, as Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Publishers Weekly responded, “James Ragan continues his song through the centuries in language that echoes Rilke.” California Poet Laureate Al Young applauds my call for human connection, “what distinguishes Ragan’s poetry is his melodic Slovak dialect and riveting delivery, which contribute to the visceral pleasure of hearing his poems read aloud.” In my recent books, I address poems of nature, love, jazz, and family, knowing that while some address the despairing tragedies of history, all remain affirmations of reassuring hope, reflecting as one critic stated, “a Yeatsian high poetic.” National Book Award winner Jean Valentine agreed, “I admire James Ragan’s sense of history and, within that, his instinct to praise.” In 2012, I received a U.S. Dept. of State Grant to lecture and perform at five universities in Portugal, Spain, and Bratislava. A year later, in 2013, I was inducted into the Slovak World Hall of Fame. My mind continues to remain passionate about the future and the role the “artist” must embrace, that is, to shoulder the burdens of himself as well as those of a beleaguered world.
TO SUM UP what has brought me to this point— my poetic sensibility has always been global, as reflected by my current Visiting Distinguished Professorship at Prague’s Charles University. I write to find expression through my poetry, plays, and films in order to bring individuals and worlds, seemingly apart, closer in understanding. The cafes that I write in are my libraries, from Prague to Paris to New York and Los Angeles. I write to live out loud and with the eternal hope that through the expansive reach of art, I can achieve community through a common language. And I keep very high optimism in that.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
In 1969 an overdose of radiation treatments for bone spurs from my days of college basketball resulted in a two years bout with cancer, which proved pivotal to my creative work. During my recovery, I studied poetry and drama for a Ph.D. at Ohio U. where my activism in the civil rights and anti-Viet Nam War movements, rife with challenges, earned my poetry the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award in 1971. The Emerson Poetry Prize followed, and my play “The Landlord” was staged at the Ohio U. Theater. I was subsequently invited to Los Angeles to see my play “Saints,” staged at the Counterpoint Theater in 1972, which earned me recognition enough to work as a staff PA during post-production of “The Godfather” for producer Al Ruddy at Paramount Studios. In 1976 Alfa Music/Sony flew me to Tokyo to adapt my poems to a jazz album for Japanese rock stars Kimiko Kasai and Tatsuro Yamashita. In 1984, actor Raymond Burr produced my play Commedia at Sonoma State University. No matter what the obstacles, I hadn’t yet realized how widely my world view toward the arts was expanding.
Sadly, such notoriety carried little weight on my return to Slovakia where my works were banned during the communist occupation. Challenges were still ahead. Required to report to police stations when traveling to local villages, I wrote “The Hunger Wall” to expose man’s infinitely evolving state of irrationality. A librarian in Humenne called me in to ask how my book had anonymously appeared on their shelf. She scissored out poems opposed to the 1968 Soviet invasion of the country and tossed them in the trash. With despotic pleasure, she re-shelved the “wounded” book, saying, “Now, it can remain.” I had never witnessed such graphic censorship. I continued to oppose communist rule until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1990 I represented the U.S. at the Soviet-American Writers Conference in Moscow along with N.Y Times editor Harrison Salisbury and Studs Terkel who praised my poems on his radio show for “their lyrical fusing of innocence and wisdom, that makes the poetry so exhilarating.” Poet William Matthews added, “Ragan’s poetry lights the passage to the larger world of global citizenship.” Achieving that goal was worth all the hurdles. I received the Medal of Merit in Poetry from Ohio University in 1990.
In 1992, while I witnessed the Los Angeles riots exploding across racial and class lines, the Czech and Slovak peoples severed political ties as a nation, causing me to examine political and racial “borders” in a world where the widening gap between the rich and the poor was, and is, dangerously explosive, a recurring theme in my writing. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in his foreword to “The Hunger Wall” writes, “James Ragan has devoted a life to bringing down walls, to ridding all borders of the stinging hunger of poverty and prejudice…something immortally compassionate in his character during our cynical times.” Library Journal called the book’s “search for reason and sense” as a study of conscience in a morally compromised world. In 1993 I accepted a USIA Grant to Poland to read at the American Centers in Gdansk, Warsaw, and Krakow and continued my quest for “reason and sense” in my books and international readings into the 21st century.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
In 1985, after immersing myself in challenging totalitarian rule in the world, what followed was an affirmation of my poetry that I could never have imagined. I was invited to Moscow’s First Int’l Poetry Festival to read for Mikhail Gorbachev and 8,000 people, alongside Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Bob Dylan, Rafael Alberti, and Yevtushenko, etc. In a Capitol News interview, I related how “I was clearly the ‘nobody’ on stage and followed Heaney and Dylan who had raptured the audience with their lyrical genius. I instantly greeted the crowd in broken Russian. They cheered! “The American is speaking Russian to us!” The Soviet press sought me out. I later performed for additional world leaders: Slovenian President Milan Kucan (1996), South Korean Prime Minister Young-Hoon Kang (2001), and (with Arthur Miller) for Czech President Vaclav Havel who introduced me as “an Ambassador of the Arts” at Prague’s 1994 World PEN Congress. I’ve since devoted my life to earning that honor. In an interview on OETA TV, PBS (2009), host Teresa Miller reflected, “you’ve read for 7 Heads of State. You’re universally recognized as a literary ambassador.” That title designation transformed me.
I credit the Moscow reading with placing me on the world stage. My goal as an artist has always been to move the minds of kings and world leaders. A New York Times reporter phoned to say that the reading was broadcast to 80 million in Iron Curtain countries and was Gorbachev’s “first foray into Glasnost.” My poem on the homeless, “The Tent People of Beverly Hills,” was first read there and recorded for “A Century of Recorded Poetry” by Warner Bros. Records. In 1986, I performed with other invited poets to 6,000 people in Sofia’s Palace of Culture for President Todor Zhivkov during the conference, “Peace the Hope of the Planet” where I read poems challenging the Bulgarian government’s role in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the documentary, “Flowers and Roots,” David Hartman, of ABC’s Good Morning America, comments, “Jim Ragan has created relationships with people of authority and power, not only in the U.S. but all over the world. He understands people, human beings He’s a remarkable man..” Poetry Magazine editor John Frederick Nims offered similar praise. “Particularly moving is Ragan’s sympathy with the downtrodden and afflicted. He continues to be something very important in our troubled world: a genuine ambassador of poetry to those who need what he has to give.” In 1987, my poem on the Challenger tragedy, “Out of Context,” was judged runner-up for the Poetry Society of America Gertrude Claytor Award.
AN ADDENDUM: James Ragan’s honors include Two Fulbright Professorships, Two Honorary Doctorates, 9 Pushcart Poetry Prize nominations, the Emerson Poetry Prize, The Borestone Award, an NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, California Poet Laureate nomination, a Phi Kappa Phi Creative Artist Award, 49th Parallel Poetry Award, Finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Gertrude Claytor Award, as well as for London’s Int’l Troubadour Poetry Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, and Walt Whitman Book Prize. He also received a Telly Award in 1996 as host of the TV show, Poet’s Chamber, on Cable BHTV, as well as the 2019 Albert Nelson Marquis Who’s Who in America Life Achievement Award, and a 2021 Honorary Award for “Contributions to Film” at the Bucharest Int’l Wallacia Film Festival.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
True creative artists will always be at the forefront of protest and dissent against proponents of racial, economic, and gender inequality. More than ever, their voices and creations will be necessary to protect the moral standard of truth and provide the inspiration for volatile and divided world cultures, including our own, to navigate the paths to sustained freedom and tolerance. Social media, ironically, is an area that presents the greatest test to our social awareness, not only due to the subversive interventions of misinformation but on a more subtle level as we, as a nation, drift more and more toward a diminished sense of “community” in our social interactions. As one example, people live with their eyes locked into the screens of iPhones instead of seeing the value in communicating by pulling back the veil and opening up through direct “in person” dialogue with family, friends, as well as strangers when the opportunity presents itself.
A personal experience— Sitting on an underground train in London, I counted 11 passengers seated across from me, their eyes and fingers manipulating their iPhones. I quietly laughed. It appeared as though a director had staged them like wax figures, transfixed, looking down and ignoring their seated neighbors. A young girl entered the train, smiled and sat next to me. I leaned in and asked her to look across from us. She instantly laughed at the sight and asked if I was an American visiting London. I answered that I was reading my poetry that night at the Pentameters Theater. She excitedly responded, “I love the Pentameters Theater, I love poetry! Can my sister and I come?” I arranged for tickets. After the reading, they joined me and others, where I learned that she was studying at Oxford University. In less than six months, she and her boyfriend arranged for me to give a reading at Oxford. That illustrates the power of personal communication in its role of inspiring “community” and a splash of good fortune. We still stay in touch till this day.
Pricing:
- My books — priced from $13 to $20 at publishers or Amazon
- June Writing Wkshop in Poetry & Screenwriting, Charles U. in Prague: $2,500, Includes transcript (3-4 credits), housing, & partial fellowship ,
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Youtube: Youtube Videos; google Poet James Ragan a.) Documentary, “James Ragan, Flowers and Roots;” b.) Rattlecast #52 Interview
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4863536/
