Poet With a Passion for Living Out Loud to Read at Princeton Public Library

Linda Arntzenius

In 1992, poet James Ragan was in Los Angeles during the riots that followed the Rodney King beating. That same year, he watched his native Czechoslovakia divide itself into two separate nations. The two events drive the poems in his 1995 collection, The Hunger Wall.

On Tuesday, May 6, at 7:30 p.m., Mr. Ragan will read from this collection as well as his books Womb-Weary (1990), Lusions (1997), and The World-Shouldering “I” (2000) during a US1 Poets’ Cooperative Special Poetry Reading in front of the second floor fireplace in the Princeton Public Library.

Named for a wall near Prague’s Hradcany Castle that was commissioned to give employment to the poor, The Hunger Wall explores the history of Mr. Ragan’s native land alongside that of his adopted country, finding striking connections through poems that delve into the concepts of walls and borders, whether they be political as in the Czech revolt against the Soviets in 1968, racial as with the Watts Riots of the sixties, or economic. His work responds to the contemporary world’s shifting cultural identities and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, with images drawn from Prague’s old Jewish cemetery; an ossuary where the remains of 40,000 bodies of the wealthy decorate a monastery; modern-day tourists carrying crosses; ancient fortresses; and legendary folk heros juxtaposed with stories from Los Angeles’ pueblo beginnings and Hollywood scandals.

“As long as I can remember, I never felt that I was ‘local’ in my goals, but rather I wanted to achieve something ‘for the world,’” said the poet by phone from Los Angeles.

As the Director of the University of Southern California’s graduate writing program for 25 years, Mr. Ragan urged his students “ to pursue writing that would prick the conscience of our society… and produce character-driven narratives that exhibit some sense of moral dilemma and redemption; in short, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”

Among several generations of graduates now working in ‘”the industry” are Mark Andrus, whose short story developed into the film, As Good as It Gets, starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt; Cosby Show writer Ehrich Van Lowe, and NPR commentator Sandra Tsing Loh.

Mr. Ragan also gathered an equally impressive cadre of diverse writers to comprise a faculty for what became the nation’s first interdisciplinary graduate writing program, including Hollywood veterans such as Frank Tarloff, Sy Gomberg, Jerome Lawrence, and Hubert Selby, along with the biographer Noel Riley Fitch, novelists John Rechy, Gay Talese, and Paul Zindel, and luminaries such as Betty Friedan, not to mention visiting writers from Edward Albee, Ray Bradbury, Athol Fugard, and American poets from Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton to Gerald Stern and Diane Wakoski.

“What most enthused and inspired me back in 1981,” he said, “was the exhilarating sense of collegiality among students, faculty, and administrators.” Over the last decade that has devolved because of an increasing “impersonality” of “corporation” styled education where students are customers and faculty are merchants.

“I am still an idealist, a long-haired activist from the 1960s, seeking a better world through art for my children’s generation.” It’s an attitude for which he was named among BUZZ Magazine’s “100 Coolest People in Los Angeles: Those Who Make a Difference” in 1996, shortly after the publication of The Hunger Wall.

Mr. Ragan was teaching in the program in 1981, when he was tapped to take on the position of Director. The role of mentor was one that he had been on the receiving end of himself as a young screenwriter when Albert S. Ruddy, who produced The Godfather in 1972 and The Longest Yard in 1974, had taken him under his wing.

His own work as a screenwriter includes several screenplays as well the films Matilda, and the award-winning The Deerhunter. He also co-edited Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Collected Poems: 1952-1990. Yevtushenko praised Mr. Ragan’s first book In the Talking Hours, published in 1979, as a “testament to universal brotherhood, a celebration.” Now in its third printing, the book has garnered a series of awards, including the Emerson Poetry Prize and the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award.

Now, without the program’s teaching and administrative responsibilities, Mr. Ragan has time to focus on poetry as well as his passion for travel. Since the early 1990s, he has been the Distinguished Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Charles University in Prague, where he spends time each year. The commitment has affirmed his friendship with the former Czech President and fellow writer Vaclav Havel. Over the years, he has read for Havel and for five other heads of state including Mikhail Gorbachev --who invited him to be one of only three Americans (the others were Robert Bly and Bob Dylan) to participate in the 1985 International Poetry Festival in Moscow in 1985.

At that time, the Moscow papers quoted him on the role of the poet as being to move the minds of kings. Now that he is retired from the university, he said: “I feel free to foster multi-culturalism and to challenge the world as an artist. My sensibility has always been global, to find expression through my poetry, plays, and films to bring individuals and worlds, seemingly apart, closer in understanding. I write to live out loud.”

Last fall, that global perspective took him on a reading and lecture tour of Tunisia, Jordan, India, China, and Tibet. He will read for the Czech Ambassador to the United Nations in New York City tomorrow, May 1, prior to his visit to Princeton.

Born in Slovakia, Mr. Ragan emigrated to the United States at the age of five when his family settled in Pittsburgh. He earned his bachelor’s at Saint Vincent College in 1966 and a masters and doctorate in English from Ohio University. He is the recipient of numerous poetry honors, including three Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, a Poetry Society of America Gertrude Claytor Award, and the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award.

He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Debora, and their daughters Tera, 22, who is also a poet graduating from USC this year, and Mara, 18, and son Jameson, 14, both students at Beverly Hills High School.

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