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Poet James Ragan began as a painter. Language was a resource quickly acquired
and artfully deployed to parry the jabs every immigrant child confronts.
"Oh, boy, were there fights!"
To visualize Slovakia from
the perspective of post-war Pittsburgh surely posed a challenge to insular,
young minds. In this century’s memory, the lesser twin in a political amalgam
only recently severed, Slovakia knew a tradition as territorial wild card, a
trophy of war traded off between Bohemia and Hungary, much as Norway was prized
and contested by Denmark and Sweden, or Poland by Germany and Russia.
While Ragan soon shed all
traces of his parent’s accent, he matured into their features: wide-angle
Slavic cheekbones and a slight lift at the eyelid’s taper as though
predisposed to a smile. From them he bears as well the memories of place and
event too deep to descend by speech, the a-verbal impressions bequeathed by
blood. That legacy informs an inner kenning which he successfully transforms to
idiom and sound.
Imagine if,
in the rehearsal of her lines so long
repeated,
she had favored as a lostness in us
all
the bestiary of our tribal greed.
(‘Hit and Run at the Pantages’, II,
RAPE’)
From his first collection,
In the Talking Hours (Eden-Hall, 1979), which evolved out of doctoral
work at Ohio University, and other, individually published pieces, the hosts of
the 1985 inaugural International Poetry Festival in Moscow concluded they had
found the unusual poet, who addressed the things that matter outside a country
that ‘needs to be invaded.’ The only other Americans invited to perform for
President Gorbachev were Robert Bly and Bob Dylan, both harvested from the
Minnesota tundra.
It serves to recall that
an Old Deal xenophobe had then just been elected to a second presidential term
by the nation that prides itself on youthful naïveté. Standing tall in the
euphoric throes of trickle-down greed and star wars one-upmanship, he was seen
by naïf and cynic alike to loot the isolated pockets of poverty to stage a
B-movie, would-be High Noon face-off against the Evil Empire and
beachhead adventures against the Grenadian mouse that roared. Why indeed address
self-absorbed imperialism, beyond recognizing the oxymoron and then leaving its
parsing to journalists? To paraphrase Kundera: shared life -- and language -- is
elsewhere.
We are faces phrased in voices,
lost vowels in the drift of innuendo
in a city’s dream.
(‘Purgatorio, c, WATTS’)
Analogizing the phases of
nationhood to Yeats’s four ages of man, the U.S. staged its first fight with
doughboy body and walked upright in Europe’s Great War, struggled second with
the heart and saw its innocence and peace depart as France’s can-do-better
successor in South Vietnam. But Gide had already acknowledged by 1918 an entire
continent’s midnight defeat in the battle with God, the fourth and last, when
he wrote, "Nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortels." The
U.S. is ill-prepared for the struggle with the mind, still just the third, which
Yeats did not mean to be merely intellectual -- or televisable. If we are ever
to leave pride behind, then, short of the invasion others prescribe for us, we
do well to assimilate the blood memory of our immigrant native sons.
And with my hair soot red
as coals above my grandfather’s
bones,
buried near the poems of Desnos,
I hurried though the "Gate of
Death,"
up the gallows’ knoll,
the executioner’s chiseled wall,
to see the Ohrˇe rivering out
to wag the Elbe’s long tail,
and hurried through the tunneled
mounds
down again to hell,
past the fire’s wind lash
of oven grates to holding cells
where brush wire and Jewish arms
in tubs of creosol
scrubbed all brains of the mind’s
eternal no.
In their bones the earth’s
push-step
the Aryan angel denied, moved me
to doubt in a changing world,
that all things, including stone,
began
from one single Godly loss of breath.
On the slab at Terezín, in the
"Lord’s House,"
I climbed to bed, cold as heaven,
and played dead.
(‘The Stone Steps to Hradcany,
c, TEREZÍN’)
* * *
Ragan sought out and
honored his poetic antecedents as well. Begun early, his dialogue with them
continues. No one will argue the axiom that any student of poetry, practitioner
or critic, must know the canon, heeding John Gardner’s cautionary that even a
genius, if ignorant of the highest effects previously achieved, is doomed to
search out the lesser. The more that Ragan conveys to those he mentors at USC,
in Prague or New York is the potential for dynamic internalization of
impressions won both on and off the page.
His own work realizes the
potential of that internalization, in full color, and with no visible trail to
another’s palette. Any ‘anxiety of influence’ has long been overcome; the
authority of his voice leaves no afterchime of ‘triumphal usurpation.’
Though he has contributed his share of scholarship, his academician’s smith
stops before hammering as thin as ‘misprision.’ He could be a genial host on
‘apophrades’, Harold Bloom’s day of ancestral poets returning to inhabit
their former houses, thus, the poems of their progeny.
But, whether appearing by
invitation or intrusion, are ghost-sightings the most rational explanation for
Bloom’s sense of déjà-lu or do the best poets simply have unstudied
access to a collective pool of elemental imagery? Ragan’s poem, ‘Zivanska’,
takes its title from the forest gathering of men around a fire to make music and
roast animal flesh, a ritual identified with Janosik, the legendary Slovak
bandit and folk hero.
After the doors were shut and the
windows sealed
to let the ember’s soft foot lie,
my father
slapped the crystal clear of wine and
rising
tall as Janosik, full of heart,
whispered down,
"Grass is burning. Stags are in
the wood."
And out into the green night and salt
arbors
of the brook we followed the king of
bandits
upslope through the branched spires
and thickets
into woods where only mold and roses
thorned.
Under a moon as low as a mushroom
scone,
we soured coals in sprigs and ginger
grass,
and hidden as with any intention the
mind deceives to rob,
the sparks saw into the burning earth
what flint of fire could set the
night to gasp.
A crackling sound began to grow into
the roaring
hooves of deer and longer still to
racing herds
as bacon fat dripped longingly into
laps of bread,
and onions skewered and spat above
the fire spears.
In my father’s fist the long wind
reed became a switch
that like the last finger on a hand
hooked
potatoes by the eye. Wine took the
aching down
into the throat and further in, the
heart of something
shook that only nature recognized as
sound.
The grass had burned to snapping
darkness and to the last
sobbing tongue, my father pointed
down to silence,
"The stags are gone. Boars have
killed their young."
And no one moved. The king of bandits
sheathed
his spearhead into ground. None had
known
that hidden in the wet rock of the
August clearing
a boar, alone and sorry for its
breed, had moaned and wept.
Even without reference to
Janosik, any American reader senses immediately that he has left the home
continent, and entered a folkloric wood most last visited with the Brothers
Grimm. One can envisage walking the green night’s brook to the thorning rose
with Goethe, the first to write ‘from within.’ But around the fire, as the
tonality takes on Rembrandt’s tawny browns deepening to a leafy, blackened
fringe, the keen, secret anguish is Rilkean, traced in hot by Dürer’s
exquisite hand with the costly, after-discovered blue of lapis lazuli.
The Middle European effect
is reinforced by rendering the poem in German; it reads as though originally so
conceived. Rilke captured the campfire scene, in outsider mood, singling out the
smallest, a Frenchman, to kiss a rose, clutch it sighing on his chest, and sing
a sad, old ballad of harvest girls humming in the fields. (Die
Weise von Liebe und Tod vom Cornet Christoph Rilke)
The forest takes on a
druidic feel with Yeats, but imagery and mood, cross-cultural, remain intact.
Do you not hear me calling white deer
with no horns?
I have been changed to a hound with
one red ear;
I have been in the Path of Stones and
the Wood of Thorns,
For somebody hid hatred and hope and
desire and fear
Under my feet that they follow you
night and day.
A man with a hazel wand came without
sound;
He changed me suddenly; I was looking
another way;
And now my calling is but the calling
of a hound;
And Time and Birth and Change are
hurrying by.
I would that the Boar without
bristles had come out from the West
And had rooted the sun and moon and
stars out of the sky
And lay in the darkness, grunting,
and turning to his rest.
(‘He mourns for the Change that has
come upon Him
and his Beloved and longs for the End
of the World’)
Ragan’s ‘Zivanska’
proceeds from shared legend to renewed private awe, from community to isolation,
wholly independent of Yeats’s theme of the lover’s lament. Yet the
painterly, elemental imagery chosen by each is strikingly similar; each voice
suffers change and degradation in his role as pursuer. The lover, who all in
green went riding to low-crouching hounds after red deer, of cummings, and
Stevens’s primal men at their flame ritual in ‘Sunday Morning’ could form
panels, right and left, in a narration by progressive tableaux of wooded,
birdless romance whose players know, ‘there is enough evil in the crying of
the wind.’ (‘He reproves the Curlew’, Yeats)
* * *
"I think I like my
answer to that question!" James Ragan’s eyes, already so inclined, tip
into full grin. "It’s something I always wanted to talk about." We
are five poets and musicians in interlude with the grape on a lengthening April
afternoon in New York, while design becomes dinner on the stove. With a
paraphrase of Yeats’s ‘The Spur’, someone has opened a free-for-colloquy
on the age limit imposed on passion.
You think it horrible that lust and
rage
Should dance attendance upon my old
age;
They were not such a plague when I
was young.
What else have I to spur me into
song?
Ragan’s response invokes
more than the maxim of sensing anew; the key is his knowing anticipation of the next
sip taken, kiss exchanged, love made. He expects more, not less intensity in
the writing of his fifties and sixties. Implicit is a different turn on the
benefit of familiarity to searching out the highest effects, and the value of a
vintage sensibility, like that of Yeats, able here to objectify itself even
while in their embrace.
Not leaving frustration
unacknowledged, he reminds that Yeats also wrote from the extrapersonal rage and
bewilderment of his interwar era. As a graduate student in the late 60’s,
Ragan was overexposed to radiation treatment for bone spurs, developing a cancer
which lamed his foot for two years, as anti-war marches led to wholesale revolt
against U.S. bombings in Southeast Asia. Temporary handicap became permanent
gratitude, both relative, both audible in Talking
Hours.
Through Yeats and Eliot,
among others, he appreciates the ‘pastness of the past,’ depending on it to
merge present into future, excited when all commingle and the boundaries vanish,
giving the lie to linear time, ‘bringing flowers in last month’s newspapers’
and letting ‘be be finale of seem.’ (‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’, Wallace
Stevens) His share in the Slovak past no doubt implanted ken that spatial
borders were more metaphor than reality, and in his recently completed sixth
book, Lostness (Grove, 2001), he deliberately folds and spindles both to
cyberambulate at large. Much-traveled in the earthly sense, the free imagery he
selects to juxtapose in this frame may be pure neuron and synaptic quark.
Ragan was in Prague in
1968; a portrait he painted of a Czech girl omits her fifth finger. He was in
Beijing prior to the massacre at Tien An Men Square. Then, with his second book,
Womb-Weary (Carol, 1990), he logged distance and risk.
In the single dying of a stone’s
last breath there is progress
we will all come to
in time, falling, each of us
through the rain of our breath,
imitations of the Dantesque,
fused by the body’s currents
down the chutes of Montparnasse,
birth-wet and river-deep
in bones descending.
(from ‘The Rivers of Paris’)
He remarks on the decline
in European readership for American fiction and few productions of our theatre,
save of Williams and Miller in revival. Asked whether the world my be imposing a
common denominator higher than what serves to reach Americans, he exclaims,
"Yes, and our fiction always has a film line!" He has plotted around
the world the fault lines become fissures that part rich and poor.
Thus, in his third book, The
Hunger Wall (Grove Press, 1995), he connects the globe’s dots from the
stone reality of Prague’s Hladová Zed, the WPA-like hill project of the
compassionate Charles IV, to Berlin (‘a symbol of nothing / more a wall could
do’), through Native American community and myth, to a metaphoric have vs.
want badly which collapses under the Turneresque valley skies of Rodney King’s
riot-riven Los Angeles.
I don’t want the poor to endure me,
she says
King Charles said to those he paid,
as he watched
their faces, building borders, hunger
for a wall,
as she faced the smoldering Vltava,
watching hunger well.
(‘The Hunger Wall’)
In their polyglot of streams, they
found a language,
called it "many tongues,"
and through its voice
broke the silence down to merging
runnels.
. . . A century of whales would scale
the ocean to see the palisades repel
the sun.
(‘Many Smokes, a, THE BASIN’)
On the day that fire swathed the
clouds,
we heard the crackling of eucalyptus
ignite the distant barricades,
as if some Virgilian urge
had launched all minds into
bereavement,
as if, in searching far from the fire’s
edge,
but for its madness we were so near
to it,
raging with Cato on the rock line’s scree,
‘Are the laws of the pit thus
broken
or is there some new counsel
changed in heaven . . . ?’
(‘Purgatorio, b, MUDTOWN’)
As creature of
destruction, a ‘lizard Lazarus’, more ‘hiss than grammar,’ prefigures
Ragan’s next, expanded inquiry into the origins of violence, ‘a million
years of stutters racing / hatred with fitful starts.’ (‘The Skinhead’) In
Lusions (Grove, 1997), he tracks its evolution through the ‘pebble
cultures’ surprising himself with moments of humor, and revisits gratitude in
‘The Astonishment of Living’, which urges, ‘Let all buckets fill, all loss
be light,’ inviting elemental placation of the ravenous flame. Gravity soon
re-exerts its ‘pull-step’, and he takes up burden, personal and universal,
in The World-Shouldering ‘I’ (Grove, late 2000). Suspicious of ‘trauma
résumés’, his courtesy is tried by self-termed ‘victims’, whose
injuries, exaggerated by privilege, rate minor in the planetary triage.
* * *
In six collections, from Talking
Hours to Lostness, Ragan has sought to ensure that each word earned
its place, that all rhythms rang true. While that crafted approach remained
constant, in retrospect, shifting affinities led him through phases, from image
to sense to sound, before arriving at what he hopes is an equal-parts blend of
metaphor, meaning and music. He tips his goblet toward the piano.
‘At his lyrical best when . . . ,’ is
a phrase that appears with regularity in reviews of American fiction. Are
boundaries blurring? Whose province is the half-empty, whose the half-full?
Ragan responds that the
image-making mind, spatial where the past, present and future merge, free of
linear time, is more easily rendered visually, with the immediacy of canvas,
film or theatre. To accomplish similar effects in prose demands verbal
reproduction of dream-state flow and truncation, thus, William James’s stream
of consciousness. Metaphor and mythos are automatic givens, the stuff of
Freudian and Jungian examination. Poetry is the verbal means to the highest
effects. Since the key is fluidity, lyric poetry may well be ‘the way in.’
And what counter to the
assertion that lyric poetry only ever deals with love and death? Ragan
identifies the fallacy: the essence of lyric is song, argumentation, resolution,
love and death merely the simplest cases to argue -- for enduring, against
transitory, sometime vice versa -- though certainly not the only ones. His ‘Purgatorio’,
like Picasso’s Guernica, lyricizes rupture and devastation, completely
persuasive of the way out.
In the community of dinner
lit by two tapered flames, Ragan seems a man suffused with profound happiness
and unspoiled sensuality. As we raise the red over white lace, his eyes angle
down to replay ceremonial imagery: from The Deer Hunter, its scene of
spilt wine, from ‘The Wedding’, his parents’ of spilt blood, memory, the
way across illusory borders.
and all she could think of
was the eye turned black
on her white trousseau,
and all he could think of
was to steal away beyond the walls
the guards had bribed
each night to open like a cask,
and all she remembered
was her breath tossed like a river
rasping over rocks and the wet
weeds of her bed when he left at
dawn,
and all he remembered,
was the year of nightly raptures,
and mourning in the cell he had grown
like stones around his head,
and all that each remembered,
was the passion they had married
to the slow want of an embrace,
a bridal dance to death,
two continents
adrift in a world racing
past the Archduke’s carriage,
falling off its rims and spinning
slowly into ash.
_____________________
Maureen Holm has rendered
in German the poems appearing in this article and many others from The Hunger
Wall and from Lusions.
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