American poet has big Czech connections

Iambic pentameter may have little sway over international power struggles, but poetry and politics have a long, shared history.

The American poet Robert Lowell, for example, helped lead the 1967 anti-Vietnam march against the Pentagon. The poet James Ragan, whose latest book Too Long a Solitude has recently hit Prague bookstores, has the easy affability of a born diplomat, and his life evinces a deep connection between his poetry and his concern for histories, both personal and international.

Ragan, whose poetry "moves us through a remarkable range of total dexterity" according to the poet C.K. Williams, recently visited Prague to teach a poetry course at Charles University. The Prague Post sat down with him to discuss his dexterous mingling of poetry and politics.

Opening the door to his residence in the Havel family's apartment on the riverfront next to the Dancing House, Ragan motions toward a modest wooden desk and a series of childish paintings mounted on the adjoining wall. St. Vitus Cathedral looms through the panorama windows.

"That desk is a Havel family heirloom. Václav painted those paintings as a child," he says. "I write my poetry there."

Ragan is not a politician. But politics play an unmistakable role in his life as a poet, professor and screenwriter, from 1960s protests in California to Carnegie Hall and the United Nations, where he has read his work before international ambassadors and heads of state. A care for the intricacies of language as well as politics has always been inherent in Ragan's vision of the poet's role, a role he feels is dissolving among younger generations.

"Poets today should take more care about what's happening in the world," he says. "Today, I don't see the kind of activism that my generation was involved in."

Born to Slovak parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ragan has lectured and read poetry internationally since he earned his Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1971. In 1985, he read to a crowd of thousands at Moscow's inaugural International Poetry Forum, an event that included Bob Dylan, American poet Robert Bly and Irish Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney.

Opening his well-stocked scrap book, Ragan points to a series of color photographs of his co-cultural emissaries in Moscow. He pauses, reflecting on one photo of himself onstage, dwarfed by the size of the packed arena, and flanked ominously from behind by his communist hosts.

"I was terrified up there!" he says, laughing. "But, a few years later, I got a call to be interviewed by The New York Times. Afterward, the reporter told me we had made history, as that reading was then considered the first sign of glasnost."

In 2007, Ragan retired after 25 years as director of the graduate professional writing program at the University of Southern California. He says the sudden onslaught of free time has given him the opportunity to do more of the traveling he had to curtail for his university duties. His yearly residence in Prague, however, is a trip he hasn't missed in a decade.

Each summer, Ragan teaches poetry to aspiring Czech and American college-aged poets at Charles University. Ragan mentioned his idea for the course to Václav Havel in the early 1990s.

"When I met Václav Havel, we shook hands, and he said immediately, 'We are colleagues.' I never forgot that," he says.

Havel was enthusiastic about Ragan's proposal to bring Prague to young international poets and vice versa. He accepted on one condition.

"It's true that I teach for free, but I get to stay here," Ragan says, gesturing to the high ceilings and bright hardwood floors of the First Republic apartment with its panoramic view of the Vltava.

Wrapping up his yearly teaching stint, Ragan planned to visit England before returning to his home in California. Asked if he'd visit Prague again next summer, Ragan answers with an enthusiastic "Yes!" A fitting answer from the poet who writes, in "Wind on the Plains," a poem from Too Long a Solitude,

As long as I am moving forward, I would rather

see the field renewed, a squint of future bursting through,

a scud of sunlight, racing through the drumming field of snow.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com